Pete Warzel Reviews Álvaro Enrigue's "You Dreamed of Empires"

Review by Pete Warzel

Last year in August this blog published a review of a history of the conquest of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, Conquistadors and Aztecs, by Stefan Rinke. That was then, this is now. Welcome to the Electric Kool-Aid conquest of the Mexica/Nahua…an extraordinary reimagining of the machinations of colonialism. Tenochtitlan here is Tenoxtitlan and 1519 is cast in a modern literary trip, non-stop, cranked up a notch or two by the ingestion of magic mushrooms. Álvaro Enrigue manages a fantastical Cortés v. Moctezuma endgame, and it works as a novel for our times.

Mr. Enrigue is an award-winning Mexican author who has taught at Columbia and Princeton, working on his PhD in Latin American literature to while away the time. He has the literary chops for this epic story that sets in motion the history of the Western hemisphere, including the devolution to our convoluted corner of the Southwest. We all know the story of the Conquest of Mexico, but not from this angle. It is stunning.

You Dreamed of Empires

Written by Álvaro Enrigue
Translated by Natasha Wimmer
Riverhead Books
Hardcover
240 Pages
$28.00.

He begins the novel with a note, instructions to his English translator, that explains his use of Nahua words and names, with pronunciations. Then he backs off, apologizes with the truest rationalization of a writer and his work. “…But I’m a writer and words matter to me. They may signify and signal, but I believe they also invoke.” 

Enrigue’s prose hints at Garcia Marquez – fluid, poetic always, but not timid. There are echoes of Borges. Dialogue is embedded in the narrative without quotation marks, much like Cormac McCarthy’s writing, but it is not difficult to follow. All flows smoothly in the story. He takes on the gore of Aztec social justice and the bone-crunching violence of battle with a wicked sense of humor. It is a chilling scene when we encounter Moctezuma with his sister/wife Atoxtli that runs counter to our historical conception of his indecisiveness regarding the Spanish invaders. “There’ll be no scandal in this house, and if I have to erase you, I will.” That is the cold voice of an emperor and a very icy brother. “These are days of blood and shit.” That is the voice of a pragmatic leader. 

All of the characters are historical, save one fictional invention. Enrigue himself appears in real time in a scene where the tripping Moctezuma sees him and certainly does not understand. The story proper is divided into four sections, and all action takes place in the course of one day – when the Spaniards enter Tenoxtitlan for the first time. It begins with “Before the Nap,” in the heart of the city at Moctezuma’s invitation. Most of the action is internal to the characters as they feast with the emperor’s sister/wife in the old palace. There is a wonderful episode where the captains of the Spanish search for their stable boy and the 27 horses in his charge. They begin to walk the palace rooms and hallways, lost in a maze, a labyrinth, and the narration is the stuff of nightmares. “Also, they had the sense that the corridors and cells they’d been wandering through were getting narrower and narrower.” They call and hear response from the rest of the Spanish soldiers in the palace. “They were on the other side of the long wall, but Caldera and his men couldn’t figure out how to get to them despite walking the length of it several times.” I have had a variation of that dream many times.

Section two is “Moctezuma’s Nap” – the center of the book. “The silence his nap demanded was imperial.” The story’s motion is on hiatus. Section three, “After the Nap” starts the forward march of history with long narration and quick cut scenes of the stress-induced palace intrigue within Moctezuma’s court. Parallel action by Cortés, Moctezuma, his sister, and the fictional character, Jazmín Caldera, moves rapidly, all leading to the same place at the same time – the end of the day for the temple sacrifices. The emperor is tripping on more and more mushrooms and Enrigue inserts modern drug slang into the story. “…Give me a slide, a whole one.” Time becomes surreal as Moctezuma and his high priest at the temple of  Huitzilopochtli hear music, and begin to dance to the music of Marc Bolan’s 1970’s rock band, T. Rex. The song is “Monolith” and you really must give it a listen to put the whole novel in context. Linked here.

Section Four, “Cortés’s Dream,” is a powerhouse of imagery at the meeting of Cortés and Moctezuma, with all the novel’s players present. Cortés delivers a history of Christianity and the emperor bids the conquistador to “dream now.” The day ends, the action of the novel is over. But the dream…it is the dream of the entire history of Mexico from that day forward, condensed elegantly into three pages. “…But the new kingdom that he had called  New Spain grew so much that it stretched all the way to another enormous kingdom to the north, to be called New Mexico.” Magnificent.

With all the press on this novel, I expected a doorstop of a book. It is about the size of a paperback physically and runs to just 227 written pages. A surprisingly modest package, but also an epic undertaking. To put it all succinctly, “No one had any idea what was going on.” We can recount history, but most assuredly we still do not know what is really going on in our world.

Álvaro Enrigue’s novel is a marvel.

Book Review of Stefan Rinke's "Conquistadors and Aztecs: A History of the Fall of Tenochtitlan"

Conquistadors and Aztecs: A History of the Fall of Tenochtitlan
By Stefan Rinke
Translated by Christopher Reid
Oxford University Press
Hardcover, 328 pages
$34.95

Book Review by Pete Warzel

The fall of the Mexica (Aztec) capital city, Tenochtitlan, and subsequent colonization of what we now call Mexico, is rife with misconceptions, and holds our interest as the start of the movement north into our New Mexico. There are many parallels of struggle, colonization, and after-effects for indigenous populations between the Valley of Mexico invasion and the entrada into the kingdom of New Mexico. Dr. Rinke, professor of the Department of History at the Institute of Latin American Studies at Freie University, Berlin, has written a detailed but engaging history that clarifies Spanish disruption and settlement of the Americas. The book has been translated from the German original.

“By the time Christopher Columbus dies in Valladolid, Spain, on May 20, 1506, the euphoria about his westward voyage and the newly discovered territories in the Indies had turned to disillusionment.” That fitting start to this book encapsulates succinctly the discovery and fitful exploration from 1492. Enter Cortes: Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro Altamirano.

Dr. Rinke gives a good history of the Spanish Caribbean and existing colonial cities before the further exploration of the Mexican mainland, as well as a brief history of Cortés’ familial background and first successes in the region.  The Mainland action begins in November 1518, when an expedition was put together in Santiago, Cuba where Cortés was the mayor for the Yucatan and then further inland. What is clear in the preparations for conquest is the politics of the Spanish court, colonies, and expansion in the new world. Everything is political intrigue. It is a distant echo of our own times of incivility and urge to political/economic gain, but perhaps on a grander scale. This is an international stage; Europe and the new unknown. Cortés has enemies in the new world, specifically in the Governor of Cuba, Diego Velázquez, and his minions. Money, position, and pay-off are the keys to the kingdom, and all the players are adept at working the system to their advantage. The Velázquez/Cortés rivalry goes on for years.

The expedition is a “hueste” defined by the Crown taking a share of the profits, and there is no doubt that the army that accompanied Cortés as he set sail, was a corps of three hundred soldiers of fortune. Rinke iterates that gold is the mantra here. The irony is that they, the mercenaries, certainly including Cortés, are deeply religious and baptism competes as the driving force for conquest with greed. This will remain the pattern throughout the conquest of Mexico and New Mexico – economic gain for the Crown and self, and “…the use of the cross as a war symbol…was very important.” “…They were able to cultivate an image of themselves as missionaries of the sword, even though, in reality, this was only a cover for their true motivation.”

The outline of the conquest is known to us all. The detail of how it worked is the core of this book. Rinke’s research is rigorous. We think of the original three hundred Spaniards and the impossibility of conquering the great Mexica city-state and alliances with such a small army, grown to six hundred fifty soldiers at the final fall of Tenochtitlan. But the scale of the indigenous allies is staggering: twenty thousand at the final push for conquest. These allies were as politically adept as the Spanish, with ongoing maneuvering between the Aztec overlords and the Spanish, waiting, in effect, to see where the cards would fall, on an ongoing basis. The Tlaxcalans, who we know as a part of the history of Santa Fe, were the mainstay of the Spanish ancillary forces, fierce and with a literal axe to grind against the Mexicas.

The conflict and conquest took four battles after the Spanish fled their initial peaceful entry into the city. This war was a constant cycle of defeat, retreat, regrouping, defeat and retreat, all bloody and brutal. The Tlaxcalans were intent on genocide of the Mexica in their capital city. The Spanish army grew with reinforcements and soldiers changing sides when Cortés defeated an opposing expedition sent by Velázquez to remove Cortés from his potentially lucrative position in Mexico.

The key underlying elements of Aztec defeat included a real hesitancy by Moctezuma to forcefully engage the invaders. Negotiations and gifts were the initial defense, perhaps partly due to Mexica myths of the return of their own god, Quetzalcoatl in the guise of the Spanish invaders. Further, the tenuous political alliances and tribute power held by Tenochtitlan fueled these rival states for revenge and alliance with the Spanish in numbers that strengthened the invading force to one of sufficient size to lay siege to the city and prevail. The tradition of “flower wars,” where rival city-states engaged in battle to take prisoners for ritual sacrifice and not specifically to kill the enemy on the battlefield, was a cultural handicap in a position of all-out war by the Spanish, and the violent revenge motivation of the Tlazcalans. Finally, the Mexica did fight to win, but the siege, including a ring of ships built by the Spanish specifically to blockade the city on Lake Texcoco, was the key to victory, as related by one Spanish chronicle of the invasions: “More people die of hunger than from the iron.”

The result of the conquest from 1518 to 1521 was an established Spanish capital city on mainland Mexico, a base for further exploration of what we know as New Mexico beginning in 1540, and first colonization in 1598. “The conquest of Tenochtitlan was thus the culmination of a Mesoamerican war, which must be understood as part of the long history of military conflicts between the Mexica and their countless enemies.” Cortés did not conquer the Aztecs with a handful of Spanish mercenaries but with superior weapons and the allied city-states that knew how to play Cortés and Moctezuma against each other for their own political and economic gain. Mesoamerica and the Valley of Mexico were structurally unstable to begin with. The Spanish invaders provided a hesitancy in proactive defense by the Aztecs through their myths of gods returning, as well as the opportunity for Tlaxcalans, and Totanocs to ally with the superior and maybe mystical firepower, to affect revenge, brutal revenge, on their Mexica overlords. But it was the sheer number of allies that was the key. Three hundred Spanish conquistadors, even with magical guns and horses, could not have accomplished the conquest.

Dr. Rinke creates a well-defined history of the seemingly “miraculous” victory of the Spaniards against the powerful Mexica city-state. It is a history we know but know much better now due to this fine work of historical research and writing.

Ned Blackhawk's The Rediscovery of America: A Book Review by Pete Warzel

The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History
By Ned Blackhawk
Yale University Press
Hardcover
616 pages
$35.00

Review by Pete Warzel

Ned Blackhawk, School for Advanced Research board director, Howard R. Lamar Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, and the recipient of many professional awards for his research and writing, has given us a major work that explores the influence of Indigenous nations in and on the making of the United States. The research is extensive, the book eye-opening. The layers of influence and interaction are not what we learned in school, and fill in the blanks that make a more coherent whole of this nation’s history. Our pristine creation myth is perhaps not the real story.

Professor Blackhawk places a map on the inside cover and frontispiece for your first encounter with the extent of what he is about to present. It is a map of the present day United States, with the names of Native Nations located geographically, designating their pre-removal locations. The map is crowded, covered in Indigenous designations that succinctly makes the point of how extensive the original habitation of our country covered the entire landscape– and these are “select” Native Nations, not the entirety. The back inside cover and end page are a mirror image of this map, but detail the contemporary locations of state and federally recognized Native Nations. I am astounded at how many of the names are unfamiliar to me. That hole in our history is eloquently filled by Blackhawk in this serious work.

The two geographic areas where I have spent most of my life begin this history chronologically– New Mexico and the Southwest, and the northeast of Colonial France and England. I grew up in upstate New York, where the Iroquois Confederacy was familiar, the tribes legendary – Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga, Oneida, and Seneca. Their names mark the geography of the Finger Lakes, New York State counties, and towns – West Seneca. NY, was a hang-out for me, Cayuga Lake a destination. New Mexico and its nineteen pueblos are home to me now, their designation on the map warranting an expanded window to show the geographic locations spilling into Arizona.

Blackhawk’s work is so extensive it is difficult to compress in this short space. Again, reflecting the crowded visual of the map, we learn that in 1492 the Americas were home to 75 million native peoples. The history lost or overlooked is immense.

You will know the Spanish history that begins the book proper. The enslavement of indigenous people by Europeans as well as by other indigenous tribes is becoming more known in our exploration of the past in New Mexico. The same is true in the traditional narrative of the founding of our country, the colonial Northeast. Details that we might be unaware of are brought to light by Blackhawk’s research, such as the very poor military performance by George Washington, as a British commander during the French and Indian War (Seven Years War), pre-American revolution. There is the symbiotic relationship of the native nations with the French in Canada and into the northern Midwest that was built on trade and protection, throwing balance into chaos when the British defeated the French in the French and Indian War. The French left their names behind in the geography and cities (Detroit, Belle Fourche, Des Moines, LaCrosse, etc.), but also left, upon their withdrawal, a new power structure that Blackhawk argues was the spark of the revolution that created the United States.

It is just that notion of creation that is the heart of the argument of this book. Colonial expansion from the original British colonies, and the power displacements leading to Indigenous migrations, followed by colonist land expansion into the Ohio River Basin and further west, created a vacuum that the British government could not fill. Militias formed by the colonists took land from the displaced tribes and nations, and sparked a trend of intentional violence against native people, but also against British troops. The first shots of what would be the American revolution may have been fired in March, 1765, in Pennsylvania. The frontier settlers began raids on British supply trains that carried trade goods to the tribes, and “…laid siege to English forts in the region.” Blackhawk terms this rebellious, political movement “settler sovereignty”, that later in the year embraced urban protests against taxes and our school-taught history of the Boston Tea Party.

There are parallels to our troubled times today. Following the French and Indian War, really a global colonial power struggle, British colonists expanded west, and Pontiac’s War (an Odawa leader) began almost immediately. A vigilante group was formed in 1763, self-titled the Paxton Boys, renamed later the Black Boys. “An interior political culture was forming that disdained Indians and the eastern officials who supported them.” This sounds all too familiar, and although the name may be coincidence, it is eerily parallel to the contemporary neo-fascist group the Proud Boys, and the rise of fringe militias in our country. The mid-eighteenth century version was also racially biased. Benjamin Franklin, then a loyal British subject and member of the Pennsylvania colonial legislature, wrote a treatise in 1764, “ A Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County of a Number of Indians, FRIENDS of this Province” that declaimed “the only Crime seems to have been, that they had a reddish brown Skin, and Black hair.” He goes on to state that this kind of racial, violent behavior, “…is done by no civilized Nation.” Franklin was not re-elected to the legislature for his outspokenness, as the “interior” of the colonies became a new political force, and that too sounds distinctly familiar in our current politics.

The distrust of the settlers in the interior of Indigenous people now carried over to the British government, which supposedly protected westward expansion. Blackhawk cites a stunning paragraph in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, the founding document of the American Revolution that certainly has linguistic ties to our contentious monument that sits, or does not, at the center of the Santa Fe Plaza. The third to last grievance in the declaration against George III, King of England, states “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

It surprises me that a discussion about this founding rhetoric never surfaced during the “battle” over the soldiers monument in Santa Fe, given the original “Savage Indians” statement carved in the monument, and then chiseled out in the night. We are indeed ignorant of our own history, or perhaps, selectively so, and begs the question what do we do with our memorialized founding document – change it, chisel the words from the paper? Ignore it?

Professor Blackhawk’s impeccable history urges us to ask these hard questions.

Governing by the initial Articles of Confederation, the new U.S structure and infrastructure was lacking, and became a driving force of the creation of the United States Constitution in 1787, more specifically addressing the relationship with, and management of, Native Nations. But the young, independent U.S. still faced uncertainties in its administration and application of its new laws. Looking to acquiring territory from foreign holdings in North America, the new U.S. administration needed to find a legal way to do so. “Could the federal government ‘purchase’ lands, and if so, how were these lands to be added to the Union? And what was to be done with the Native and non-U.S. peoples upon them?” Acquisition by war and conquest were recognized by the Constitution. But how was the new country to govern other circumstances? Treaties with the Native Nations became the country’s internal growth mechanism, accompanied certainly by the now repeated violence of settlers against Indians. Blackhawk argues that the treaty process in place set the path for relations with other countries and empires, and the further acquisition of territories to add to the growing boundaries of the new country. The U.S cut its diplomacy teeth on Indigenous Nations.

In 1860 the pattern of expansion and violence repeats as the nation drives towards Civil War. Union soldiers stationed in the west for Indian matters are recalled for the war, and volunteer militias take on the process, again, of “settler colonialism.” As Professor Blackhawk points out, through the words of General John Pope in orders to Colonel Henry Sibley, ‘it is my purpose utterly to exterminate the Sioux if I have the power to do so….” We cannot hide that direct statement behind the blur of time and history. This federal position is a stark, reprehensible admission. It is our country’s history, plain and chilling.

In a recoil from federal mismanagement of relationships, many tribes also seceded from the Union, forming treaties with the Confederate States. In 1864 a Cherokee secessionist, Stand Watie, became a brigadier general, and “…was the last Confederate general to surrender.” Other tribes and leaders sought to maintain the treaties made with the United States–the Union –abiding by a commitment to the law. As Blackhawk relates about Indian Territory, “…the war was becoming a civil war within the civil war.”

The period following the Civil War, into the twentieth century, and now into the twenty-first, is an alternative repeat of policies and friction. “Termination” in the 1950s and 60s was an attempt by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to terminate treaties, and so tribal lands, hinting at or promising individual compensation, and more direct control by the nations. Given the murky status of sovereignty and U.S. citizen status of tribal members, termination promised it all, including relocation programs for Indian families to urban areas This effort resulted in a significant protest movement, awareness by the general public, and a true step forward in self-management, and economic development through reversal of termination, and re-establishment of sovereign autonomy on the reservations. Professor Blackhawk cites the establishment of IAIA in Santa Fe, as a transformative experience in empowering this trend.

Ned Blackhawk has given us a major work of American history. It is straightforward, rigorous, non-apologetic, and non-accusative. (The facts and citations are damning on their own). The book is simply a presentation of a documented history that we have never entertained previously, one that fills in the blanks of time to give us a more complete story of our nation’s founding and evolution. Writing of the Cold War era, Professor Blackhawk states “For most Americans, Indian affairs seemed inconsequential.” Hopefully, that is no longer the case, but if so, perhaps this book, and its wide reach into our collective history, can help to change that.

If you can grapple with the early 18th century, and the mid-19th century quotations cited above, and believe that violent rhetoric is outdated in our country and world view, let us end with a quote by Mayor Herschel Melcher, Chamberlain, South Dakota, speaking about the urban migration of Native Americans as the treaties were offered “termination” in exchange for citizen rights and self-management: “We do not intend to let an Indian light around here at all. If they come in here it will be necessary to declare an open season on Indians….We do not want them and we see no reason why we should, and don’t want them in our schools.” This from the 1960s, not so long ago in our self-enlightened times. In other words, as Blackhawk points out. Indians threaten “the American way of life.” That is the very convoluted logic that we see today in the politicization of everything American.

Take the time to read and think through the work presented in this powerful history. It is well-worth your understanding of who and how we really are as a nation.

Casa Santa Fe: A Book Review

Casa Santa Fe: Design, Style, Arts and Tradition

Photography by Melba Levick
Text by Dr. Rubén Mendoza
Rizzoli International Publications, Inc.
Hardcover, $55.00
288 pages

Review by Pete Warzel

The book that set the “style”, Santa Fe Style by Christine Mather and Sharon Woods, was published thirty years ago, in April. The past six months seems to have opened the floodgates on related publications, with Santa Fe: Sense of Place and Santa Fe Modern both published at the end of 2022, and now Casa Santa Fe: Design, Style, Arts and Tradition just released in 2023. They all are hefty, elegant books, each taking that original look at Santa Fe homes and gardens a step further in breadth and quality of the photography.

David Skolkin designed this most recent book for Rizzoli. David did the scheme for our very own 2022 publication, Old Santa Fe Today, and although different in purpose, is just as elegant as the house-style publications.

Casa Santa Fe is a handsome, substantial book, replete with engaging photographs of the subject houses. Melba Levick, photographer, has contributed to over sixty books, including two other collaborations with archeologist and educator Dr. Rubén Mendoza – The California Missions and The Spanish Style House: From Enchanted Andalusia to the California Dream. Rizzoli has found a duo that presents very well.

The cover jacket is a photo of the Amelia Hollenback House, an extraordinary John Gaw Meem house built in 1932, that was the site of one of our Steward events in 2021, thanks to Temple and Mickey Ashmore. Coincidentally, the back jacket cover is an image of the Donaciano Vigil House, the location of another of our Steward events in 2022, hosted by Christopher Watson. (Both of these houses also have entries in the book proper). The Vigil House is listed on the Historic Santa Fe Foundation Register of Properties Worthy of Preservation, and wears our shield plaque proudly on its exterior adobe plaster wall. Four other homes on the HSFF Register are included in the book, with excellent interior photographs of each.

The book begins with a comprehensive introduction by Dr. Mendoza that addresses the pre-history and history of the Santa Fe area, evolution of architectural styles, and the architects who worked to present a livable, visually pleasing, built environment that stewards the heritage of the area. Casa Santa Fe presents elegant home facades, grounds, and interiors, in defined sections: Historic and Spanish Pueblo Revival, Meem houses, Collector’s homes, Eclectic adobes, Artists’ homes, houses of the Cinco Pintores, Ranches, and finally Contemporary homes. The broad survey is interspersed between home entries with two page photo essays on various subjects that flow from the preceding chapters: tins and lanterns, portales, fireplaces and hornos, nichos, and more. This structure provides a feast of visual elements that define design and style of how we envision the city’s architecture.

All of the homes are wonderfully presented. We obviously have interest, and pride, in the homes designated on the HSFF Register. Of special interest to me are several other houses that are stunning in design, or provide room for collections that define the space or its owners. Architect Beverley Spears’ family house is a contemporary adobe house with barrel vaulted ceilings, creating what Mendoza terms a “sanctuary for the owners.” In the “Collector” section of the book, the home of Christina and Curt Nonomaque pictures a shelf in a dining area, that holds an extraordinary collection of Patrocino Barela carvings, certainly the most I have ever seen in one place. J.B. Jackson’s house in La Cienega, now owned and restored by the artist Billy Schenck and Rebecca Carter, is an expansive museum of art and prehistoric ceramics. All fascinating. Each a special look at properties that are so individually, personally designed.

The book ends with a glossary of terms, completing the excellent survey of residential architecture that helps to define the aesthetic of northern New Mexico. It is an elegant reminder of why Santa Fe feels like home to so many of us around the world.

I Got Mine: A Book Review

I Got Mine: Confessions of a Midlist Writer
By John Nichols
University of New Mexico Press
Hardback, 280 pages, 36 halftones
$27.95

A Review by Pete Warzel

John Treadwell Nichols will be 82 years old this year. He has been writing for much more than a majority of those years, having his first publishing deal for A Sterile Cuckoo, at the age of 23. A wunderkind, for sure. The golden boy.

This memoir by Nichols covers that initial success and the years that follow, up to now, focused on the writing aspects of his 23 novels and non-fiction books, myriad essays, political diatribes, screenplays, and all the work that did not get published along the way. Some of his personal life comes through in this book, some of the marriages, the political engagement, and certainly his pure feelings about Hollywood, but it is really a travelogue through a writing life. In that, it is fascinating.

I once had the opportunity to visit John’s storage shed in Taos many years ago, to view the manuscripts, the endless rewrites, that now reside at the University of New Mexico in the John Nichols archives. I believe it is no joke in this memoir when he cites the astounding 35th draft of his book On the Mesa, a non-fiction love story about the natural world around Taos, that finally came in at 193 pages. All his manuscripts filled a shelf that ran around the shed about the size of a two-car garage. Boxes filled the floor. It was a three-dimensional visualization of this memoir.

The title I Got Mine is taken from the epigram to the book, a two verse quote from a traditional song that tells the tale of a gambler losing all his money at a crap game, but when the police broke up the game someone dropped a bet on the floor, immediately swiped by the narrator on his way out the door. That is a witty analogy to John’s success, or not, as a writer. No money, big money, broke again. The Milagro Beanfield War sells very little, lingers, becomes an underground classic, while the third book in The New Mexico Trilogy, Nirvana Blues, becomes a best-seller in major cities and sends Nichols on his first book tour. Milagro percolates and becomes a film project for Robert Redford, and so up and down, paydirt and paucity.

Nichols rings true when he recalls the screenwriting gigs for Hollywood films, capturing the essence of the biz, as only his sense of humor can do. “So we park, take an elevator to the top floor, and sit down with Eddie Lewis and eight tanned moguls wearing Armani suits… Everyone gets comfortable, politely eats a delicate little cucumber and sprouts sandwich, takes a sip of Pellegrino sparkling water and then the head addresses Costa: ‘Well Costa, tell us what you have in mind’” Perfect. Costa is Costa-Gavras the director of Missing, an outstanding film that Nichols wrote the screenplay for… and got pushed out of the film credit by the Screenwriters Guild. Hollywood politics, a cruel outcome since it won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

He also rings so very true when he talks about his adopted home of Taos, New Mexico. “The stands at Friday or Saturday Taos High football games boasted cheering fans. Overhead, doves flew south trailed by noisy sandhill cranes. The Wednesday drive-in movies featured Tony Aguilar – I parked the family there to learn Spanish and enjoy the music. Lightning streak lit up the western sky as we pigged out on butter-drenched popcorn.” Idyllic, small town America, but in the kingdom of New Mexico, Chamisaville, to some. 

There is a sense of endless energy in this book. Nichols writes and writes and rewrites, multiple novels and screenplays at once, while taking time to commit to political protest and engagement, raise a family, remarry and remarry. He describes himself as “…a one man writing factory, working on five novels at once.” My sense is that at 81 he still has a good chunk of that energy left. This book gallops and roars, laughs out loud at the publishing business, the movie business, and at the author himself. John Nichols really never pulled his punches in his writing, or in conversation or protest. This book follows suit. He is ethically consistent in everything he does, like it or not.

Let me close with an opinion. American Blood, a Nichols novel from 1987, breaks the mold of his work, and it is a masterpiece. Like Cormac McCarthy, but in Nichols own style and vision, he explores the undercurrent, no, the heart and soul of America as violent. I remember when it was first published, I bought it and read it in a night and day. It is a powerful, ugly, beautiful piece of writing, and I could not put it down deep into the night. It scared me, as does our country more and more these days. John has written a lot of very good books with his singular sense of humor and love of land and people. American Blood is a work from deeper inside. It was I thought, on that first reading, truly a great novel. I will go back and read it again and hope I was correct. It is, given the past several weeks of repeated mass killings in our country, a reflection of our society, but written 35 years ago. It is timely again, and might be of interest to you, but with a WARNING. It is violent and disturbing. The reviews Nichols includes in I Got Mine might be worth reading before trying out American Blood. A comment Nichols himself makes in this memoir about being asked to write a screenplay of the novel is to the point. “This time around I chickened out of writing a script because I couldn’t deal with the violence.”

So let’s end with this to put it all in perspective. Nichols is on the set of The Milagro Beanfield War in Truchas, New Mexico, 1986. Robert Redford walks by and says “ Oh, John Nichols, are you slumming in Hollywood again?” Enough said. John Nichols has had a wild ride.

Donaciano Vigil: A Book Review

Review by Pete Warzel

518 Alto Street is an elegant, traditionally adobe plastered home, formerly owned by the Historic Santa Fe Foundation, and recognized as historically significant by the Foundation’s Register of Properties Worthy of Recognition, as well as the National Register of Historic Places. HSFF holds a preservation easement on the property ensuring the façade, footprint, and specific elements be maintained as is, in perpetuity.

The house was brought to prominent public attention in the 1960s when owned and renovated by Charlotte White and companion, the sculptor Boris Gilbertson. It was much earlier owned by the Vigil family, the land purchased and the home built sometime between 1792 and 1800. It is the birthplace of Donaciano Vigil, Territorial Governor of New Mexico following the murder of Governor Charles Bent during the Taos Revolt in 1847. His fascinating life spanned Spanish, Mexican, and United States jurisdiction of the area in the 19th century, and so was at the center of the change to what we are now.

Authors Maurilio E. Vigil (descendant of Donaciano) and Helene Boudreau, both professors at New Mexico Highlands University, have written a thoroughly researched, engaging history of Donaciano Vigil, within the context of New Mexico history, and the long arm of Spanish colonization of New Spain and the northern reaches of what would become our state. The detail in this book is prodigious, the writing well done, the story fascinating. And because of our former ownership of the Alto Street House, Donaciano feels like a cousin we are just learning about.

The authors trace the origination of the Vigil family from Spain, and follow the emigration of the noble class to the new world due to “…the many Spaniards trapped in this archaic social and political system…” that arose under the Austrian Habsburg monarchs of Spain during the sixteenth century. Juan Montes Vigil II was the third named Vigil immigrant to the Americas, and the patriarch of the family in New Mexico. Juan Montes Vigil III had a son out of wedlock, Francisco Montes Vigil, most likely a mestizo, and the first Vigil to move his family to New Mexico, following Don Diego de Vargas’ call for settlers to propagate the newly reconquered land in 1695. (The authors pull no punches in describing the years of Spanish return following the Pueblo Revolt, “Santa Fe was liked an armed camp….Food was scarce, and it was up to Vargas to remedy the situation. He commanded a force to Picuris and Taos to steal food from the natives.”)  Juan Cristobal Montes Vigil II, great grandson of Francisco Montes, purchased the land and built the home on Alto Street sometime around 1800, where Donaciano was born in 1802.

I have long pondered the lack of focus on Mexican history in Santa Fe, and why that might be. It is a significant missing piece in the way the city promotes its past, and a hole in our own knowledge of the cultural history of our city. No longer. Donacinao Vigil’s life is at the heart of Mexican rule in New Mexico, and the authors fill in the blanks with great research and detail. In many ways, Donaciano is a cultural bridge between Spain and U.S. ownership of the land here. Born under Spanish rule in Santa Fe, he begins his prodigious career in the military, as many of his forefathers had done for Spain and Mexico. He serves during the rebellion in Santa Cruz in 1837, and again during the attempted Texas invasion of New Mexico in 1841, takes on a political persona as secretary of the assembly in the Department of New Mexico under Mexican regime in Santa Fe, and following General Kearney’s invasion by the Army of the West, and proclamation that New Mexico was now part of the U.S., is appointed Secretary of the first, civil U.S. government. That position was second in political command to the governor, Charles Bent. Upon Bent’s murder in Taos during the Taos uprising, Donaciano Vigil stepped into the position and began to create new government structure and process, following the Kearney Code, and supervised the creation of the Vigil Index, a guide to the document archive of Spain and Mexico for future use by the United States in lawsuits and land claims. His dedication and energy out ran the new national affiliation’s timeframe as he was informed the structure could not stand, since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo had not yet been signed by Mexico and the U.S., so ownership of New Mexico was still under Mexico jurisdiction. Ooops.  

The subtitle of the book cites Donaciano Vigil’s service as soldier, statesman, and territorial governor, but that leaves so much of his life out of the picture. An active life of community and political involvement put him at the center of everything. He retired to land purchased in Pecos, NM, ostensibly as a gentleman farmer, yet continues to be called and serve as a Territorial Representative to the New Mexico legislature. He built a molino, grist mill, on his land beside the Pecos River, and ground corn and threshed wheat for his neighbors, augmenting his income. Upon his death, he received a spectacular send-off by his fellow New Mexicans, the authors quoting historian Ralph Emerson Twitchell, “…by far the largest and most distinguished gathering ever witnessed in New Mexico.”

Professors Vigil and Boudreau have written an important book on a native born New Mexican who straddled three political and cultural worlds, and was instrumental in forming the government of the United States in the Territory that would eventually become the forty-seventh state. In doing so, they highlight Mexican history in Santa Fe, and how governmental transition worked and cultures interacted on way to becoming New Mexico.

Donaciano Vigil: The Life of a Nuevomexicno Soldier, Statesman, and Territorial Governor
By Maurilio E. Vigil and Helene Boudreau
University of New Mexico Press
Hardbound, 318 pages, $39.95

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Donaciano Vigil The Life of a Nuevomexicano Soldier, Statesman, and Territorial Governor, Maurilio E. Vigil & Helene Boudreau

$39.95

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