For more than half a century this condition prevailed. No church, no crusading newspaper, no band of women sought to correct this basic evil, and across Colorado, Anglo children who once had been raised to believe that Indians were not human were now raised to think that Mexicans were even less so. As one popular children’s book stated: “By the time Billy the Kid was twenty-one years old, be had killed one man for each year of his life, not counting Indians or Mexicans.”
It was to this kind of Little Mexico that Tranquilino Marquez moved permanently in late November 1921, with his wife, Serafina, his hot-headed son Triunfador and his lovely daughter Soledad, now thirteen years old. They found a shack of unbelievable decrepitude and filth, which they proceeded to clean up. Serafina performed miracles with scissors and needle; she would have done even better had a sewing machine been available. And Triunfador obtained, in a way that his father thought best not to inquire about, some lumber for shoring up the falling sides of the building. When they were through, the place could not have been called a house, for it offered practically no protection from either rain or wind, but it was a shelter, and there the family settled down.
They were not the kind of people to attract attention, so they had no reason to fear raids by Sheriff Bogardus, nor was Tranquilino disposed toward the Penitente movement, so there was no danger of his being clubbed by the deputies. The trouble lay with Triunfador, tall and sinewy, like his father; hard as iron, like his mother. He was now twenty and well instructed in the methods of sugar-beet cultivation. He was not able to read or write, but he had an unusual ingenuity and a determination to better himself.
Trouble started when he found an abandoned shack close to State 8, the rural highway leading from Centennial to Line Camp. Without seeking permission from the authorities, he took it over and installed a phonograph, three tables and some chairs. He made it a congenial place for the unemployed laborers to congregate and soon he was selling candy bars and soda pop.
It did not take the farmers of Centennial long to discover that in La Cantina, as it was called, lay the seeds of rebellion. “You let them damned Mexicans start congregating like that,” a Russian beet farmer warned Sheriff Bogardus, “and first thing you know, we got labor unions and all sorts of trouble.” When a second complaint was filed, Bogardus saw his duty.
Looming in the doorway, his pistols protruding from his holster, he announced, “This place is closed.” Saying no more, he withdrew, confident that no Mexican would defy such a clear-cut order.
Triunfador did not intend to close down, for he saw in La Cantina a nucleus around which a better way of life could be obtained for his people. “La Raza,” he said when speaking of his fellow Mexicans. The race, the whole Spanish race, both those from New Mexico, like Father Vigil, and the peons from Old Mexico, like his father. They must not live like animals, the members of La Raza, hibernating in their winter hovels like rattlesnakes. They must devise something better, something finer even than the back streets of Denver. He would not close.
“Goddamnit!” Sheriff Bogardus bellowed the next morning, after farmers had complained that “them damned Mexicans are still at it.” “I told you to close this joint. Now you get the hell out of here.” He started kicking the furniture around, and some men, who had already experienced his violence, left. But not Triunfador. Standing behind his improvised bar, he stared at the sheriff and said nothing.
“You!” Bogardus shouted. “I told you to get out of here.”
“This is my place,” Triunfador said, with heavy rising emphasis on the final word.
This is my plAAAAce!” Bogardus mimicked. He glared at the young man who was defying him, and with a sudden reach of both hands, grabbed Triunfador, jerked him across the bar and threw him out the door and into the gutter.
That afternoon he returned with a court order directing him to padlock the place, and when Triunfador, against his father’s admonition, ripped off the padlock, a passing farmer hurried in to the sheriff’s office to report, “Well, Sheriff, them Mexicans tore down your paper. We got trouble.”
Bogardus and three assistants speeded out State 8 and wheeled their vehicles to the door of La Cantina. “You son-of-a-bitch!” the sheriff bellowed. “Who in hell do you think you are, defying a court order?”
He ordered his deputies to haul the revolutionary off to jail. Next morning Triunfador was arraigned before the judge in Greeley, a man who owned a farm himself and recognized insurrection when he saw it. Leaning across the bench, he admonished Triunfador: “Young man, you’re a visitor in this country and you must obey our laws. You have no license to operate a house of amusement, no license to play music and certainly no license to sell either candy or soft drinks. Furthermore, you have no right to be on that property, and you have defied a court order. Sixty days.”
During his time in jail Triunfador did not know that he was being defended by a robust woman he had never met. Father Vigil, outraged at the sentence, did what he could to arouse public indignation, but he was ineffective, and one night in a shack at Little Mexico he confessed his impotence: The judge won’t listen. The sheriff is a bully. The newspaper laughs at us. The priest is more useless than the Anglo ministers. Not even the professors in Greeley will attend. Doesn’t anyone in Colorado care?”
From the shadows a workman said, “Charlotte Lloyd. One day she brought my children clothes.”
“Mrs. Lloyd!” some of the others muttered, and next morning Father Vigil stood before the castle, knocking at the great oak door.
After a while a formidable woman greeted him, Charlotte Lloyd, almost seventy now but still straight as a soldier. As major stockholder in a famous ranch, she was a woman who accepted no nonsense, for she had proved that she could handle a man as easily as a horse. She had a weather-beaten face and a hearty laugh. “Come in,” she said abruptly, leading him into a large room from whose walls the heads of stuffed moose and buffalo stared down. “What nonsense are you up to?” Before he could answer, she asked, “Aren’t you the one who sticks darning needles into people?”
Father Vigil was confused, but he sensed that he was in the presence of someone who might help, so he persisted. “I come to you about injustice,” he said.
“World’s full of it,” Charlotte replied.
“The Mexicans.”
“Never had much use for ’em,” Charlotte said. “What’s happening to ’em now?”
He burst into an impassioned series of questions “Is it fair to work our people all summer and then force them to sit like puppets in the dark all winter? Are we not entitled to a cantina where we can have music?”
“Everyone’s entitled to music.”
“Is it fair that we have nothing, nothing?”
“Doesn’t sound fair at all. Be specific.”
He was, and the more he said, the more furious Charlotte became. “This is outrageous,” she fumed, reaching for her hat.
With Father Vigil, she visited the Roman Catholic priest in Greeley, the editors, the licensing board in Denver, the sheriff, and wherever she went she asked one simple question: “Aren’t you ashamed of what you’ve been doing?”
When word of Charlotte Lloyd’s interference reached the beet farmers, there was consternation. “Father Vigil’s putting her up to this,” the farmers said. “He’s preaching revolution.” So the farmers started a backlash. “Charlotte Lloyd is nothing but a damned fool. Not a brain in her head. But this Father Vigil. He’s got to go.” Petitions were circulated, calling for the deportation of the priest to Mexico, and when the signatures were presented to the judge, he summoned Father Vigil to the bench; unfortunately for the cause of justice, Charlotte Lloyd came along, and a rather hectic legal scene ensued.
JUDGE: You know, Father Vigil, you’re only a guest in this country and Sheriff Bogardus has the power to send you back to Mexico if you don’t behave.
CHARLOTTE: He absolutely doesn’t.
JUDGE: Are you contradicting this court?
CHARLOTTE: Fa
ther Vigil’s a citizen of New Mexico. He’s an American.
JUDGE: He is?
CHARLOTTE: His ancestors have lived here for the past four hundred years. I chanced to look up the ancestors of Sheriff Bogardus and they came here in 1901. If any body gets thrown out of this country, maybe it should be Sheriff Bogardus.
JUDGE: May I ask, Mrs. Lloyd, are you a citizen of this country?
CHARLOTTE: Give up my British passport? Are you crazy?
The judge leaned back. It was incomprehensible that Father Vigil, this unlovely man who stuck thorns in people, should have been an American longer than anyone else in his court that morning. Emig, Osterhaut, Miller—they had been serfs on the Volga at a time when the Vigils had already occupied New Mexico and southern Colorado for centuries. It was most confusing.
The judge denied every request Charlotte made, and Triunfador was ordered to close his cantina for good. When the decision was promulgated, Charlotte appeared to accept it with good grace, and she commiserated openly with Triunfador. The judge and sheriff, pleased with having fended off this difficult Englishwoman, started to terminate proceedings, whereupon Charlotte asked innocently, but in a loud voice, “By the way, Harry, who owns those shacks?”
A hasty recess was ordered, during which the judge explained in a whisper, “You know damned well, Charlotte, that Mervin Wendell built them. Now his son owns them, but it would be most embarrassing if this appeared in the paper. Philip does many good things in this community. Matter of fact, he’s promised us a new library.”
“Then I will expect him, this afternoon, to sell me for one hundred dollars the shack where Triunfador has his cantina, and I propose renting in to Triunfador for one dollar a year. I’m sure you and the sheriff can convince him to sell. Otherwise, I take my story to the Denver Post.”
“That’s blackmail,” the judge protested.
Charlotte smiled, and in this roundabout way Triunfador Marquez obtained his license to operate a cantina, which became, as the Anglo farmers had predicted, a center for Mexican agitation. Core of the place was the phonograph with its stack of records imported from Old Mexico. Could the beet farmers have heard the songs which emanated from this creaky machine, they would have been terrified, for they were the songs of revolution. One of the most popular was “La Adelita,” that heart-pulsing ballad of the woman bandoleras:
Oh, if Adelita ran off with another,
I would follow her by land and sea.
If by sea, in a ship of war.
If by land, in a military train.
Many of the songs spoke of the brave years when men caroused across the state of Chihuahua aboard the military trains. Tranquilino often sat in his son’s establishment, listening to ballads which told of this excursion or that:
I boarded the train in Chihuahua
Seeking the war of Pancho Villa
But there was that girl in Durango.
Ay, me! I am not a brave one, not me.
But the song which gave deepest gratification to the Mexicans was “The Corrido of Pancho Villa,” for in its verses the Mexicans won the war of 1916. They simply kicked hell out of the inept Americans under General Pershing:
On February twenty-third
President Wilson sent six thousand Americans
Into Mexico to hunt down Pancho Villa
Through all the hills and mountains.
The bouncy ballad, sung by a double quartet of male voices, told in many stanzas how Villa tantalized the Americans, leading them into one ambush after another until they had to retreat in ignominy, leaving Villa triumphant.
Valiente, valiente Pancho Villa!
Conquistador y sus Dorados!
It was some time before Tranquilino confessed that he had been one of the Dorados, the golden ones who had swept across Chihuahua and Sonora and Durango. When the ballads were playing on the phonograph he would close his eyes, and whenever the phrase “el tren militar” occurred, he would open them and smile at the men watching him, and they would nod out of respect, knowing that he had been on such trains and they had not.
Oh, brave Pancho Villa! How you fought!
How you drove the hated Yanqui from our land.
We adore you and your Golden Ones.
Oh, Pancho Villa, teach me how to fight.
Sheriff Bogardus kept a close watch on La Cantina and made arrests whenever singers grew raucous or someone threw a pop bottle onto the road. He suspected that the new amendment forbidding alcohol in the United States was being flouted, and numerous raids were made. Whenever news of a shipment reached him—for bootleggers driving down from Canada to deliver their goods to homes in Centennial sometimes dropped a few bottles off in Little Mexico—he ignored the sales in town and arrested Triunfador, and on Monday morning the Clarion would, carry a sarcastic notice:
Triunfador Marquez, the would-be mayor of little Mexico, was arrested again last Saturday night, dispensing bootleg alcohol of a deadly variety from his esteemed emporium. He is now in jail.
Those frequent arrests of his son caused Tranquilino much anxiety, for although he had been a considerable revolutionary in Old Mexico, in Little Mexico he had always been an exemplary citizen, and he often upbraided his son.
“Last time you were in jail,” he said to Triunfador, “Sheriff Bogardus, he came to see me and asked, ‘Why can’t Triunfador be a good Mexican? Work in summer and keep his nose clean in winter?’ ”
During his stays in jail Triunfador was frequently visited by Father Vigil, and to his surprise he found the Catholic priest to be a man of profound vision. He foresaw a day when Mexicans in states like Texas and Arizona would come into their own, finding a satisfactory level of life, neither high nor low but just. To prepare for that day he started teaching Triunfador how to read and gave him primary-school texts imported from Old Mexico. In them the prisoner learned about Mexican history and the traditions of his land. In more advanced books he studied how the dictator Porfirio Díaz had sold every worthy item in Mexico to the highest bidder, whether he be Mexican, Spaniard, Yanqui or German. He was delighted when he read of General Terrazas, dictator of Chihuahua, for his father had told him of how they had burned the Terrazas ranches, and he began to comprehend what it meant to be a Mexican.
He had no desire to return to the land of his birth; indeed, he barely remembered it now. It was like a bad dream, for he recalled something his father had told him: “On the trains you could tell which of us had worked in America del Norte, for we had shoes.” It was better in Colorado, infinitely better than in Chihuahua. He loved America and its relative freedom and the opportunities it gave people. He could even borrow money from the soda-pop distributor, and he had bought on credit the lumber for the extension to his cantina.
But some things that happened in America enraged him, like the incident in October 1923. That summer his father and mother had worked for a Russian named Grabhorn, and they had slaved extra-long hours at the beets. When the crop was harvested, Tranquilino had served as beet-fork man—“the widow-maker” this fork was called, for it pulled a man’s guts out, lifting thirty-two pounds of beets and tossing them high into the wagons—but he had justified the extra effort by explaining that when the check arrived on November 15, he would have additional money which he would give to Triunfador to help enlarge the cantina.
On the last day of October, Mr. Grabhorn made the telephone call. All the Anglo farmers knew how to do this—Immigration Service Denver Colorado. You didn’t have to give your name, either. You just whispered in the phone, “I’m a loyal American and it turns my stomach to see what’s happening to this country. At the Rudolf Grabhorn farm in Centennial seven miles east on Weld 17, two Mexicans are working without proper papers, Tranquilino Marquez and his wife Serafina. They ought to be sent back to Mexico, where they belong.”
So three or four days before the checks arrived, immigration officials swept down upon the Grabhorn farm, arrested Tranquilino and his wife, and shipped them back to Mexico. Grabhorn, of cou
rse, escaped paying their wages and pocketed the money they had so painfully earned. Come next March, he would hire a different family. As for Tranquilino, once he and his wife were thrown across the border at Ciudad Juarez, they were free to slip upstream a few miles, wade across the Rio Grande, and walk right back to Centennial, where they could hire themselves out to some other farmer.
This extraordinary procedure was condoned because neither Colorado nor national laws cared to face up to the problem. Colorado farmers were allowed to employ wetbacks, as they were called, without fear of punishment, but the wetback himself was illegal, and could suffer both punishment and deportation. Whenever the matter came before the legislature, it was quickly brushed aside on the grounds, “We need them.” They were needed, but they were not wanted, and it was for this reason that evil tricks like the one played on Tranquilino Marquez were allowed.
When Triunfador heard of how his parents had been abused, he stormed about his cell. “They were robbed! And the government helped!” He vowed he would gain revenge, but it was then that Father Vigil spoke most persuasively. “You must subdue your passions, my son. You must control them and bend them to your purpose. There is simply no good in raging or cursing or making threats. The whole judicial system is contrived against us, and there is no way we can fight back. What we can do ...”
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