by John Nichols
With luck, the first-draft writing flows. More often my initial manuscripts read like a Fellini movie shot by Russ Myers, Ken Russel, and the old Dennis Hopper. That is, the writing is full of energy and invention but largely incoherent. With Milagro, happy to say, I got very lucky.
For all of November I blammed my ass off. I literally pounded into submission my tiny green Hermes Rocket, the original “disposable” typewriter. (I used to buy ’em for forty dollars, and toss their remains after almost every novel. Since 1975, though, I have worked exclusively on an archaic Olympia portable that I’m sure will last until I die.)
In forty days I created a five-hundred-page book. I corrected the manuscript in about three weeks, and spent another three weeks typing up a clean copy. This I promptly sent off to my agent, Perry Knowlton, at Curtis Brown. Perry gave the novel to Marian Wood at Holt, Rinehart and Winston. And Marian bought it for ten thousand dollars.
Wow.
The whole process, start to finish, had taken about sixteen weeks. I was flabbergasted.
Holt allowed me about six months to rewrite. So throughout 1973 I added and subtracted, making endless revisions. I worked often at Rini’s cabin. Rini read the book and offered comments and suggestions. She also did a series of drawings to illustrate the novel and its cover.
Despite poverty and a confused marital situation, the year that went into the creation of Milagro became a great time in my life. I had no car, and often hitchhiked or took a bus down to Pilar Hill. Rini was sculpting then in a small, cold shack behind her cabin. Late at night we made cheese tacos and drank Dos Equis beer, and Rini smoked her Delicados. We sipped wine, also, and downed many cups of chicory-flavored coffee. It was a feverish working time for both of us, and also a joyful and passionate sojourn that has defined how I’ve tried to live ever since.
It snowed late into that spring. There were always magpies and Steller’s jays and ravens and coyotes near the cabin. After the thaw, we went fishing and camping in the nearby high country. I remember one day skinny-dipping in the icy Little Rio Grande, and I can still hear Rini’s gasping shouts echoing down that verdant canyon.
Milagro just kept on writing itself. None of my other books have come so easy. I daresay the process was close to “effortless.” I used to laugh at my own jokes as I typed. On occasion Rini said, “Cut that, it’s just too stupid.” But jeez, I was having so much fun.
Meanwhile, in real life, the conservancy and the Indian Camp Dam looked like a shoo-in. No matter, my fiction could defy the odds. And, given the jubilant mood I was in, of course the citizens of Milagro defeated that conservancy and Ladd Devine.
Only years later did life imitate my art. But in the end, the Tres Ríos Association also scored a unique triumph that paralleled the resolution of Milagro.
* * *
When this book was published in 1974, not much happened. It received good reviews and rotten reviews. Only Ballantine made a paperback offer, and I believe they paid $7,500. (Ten years earlier Avon had coughed up $37,500 for paperback rights to The Sterile Cuckoo.) Though recommending Milagro, Book-of-the-Month Club didn’t buy it. Holt did a small second printing, but then had to remainder quickly for lack of interest.
And my next two novels were rejected.
Worse, my friend Rini effectively disappeared by moving to Mexico City.
The good news was that Milagro went out on film option even before publication. Not for a pile of money, but in those days $4,500 constituted a major fortune to me. The producers tried for six years to realize a movie. They never succeeded, but they tried like hell. Bob Christiansen and Rick Rosenberg were also real good guys, and they kept me alive in the process. Their option payments allowed me to write, and eventually I scored another novel, The Magic Journey.
Which hit bookstores all over America (with a whimper!) in 1978.
Like most writers, though, I am a tenacious bloke. I estimate that if all the various drafts of books I have done were counted up, I have probably written seventy or eighty since the age of seventeen. I have only published fifteen. So despite reversals of fortune after Milagro, I simply kept on plodding ahead, the quintessential tortoise, and by 1982 I had actually published three more novels and a couple of nonfiction books. None sold well, but I seemed to be developing both a career and a “reputation.”
If you believed the newspapers, a decade after its publication Milagro had become an “underground cult classic.” It was being used in high school and college sociology, literature, and Chicano studies classes. Ballantine had kept it in print in paperback, and for that I bless them.
But no foreign publisher (aside from Andre Deutsch in Great Britain) had brought out an edition. And although the book had been on film option for ten years, I’d still have bet the farm that a movie would never be made.
In 1980 I myself began working on films. My first effort was a rewrite of the picture Missing for Costa-Gavras. According to Missing’s producer, Eddie Lewis, Milagro got me that job. The novel’s politics and its humanity had caught his eye, so he made a call that launched my film career.
Missing was successful, and Costa and I worked on a couple of other films together over the next five years: neither saw the light of day. I also wrote multiple drafts of a Milagro script for the L.A. producer Moctesuma Esparza, and for his eventual partner, Robert Redford. I produced scripts for Louis Malle and Karel Reisz. And I spent two years developing a CBS miniseries about the life of Pancho Villa and the Mexican Revolution.
During this fruitful time I also published three nonfiction books and another novel, American Blood (in 1987). So by the time Milagro actually became a film, fifteen years after the book’s debut, I could say that I had held together a writing career for almost twenty-five years.
Thanks to the film (a 1988 release), translations of Milagro appeared in Danish, German, Dutch, Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese.
And the albatross had become firmly established around my neck.
I won’t say much here about the moviemaking process. The hoopla surrounding this book during its filming in New Mexico triggered the most intrusive and traumatic period of my life. I dealt poorly with all that publicity. Yes, I had my fifteen minutes of Warholian fame, but I didn’t much like it. I was very happy when the brouhaha subsided.
The film itself is a lovely and compassionate work of art, and I’m indebted to Bob Redford for putting it together with such a gentle and timeless sensibility.
* * *
My friend Rini never saw the movie. She died in Mexico City in 1986. She was only fifty-one. Her death is a great loss in my life, and in the lives of many people whom she worked for, touched, and inspired. Rini was a dear friend and a powerful mentor to me. She was also the political and cultural worker that I most admired in the movement.
Too, she was probably the most unselfish person I have met. She grew up with money, but rejected it in her adult life. She lived simply, and did most of her work for free for people organizing on behalf of human rights and economic justice. Her dedication to the causes she believed in was total. Rini literally worked herself to death. But she left behind a shining body of art, and a lifetime of commitment to the struggle for a better world.
After her body was cremated, the ashes were brought north to New Mexico. We put together a ceremony at her cabin on Pilar Hill. Many friends and comrades from Mexico and the United States gathered to honor her work and her memory. After all had spoken their thoughts, a few of us took small handfuls of her ashes and went out on the mesa to scatter them in private.
I recalled the walks we had taken thirteen years earlier while I was working on this book. I scattered a few ashes and bone chips at the gorge rim, then I sat in the shade of a juniper, weeping because she was gone. I licked the chalky residue of her bones from my fingertips.
Much of Milagro’s insouciant vitality I owe to Rini. She made me joyful in a difficult time, and it sure showed in the writing. Discovering her, in 1973, has reverberated in my life an
d work ever since.
* * *
My friend Andrés Martínez lived to a ripe old age. He was still president of the Tres Ríos Association when the New Mexico Supreme Court overturned a district court ruling and threw out the Taos conservancy district. After that, Andrés continued to act as an organizer and spokesperson in many conflicts over land and water rights in northern New Mexico.
When Milagro went into film production, Andrés was not all that interested. He had never heard of Robert Redford. When the picture had a benefit opening in Taos to raise money for the Tres Ríos Association, Andrés showed up and even gave a little speech. His eyesight had deteriorated so that it was difficult for him to follow what was on the screen. But he got a kick out of Amarante Córdova hijacking a bulldozer, and all those water politics only slightly skewed by the Hollywood lens.
Even in his nineties, Andrés would show up at important meetings in our valley and give his opinion. He would demand that the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which had ended the Mexican-American War in 1848, be honored by the current government of the United States. He was a Mormon and a Republican, and yet up to the end he got along famously with yours truly, who was an Agnostic and a Commie. We loved each other dearly.
My aged friend’s death occurred in December 1990. Andrés was ninety-two and still talking about land and water struggles the day before he died.
* * *
No doubt any author would be grateful to have just one book achieve longevity, a life of its own. I am sad, however, that April Delaney and Virgil Leyba of The Magic Journey have not touched as wide a chord as Herbie Goldfarb and Ruby Archuleta and José Mondragón. And I do wish that somehow Janine Tarr and Michael Smith from American Blood could reach my country’s soul.
Still, as albatrosses go, I guess this one, ultimately, is fairly benign. I don’t know if Milagro is a good book, or just one with a lot of upbeat energy that has captured a certain fancy. To be truthful, though, I do have a few minor regrets. For example, given the opportunity to rewrite this novel, for sure I would cut out two thirds of the cussing, which often seems gratuitous. And believe me, only one character, and just once during the entire novel, would dare exclaim, “Ai, Chihuahua!”
Other than that, I still haven’t reread the book in its entirety since the galleys were returned to Marian Wood so long ago.
I will admit that it’s interesting to have the novel, like a dutiful son or daughter, phone home from time to time. I have received calls from a broken-down theater in Port-au-Prince, and from a prison cell in Mazatlán. Milagro told me once that it was being used for toilet paper by members of the FMLN in the high country of El Salvador. I got notice years ago that a Russian Anglophile waiting in line to see Lenin’s tomb almost died laughing while reading about the misadventures of Pacheco’s pig. And I heard a rumor that when a noted member of the Weather Underground turned herself in some years back, she carried a copy of Milagro to her prison cell.
So, yes, the beat goes on. Naturally, I hope this book will continue to inspire people and make them laugh. And if in the process it should also encourage them to overthrow the capitalist system, well, why not?
As Joe Mondragón once said in a mild fit of revolutionary zeal, “A person’s reach should exceed their grasp, or else what’s a heaven for … qué no?”
Taos, New Mexico
April 1993
Books by John Nichols
FICTION
The Sterile Cuckoo
The Wizard of Loneliness
A Ghost in the Music
American Blood
An Elegy for September
Conjugal Bliss
THE NEW MEXICO TRILOGY
The Milagro Beanfield War
The Magic Journey
The Nirvana Blues
NONFICTION
If Mountains Die
(with William Davis)
The Last Beautiful Days of Autumn
On the Mesa
A Fragile Beauty
The Sky’s the Limit
Keep It Simple
Owl Books
Henry Holt and Company, LLC
Publishers since 1866
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New York, New York 10010
www.henryholt.com
An Owl Book® and ® are registered trademarks of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
Copyright ©1974, 1994 by John Treadwell Nichols
Afterword copyright ©1994 by John Treadwell Nichols
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nichols, John Treadwell
The Milagro beanfield war /John Nichols.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-6374-5
ISBN-10: 0-8050-6374-9
1. Mexican Americans—New Mexico—Fiction. 2. Water rights—New Mexico—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3564.I274M5 1994
813'.54—dc20
93-11937
CIP
First published in hardcover in 1974 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston
First Owl Books Edition 2000
eISBN 9781466859616
First eBook edition: October 2013