Six years after the founding of the SCLC, Martin Luther King decided that nonviolent resistance by itself was inadequate, and the violence the southern segregationists inflicted on blacks should be made as public as possible. The audience would no longer be merely the oppressors, but the world. This was the strategy of the Birmingham struggle, perhaps the central episode of the civil rights movement, which began on Good Friday of 1963 with the first of many marches, or processions. It is from these protests that the most famous images come, of people being blasted by high-pressure fire hoses and savaged by police dogs, images that provoked worldwide indignation. King and hundreds of others were arrested for marching in Birmingham, and after the supply of willing adults began to run out, high school students were recruited, and their younger siblings volunteered. They marched for freedom with bold jubilance, and on May 2 of that year 900 of these children were arrested. To go out onto the streets knowing they risked attack, injury, arrest, and death took an extraordinary resolve, and the religious ardor of Southern Baptists as well as the Christian iconography of martyrdom seems to have strengthened them. A month after the Birmingham campaign had begun, writes one of King’s biographers, “Reverend Charles Billups and other Birmingham ministers led more than 3,000 young people on a prayer pilgrimage to Birmingham jail singing ‘I Want Jesus to Walk with Me’ as they moved.”
A photograph of the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march has been on my refrigerator for months, and it speaks of this inspired walking. Taken by Matt Heron, it show a steady stream of marchers three or four wide moving from right to left across the photograph. He must have lain low to take it, for it raises its subjects up high against a pale, clouded sky. They seem to know they are walking toward transformation and into history, and their wide steps, upraised hands, the confidence of their posture, express the will with which they go to meet it. They have found in this walk a way to make their history rather than suffer it, to measure their strength and test their freedom, and their movement expresses the same sense of destiny and meaning that resonates in King’s deep-voiced, indomitable oratory.
In 1970 the form of the pilgrimage was moved yet further from its origins when the first Walkathon was held by the March of Dimes. Tony Choppa, who has been working on these walks since 1975 and is their unofficial historian, says it was risky at the time, since walking the streets en masse was associated with more radical demonstrations. The first walkers were high school students in San Antonio, Texas, and Columbus, Ohio, and this first “walkathon” was modeled after a fund-raiser for a hospital in Canada. It rained on both walks, he says, and there was “no money but great potential. People did actually come out and walk.” Over the years the route was trimmed from the initial twenty-five miles to ten kilometers, and participation mushroomed. The year we walked to Chimayó from Greg’s land, nearly a million people were expected to join what the March of Dimes now calls WalkAmerica, and they would raise about $74 million for infant and prenatal health care and supporting research. The walk was cosponsored by K-Mart and Kellogg’s, among others. This walkathon structure, with corporations sponsoring the event in return for promotional opportunities and walkers raising the money for the charity, has been adopted by hundreds of organizations, the great majority of them dealing with disease and health care.
The summer before I had accidentally run into the eleventh annual AIDS Walk San Francisco in Golden Gate Park. A huge throng of people in shorts and caps milled around the starting area that sunny day, holding various free beverages, advertisements, and product samples. The hundred-page booklet for the walk consisted almost entirely of advertisements for the dozens of corporate sponsors—clothing companies, brokerage houses—who also had tables set up around the lawn. It was a strange atmosphere, a cross between a gym and a convention, crawling with logos and ads. Yet it must have been profound for some of its participants. The next day the paper said 25,000 walkers had raised $3.5 million for local AIDS organizations and described a walker who wore a T-shirt printed with photographs of his two sons who had died of AIDS and said, “You never get over it. The walk is a way to cope with it.”
These fund-raising walks have become the mainstream American version of the pilgrimage. In many ways they have traveled far from its original nature, notably in the evolution from devoutly appealing for divine intervention to pragmatically asking friends and family for money. And yet, however banal these walks are, they retain much of the content of the pilgrimage: the subject of health and healing, the community of pilgrims, and the earning through suffering or at least exertion. Walking is crucial to these events, or at least it has been. Bikeathons have come into being, and the last indignity dealt to this highly mutated form of pilgrimage came with the virtual walk, including the San Francisco Art Institute’s “nonwalk,” in which people were asked to give money and were given a T-shirt but weren’t obliged to show up, and AIDS Action’s “Until It’s Over e-March,” which proposed that participants electronically sign their names to a letter on the Internet as a substitute for marching or walking.
Fortunately, walkathons are not the end of the story. Though mutant forms of the pilgrimage keep springing up, the older ones thrive, from religious pilgrimages to long political walks. A month after 25,000 people walked ten kilometers to raise money for AIDS organizations in San Francisco, gang counselor Jim Hernandez and antiviolence organizer Heather Taekman finished a 500-mile walk from East Los Angeles to Richmond, California, carrying more than 150 photographs of young murder victims and meeting with teenagers along the way. In 1986 hundreds of people joined together to form the Great Peace March. They walked across the United States together to ask for disarmament in a mass pilgrimage that created its own culture and support structure and had a large impact in some of the small towns through which they trekked. The walk began as a sort of publicity event, but somewhere along the long way the walking itself took over, and the walkers became less concerned with media and message and more with what was happening within themselves. In 1992 two more cross-continental peace walks did much the same thing, and like the walkers of the Great Peace March they drew inspiration from Peace Pilgrim. Similar walks went across the Soviet Union and Europe during the early 1990s, and in 1993 strawberry pickers and other United Farm Workers (UFW) supporters reenacted the great three-hundred-mile Delano-to-Sacramento march César Chávez had organized in 1966 and called a pilgrimage.
Even the most sophisticated yield to the pilgrim’s impulse, and even without the superstructure of religion, the ordeal of walking makes sense. The filmmaker Werner Herzog writes, “At the end of November, 1974, a friend from Paris called and told me that Lotte Eisner [a film historian] was seriously ill and would probably die. I said that this must not be, not at this time, German cinema could not do without her now, we would not permit her death. I took a jacket, a compass and a duffel bag with the necessities. My boots were so solid and new that I had confidence in them. I set off on the most direct route to Paris, in full faith, believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot. Besides, I wanted to be alone with myself.” He walked the several hundred miles from Munich in winter weather, often wet, often smelly, often thirsty, and usually suffering from great pain in some part of his feet and legs.
Herzog, as anyone who has seen his films knows, is fond of deep passions and extreme behavior, however obtuse, and in his journals of his long walk to Paris he took on the qualities of one of the obsessives in his films. He walked in all weather, though he occasionally accepted a lift, and he slept in barns and a display mobile home he broke into as well as in strangers’ homes and inns. The sparse prose describes walking, suffering, minor encounters, and fragments of scenery. Elaborate fantasies that themselves sound like outlines for Herzog movies are woven into the description of his ordeal. On the fourth day, he writes, “While I was taking a shit, a hare came by at arm’s length without noticing me. Pale brandy on my left thigh which hurts from my groin downwards with every step. Why is walking so full of woe?” On the twenty-
first day, he put his feet up in Eisner’s room, and she smiled at him. “For one splendid fleeting moment something mellow flowed through my deadly tired body. I said to her, open the window, from these last days onward I can fly.”
We had arrived too, along the curving road into Chimayó. Sal and I sat down and waited for Meridel on a sidewalk. Cars, policemen, and children carrying Sno-Cones passed by in front of us; behind us bloomed a few stunted fruit trees in a knobby pasture. Afterward, Sal went to stand in the long line in front of the Santuario, and I went off to buy us some lemonade at a little mobile food-stand around the corner, near the Santo Niño Chapel, where people used to offer up children’s shoes because the Santo Niño, a version of the Christ child, is said to have worn out his own running errands of mercy around the countryside at night. It was nice to be back on familiar ground. I knew what was inside the Santuario and thought of the thousands of crosses woven into the cyclone fence behind the outdoor chapel below, crosses made of grapevine and cottonwood twigs and larger sticks, and then of the irrigation ditch that flowed just the other side of the fence, of the swift shallow river that runs through the town, of the burrito stand that sold meatless alternatives for Lent, of the old adobe houses and the trailer homes that are beginning to look old, and of the many unwelcoming signs: “Notice: Please Don’t Leave Your Belongings Unattended at Any Time,” “Not Responsible for Theft,” “Beware of Dog.” Chimayó is a desperately poor town, known for drugs, violence, and crime as well as for sanctity. Jerry West was waiting for his wife, Meridel, in front of that chapel, and I made my last foot journey back with the lemonade, bade Sal farewell, and went off to my own culminating destination. About ten thousand pilgrims would come into town and stand in line to go into the chapel that day, and Jerry found Greg and Sue standing in line to go in too. When we left after the moon had risen, there were still more figures walking along the narrow shoulder of the road in the night, shadowy groups that no longer looked festive, but dedicated and fragile in the dark.
Chapter 5
LABYRINTHS AND CADILLACS:
Walking into the Realm of the Symbolic
I didn’t mind not getting into the church at Chimayó along with all the long patient line of pilgrims, because I had another destination. The year before I’d walked the last six or so miles of the pilgrimage, and later, trying to catch up with my friend who’d driven in, I walked past the Cadillac with the stations of the cross painted on it. I kept going after a cursory inspection, and then I did the world’s slowest double take. A Cadillac with the fourteen stations began, during the interim between those two Good Fridays, to seem more and more extraordinary, a gorgeous compression of many symbolic languages and desires into one divinely strange chariot. Jerry said, in front of the Santo Niño Chapel, that it was just up the road a hundred yards, and so I limped off to see it again.
Long and pale blue and somehow soft-looking, as though the metal body were dissolving into velvet or veils, this 1976 Cadillac was a contrary thing. The stations of the cross were wrapped around its long lean body, below the chrome line that bisected it horizontally. Jesus was condemned at the rear end of the driver’s side and carried the cross, stumbled, and encountered his way around the car to be crucified in the middle of the passenger’s side, next to the door handle, and he was buried at the back end of that side. All along those sides was painted a dark gray sky full of lightning that made the place of his suffering into New Mexico, with its volatile thunderclouds. There was Jesus again on the trunk as a big soft-focus head with a crown of thorns, flanked by angels, thorny roses, and the same kind of undulating ribbons that bear inscriptions in medieval and old Mexican religious paintings. The thorns everywhere seemed like further reminders that Chimayó and Jerusalem were both arid landscapes, and the same thorny roses adorned the hood, where Mary, the Sacred Heart, an angel, and a centurion were.
This car was designed to be looked at standing still, but it retained the possibility of moving. It didn’t matter if the car ever went far, just that it could, that these images could hurtle down the highway, whipped by wind and drops of rain running sideways. Imagine it doing seventy on the interstate, passing mesas and crumbling adobes and cattle and maybe some billboards for fake Indian trading posts, Dairy Queens, and cheap motels, an eight-cylinder Sistine Chapel turned inside out and speeding toward a stark horizon under changing skies. The artist, Arthur Medina, a slender, restless-looking man with wavy black hair, showed up while I was admiring it and leaned against the adjacent wooden shed to receive compliments and questions. Why a Cadillac? I asked, and he didn’t seem to understand my premise that a luxury car is not the most natural and neutral thing on which to paint holy pictures. So I asked him why he painted the car with this subject matter, and he said, “To give the people something for Lent,” and indeed he displayed it here every year.
He had, he said, painted other cars and had an Elvis car, and then he darkly intimated that other local artists were imitating him. It was true that another long 1970s car was parked nearer the Santuario, in front of a white-painted adobe shop, and that very shop was painted with perfect accuracy on the side of the car facing the street, while a radiant image of the Santuario itself covered the hood. This made it almost as dizzying a vehicle of meaning as Medina’s car, a transformation of immobile place into speeding representations. But the tradition of customized low-rider cars goes back more than a quarter of a century in northern New Mexico, and this other car was painted much more professionally—which is not to say that Medina was a lesser artist, only that most such cars have an orthodox aesthetic that comes from a particular way of handling the airbrush, and Medina had made his figures simpler and flatter and created a much more lushly misty atmosphere. You could say that most low-rider cars are baroque, with a slightly cynical hyperreality of form, while Medina’s had something of the flat devout force of medieval painting about it.
It was an extraordinarily quixotic object, a car about walking, a luxury item about suffering, sacrifice, and humiliation. And the car united two radically different walking traditions, one erotic and one religious. Customized cars exist both as art objects and as the vehicles for an updated version of an old Spanish and now Latin American custom, the paseo or corso. For hundreds of years, promenading the plaza in the center of town has been a social custom in these places, one that allows young people to meet, flirt, and stroll together and dictates that villages and cities from Antigua, Guatemala, to Sonoma, California, have a central plaza in which to do so (the more casual promenades of northern Europe take place in parks, quays, and boulevards). In some parts of Mexico and elsewhere the custom was once so formal that the men strolled in one direction and the women in the other, like the indefinitely extended steps of a line dance, but in most nowadays the plaza is the site of less structured promenading. The promenade is a special subset of walking with an emphasis on slow stately movement, socializing, and display. It is not a way of getting anywhere, but a way of being somewhere, and its movements are essentially circular, whether on foot or by car.
During the days I was writing this, I ran into my brother Steve’s friend José in Dolores Park after San Francisco’s May Day Parade and asked him about the custom. At first he said he knew nothing about it, but as we talked, more and more came back to him, and his eyes shone with the old memories flooding back in a new light. In his hometown in El Salvador, the custom was called “going around the park,” though park meant the plaza at the center of town. Mostly teenagers used the park for this socializing, in part because the small houses and warm weather made it uncomfortable to socialize at home, at least at that age. Girls didn’t go to the park alone, so he was much in request as a sort of midget chaperone by his older sister and his three beautiful cousins. Many Saturday and Sunday evenings of his childhood were spent licking an ice cream cone and ignoring their conversations with boys. The paseo, like less structured courtship walks in other places, allows people to remain visually in public but verbally in private, giving the
m enough room to talk and enough supervision to do little more. Nobody could afford to stay in the village, he said, and so the romances kindled during strolls in the parks rarely led to marriage. But when people came back home, they would go around the park again, not to meet people but in reminiscence of this part of their life. Every small town and village in El Salvador and, he ventured, Guatemala had some form of this custom, and “the smaller the town the more important it was for keeping people’s sanity.” Other versions of the pedestrian paseo exist in Spain, southern Italy, and much of Latin America; the custom turns the world into a kind of ballroom and walking into a slow waltz.
It is hard to say how the customized car and the cruise came together, but the cruise is very much the successor to the paseo or corso, with the cars moving at promenade speed and the young people within flirting with and challenging each other. Meridel, my companion on the Chimayó pilgrimage, had in 1980 made one of her earliest series of photographs about New Mexico, a documentary project on low riders. At that time the subculture was booming, and the cars would slowly cruise the old plaza at the center of Santa Fe. Like low riders in most places, these ones met with the hostility of the civic authorities, who turned the four streets around the plaza into a one-way roundabout and took other steps to ban the practice. But when Meridel’s series was complete, she organized a show of her work in the plaza, to which the low riders were invited and at which many of their cars were on display. By resituating them within the context of high art, she had reopened the space to them and introduced their work and world to the others in the region. It was the biggest art opening in Santa Fe history, with all kinds of people milling around the plaza to look at the cars, the photographs, and each other, an art paseo.
Wanderlust: A History of Walking Page 9