He’s the only member of the “Miracle Mets” still playing and one of the oldest men ever to play in the big leagues. He has endured to stay in the majors longer than any other player. But he hasn’t spent these waning years of his career simply occupying an occasional spot in the Rangers’ pitching rotation between ailments.
During his prime in Houston in 1981, Ryan pitched his fifth no-hitter, breaking Sandy Koufax’s record of four. With the Rangers in 1990, at age forty-three, he pitched his sixth. At age forty-four, on May 1, 1991, he pitched his seventh, giving him three more no-hitters than Koufax and four more than Bob Feller, the only other pitcher to throw as many as three. Ryan’s fastball averaged ninety-three miles per hour that night. He struck out sixteen batters.
Back in 1983, in Houston, Ryan broke Walter Johnson’s ancient record of 3,508 strikeouts, a record that was expected never to be broken. Only two years later, he became the first pitcher to strike out four thousand batters. And on August 22, 1989, at Arlington Stadium, in the fifth inning against Oakland, Ryan threw a ninety-six-mile-per-hour fastball over the plate and fanned Rickey Henderson for his five thousandth—864 more than any other pitcher’s career total at the time.
Baseball Commissioner Bart Giamatti witnessed the event, calling it “one of the great achievements in the history of the game.”
But what sticks in the mind about that night is what Ryan did after he fanned Henderson. He just gave a little pump with his fist and doffed his hat to the 42,369 screaming fans. After his teammates ran to the mound and shook his hand, after allowing only a minute and twenty-five seconds of roaring ovation, he raised his glove to the umpire and called for another ball. It was time to get back to work.
That’s how he has played the game.
September 1993
Back in the 1950s, when I was a teen-age cub reporter for The El Paso Times, I was sent down to Ysleta to write a story about the dances the Tigua Indians were doing there. I didn’t know anything about the Tiguas then, and I’m sure my story reflected my ignorance, but I enjoyed the dances.
The Tigua community has changed a lot since those days, but it’s still struggling to hang onto its identity, as it was then.
As of this writing, the Tiguas are fighting the State of Texas in the courts to assert their right to operate a gambling casino on their reservation.
Bloodline
Marty Silvas, war chief of the Tiguas, is in a warlike mood this morning. “There’s no respect,” he says. “There’s no respect for the living or the dead. They keep it hush because they’re afraid of losing their jobs. But the only thing they had to do is come up to us and tell us, ‘Look. We found this and this. What do you want to do about it?’ ”
The previous evening, Mr. Silvas received a disturbing phone call. A Tigua had fallen into conversation with a security guard at a construction site just a couple of blocks from the tribe’s administration building. The guard told the man that workers had uncovered human bones and pottery shards during their excavation.
“It’s on land that used to belong to the tribe,” Mr. Silvas says. “They found the parts of a spinal column, a shoulder blade, a femur, and a jawbone. But they didn’t inform the tribe. They did not contact the tribe in any way. They wanted to keep it hush.”
While he fumes, he waits for one of the tribe’s lawyers to return his phone call. “I need to talk to them to see what we should do,” he says, “whether we should get a court order or just go down there and stop this damn thing. If it were me, I would just go down there and stop the damn project by any means necessary. But we want to go through proper channels. These days, we have to go through the courts like everybody else. That’s the only way to win battles nowadays.”
Mr. Silvas is only thirty years old. Unlike his ancient predecessors, he isn’t expected to lead his tribe into battle against its foes, but his duties still are important and heavy for one so young. The war chief of the Tiguas is the right-hand assistant of the cacique, the chief spiritual leader of the tribe. “I’m the keeper of tradition and culture,” Mr. Silvas says, “keeper of the sacred drum and the grandfathers. I guess you could say I’m the medicine man.”
It’s his job as keeper of the grandfathers that occupies him this morning. Someone knocks on his office door and hands him a plastic bag containing a shard of red pottery and a sliver of bone, which he removes from the bag and holds up to the light.
“This is the bone of a human being,” he says. “Everybody in El Paso knows our people are buried around here. We even have an agreement with Fort Bliss that if the army takes remains out of the ground, we work with them to rebury them. Companies that build things around here know that our people are in this ground. It gets me very, very angry that people can take my grandfathers out of their graves and not even care about it.”
His phone rings. It’s the lawyer. After a brief conversation, Mr. Silvas hangs up and begins phoning the other members of the tribal council. They must meet right away, he tells them.
Soon a half-dozen men arrive together. They retire to the meeting room and shut the door. An hour later, they emerge and walk together toward the site of the desecrated grave. They’re going to confront the construction crew.
A white visitor wants to go with them, but Mr. Silvas waves him back. “You can’t come,” he says. “This is tribal business.”
Being a Tigua has never been easy. In 1680 a chief named Pope led the Pueblo tribes of northern New Mexico in a revolt against their Spanish conquerors. In a series of bloody battles, the badly outnumbered Spaniards retreated southward along the Rio Grande. On the way, 317 Tigua Indians from the pueblo of Isleta, near the present city of Albuquerque, joined them on their march. When the rebellious tribes finally stopped their pursuit, the weary refugees halted beside the river a few miles below the spot where it becomes the border between present-day Texas and Mexico.
They built a village, and in 1682 the Franciscan friars who had fled with them established a new mission for the Tiguas and called it La Misión de Corpus Christi de Ysleta del Sur, to distinguish it from Isleta del Norte, the home that they had left in New Mexico.
“We didn’t want to be Christians,” says Miguel Pedraza, a former governor and the present lieutenant governor of the tribe. “The Spaniards’ attempt to force Christianity on us was what made the pueblos revolt against them. There was a time when our people were killed for speaking our language and dancing our dances, and even for the way they dressed. Our people were afraid to teach their children, thinking that their kids would be punished or killed by the Spanish missionaries.” His ancestors accompanied the Spaniards on their march, he says, only because they were forced to.
Spanish records, on the other hand, say the Tiguas were Christian converts who voluntarily threw in their lot with the Spaniards.
In 1693, Diego de Vargas reconquered the northern pueblos. Some of the southern Tiguas returned to New Mexico and reoccupied the old Isleta pueblo, but most remained in the south. They had established farms and vineyards around the mission and made it their home, and the Franciscans allowed them to perform their ancient dances and religious rituals along with their new Catholicism.
“We went into the practice of Christianity, but not the way the Spaniards wanted us to,” Mr. Pedraza says. “We fooled them when we accepted Christianity by having our own way of doing our dances in front of the churches. They thought we were practicing their religion, and at the same time we were having our own religion going on without them knowing it. They were happy and we were happy at the same time.”
Despite attacks by Apaches and other hostile tribes, the mission and the village around it survived and eventually became the oldest settlement in the new state of Texas. In the nineteenth century, the newer village of Franklin, just upstream, would grow much faster and become the city of El Paso, but Ysleta remained an independent town until the 1950s, when El Paso annexed it.
For more than three hundred years, the Tiguas have lived beside the old mission tha
t the Spaniards established. But the geographical accident that put their pueblo in Texas instead of New Mexico or Mexico almost ended their existence as a tribe. In the 1860s, while the Civil War was raging, President Lincoln recognized the sovereignty of the pueblo tribes in New Mexico and presented the cacique of each tribe an engraved walking cane symbolizing that sovereignty. The canes are still prized by the pueblos and sometimes are displayed during their ceremonials. Mr. Lincoln’s action also confirmed the tribes’ titles to their lands and gave them the protection of the federal government.
But the Tiguas lived in Texas, a Confederate state. Their sovereignty wasn’t recognized. And when Texas rejoined the Union after the war, nobody bothered to rectify the injustice. The Tiguas were swindled out of much of their land and lost more of it because of taxes they had no money to pay. Many of them married into the growing Hispanic population around them.
“We were a forgotten tribe,” says Mr. Pedraza, who has lived all his sixty-three years in Ysleta.
Then in 1966, at the urging of El Paso attorney Tom Diamond and anthropologist Nicholas Houser, the Texas State Historical Survey Committee passed a resolution finally recognizing the Tiguas as a tribe. An act of the legislature the following year placed them under the care of the state Commission on Indian Affairs, which had been established in 1965. And in 1968, Congress passed Public Law 90-287, acknowledging that the Tiguas are, indeed, an Indian tribe in the eyes of the federal government.
The law declared that “the Indians now living in El Paso County, Texas, who are descendants of the Tiwa Indians of the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, settling in Texas at Ysleta in 1682, shall from and after the ratification of this act be known and designated as the Tiwa Indians of Ysleta, Texas.”
The remnants of their tribal lands—forty-seven acres amid El Paso’s urban sprawl between Interstate 10 and the Rio Grande, and about twenty acres elsewhere—are now their tiny reservation. And the 1,463 people on the tribal membership roll—some of them, anyway—are trying desperately to preserve what is left of their ancient traditions and culture and are trying to recover what they can of what has been lost.
They also want to change the federal definition of what a Tigua is, and bring about a major change in the state that has been their inhospitable home for three centuries.
They want to build the first legal gambling casino in Texas.
“We have lost a lot of our tradition on account of we live in the city,” Mr. Pedraza says. “But we still have our burial ceremony. We still do the same dances we did back before we came from Isleta, the same processions. We still elect our officers the same way. We still remain a pueblo without a constitution or bylaws. We still have the traditional way of voting for members of the council.”
But the Tigua culture suffered during his lifetime, he says, because the tribe had to endure the worse of two worlds: The U.S. government didn’t recognize them as a tribe, which deprived them of the federal benefits that went to other Indians, but at the same time, the non-Indian people they lived among thought of them as Indians and discriminated against them.
Years later, when Mr. Silvas—a much younger man—was growing up, the situation still hadn’t improved much. “It was rough being an Indian,” he says. “People didn’t like you because you had long hair, because you followed your way, because you wanted to learn about your grandfathers and traditions. We were always being called witches because we followed our own way of prayer, because we pray different from the people surrounding us. We were called ‘dirty Indians.’ ”
Elias Torrez, the Tiguas’ thirty-four-year-old governor, also remembers some of his school friends treating him “differently” when they found out he’s an Indian. “I went to Ysleta High School,” he says. “The mascot there is an Indian. But when all of a sudden real Indians surfaced, problems occurred. There was a time when people didn’t want to be Indians anymore. It wasn’t cool, if I may use that word, to be an Indian.”
During those years, many Tiguas intermarried with their Hispanic neighbors, and many claimed to be Hispanics themselves. “But now a lot of people want to be Indian,” Governor Torrez says. “If we could bottle our Indianness and sell it, we would be rich.”
Mr. Pedraza gets letters and phone calls from people all over the El Paso area who want to become members of the tribe. “Everybody wants to be part of it,” he says. “They think we’re rich or about to become rich, which is not the case. Nowadays, there are two kinds of Indians. We have our traditional Indians, and we have our program Indians. The traditional Indians are the ones who have always kept the traditions and the feasts and do all this work for the tribe during the year. The program Indians are those who are just interested in what kind of benefits they can get by being Indians. They want to exploit the tribe for what they can get out of it—medical attention, education, whatever. There’s a little town called Tigua five or six miles from here, and some people believe that because they were born in that town they’re members of this tribe. Some people think that because they went to Ysleta High School they’re members of the tribe. They try all kinds of ways to get onto the tribal rolls. But our tribal rolls were closed in 1987.”
Under federal law, in order to be a member of the tribe, one must be of at least one-eighth Tigua blood and a member of one of the families registered before the rolls were closed. Because they’re such a small tribe, the one-eighth “blood quantum,” as it’s called, is becoming a problem for the Tiguas. Of the 1,463 people on the tribal rolls, only six—all of them women—are full-blood Tigua. Another 582 are one-eighth. The rest are in between. But only about eight hundred of the tribal members live in El Paso, and most of them are related.
“We can either marry our cousins, or we can marry outside the tribe,” says Governor Torrez, whose blood quantum is one-eighth. “I think marrying cousins is dangerous. It could cause a lot of problems. But if we marry outside the tribe, the blood quantum of our children or grandchildren won’t qualify them to be Tiguas. I myself am married to a non-Indian. My children’s blood quantum is one-sixteenth. The government doesn’t consider them members of the tribe. But Indian people amongst ourselves don’t discriminate. We don’t see each other as a quarter, an eighth, a full blood. We’re all Indians. Period. Look at me. If you saw me in downtown El Paso, I would be just another Hispanic. But it’s what we have in our hearts—the tradition that was planted in our hearts and in our souls and in our minds—that matters.”
Blood-quantum qualifications vary from tribe to tribe among American Indians. Some large tribes require high quantums—as high as one-half blood—to encourage members to marry within the tribe. Other tribes require only a small amount of Indian blood to qualify. Each tribe’s blood quantum has been determined through negotiations with the federal government, then made law through an act of Congress.
“Implementation of the blood quantum was done by the U.S. government as a means of getting rid of the Indian people,” says Mr. Pedraza. “Just like they tried to starve the people by killing the buffalo. The U.S. government gave us a blood quantum in order to diminish us.”
The Tiguas’ tribal council has petitioned Congress to reduce the blood-quantum requirement from one-eighth to one-sixteenth and to change the official name of the tribe from “Ysleta del Sur Pueblo” to “Tigua Indians of Texas,” which is what they have always called themselves. They also request that “Tigua” become the official spelling of their name, rather than “Tiwa,” as it is in the 1968 law.
Lowering the blood quantum would more than double the size of the tribe, but all the new Tiguas would be children or other relatives of present members.
“It’s sad to have to tell a family, ‘Yes, I can help you, ma’am, but not your husband or your children. They don’t qualify,’ ” says Governor Torrez. “We don’t tell them they’re not Indians. We just say they don’t qualify.”
“Often the one-sixteenth knows more about tradition and follows his heart better than the full-blooded Indian,” says Mr. Silvas. He�
�s also one-eighth Tigua blood, and his children are one-sixteenth. “It all depends on the family you’re in. I’ve lived here all my life. I’ve been dancing since I was four years old. I started singing when I was three. That’s the reason I’m the war chief right now. Everything that is supposed to be learned, I learned it. I might have a low blood quantum, but in my heart, it don’t get more Indian than I am. A young lady from our reservation has said, ‘It’s not the Indian blood that runs through our veins, it’s the Indian in our hearts.’ And nowadays that’s all that matters.”
Although Mr. Silvas’ children aren’t eligible for medical and other benefits that the federal government grants to Indians, they’re being brought up Indian. “My son goes to Tigua language classes at school,” he says. “And then he comes home and teaches me. In the old days, the older people would teach the kids. But now the kids teach the older people.”
Whether or not Congress lowers the blood quantum, he says, the one-sixteenth people are true Tiguas, and the tribe has an obligation to them. That’s why the Tiguas must build a casino.
The complex of pueblo-architecture buildings that the Tiguas have built on their tiny reservation includes a popular restaurant, a shop where Tigua-made Indian souvenirs are sold, outdoor ovens where delicious Tigua bread is baked for the restaurant and for sale to the public, and a courtyard where dancers entertain tourists during the summer. But the part of the reservation that draws the biggest crowds is a huge bingo hall with expensive carpets, brass rails, and chandeliers.
It looks too fancy to be a mere bingo parlor. And indeed, the Tiguas hope that someday soon it will become a full-fledged casino, offering blackjack, craps, slot machines, and any other diversion that a Las Vegas casino might offer.
Then, if business is good, the tribe hopes to build a Las Vegas-style entertainment center including a large casino and hotel, perhaps at the intersection of Interstate 10 and Avenue of the Americas, a major thoroughfare between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez across the river in Mexico.
Generations and Other True Stories Page 23