The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess

by Jeff Wheelwright

  At the insistence of the Franciscans, slavery of captured Indians was illegal, but not enforced bondage for the purpose of their conversion and improvement. Indian women and children, stolen or bartered, were known as genízaro and were as good as slaves. Marianne Medina had said that her father, Juan Quintana, came from genízaro Apache stock. They were considered low-class people, lower than the Pueblo Indians. The second- and third-generation genízaro, having been stripped of their tribal identities, went off and formed their own villages in the borderland between Apachería and New Mexico, where they worshipped Christ in weird and wonderful ways.

  Internally the Hispano colony was preoccupied with race, since racial distinctions determined the social order. New Mexico had a casta system: casta means a person of mixed blood. In addition to españoles and indios, new categories of citizens had emerged in Santa Fe. The españole still was at the top, whether or not he was fully Spanish. A mestizo was the child of an españole and an Indian woman; a mulato of an españole and a black woman. A coyote was the offspring of a mestizo and an Indian. A lobo was a cross between a Native American and a Negro. Just as in the animal kingdom a coyote is less dangerous than a wolf, the human coyote signified less trouble to the social order than the lobo, thanks to the Spanish blood moderating the former. The genízaro represented yet another native type, as mentioned. If you weren’t sure of the mix in the person you were dealing with, you might refer to him or her as color quebrado (broken color).

  All this was pre-Mendel, pregenetics. What you saw on the surface of people, whether their clothing or color, was thought to reflect the innate, blood-borne indicators of their race. (In parts of New Spain it was illegal for a non-Indian man to wear Indian clothes.) Fast-forwarding a couple of centuries, scientists have learned that skin pigment is an extremely complex trait. It is controlled by at least one hundred genes in variant forms. The variants act like rheostats, turning up or turning down the amount of melanin in the skin cells. In the grand scheme, evolution, responding to environmental factors such as solar intensity, shapes the genes underlying the differences in human skin color. Although the best predictor of your color is your parents’ coloring, the mechanisms of inheritance can cause surprises. The casta system was mystified by what were called torna atrás (throwbacks). An example would be the child of a white father and a lobo woman who turned out blacker than the mother—this due to recessive African and/or Native American variants surfacing in the admixed DNA.

  Hispano people as a rule are lighter-skinned than other Hispanics, owing to their higher proportion of Spanish blood. Even within the Hispano population, according to the 2004 study of San Luis Valley DNA, European ancestry is greater in Hispanos of lighter skin. It seems that, among New Mexicans, skin pigment was lightened without waiting for evolution. The reason is something called assortative mating. When whites marry whites, and mestizos marry españoles rather than indios, the children will on average be whiter. In Santa Fe during the eighteenth century a distaste for dark skin led people of all hues to generate kids who were lighter. First cousins from wealthy, white españole families sought dispensations from the Church to marry each other. The dispensations were granted because of the importance of keeping Spanish blood pure, outweighing the problem of consanguineous marriage. The offspring of such couples were more likely to survive than the darker, out-of-wedlock babies of genízaro Indian women, even if the fathers were the same men.

  Recall the Spanish ethos of limpieza de sangre, blood that was free of foreign taint, blood that had vanquished the Muslims and routed the Jews. In colonial documents and letters the Indians are disparaged as Moors and their kivas compared to mosques. As for the Jews, in 1751 a man reported that he had beaten his Indian slave with every right, “so that I might do to these Jews what they did to Our Holiest Lord.” The Old Christians of New Mexico feared that the swarthy New Christians could lapse at any moment into a primitive state, as they had in 1680. The sexual mingling taking place on the down-low did not allay these fears but only increased them, as the españole, despite his posturing, could feel his essence dribbling away.

  All the while, the untamed nomads harassed the colony. During the second half of the eighteenth century Comanche war parties sweeping down from the Great Plains became a powerful enemy, such that the Jicarilla Apaches and the Utes made alliances with New Mexicans against them. In 1779, setting out with eight hundred soldiers and Indian auxiliaries, Governor Juan Bautista de Anza circled through the San Luis Valley and attacked the Comanches from the north. Anza marched his army at night so that Comanche scouts would not spot its dust cloud on the horizon. Besides gaining a major victory, Anza is credited with naming the Valley. San Luis, or Saint Louis, was King Louis IX of France and a Crusader against the Muslims.

  By this time, however, Spain had nearly given up on New Mexico, a poor place with few resources and inconstant souls. Almost nothing was being invested there, almost nothing extracted. About the best that could be said of the colony and its thirty thousand inhabitants was that they were self-sufficient. The bishops in Mexico City and Durango stopped sending Spanish priests to serve in the north. Ignorant of events in the rest of the world, the Hispano gentry, hidalgos in their own imaginations, like little Quixotes, grazed their flocks, managed their stone-faced servants, and patrolled their baked-mud domains. Fray Angélico Chavez, New Mexico’s best-known historian, equates them during this period to a lost tribe. When Mexico broke away from Spain in 1821, the title to the place changed hands without notice.

  The new government ended the casta system of racial discrimination, at least officially. Religious standards having been slipping for years, folk Catholicism and Indian rites consorted with each other out in the open. Priests took common-law wives. Not only was the province a backwater, but also the towns within the province were cut off from one another because of the Indian threat. The former regime had restricted travel between villages, partly for public safety, partly so that the pueblos wouldn’t plot insurrection. It’s estimated that 90 percent of the marriages took place between people who lived in the same town or pueblo. The Hispanos were ghettoized along the Rio Grande. The isolation and inbreeding had genetic consequences that still register today. Even in the twentieth century, because births took place out of wedlock and birth certificates were inaccurate, you might marry a close cousin and not realize it. As was pointed out in chapter 3, when a population becomes separated geographically or culturally, a genetic disease originating in a few persons can affect a large number of descendants, because of the phenomenon of genetic drift.

  In effect the Hispanos experienced a bottleneck. Bottleneck usually implies that a group is reduced in size before expanding, but here it merely suggests a small population bottled up in its location. On the one hand, harmful mutations aren’t vented and dispersed; they may multiply unpredictably. On the other hand, the persons who inherit the genetic disorders may not survive or, if they do, they tend not to have kids themselves, which puts a brake on the spread of the mutations.

  In families from northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, doctors have identified a rare type of muscular dystrophy (OPMD for short) that weakens the eye and throat muscles progressively; cavernous angioma, an inherited malformation of the blood vessels of the brain; a unique strain of dwarfism, as yet unnamed; and recombinant chromosome 8 syndrome, which involves mental retardation and heart problems and also goes by the name San Luis Valley syndrome. In the 1980s, an investigator of San Luis Valley syndrome, working with affected families in different states, traced the DNA disruption back to a common ancestor, the founder, who lived in northern New Mexico in the nineteenth century.

  To this unfortunate collection of disorders can now be added a cancer syndrome caused by 185delAG. The gene was very slow to be detected in the Hispano community because it hid behind the background cases of sporadic breast and ovarian cancer. With families reluctant to talk about cancer and physicians not asking patient
s about relatives with the disease, the mutation multiplied freely. Potentially, the mutation is as pervasive among the Hispano people as among Ashkenazi Jews. The geneticists don’t know because they have not studied Hispanos to nearly the same degree, but the gene may well be altering the cancer statistics of the region surreptitiously. Scientists do know that Hispanic and Latina women—a grouping that includes Hispanos—are at lower risk for breast cancer than non-Hispanics, though the risk rises in proportion to the amount of their European admixture.

  Genetic disease also infiltrated the pueblos of the uncomplaining Indians. Reduced to twenty villages by the start of the nineteenth century, the Puebloans turned inward. The fragmentation created a string of bottlenecks. One result, at Hopi Pueblo and others, was a relatively high number of albinos. Zuni Pueblo, having expanded to a community of ten thousand, was reported to have the highest measured rate of cystic fibrosis in the world, as well as the highest rate of end-stage kidney disease.

  Cystic fibrosis was introduced to the Zunis by a Spanish founder many generations ago. The powerful recessive mutation has a European signature. The DNA variants behind the Zuni kidney-disease problem are unknown but are related to the Indians’ high incidence of type 2 diabetes. For the latter two diseases, genes are not the whole story, since the conditions are triggered by dietary and lifestyle changes entering from the American environment. Zuni keeps its suffering from kidney disease private. It is disturbing to visit the tribe’s dialysis clinic, which treats three shifts of patients each day. Young bodies as well as the elderly are hooked up to the machines. Their faces are pale and drawn as their mixed blood is cleansed.

  When driving from the green corner of Culebra to the scrappy city of Alamosa, first you head north to the forgettable towns of Fort Garland and Blanca, near the foot of the sacred mountain, and then you go west. For miles and miles on a straight road through empty, overgrazed prairie, the mountain never moves.

  The noonday August light drains the sagebrush and prickly pear cactus of their coloring. Sunlight saturates the landscape so thoroughly that shadows standing next to objects (a telephone pole, a well casing) are unexpected and alarming, like black holes.

  Above the treeline, Blanca’s throat is bare and fluted. The rock to the summit is dotted with pearls of snow.

  Dorothy Martinez Medina, Shonnie’s grandmother, lived in Alamosa in a housing project for low-income seniors. Each of the ranch-style units, with neat sidewalks and squares of lawn between them, contained two or three apartments. With minor rearranging, the project would look like the original New Mexico plaza.

  The three small rooms of Dorothy’s apartment were laid out in a row, so that you could see from the front door through the sitting room, through the kitchen, and into her bedroom. There were lots of things to look at: family photos in frames, stuffed bunnies, brightly colored tchotchkes on the tables and counters, but no religious items. Dorothy’s two favorite colors, whether in stripes, checks, or polka dots, seemed to be red and white. Throughout the apartment, pictures of Shonnie showed her at various times of her life. The cutest might be the one of Shonnie as an infant. She is standing up on a table between her two seated parents. It’s the early 1970s, and Joseph has long hair and wears a beaded necklace. Marianne’s black hair is very long and spills down her back. Joseph was working then as a musician, Marianne as a department store model. A handsome seventies family, just getting started.

  Dorothy Medina, the matriarch, Mamacita to her kids, was about to turn seventy-five. As of August 2007, she had outlived her ex-husband, seven of her thirteen siblings, four of her fourteen children, and of course her grandchild Shonnie. Five of her sisters had died of breast or ovarian cancer, but Dorothy, though she carried the 185delAG mutation, was unaffected. Possessing a thin, angular body and cheerful, darting eyes, she did not talk much. She looked to be in good health.

  She has diabetes and high blood pressure, cautioned her granddaughter Shannon Apodaca, who was managing the meeting today. Shannon worked as a visiting nurse, and she would drop in on her grandmother to make sure Dorothy was taking her pills for her two conditions. Hypertension and high blood sugar are silent ailments that were never diagnosed in Hispanos of earlier generations. But look, said Shannon, she has wrinkle-free skin. Her grandmother beamed. Mestiza Dorothy was a little darker than most of her children. Shannon was somewhat dark as well, and heavy-browed and broad-faced like an Indian, but she was a world apart from Culebra, a confident young woman, outspoken and moody. She said, I wish I could be as dedicated as you, Grandma, with my diet.

  Dorothy had attended the genetic counseling session for the Medina and Martinez cousins at T-ana’s Restaurant. She understood the part about inheritance, but today she wanted to know what genes were. That required a little discussion at the kitchen table, with its red-checked vinyl tablecloth. Shannon asked, Does this stuff about genes scare you? Confiding in a stage voice about her grandmother, She’s a worrywart. . . . Aren’t you? Nonetheless, a few weeks later Dorothy took the test for 185delAG—her positive result nearly a foregone conclusion—while Shannon, the nurse, put off the testing and continued to put it off, even though, or perhaps because, Chavela, Shannon’s mother and Dorothy’s daughter, had tested positive for the mutation earlier. Because my mother is a carrier, that means I have to be tested, Shannon said, trying to convince herself.

  Dorothy Medina straddled two medical camps, the modern one that analyzed her blood sugar and DNA mutations with the aid of government subsidies and the Culebra world of catch-as-catch-can. Every day she drank a cup of her home-brewed herbal tea, half a cup in the morning and half a cup in the evening. Standing before the cupboard, Dorothy pointed to her stores of dried plants. The leaves were collected by her or her knowledgeable friends—women walking in the woods looking for what they could use. She had big mason jars of chamiso, yerba buena, manzanilla, wild rose hips (champe), and others whose names went by too fast.

  In the old days every Hispano village had an amateur doctor or médico. The cultural descendant of the Pueblo medicine man, the médico would set broken limbs, perform simple surgeries, and treat internal ailments with plants and herbs. As time went on, the healer’s role was taken over by a woman, the médica, for it was the women who guarded the knowledge of plants and organic processes. The most useful herb for tea was the common prairie shrub chamiso, or big sagebrush. Dorothy went to the refrigerator and brought out a small jar. Her children laughingly called it Mama’s whiskito because she took it everywhere, as other people must bring a flask. The elixir was dark brown. It was very aromatic. In passing from mouth to stomach, the snakelike liquid slithered down rather than swallowed down, a true culebra drink, cool and laden with botanical oils. The gullet was left tingling, the mind freshly focused. Dorothy had given the tea to one of her sons when he visited from California recently, and it had relieved his stomachache. Chamiso tea had been a staple for Shonnie growing up.

  Besides modern medicine and Culebran folk medicine, a third way, a middle approach, was being applied to Dorothy’s health. It was modern folk medicine, aka alternative or complementary or New Age medicine. Dorothy kept in the fridge, next to her square jar of tea, a futuristic-looking plastic bottle of FrequenSea, a dietary supplement. Her son-in-law Bill Kramer had recommended it for the treatment of diabetes. FrequenSea’s core ingredient was marine phytoplankton, described on its website as a superfood; it also contained extracts of blueberries, aloe vera, frankincense, and rosemary antioxidants, plus plenty of sea minerals and amino acids. FrequenSea was purveyed by a Utah company called ForeverGreen, and Bill sold ForeverGreen health products on commission. Dorothy had no objection to drinking it.

  To get to the nub of this digression: Marginal medicine, meaning unproven medical treatments, and marginal religion, meaning the sect of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, swirl about the story of Shonnie Medina like two furies. Shonnie inherited a gene, the fifth business of the story, and then two c
ontingent actors came into play, superseding but also springing from her hybrid Hispano background. Shonnie’s religion and her medical choices were not connected, not on the face of it, for Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t espouse alternative therapies as part of their program. Their official advisories about medicine—and about genetics, for that matter—are responsible and fairly accurate. But it does seem that one belief system made her susceptible to the other, just as 185delAG sped the way to her cancer.

  Dorothy Medina had converted to the Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1983. On this subject the gray-haired, bright-eyed woman suddenly became talkative. It was a treat for her to hold and understand the Bible, she said, and in fact she had learned to read English from the weekly booklets of biblical instruction sent by the Watchtower Society. (The Catholic Church for a long time resisted giving people access to the Bible. Like much else imported from Spain, spiritual truth was hierarchical and dispensed in snippets by the priests.) We don’t learn nothing in the Catholic Church, Dorothy exclaimed. They don’t read the Bible. They teach us from Jesus and they don’t teach us Jehovah. We have to do Jehovah’s will, she went on. We have to do what the Bible says—no birthdays, no Christmas, no Mother’s Day. She might have added, no icons or santos.

  Shannon had tried to become a Witness but had lapsed. Five years younger than Shonnie, Shannon had read Bible verses under her cousin’s tutelage. I used to study with Shonnie but I quit, she recalled. I was never happier in my life than when I was out in [door-to-door] service. Even after the fourth time I quit, one day I called her again, asking her to study with me. . . . And here she comes! The same day! Shannon remembered with a thrill in her voice.

  When Shonnie arrived at her door, Why? Shannon asked her. Why are you doing this for me? Shonnie answered, I’ll always come back. Because if I were to die, and I find out that you are not in the new system with me [the paradise coming for Witnesses], I wouldn’t be able to stand it.