From Mystery to History: Part 2,
From Mystery to History: Part 2
About 15 years ago, as part of the research for a memoir of my childhood, I found myself in Tucson, Arizona in a neighborhood of cinder block houses and unpaved streets called Old Pascua. This neighborhood had been a village once, the settling place of the Yaquis, a tribe of Mexican Indians whose homeland is a river valley at the edge of the desert in the Mexican state of Sonora. At the end of the nineteenth century, Porfirio Diaz, the dictator of Mexico from 1876 to 1911, sent his army into the Yaqui homeland to seize their land, much like the United States government did with its indigenous people. What followed was one of history’s small and unnoticed genocides. The Yaquis were reduced from a population of 30,000 to 3,000. A handful of survivors made their way into Arizona.
My grandfather, Ramon Herrera Acuna – born in Arizona in 1905 – was a child of one of those refugee families. There was no mistaking his heritage; he looked like the Indian on the old Indian head nickel. Yet, he never spoke of his family or the Yaquis. Indeed, he rarely spoke at all; there was a pent-up quality to him. I was a bastard boy and this hard and silent man was the nearest thing I had to a father.
Toward the end of his life, he softened a bit. At one point in high school, I read the books of Carlos Castaneda about a Yaqui “shaman.” I described Don Juan to my grandfather and asked him whether he had known anyone like him. My grandfather said the books were “bullshit.” Yes, he said, there were Yaqui brujos, but the true history of the people had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with suffering. He left it there.
Suffering. An understatement. Barbaric Mexico, a 1904 indictment of the regime of Porfirio Diaz, included a chapter entitled: “The Extermination of the Yaquis.” In it, the author described some of the methods by which the Mexican government waged war against the Yaquis – killing women of childbearing years to prevent further Yaqui children, giving Yaqui infants to Mexican families to raise as Mexicans, enslaving Yaqui men and working them to death on hemp plantations in the Yucatan. Yaquis were burned, hanged, shot and drowned in the Sea of Cortez.
No wonder my grandfather was so filled with rage and reticence. Like other survivors of genocides – Jews, Armenians, and indigenous peoples everywhere – guilt and horror were his gruel.
That night in the desert, for the first time in my life, I saw dozens of people who looked like my grandfather and something in my heart broke open, some sorrow I did not even know existed; the DNA of grief passed down to me from my grandfather.
I had come for the culmination of the Yaqui celebration of the Passion and Resurrection of Christ, called in the language of the Yaqui, the Waehma. For what had sustained the Yaquis during the decades of tribulation was their profound religiosity and their personal identification with the Catholic pantheon, particularly Mary and Jesus. But their faith, their religious practices were far from orthodox. Their Christian beliefs coexisted with a more ancient spirituality represented by the Deer Dancer. He enacted a rite of sacrifice and resurrection – the deer which gave itself to the hunters that the people might be fed and was then resurrected in a paradise called the Flower World – which had allowed the Yaquis to accept the Jesuit priests’ story about Jesus’s sacrificial death and resurrection four hundred years earlier.
Thus, while some Yaquis danced a re-enactment of Jesus’s passion in the dust outside the whitewashed church, a deer dancer danced the older story in a ramada off to the side. As I went back and forth all night between the church and the ramada, I knew that here was a story here that I profoundly wished to tell.
At the same time, another story began to work its way into my imagination. The story of a young refugee who, with his family, had been driven out of Mexico during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), arrived virtually penniless in Los Angeles in about 1915 and, within a decade had become, with Chaplin, Valentino, Gloria Swanson and Mary Pickford, one of the first generation of Hollywood movie stars. His name was Ramon Novarro.
I knew only two things about Novarro before I saw one of his movies: he was a homosexual and in 1969 he had been savagely murdered by a pair of teen-age hustlers whom he had invited into his house. Kenneth Anger had devoted a salacious chapter to Novarro’s murder in his Hollywood Babylon and Thomas Tryon, the gay actor-turned –novelist, used the incident in Crowned Heads, his Hollywood roman a clef. But about Novarro the actor I knew nothing until I saw his most famous film, Ben-Hur, projected on the screen at the Castro Theater – a legendary movie palace from the 1920s – with musical accompaniment.
Novarro was exquisite. Exquisitely beautiful. Exquisitely vulnerable. His was not the slab-of-beef heroism of Charleton Heston’s performance in the 1963 version of Ben Hur. Novarro’s performance was nuanced and sensitive and riveting. The film itself, the intrusions of language absent, unfolded with the clarity and strangeness of a deep dream, as if the images were being dredged up from the audience’s collective unconsciousness. This was the beginning of my fascination with Novarro as an actor and, more generally, with silent film.
The two stories came together in my imagination when, long after his death, one of my aunts mentioned that grandfather had once told her that in the 1920s he had lived in Los Angeles where he had worked as an extra in the movies playing Indians in Westerns.
The writer’s “what ifs” started to work their way into my unconscious that “foul rag-and-bone shop” as Yeats called it, where all the ladders start.
What if someone like Novarro had met someone like my grandfather in Hollywood when they were young and poor and struggling to survive? What if the Novarro character – who I called Jose – was in love with the young Yaqui – who I called Mateo? What if there was another character – a young actress – to complete the triangle?
These “what ifs” unfolded against the backgrounds of my other interests and obsessions. My love for Los Angeles which in the 1910s and 1920s was still a kind of paradise where the air was scented with orange blossoms and thyme. My fascination with silent films and the first generation of world famous movie stars, particularly Mary Pickford, a brilliant actor, shrewd businesswoman – the only woman to every own her own studio – and a kind and tragic figure. The startling fact that, at a time when white America was deeply, openly and unself-consciously racist and xenophobic, the movie industry in Hollywood was partly run by East European Jewish immigrants and its stars included the Italian Valentino, Mexican Novarro and Japanese Sessue Hayakawa (all ethnicities who were openly discriminated against); even Pickford, America’s Sweetheart, was Canadian. It got to me thinking about multiculturalism and the suppressed history of the United States, a nation built largely on the backs of the disenfranchised and the despised.
My plan was to explore all of this in a single novel, set in Hollywood, between 1916 and 1922. That was the plan but 15 years later one novel had become four and the first one, The City of Palaces, opened not in Hollywood in 1915 but in Mexico City in 1895. I will explain how this happened in the next installment.
