Rain of Gold Read online

  Rain of Gold

  Victor Villaseñor

  Recovering the past, creating the future

  Arte Público Press

  University of Houston

  4902 Gulf Fwy, Bldg 19, Rm 100

  Houston, Texas 77204-2004

  Cover design by Imran Chaudhry

  Villaseñor, Victor Edmundo.

  Rain of Gold / Victor Edmundo Villaseñor

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-55885-809-1

  1. Villaseñor, Victor Edmundo—Family. 2. Villaseñor family. 3. Mexican Americans—California—Biography. 4. California—Biography. 5. Mexico— Biography. I. Title.

  F870.M5V548 1991

  979.4’00468720730922—dc20

  [B]

  91-7587

  CIP

  The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1984.

  Copyright © 1991 by Victor Edmundo Villaseñor

  Printed in the United States of America

  15 16 17 18 19 20  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is dedicated to my father and mother and my grandmothers, two gran mujeres, who inspired me to put into words their life story, the ongoing history of women and men.

  Foreword

  Book One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Book Two

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Book Three

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Book Four

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Book Five

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Author’s Notes

  Acknowledgements

  FOREWORD

  It all started in the barrio of Carlsbad, California, when I used to walk to my grandmother’s home behind my parents’ pool hall. My grandmother on my mother’s side, Doña Guadalupe, would sit me on her lap and give me sweet bread and yerba buena tea and tell me stories of the past, of Mexico, of the Revolution and of how my mother Lupe had been just a little girl when the troops of Francisco Villa and Carranza had come fighting into their box canyon in the mountains of Chihuahua.

  My father, Juan Salvador, also a great storyteller, would tell me of his own family and how he and his mother and sisters had escaped from Los Altos de Jalisco during the Revolution and how they’d come north to the Texas border. He told me of the horrible times that they’d endured on each side of the border, and how these horrible times had actually—in some strange way—become good, because they’d taught them so much about love and life and united them closer and stronger as a family. Often during these talks, my father, a big strong man, would cry and cry and hold me in his arms and tell me how much he still loved his poor old dead mother, and how there wasn’t a night that passed that he didn’t dream of her, the greatest woman who had ever lived.

  Reaching my teens, the stories of my parents’ past grew distant and less important as I became more and more Anglicized. And in my twenties, I reached the point where, regrettably, I didn’t want to hear about our past because I couldn’t really believe in my parents’ stories anymore.

  Then, turning thirty and finding the woman that I wished to marry and have my children with, I suddenly realized how empty I’d feel if I couldn’t tell my own children about our ancestral roots.

  The year was 1975 when I began to interview my father and mother in earnest. I bought a Sony tape recorder and looked up my aunts and uncles and godparents. I accumulated well over two hundred hours of taped conversations over the next three years.

  But, still, some of the things that my parents and relatives told me were just too foreign, too fantastic, for my modern mind to accept. For instance, the gold mine where my mother was born had been purchased by a man who’d skinned out a steer—because the hide was more valuable than the meat—and he’d run the naked animal up the mountainside to pay the Indians off. My God, I couldn’t write that down with conviction. First, it was too barbaric and, secondly, I didn’t think it was possible. But my relatives kept insisting that it was absolutely true. I grew to doubt all their stories and began to think that they only spoke in metaphors, at best.

  Then with the birth of our first child, I decided to make the big leap. I went down into Mexico with the exclusive mission of researching my parents’ past, of questioning everything that I’d been told—and see if, once and for all, it was possible for me to believe enough in my ancestral past so I could write about it.

  I went by plane, by bus, by truck, by burro, by foot. It took me two days to climb the mountains of La Barranca del Cobre where my mother was born. One morning, I saw Indians so shy that when I waved hello to them they froze like deer, then ran away from me with the agility and speed of young antelope. I saw swarms of butterflies so vast that they filled the entire sky like a dancing tapestry. I saw skies so clear and full of stars that I felt close to God. I spoke with a local rancher who butchered cattle for a living and I asked him if it was possible to skin out a steer alive and run him up a mountain. He said, “Sure. You knock the animal out with a sledge and four good men could have him skinned before he came to. Then, believe me, he’d run like hell for a couple of miles before he died.”

  I took a big breath and, little by little, I began to see that maybe one person’s reality was, indeed, another’s fantasy—especially if their childhood perceptions of the world were so different. I came to understand why my father had always told me that it was easy to call another’s religion superstitious.

  For the next five years, I wrote and rewrote, first in Spanish in my head, then in English on paper. I wrote my father’s story in the first person, just as it came from his mouth. I wrote my mother’s story in the third person because more of her relatives were alive and I could verify situations from different points of view.

  But then as I kept writing and rewriting, another problem presented itself. Both of my parents used the words “miracle,” “greatness,” “devil” and “God” so often that when I translated these words into English, the whole story just didn’t sound right or believable. And, also—to add to my problems—my parents and relatives kept telling me how they’d grown up feeling so close to the Almighty that they’d spoken to Him on a daily basis as one would speak to a friend and how, now and then, God had actually spoken back to them in the form of miracles. I was stumped. I thought if I wrote this down, I’d look totally foolish.

  But as the years passed and I recorded their stories and listened more and more to my parents and relatives, I began to see that, yes indeed, they had lived in a world engulfed by God’s spirit.

  Or, as my grandmother Doña Margarita once told my father, “Do you really think God stopped talking to us, His people, with the Jews and the Bible. Oh, no, mi hijito, God lives and He still loves to talk, I tell you. All you have to do is look around and open your eyes and you’ll see His greatness everywhere, the miracles of life, la vida.”

  And so I kept going—feeling inspired—and got up most mornings at 4:30 AM and worked until late at night, writing and rewriting and checking with my parents and relatives to make sure that I had it right.

&
nbsp; This, then, isn’t fiction. This is a history of a people—a tribal heritage, if you will—of my Indian-European culture as handed down to me by my parents, aunts, uncles and godparents. The people in this story are real. The places are true. And the incidents did actually happen. Thank you.

  Con gusto,

  Victor Villaseñor

  Rancho Villaseñor

  Oceanside, CA

  Spring, 1990

  BOOK ONE

  Rain of Gold

  Doña Guadalupe (Lupe’s mother)

  María Guadalupe Gómez known as “Lupe,” age 15

  María and Don Victor in California (Lupe’s sister and father)

  Victoriano and Doña Guadalupe (Lupe’s brother and mother)

  Juan Salvador Villaseñor in Montana, age 20

  Sheriff Archie Freeman

  Juan Salvador and Lupe’s Wedding, 1929

  High in the mountains in northwest Mexico, an Indian named Espirito followed a doe and her fawn in search of water. The spring in the box canyon where Espirito and his tribe lived had dried up.

  Following the deer through the brush and boulders, Espirito found a hidden spring on the other side of the box canyon at the base of a small cliff. Water dripped down the face of the cliff and the whole cliff glistened like a jewel in the bright mid-morning sunlight.

  Once the deer were done drinking, Espirito approached the spring and drank, too. It was the sweetest water he’d ever tasted. Filling his gourd with water, Espirito pulled down a couple of loose rocks from the cliff and put them in his deerskin pouch. He knelt down, giving thanks to the Almighty Creator. He and his people weren’t going to suffer the long, dry season, after all.

  Then that winter came a torrent of rain, and it got so cold that the raindrops froze and the mountaintops turned white. Espirito and his tribe grew cold and hungry. Desperately, Espirito went down to the lowlands to see if he could sell some of the sweet water that he’d found.

  Walking into a small settlement alongside the great father river, El Río Urique, Espirito told the store owner, Don Carlos Barrios that he had the sweetest water in all the world to trade for food and clothing.

  Laughing, Don Carlos said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t trade for water, living here alongside a river. Do you have anything else to trade?”

  “No,” said Espirito, turning his purse inside out. “All I have are these little stones and this gourd of water.”

  Don Carlos’ fat, grey eyebrows shot up. The stones were gold nuggets. Picking one up, Don Carlos put it to his teeth, marking it. “For these I can trade you all the food and clothing you want!” he screamed.

  But Espirito was already going for the door. He’d never seen a man try to eat a stone before. It took all of Don Carlos’ power to calm Espirito down and to come back into the store to trade.

  Then, having traded, Espirito loaded the food and clothing into a sack, and he left the settlement as quickly as he could. He didn’t want the crazy store owner to go back on their deal.

  The winter passed and Espirito made a dozen trips down the mountain to trade stones for food and clothing. Don Carlos made so much money from the gold nuggets that he quit attending to his store and began having great feasts every evening. He begged Espirito to sell him the place where he got the nuggets. He offered to send his fat son up the mountain with his two burros loaded with merchandise every week so Espirito wouldn’t have to come down the mountain anymore.

  “I can’t do that,” said Espirito. “I don’t own the stones or the spring any more than I own the clouds or the birds in the sky. The stones belong to my people who use the spring.”

  “Well, then, talk to them,” said Don Carlos excitedly. “And offer them my deal!”

  “All right,” said Espirito. He went back up into the mountains and he talked it over with his people. They agreed to Don Carlos’ deal, but only on the condition that he’d never dig into the cliff itself and ruin the spring which held the sweetest water in all the world.

  Coming down from the box canyon after delivering the first two burro-loads of merchandise, Don Carlos’ fat son was beside himself with joy. “Papa,” he said, “it’s not just a pocket of gold. No, it’s a whole cliff of gold raining down the mountainside!”

  “How big a cliff?” asked Don Carlos, his eyes dancing with gold fever.

  “As tall as twenty men standing on each other and twice as wide as our house.”

  Don Carlos bit his knuckles with anticipation. He began to send his fat son back up the mountain for more gold as soon as he’d come down.

  Don Carlos’ son lost all his soft flesh and grew as strong and slender as a deer. Espirito and his people came to like the boy and named him Ojos Puros because of his light blue eyes.

  Years passed and all was going well in this enchanted box canyon of raining gold, until one day Ojos Puros came down the mountain and told his father that there wasn’t any more gold.

  “What do you mean no more gold?” demanded Don Carlos, who now wore fine clothes from Mexico City and boots from Spain.

  “All the loose nuggets are gone,” said Ojos Puros. “To get more gold, we’d need to dig at the cliff, and that would ruin their spring.”

  “So do it!” ordered Don Carlos.

  “No,” said Ojos Puros. “We gave our word not to ruin their spring, Papa.”

  The rage, the anger that came to Don Carlos’ face would have cowed Ojos Puros a few years before. But it didn’t now. So Don Carlos slapped his son until his hand was covered with blood, but still his son never gave in nor did he hit him back. That night, Don Carlos drank and ate with such rage that he came down with a terrible stomachache. He slept badly. He had nightmares. And in his sleep he saw an angel of God coming to kill him for having tried to go back on his word.

  Three days later, Don Carlos awoke with a fever and he apologized to his son and wife for all the bad he’d done. Then he sold the gold mine to a local rancher who didn’t know the meaning of the word “fear.” This rancher’s name was Bernardo García. The next day, Bernardo had a steer knocked down that Don Carlos still owed to the Indians and he had the animal skinned alive so he could keep the valuable hide. Then he forced the naked animal to run up the mountain to Espirito’s encampment.

  Seeing the naked animal come into their canyon, Espirito and his people were terrified. Bernardo himself cut the steer’s throat in front of them, told the Indians that he’d bought the gold mine from Don Carlos, and he put a dozen men to work digging at the cliff. He ruined the spring and, when the Indians complained, he shot them and ran them out of their box canyon, even over Ojos Puros’ protests.

  In less than five years, Bernardo became a man so rich and powerful that he bought a home in Mexico City among the wealthiest of the world. He became a close friend of the great President Porfirio Díaz himself, and he took a second wife of European breeding, as Don Porfirio had done. Then, in 1903 he sold the mine to an American company from San Francisco, California, for unheard-of millions on Don Porfirio’s advice of modernizing Mexico.

  The American mining company came in with large equipment and dammed up the Urique River, put in a power plant and built a road from the coast. The mine came to be officially known as La Lluvia de Oro, “The Rain of Gold,” and thousands of poor Mexican people came to the box canyon hoping to get work.

  Every six months the Americans loaded thirty-five mules with two sixty-pound bars of gold each and drove the mules out of the canyon and down the mountain to the railhead in El Fuerte. There, the Americans loaded the gold bars on trains and shipped them north to the United States.

  The years passed, and the people who lived in the bottom of the box canyon made houses out of stone and lean-tos out of sticks and mud.

  The American company prospered, grew and built permanent buildings inside a fenced area for their American engineers.

  But then, in 1910, a huge meteorite came shooting out of the sky, exploding against the towering walls of the box canyon. The people who lived in the ca
nyon thought it was the end of the world. They prayed and made love, asking God to spare them. And in the morning, when they saw the miracle of the new day, they knew God had, indeed, spared them. They thanked Him, refusing to go to work inside the darkness of the mine anymore.

  The Americans became angry, but no matter how much they beat the people, they still could not get them to go back down into the darkness of the devil’s domain. Finally, the Americans brought back Bernardo García from Mexico City, and he threatened the people with God and the devil and got them back to work.

  That same year, President Porfirio Díaz used La Lluvia de Oro as one of his examples to show to foreign dignitaries—whom he’d invited to celebrate his eightieth birth-day—of how foreign investors could make a profit in helping him modernize Mexico.

  The celebration for Don Porfirio’s birthday lasted one month, costing the Mexican people more than twenty million dollars in gold. Bernardo García stood alongside Don Porfirio in gold-plated charro dress, welcoming the different foreign dignitaries with a present made of pure gold.

  Both Don Porfirio and Bernardo wore white powder on their dark Indian faces so that they’d look white-European. No Indians were allowed in Mexico City during the celebration. No mestizos or poor, dark-skinned people. So for thirty days the foreign dignitaries were driven in gold-studded carriages up and down the boulevard of La Reforma in Mexico City, which had been specially built by Don Porfirio to be an exact replica of the main boulevard in Paris, and the foreign visitors only saw beautiful homes, prosperous factories, well-cared-for haciendas and well-to-do European-looking people.

  This, then, was the last straw that broke the burro’s back. And the poor, hungry people of Mexico rose up in arms by the tens of thousands, breaking Don Porfirio’s thirty-year reign, and the Revolution of 1910 began.

  Broken-hearted, Espirito and his people watched from the top of the towering cliffs as their beloved box canyon—in which they’d lived peacefully for hundreds of years—turned first into a settlement of electric fences, grey stone buildings and terrible noises, and now into a bloodbath for the soldiers of the Revolution.