One thing about our house: it was old for that neighborhood of mostly fifties ranch houses. The walls were three-foot-thick adobe, the layout eccentric. It had been a smaller house before, and it had been added on to, but long ago—at least in Western town terms—in the forties (according to city records), in the twenties (according to neighborhood lore), perhaps even earlier. There was a room that had no windows. It had once been a kitchen. You could see traces of where the hooded comal for the household fire had been. Now its only light came from a poorly made skylight—lined with brittle plastic, which gave off a faintly spectral light.
Whenever I slept in that room, which we gave to our small son, who liked it for its resemblance to a cave, I had strange dreams—always similar dreams. People were walking through the room, a winding procession that never seemed to end. They were rather short people—my height or under, four-ten or eleven—and often they bumped into the bed.
As is often the case in such dreams, I was aware of these people, intensely so, able to watch them from under my lowered eyelids, squint up at them, but paralyzed, utterly unable to move or cry out.
I am not a ghost believer per se, but I had the dream of these wandering people so often I came to think of them as almost real. I decided they had lived here, or they did live here. I decided they were walking through the bedroom, which had once been the kitchen of my house, because they were going toward water, toward the Acequia Madre, the mother canal, that the ditch rider responsible for our section (we were given water three, sometimes four times a year; later—when drought grew—twice or maybe once) told me had existed there for over six thousand years.
“The Aztecs built it,” he said. I answered that I was not sure the Aztecs had come up this far. “Aztecs, Maya,” he shrugged. “Someone.”
This was not, in fact, true. The Acequia Madre was old, but not that old. It was a product of the colonization of New Mexico by Juan de Oñate. In 1598, Oñate, traveling north from Mexico City, crossed into New Mexico with a party of four hundred soldiers, establishing the Camino Real, which begins in Fort Seldon, just north of Las Cruces. After tacking north across the bitter high desert plain of what is now Las Cruces to Albuquerque (the Jornado del Muerto——“Journey of Death,” Oñate’s soldiers called it), he established a base at La Villa de San Gabriel in northern New Mexico, not far from Santa Fe.
One of the first things the Spaniards did after seizing control of the lands from the Native tribes—a seizure they accomplished with few difficulties, for the natives were, for the most part, friendly and ill-prepared to resist invasion—was to begin construction of the acequias that for centuries after would run through New Mexico communities, large and small.
• •
In his first crossing into what was modern-day New Mexico through the Paso Del Norte, Oñate and his men found a sizeable number of people living in the lower Rio Grande Valley.
These people, who must have numbered more than a thousand men and women, and who are settled in their rancherias and grass huts, came out to receive us. . . . Each one brought us his present of mesquital, which is made of a fruit like the carob bean, fish of many kinds, which are very plentiful in those lagoons, and other kinds of their food, in such quantity that the greater part spoiled because the amount they gave us was so great. . . .
The account Oñate’s party gave was that these people greeted them with the words “manxo, manxo, micos, micos,” which the Spanish took to mean “friends.” From this, the Spaniards named them “Manso” from the Spanish meaning “tame,” “docile,” and “meek.” To thank God for the survival of his party in the harsh desert landscape, Oñate ordered a feast and invited the Manso to be his guests.
• •
Sometimes where we lived it did not rain for a hundred days, though you would often see virga—sheets of dark rain in the sky that evaporated—or how I loved this word—sublimed before they hit the earth.
Virga could bring a slight chill to the hottest day, a sudden swoosh of cold air down the back of your neck. People called it “walking rain,” though Don Antonio, my elderly neighbor, who sometimes came to pick pecans in my yard, laying old sheets under the tress and agitating the branches with long poles, called it “ghost rain,” which seemed an even better name.
Some days the ghost rain turned the sky the brilliant black-and-white of an old movie. More rarely you would see a hole form in the funnel of virga clouds—like a doorway through which another world might enter.
• •
The Chihuahuan Desert is one of the youngest deserts in the world—about eight thousand years old. It is what is called a “rain shadow” desert because the rain it should receive is blocked by the mountain ranges that surround it—the Sierra Madre and Sierra Carmen to the south, the Franklins, Guadalupes, Organs, and the Chisos (the Sierra Madre Oriental) to the north. The average rainfall is only around 9.1 inches, most of it in the summer monsoon season—when violent thunderstorms form, fed by warm air off the Gulf of Mexico.
Although the Chihuahuan Desert, because of its high elevation, is moister than the Sonora to the south, some years the rains failed and the plants became so dry it seemed as they would sublime, too—a leaf crumbling away into dust or something lighter, a mere glitter in the air when you touched it. That was a kind of ghosting, too. Evaporation, crumbling away. The walking rain like the walking people.
• •
Perhaps because of my dream—this recurring dream that appeared to everyone who slept in the room with no windows, I looked up the names of the people who had lived in the land I now occupied. The names themselves were not hard to find—the Piro, the Manso, the Suma, the Jumano. Yet it was hard to uncover much more. Only the fact that they had disappeared.
In the traffic circle that led to El Paso International Airport, which you circle whenever you enter or depart the Borderplex region, there is a gigantic statue of Juan de Oñate. One of our local high schools is named Oñate; there is also an Oñate Road, and during fiesta in September a man dressed up as Oñate leads the marchers. But there are no similar road names or statues celebrating the Manso.
I leafed through the card catalog of my local library, pored over the histories of New Mexico I found there, yet I found scant documentation of the people who had lived on the land before me. The “New Mexico History” website said, “Only traces of the native peoples survive; perhaps in the distant memories of a few pockets of survivors.” And on the “Tribes of Texas,” website, the state archeologist wrote:
The situation has been plagued with a feeling of hopelessness. The Spanish documents are “in all cases sadly incomplete, especially in descriptions of the native cultures. Besides being sketchy, the documents are often contradictory and inconsistent. Band or tribal names are an ever-present problem. We are to a large extent in the dark concerning how and why names were applied. . . . The result is a baffling array of names whose meanings and associations are little understood.
• •
In July 1598, Oñate and his soldiers feasted with the Manso along the banks of the Rio Grande. However, by the end of the year, everything changed.
Juan de Zaldívar, one of Oñate’s captains, and a party of forty or so of his soldiers, rode into the village of Acoma, about sixty miles west of present-day Albuquerque. Later, the Spanish would claim they were simply stopping for provisions en route to Zuni Pueblo, but the people of Acoma said that Zaldívar’s soldiers raped their women and looted their food stores. The Acoma killed Zaldívar and twelve of his men in retaliation. A three-day battle followed, and four hundred of the Acoma were killed.
When Oñate heard what had happened, he and his troops descended on the Pueblo and rounded up its citizens. Every man over the age of twenty had his left foot cut off; these men were then sentenced to twenty years of servitude to Spain. Women over the age of twelve were also sentenced to twenty years servitude. The young girls—some six hundred of them—were rounded up and marched south to Mexico City, where they would serve as maids and workers in the houses of the wealthy, never to see their homes again. The mutilated men of Acoma were then sent out to other pueblos to bear testimony to the Spanish might and the futility of resistance.
The acequia system was built during this period, much of it with forced labor.
• •
My yard was bigger than average for the neighborhood—almost a full acre. At the back, the grass grew so twisted and thick and high that you almost needed scythes to cut through it. The largest lawn mower would meet its match in that tangle of caliche and dead grass and roots—roots everywhere.
Ailanthus had half colonized the yard—the trees pretty, but with foul-smelling flowers, a sickly too-sweet smell. The ailanthus was a recent visitor, brought over from China to cities on the East Coast because of its propensity to grow quickly and in places that generally would not support trees—concrete jungles and the like. The ailanthus spread, taking root in wooded areas, plains, and even deserts, forcing out native species. The remarkable vitality of this plant, also known as copal, knotweed, stinking quassia, tree of heaven, springs from the fact that ailanthus can take root again from any live shoot, making it almost impossible to eradicate.
My neighbor Don Antonio explained to me how the ailanthus worked—each tree a “sucker” growing from the same underground linked root system. He called it “a twilight tree,” a monster tree under the earth, spreading its ghost limbs everywhere. All the little trees that appeared separate were really part of the same huge living organism, one which, or so he informed me, leached mysterious poisons into the soil, so nothing else would grow near it, though this being a desert with water, other things did grow.
When the rain came, everything about our garden resembled paradise. We had pomegranate bushes that were ten feet tall. We had a fig tree like the tree in the Garden of Eden, and every monsoon season, when the figs ripened, the yard filled with strange birds—roadrunners, a vulture or two, crows, a raven. I warred them for the figs and often lost, but sometimes won as well. Figs in a basket, figs so sweet that when you ate one, you tasted the sugar in your mouth for hours.
• •
The Manso were also known as the Tampchanga, which is perhaps closer to what they called themselves. Oñate and his soldiers admired them for their lives full of dancing and flowers: “They live a simple carefree life and have many dances, which they perform day and night,” but they despised them for having “no civilization.”
Father Benavidez, a well-known Franciscan monk who traveled with Oñate’s party, wrote in his memoir of 1630: “This . . . is a people which has no houses, but only huts of branches. Nor do the [men] wear any clothing in particular, but all [go] naked. And the women only cover themselves from the waist down with two deerskins, one in front and the other behind. . . . Between a few of them they eat a cow raw, leaving nothing of the paunch—since they do not even pause to clean it of its filth but swallow it as it is, like dogs, grabbing it with the mouth and cutting it off with knives of flint, and swallowing it without chewing.”
Another contemporary observer declared: “The nation of Manso Indians is so barbarous and uncultivated that all its members go naked, and, although the country is very cold, they have no houses in which to dwell, but live under the trees, not even knowing how to till the land for their food.”
Yet Pedro de Luján, who accompanied the 1582 Espejo expedition into New Mexico, wrote in his diary that the Manso were skilled fishermen, employing “nets to catch fish in the lagoons on the Rio Grande.” They also ate corn and wild fowl—ducks, geese, and cranes, which were plentiful in and around the river. “The men cut their hair in a distinctive bowl style around their heads and dye their hair red.”
Benavidez also noted, “They are a handsome people, tall and well-figured,” and concluded his account by saying that while the Manso asked the Spanish for food, they were also willing “to share all they had.”
• •
In Doña Ana County, several hearth structures, which date from this period, have been identified as Manso. Because of lack of funding, excavation of these has been limited, but the hearth structures suggest that the idea that the Manso did not have houses may not be accurate. Perhaps the grass huts the Spanish saw might have been temporary camps or perhaps even places the Manso set up in order to greet the Spanish invaders and perhaps steer them away from their more permanent dwellings, though no one can say for sure.
These hearth sites contain obsidian tools—arrowheads and others, suggesting a wide-foraging range area and that the Manso engaged in trading with other tribes, since there is little obsidian in the immediate vicinity. There are some pottery shards, most simple brown ware, but others that appear more decorative, though the sites have been looted so frequently and excavated so imperfectly, no one is certain about this either. In an article titled “Prehistoric Confusion, a Cultural Comparison of the Manso, Suma, and Jumano Tribes of the Paso Del Norte Region,” archeologist Bill Hayward states baldly, “Few conclusions about the Manso, Suma, or Jumano Indians of the Paso del Norte region can be regarded as absolute. Primary source evidence is insufficient to produce results. . . .”
The most generally cited theory, which Hayward accepts, is that the Manso were probably descended from the earlier Mimbres and Mogollon peoples, who occupied the Gila Mountains to the northwest.
Beginning in about 800 AD, the Mogollon constructed multistory cliff dwellings in the mountains and left behind their finely wrought pottery picturing animals and intricate abstract patterns that suggest everything from leaves to the stars. These pots are elaborately glazed in red, brown, and black, a precursor to the Pueblo pottery of today. By the fifteenth century the Mogollon had abandoned their cliff cities, for reasons that are unknown—though most believe a change in weather patterns led to agricultural collapse. Simply put, the land became too dry to sustain them.
Archeologists theorize the Mogollon joined the Colorado Pueblo peoples or evolved into the smaller bands of nomadic Manso and Suma, whose way of life anthropologists describe as “a more archaic adaptation,” a mobile hunter-gatherer lifestyle necessitated by the challenges of surviving in the unpredictable desert ecosystem of the Paso del Norte region.
The Manso and the Suma appear to have had enough differences in habit and belief to form distinct tribes, though the Spanish accounts often confuse them. The Manso seem to have lived mostly by and through the river, while the Suma subsisted on agave and settled the foothills and higher mesas. The Manso had a matrilineal structure of inheritance through which chieftains were selected, which was not shared by the Suma. Manso religious practice revolved around dances in which tobacco was shared, while the Suma used peyote in their rituals, but beyond this—almost nothing.
At one point, a pair of linguists tried to develop a theory of the Manso language using six names—Manso names—recorded of conspirators hanged in an aborted rebellion in 1681, but as other scholars pointed out, “Six words is not enough to establish a language base.”
We do not even have many stories of the Manso to draw on. One of the few glimpses we have comes from Pedro de Luxán, who chronicled the early expedition into Arizona and New Mexico led by Spanish naturalist and explorer Antonio de Espejo. Luxán reports that in 1581 one Friar Francisco Sánchez Chamiscado abandoned his lame sorrel horse in a Manso encampment. He returned a year and a half later to find the horse being fed agave and talked to “as if it were a person.”
• •
Spring in Las Cruces was not like spring in the East. There was some blooming, for sure, but by the end of March you were mainly aware of an inexorable movement from hot to hotter, from dry to drier. First, the warm winds of April, which could drive you crazy, because of the high whine they set up in the air, and the clouds of fine red dust that entered everything; then the rising mercury of May, and more wind, more dust, until by June my yard, and all the other yards that weren’t being continually watered, turned brown and tinder-dry. Only then would the monsoons arrive, but even then, in bad years, everything remained yellow-brown—half-alive, half-dead.
Usually, there was one flooding allowed in early summer by Elephant Butte Water District, which controlled the flow of water from the acequia. However, to get it, you had to haunt the canal and search down the elusive ditch riders and plead for your allotment, and this took a lot of time. If you were able to get the water, though, the transformation was miraculous. You turned the wheel by the entrance to the head gate. The water seeped in overnight, changing the ground around the pecans to silvered pools, and as the water sank into the dry earth, soft green grasses and wildflowers appeared almost instantaneously, along with mosquitoes and night swarms of bats. In a few days, birds settled everywhere—doves, green herons, and prehistoric-looking roadrunners. They shared the space a little awkwardly, bending their necks to drink.
• •
Through the rising heat of April, May, June, July, I thought about the Manso, the time before the acequias when there was only the river. I would think about survival and what the Manso had known, which we no longer knew. Even if the weather had been slightly milder in those times—and there was no indication of that judging by the accounts of Oñate’s soldiers or the names they gave this land: Jornado del Muerto, Laguna del Muerto, Ojo del Muerto, as if the mere sight of this desert made them singularly possessed by thoughts of death—it had always been a hard place. Yet the Manso had flourished, able to live here without recourse to aid or technology from elsewhere.
The Rio Grande had been for them the source of all they needed, whereas in my New Mexico, the river was housed in concrete levees and walls so high and forbidding that one scarcely thought of it as a river. It felt instead like some military or industrial space, one at a remove from our daily lives. People rarely went to the river to wade or fish or swim. Somehow in our collective imagination the river itself had become toxic, taboo. Yet it had not been so for the Manso. Even in the brief accounts I had been able to find, the Manso came across as resilient and at ease—greeting the invaders with flowers and dances, sharing the fish they caught in such plenty the Spanish could not even eat it all before it rotted.
• •
On the evening of March 15, 1684, Don Domingo Jironza Pétriz de Cruzate, governor of the Guadalupe Mission near El Paso, received a visit from the governor and lieutenant governor of the Tiwas. They were accompanied by two Piro Indians, known only as Pedro and Venture. The visitors had come to tell the governor that the Manso in and around the mission were planning an uprising, like the Pueblo uprising of 1680 in northern New Mexico. The governor’s account, written out by hand, lays out a complex web of relationships and conspirators.
The Piro and the Tiwa had been approached by the Manso governor, Luis, and their magistrate, Antonio, apparently with the approval of the Manso cacique—Chief Chiquito. The visitors affirm that the agitator in this case was one Josepillo, “The Apache,” which in this context seems a vague designation meaning only a tribe still hostile to the Spanish. The visitors are then interrupted by yet another supplicant—a Manso named Juan the Christian, who enters and confesses he is troubled and frightened. He has just come from visiting the home of a Manso named Augustin, and his son-in-law Gregorillo, who, under the influence of the same Josepillo, have told him that on Easter Sunday, the day the Spanish God rises from his grave, the Manso, along with the Piro, Tiwa, and Sumo, plan to attack the mass and set fire to the mission and its granaries. They will kill everyone in the place but have discussed at length a plan to spare one friar who will be sent on foot to tell the King of Spain what the Manso have done.
The governor’s agents at this point bring in the conspirators, and the documents continue with their confessions: Josepillo the Apache, Augustin Gregorillo, Josepho, Francisco, Antonio, the Manso magistrate, and Luis, the Manso governor.
Their confessions are taken by the friars of the mission. All share a similar style and wording. We learn little of the conspirators’ individual personalities or experiences. All say they do not know their age but appear between twenty-four to thirty. Up until this point, they have been tasked with doing errands—farming, gardening, washing—for the friars at the mission. “We have seen how the people of New Mexico revolted and enjoy their freedom and nothing has happened to them,” says Gregorillo. “We want only to be rich and free,” explains Juanillo, the War Lord, of whom no explanation is given for his title.
The friars encourage the Manso to admit that they have been tempted into ideas of rebellion by the Devil, who has turned their heads with thoughts of wealth. The Manso agree, at least as far as the records go. Each confession ends with the Spanish demanding that they sign their names and the Manso insisting that they do not know how to do so.
Nothing is noted about what becomes of Juan the Christian, who plays the Judas role in this story. Yet the arrested men admit they had been speaking of this conspiracy for some time. “Since the time of the Governor before this one,” Josepillo the Apache tells his inquisitors, and Josephus, of whom little more is given than his name, agrees that, yes, all the Mansos have known of this for some time, except “about three, including Juan the Christian,” presumably because the others were concerned he would give them away, as, in fact, he did.
The testimony pf Juanillo, the War Lord, is glossed by the Spanish friars as follows: “And the reason or wanting to rebel and kill the friars and the Spaniards is and always has been wanting to live by their former religion and being tired of everything to do with the church.”
A lawyer, Matias Lucero de Godoy, is appointed hastily—that very night—to represent the conspirators. At the trial, which takes place on March 18, Godoy argues that “having been so recently converted to our holy Catholic faith and having been raised in such liberty [that] they have never recognized any authority, nor have they been in bondage, and in their incapacity they do not understand the enormous error they were planning to commit . . . moreover their confessions show how readily they make them and confess their crime, whereby one can see and recognize their innocence . . . they are like children who do not know or understand what they do. . . .”
This plea appears to have been submitted primarily as a formality, for the conspirators are all hanged by the neck three days later. A period of unrest follows with confusing reports by the governor of fruitless efforts to convince various Manso camps around the Guadalupe Mission to prove themselves good Christians by coming into the Mission to pledge their allegiance. The tone of the governor becomes testy—he is “disappointed,” “distressed,” insulted that despite “all our good offices,” the major Manso camp, led by Chief Chiquito, continues to resist. In November, sixty Spanish soldiers from the Mission are sent to bring in and subdue the remaining Mansos. We do not know anything of the Manso fatalities resulting from this incursion, only that after this the tribe appears to disperse and scatter—perhaps joining with the Piro and Tiwa, perhaps running into the hills to join the Apaches.
In 1765, when Bishop Pedro Tamarόn y Romeral tours the region, he describes El Paso and the residents of the surrounding lands as comprised of 2,469 Spaniards and 249 Indians. No tribal affiliation is provided. The Manso as a distinct tribe slides out of the historical record.
• •
Who were the people in my dream? The ones who had lived there and fled when drought came over the land? Or the ones who had been driven out—slaughtered, placed in servitude, hanged until dead by the neck at the side of Guadalupe Mission? There was probably no place in the whole country where I had been born where something similar had not happened—people removed, killed, erased from the land they called home. I found myself wondering what land feels about what crosses over it. Perhaps my ghosts were just the memory of the land—the forced marches, the people who lost their feet or hands, the people whose blood was spilled as new armies marched in or the ones who shivered along the river, felled by the new diseases brought by strangers.
Some peered at me as I lay on the bed; sometimes they stopped and held out their hands in front of my (in the dream) almost closed eyes as if they were about to run hands across my face. I was afraid when they did this, but not because I thought—even in the dream—that they intended me any harm. No, I was afraid because they seemed to suggest the impossibly long and implacable flow of time and how small I was in that version.
They had walked here to the water, and I could not help feeling that they knew more than I did. The water had been there, and then it had not been there, forcing them to leave. Or else they walked here because their homes had been taken, because the water, the canal, is always the way out or perhaps the end of the line.
• •
Things happened to me in that house. I had a third child; my son was diagnosed with acute juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, and, every few weeks, we would make the drive up to the hospital in Albuquerque along the old Camino Real and through the sere plain around Socorro that had stuck terror in the hearts of so many of Oñate’s soldiers, one of whom had written in his diary, “Oh Dios, qué tierra tan solitaria” (“Oh, God, what a lonely country!”) I lived in the vague bootcamp survivalist way of families with young children, without ever feeling as if we had enough money, or enough security, or even enough time to take any measure beyond the life we were living, that life was often sweet but equally was seamed with the bitter: sickness, almost deaths, jobs and more jobs, the work of tending that garden with its imported pecan trees and wall of pomegranate. I did not think about the land—when did I have the time?—but it entered me: creosote and bitter brush after rain, the ghostly, sweaty smell of the onion fields at the end of the harvest season, the Hatch Chile Festival around Labor Day, and the time in September when all the air across New Mexico became filtered with the throat-catching earth-smell of roasting chili.
• •
At the time when we lived in that house, the fact of global warming, though spoken of, still seemed a far way off—a story you might tell yourself that happened elsewhere. Back then, we, with our acequias, our swamp coolers, our modern world, would not find ourselves in the position of having to leave simply because there was no other way to survive. Ten years later, the possibility seems much closer. I no longer dream of the walking people but dream instead often of that house and garden. These dreams have the normal surreal distortions of all dreaming. In one there is a room in the house that for one reason or another I have not entered for a very long time. I worry about this room, because there is a potted tree inside, a palm tree which is growing right up against the skylight, and I can see a glimpse of its fronds against the dirty glass, yellow, because I have not given it water.
Land of drought and slaughter. The crossroads where people have always passed through. Part of the process of thinking about global warming is thinking more precisely about what eradication looks like, what it might mean, the many stages and forms it might take. These days, when I think of global warming, it is the landscape of the Chihuahuan Desert I see because of its history, because it is a place where people have built cities that vanished, where people have been eradicated, where the traces linger, where the landscape has been remade by people into something that illustrates the rules of industrial-style survival, because it resembles what we might be looking at in the planet as a whole.
A few springs ago, I walked along the Rio Grande during a brutal drought season when the New Mexico Water Board warned we might have to get ready for the river to dry up entirely in the month of April, which would be disastrous for the crops. This year, thanks to violent storms over the winter months, the Rio Grande is cresting at twenty-plus feet in northern New Mexico, but southern New Mexico is still dry because the water is being held at Elephant Butte Reservoir, where officials are waiting for enough water to make up for the depletions of the last few drought years before they release any of it. “When Will Rio Grande Start Flowing in Las Cruces?” was the headline of the local paper all through April.
The Manso would have known of such variances—dry years, wet years, the endless desert cycle, but they also knew something we no longer have within reach—a river so rich in fish and wild fowl that it gave them all they needed to live.
How, a friend asks me, is mourning for a planet really any different from mourning your own existence? I think about that a long time because it does feel different, because, even at the worst, even at the point of eradication, what we have looked back to and forward at is the planet itself, its habits, its landscapes, as if they were part of us, though as many geologists keep pointing out, it isn’t the planet that will die; the planet, like the Spanish god, will rise, most likely, from the grave of what we have done; it just might not be a planet we can live in anymore.
• •
I dreamed the dream of the walking people maybe once a week the ten years I lived in that house in Las Cruces, New Mexico: 520 times. Each time, they moved right past me, so close I could have touched them. They were not in a hurry, but they were resolute. In my dream, I never opened my eyes to see what they were carrying, but their joint movement, a kind of rustle and buzz, suggested people leaving behind what they knew, people banding together, bearing what they had, people moving in order to keep what they could.
The Piro, the Tiwa, the Manso, the Suma, the Jumano. Their lost languages would surely describe the desert I lived in with the benefit of some twelve thousand (according to the archeologists) years of experience, rather than the three hundred years of acequias and head gates and the control exerted over the water.
• •
Details that haunt me: the sorrel horse; Juan the Christian—the one none of the others trusted; the determination of all the Manso who plotted rebellion to send one surviving friar back to the King of Spain to bear witness. Where did the people of Chief Chiquito’s camp go after that day in November 1684?
• •
In 2016, Ed Roybal, the current cacique of the Piro-Manso-Tiwa tribe, presented to the Doña Ana County Commission a petition asking for support for the tribe’s effort to gain federal recognition as a legitimate tribe. “We know we share a history,” Ed said. “What we ae asking only is that you celebrate that history with us.” To date, no decision has been made on federal designation. However, Ed said that his memories and stories he had heard was that there was a patch of land—between Valley, San Pedro, and Amador Avenues that has “been important to the Manso people.” This was the land I lived on. I thought of people moving, melting away, crossing the difficult desert, and yet looping back to walk again the land they knew. The lost Manso scattering north and south, east and west. The lost girls of Acoma, who, after their fathers and brothers had their lives or left feet taken from them, were marched south to Mexico City to work in houses unlike any they had ever seen. What story did they tell themselves about where they had arrived or where they were heading?