The little things you learn from interviews.
I recently read an interview with Denise Chávez, the New Mexican poet, who said her mother’s side of the family was from El Polvo, Texas.
It’s in the Big Bend. Years ago, I drove through there, taking the River Road from Lajitas to Presidio. Along the way, you pass through Redford, as in the Red Ford, Vado Colorado, a ford in red rock. Redford includes the community known as El Polvo, the dust.
The area is part of an oasis the Spanish called La Junta de los Rios. Rios Conchos and Bravo del Norte, which we call Rio Grande, converge near the twin cities of Ojinaga, Chihuahua and Presidio, Texas.
Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and friends passed through in 1535.
Several entradas, as the official expeditions were called, explored the area in the 1580s. The Spanish found pueblos — agricultural people living in adobe houses with flat roofs — along both rivers. The Conchos is the mightier river, and most of the pueblos were south of the modern border.
The soil in the river bottoms is rich, and the rivers made irrigation possible. The people of the pueblos knew of the other peoples of the Southwest. Some archeologists and anthropologist see this as the southeastern-most extension of that larger culture.
At El Polvo, the pueblo was called Tapacolmes.
The Spanish set up a mission. It didn’t last, and the story of its failure is long and poisonous.
The first Europeans the native people saw after Cabeza de Vaca were slavers. Countless people worked and died in the silver mines of New Spain. The slavers first arrived in the 1560s, and they kept coming, on and off, for 200 years.
And so began a tug of war. Missionaries wanted to make converts for the church and citizens for the king. Many of these priests were well educated, with the ideals of Augustine’s City of God in their minds. They’d come, learn something of the language and culture, and then be expelled, or killed, whenever the slavers returned.
No comments:
Post a Comment