Killing the Spirit: A Land before Borders

 

                                                                                   

                                                                                    

            My Gonzalez-Villalobos grandparents, from Mitic, a Tecuexe village preceding European arrival

     When I listen to the news today and hear how our government is erasing Ethnic Studies classes from our universities and schools, banning books about race, and physically attacking Mexican and Latin American immigrants, with or without documents, I can’t help but take it personally, like they’re coming after me, and my family.

     Should I really have to warn my teenage grandson, “Eli, if ICE or men in dark clothes and facemasks pull you, or your friends, over, do exactly what they say. Be polite, answer them respectfully, or they can take you in and make you disappear.” It's a technique terrorists use to kill the spirit, straight out of a novel by Camus or Kafka. We used in Vietnam to threaten innocent villagers from cooperating with the Vietcong. Pinochet used it in Chile, so did the military generals in Argentina. I never thought I see it used here, in the "land of the free."  

     I always thought my Mexican relatives and I were protected from deportation, but when I look in the mirror and see the olive skin and high cheekbones I’ve inherited from my indigenous ancestors, I'm not so sure. What if I'm at Home Depot, and I accidentally get swept up in an immigration raid and don’t have the necessary documents to prove my Yankee status, will I end up, another victim lost in a detention center some place? I could show ICE officers my military disability card, but they're taking Latino veterans, too. Sometimes, I imagine an ICE agent, pissed off at the world, look past my pleas, and say, “I don’t wanna hear it, Pancho.”

     It wouldn’t be the first time. Immigration enforcement deported hundreds-to-thousands of Mexican Americans in the 1930s, when politicians needed a scapegoat to blame for their reckless economic decisions that ended in a great depression. I am a third-generation American, my children fourth generation, my grandchildren fifth generation, and my great-grandchildren sixth generation, our roots burrowed deeply in the land.

     According to archeologists and linguists, my Mexican Indian ancestors had been traveling from the far reaches of Mexico up to what we know today as Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and Montana, traces of the Nahuatl language detected in Shoshone, a root language of many northern indigenous people, thousands of years before the English landed at present day Massachusetts or the Spaniards marched into Tenochtitlan. Some paleontologists and geologists claim their archeological discoveries prove indigenous traders conducted business from the Inca Empire in Cusco up into present-day New Mexico and Colorado.

     As a teacher, I found my vocation in literature and storytelling, especially the stories of those who came before us, historians and novelists who tell of old San Diego, San Gabriel, and Los Angeles, the oldest settlements on California, what the Spanish named Alta California, and the early Chinese referred to as “Gold Mountain,” or “Land of the Barbarians.”

     That’s what started me on a search to talk to the descendants of Californios, who have a documented history on these lands. It was a cold November night in 2001, when I met octogenarian Fred Machado and his nephew, Ron Mendez, descendants of Manuel Machado y Yanez and his wife Maria de la Luz Valenzuela, who left Sonora on an overland expedition of settlers and reached the San Gabriel Mission in 1781.

     After a grueling and harrowing trek through the savage deserts of Arizona and California. Their future sons Agustin and Ygnacio, along with other family members, the Lugos and Talamantez, would eventually establish the family ranch, Rancho La Ballona, a large section of land just below the Westchester bluffs, butting up against today’s Playa del Rey.

     When I spoke to Fred (RIP), he still lived in Culver City, “part of the old land grant,” he told me, laughing at the irony of having to have purchased a house on land his family once owned. He told me the original grant stretched from Playa del Rey east to Baldwin Hills, east across to Palms and Rancho Park, north to about the southern fringes of West L.A., and west to Pen Mar and Venice beach, land known as Pwinukipar, or “full of water” to the native Tongva people, who would watch the land flood during the rainy season.

     After the early Californias staked their land claims, the floods caused the property lines to shift, raising havoc at a time when ownership boundaries were often identified by dead tree trunks, dry gulches, weedy mounds of earth, and maps drawn on homemade linens.

     As we spoke, Fred pulled out one document after another and told me a myriad of fascinating family stories he’d uncovered in his years of researching his family’s history. He and Ron talked as if their ancestors still lived, calling them by their first names. After a couple of hours steeped in Machado family history, I prepared to leave, much to ponder, but first, Fred told me he had one more piece of family lore he wanted to share with me. Barely able to contain his excitement, he placed a copy of an old map across his dining room table.  “Look at this,” he said.  

     Ron responded, "This [map] has its own story." 

     Fred said, “After my cousin Jimmy died, Jimmy's wife found an old tube container at the back of a closet.”

     Fred said his cousin’s wife opened the tube and pulled out a faded, rolled-up cloth--a map of some kind. She knew Fred’s interest in the family history and called him. Printed on linen, the map measured three feet by four feet. In 1868, someone, probably their elder ancestor, Agustin Machado, had meticulously drawn, in neat handwritten script, an outline of the land, Rancho La Ballona, indicating all the boundaries.

     Agustin had drawn parallel lines starting at the coast, most of what is the Marina and Venice Beach today. Fred laughed calling it, "beachfront property." Agustin had written a family member's name in each tract, which represented three hundred feet of land. This was the Machado family inheritance as handed down by Agustin Machado to his children.

     I noticed the lines on the map showed portions of land where Playa Vista Development, west-side environmentalists, and the remaining Tongva people were once battling over La Ballona’s Wetlands, the last open sanctuary for wildlife in the Westside basin.

     Fred showed me where his grandfather Ricardo’s ranch house, or as Fred called it, “the Big House,” his birthplace, had once stood. Fred took out a wrinkled black and white photograph of the house, surrounded by open fields. He said, “Today, that’s near the corner of Jefferson and Centinela.”

     Fred guessed his cousin Jimmy received the map from their grandfather, Ricardo, who received it from Jose Agustin, his father. Ricardo Machado, a farmer and real estate investor in the early 1900s, continued to use the map, making his own pencil markings and notations. Throughout the years, some of the pencil markings had faded.

     Fred told me he needed to do more investigating, at the time. He took the map to a friend who had a blue light, and under closer observation, he could decipher much of the handwriting.

     “Let me tell you an interesting story about this map,” Fred said. “One day, I received a call from a young man in Washington D.C. He had been discharged from the Air Force and was living back East.” Apparently, the young man had been studying and researching our family.

     Fred invited the young man to visit and stay a few days. When he arrived, the young man told Fred he had heard his grandmother was the daughter of a man named Juan Lugo, a relative of the Machado family and one of the original founders of the ranch. Fred told the young man there were Lugos in the family, but he had never heard of a Juan Lugo and nothing in the family's records showed that name.

     Fred said, “It could have been a mistake or Juan Lugo was illegitimate,” in which case, his name probably wouldn’t appear on any legal documents.

     Fred thought the young man might enjoy seeing the map, so he took it out and spread on the dining room table. As they looked closely, surveying the designated plots of land, boundaries and names, their eyes came to rest on a tiny corner where they saw the almost invisible name written, Juan Lugo. Fred had never noticed it.

     "The kid became unglued, just unglued," Fred said, delightedly. “No one had ever mentioned a Juan Lugo. And there in my great-grandfather’s writing was the notation, showing where Juan Lugo had lived on the ranch, close to where Walgrove Avenue crosses Venice boulevard," today.

     Fred realized the young man wanted a link to his past, maybe even to a family connection where none had existed.

     Fred's eyes gleamed as he finished telling the story, a near tear-jerker, which showed me that to Fred, and his nephew, Ron, history is not simply books with facts and dates. History is people and their stories. As someone once said, history is a breathing, living thing. If teachers approached it this way, students might have a better appreciation of our past and the people who lived it, and it might make it more difficult for those who are trying to erase it, as if we and our ancestors never existed.

     Of course, Fred realized the historical value of the map. He told his cousin’s wife, "Whoa! You're not giving this to me to keep. It's too important for one person to have."

     After verifying the map's authenticity and its place in Los Angeles history, the family donated the map to Loyola Marymount University, where, Fred said, scholars are still studying early Southern California history, particularly the history of early Los Angeles, a rich history unknown to many, and sadly, a history many would prefer remains uncovered and untold.