Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista (27 page)

“What can I say about Tierra Andalucia?” said Carvahal.  “They’re crazy up there, they always have been.  Sure, we made it back, but the training camp visits were a disaster for el Gobernador.  Magón ran the entire show—it was bad.  He made Deleon look so damn old…  He didn’t disrespect him outright, not in front of the troops, but he made it clear who was the real boss.  And it sure wasn’t Gobernador Deleon.”

“Well shoot, the Mountain Lion
is
old.”

“Yeah, and now it’s showing.  Magón kept the inspecting teams moving fast, and Deleon just couldn’t keep up—he was staggering along behind like a Methuselah.  Magón’s people kept pulling petty stunts like that. It was really a set up—Deleon was suckered.  I actually felt sorry for him.  Magón was getting the recruits all fired up, strutting around, waving his pistol like Hugo Chavez, giving his ‘República Del Norte’ speech.  You know, ‘Aztlan, we have returned!’ and all of that crap.”

“He must be practicing for Saturday, for the rally,” said Garabanda. Although Agustín Deleon and Félix Magón were still nominally members of the Democratic Party, they were also leaders of
Nuestra Raza,
the
Movimiento A Socialismo
and the international
Partido del Ejercito de los Pobres
. This group was the “Party of the Army of the Poor,” more commonly referred to as
Los Pepes
. A mass rally was scheduled for Saturday on the Civic Plaza in downtown Albuquerque, and Deleon and Magón were the keynote speakers.  

There were rumors that Deleon was going to announce the formation of a new Chicano political party, separate from the Democrats.  This new party would run its own slate of candidates for office, candidates dedicated to turning the Southwest into an autonomous region from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific.  Their long-standing goal was to see the states of the Southwest form an independent “República Del Norte,” which would be closely aligned with other socialist-leaning nations from Mexico to Argentina.

Carvahal said, “I was thinking the same thing: Magón’s getting warmed up for the big rally.  Rehearsing.  And I’ve got to admit, he’s good in front of a crowd. Damn good. When he pulls out his pistol or he starts waving his machete, the troops go wild!  Deleon looked so old and tired beside him, it was kind of sad.  I rode with Deleon in his Cadillac, but Magón set the agenda, and we just followed him around like puppy dogs. It was the vicegobernador’s show all the way.”

“Luis, keep an eye on the gas.  There’s no automatic shutoff.”

“I know.  I’ll be able to hear it when it’s almost full.”

Garabanda leaned through the open window into his Ford, his hand on the cigarette lighter plug.  “Tell me when.”

“Just a minute…a little more.  Here it comes…a little more…okay— that’s it!”  Garabanda yanked out the 12-volt plug, but some gasoline still back splashed from the Toyota’s gasoline fill, down the side of the car, and onto the ground. 

While Garabanda drained the hose, rolled it up and put it away in his trunk, Carvahal said, “Listen, Alex, let’s not talk here.  There’s something I want to show you.”  

“That’s fine.  We shouldn’t keep our cars together anyway.”  

“Leave yours here and follow me, okay?”  Carvahal climbed back into his Toyota, backed up, and pulled around the Crown Victoria. Garabanda waited until the Toyota was almost out of sight among the shrubs, and followed on foot.  The burial ground was almost a mile by a half mile of grass, headstones, monuments, hedges and trees.

They met up again in a more open part of the cemetery, near the old Santa Barbara section on the west side.  Carvahal was waiting by a rough-edged granite tombstone.  It was pleasantly cool there, in the shade beneath a cottonwood tree.

“Here’s my grandmother.”

Garabanda read the inscription aloud. “
Davita Ester Flores de Carvahal y Nuñez, 1891-1963
.”

“She was a great woman.  The family was never the same after she died.”

“Davita Ester…not exactly your typical Spanish Catholic names.” Garabanda crouched low by the tombstone, running his fingers over the Spanish inscriptions below the dates.  A cascade of flowers was carved under the words.

“No, not exactly Catholic,” agreed Luis Carvahal.  

“These flowers, in the middle, they remind me of something.  I’ve read about it, but I’ve never seen it.”  Garabanda looked up at his friend, then back at the stone monument.  “These are Hebrew letters, aren’t they? Here in the petals?”

Carvahal hesitated, and said, “Yes, that’s what they are.  I don’t read Hebrew, but I know that one is the letter ‘Shesh.’ It was a code for the holiest Jewish prayer, the Shema.  I guess you’ve figured it out by now, G-man.”

“Your family were crypto-Jews?”

“Yeah, it seems that way.  The Carvahals were ‘conversos,’ Jews who were forced to convert.  All the way back in 1492, the same year that the last Moors were pushed out of Spain, and Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”

“Only they didn’t convert?”

“Only they didn’t convert.  Well, they did here, outside.”  Carvahal made a sign of the cross, blessing himself in the Catholic way, and then he pointed to his heart, and tapped his chest with his finger.  “But not in here. They kept their Judaism alive, in secret, right down the centuries.  The crypto-Jews ran to the furthest ends of the Spanish empire, always trying to stay one step ahead of the Inquisition.”

“And this was about as far as they could go.”

“That’s right.  New Mexico was the far frontier, the ragged edge of the empire.”  Carvahal snorted a small laugh.  “Just about like it is today, for America.  I guess the more things change…”

Garabanda finished the saying.  “…The more they stay the same.  But the Inquisition ended hundreds of years ago.  Why did they keep it a secret?”

“I don’t know.  Habit, maybe? The family tradition was to practice the faith in secret, so even when they didn’t have to, they still kept the secret. Secrecy became part of the tradition, I guess.  And for all that time, our family observed the Sabbath, in the back rooms of our houses with the curtains closed.  For five centuries!  And we weren’t the only ones…we only thought we were.  There were probably dozens of crypto-Jewish families in New Mexico, but it’s been only in the last years that we’ve broken out of the secrecy.  I was just a little boy when my granny died, but I remember those days.  Putting a coded signal on a tombstone was about the limit in those days.”

“In a Catholic cemetery,” added Garabanda.

“Yes, in a Catholic cemetery.  I mean, we were Catholics too, in our way.  It was strange growing up—we had a Christmas tree in the front parlor, and a Menorah in the back.  We went to Mass, and we kept the Sabbath.  But in the end, after she died, I didn’t believe in either faith.  lost them both.”

“It’s a fascinating family history, Luis, but why are you telling me all this?  Why now?”

Carvahal exhaled slowly, hands in his blue jean pockets, looking up into the top of a lone Ponderosa pine.  “Deleon’s trusted me since the old days.  You know what a radical fool I was back then!”

“I’ve seen your COINTELPRO files.”

“Todo Por Nuestra Raza
—everything by, for and through our race.  I bought all that ‘brown power’ crap, hook line and sinker.”

“But you were just a kid, what, in your twenties?”

“Right.  Just a kid, fresh out of college.  Ready to save the world, to right all the wrongs, with my journalism degree and my brand new Smith-Corona.  Anyway, Deleon liked what I wrote about him.  I got the only interviews from him when he was a fugitive in the mountains, and later when he was in exile in Mexico.  He always trusted me, and I always liked him, as a man.  Crazy as a bed bug, I know that now, but he was a real man!  And such charisma, such a natural leader you never saw!  Then, after my politics changed, after I grew up you might say, he still came to me. As a reporter for the Herald, I was always fair to him, even when he was in jail.  And now, all these years later, he came to me to be his scribe, to ghostwrite his memoirs, even though I’m not the same radical jerk he befriended 35 years ago.  Far from it.”

“But that old personal connection is still enough to get you access inside of the new government.”

“Sometimes.  Like on this trip to Tierra Andalucia.  I just stay in the background, I don’t participate, but they speak freely around me.  I’m trusted.  And you wouldn’t believe what they say, you just wouldn’t believe it!  That’s why I contacted you in the first place, and that’s why I brought you here today, to show you this grave marker.  Understand Alex, I’m not an observant Jew.  I haven’t been, really, not since my grand mother died back when I was a little kid. I couldn’t juggle two religions, and my own father and mother didn’t care much either way.  So I just dropped them both.  But inside, I guess I always understood that I was a Jew.  I even had the genetic test done.”

“I’ve got it, your family was Jewish.  Is this leading to something?”

“Yes! Be patient Alex, this isn’t easy for me.  It’s my life, and I have nobody else to confide in, nobody! Anyway, the new government …they’re unbelievably anti-Semitic.  It just oozes out of them.  I can’t explain it, other than they’re ‘red fascists.’  It’s the old
Nuestra Raza
gang, and the ‘Sword of Aztlan’ maniacs.  It’s all about race to them: race and ideology.  They’re really into something they call
etnogeopoliticos
— ethnogeopolitics.  They’re not just harmless old Santa Fe hippies, like they think up in Washington.  They’re not just ‘New Agers’ doing the peace and love thing, with a little socialism-lite on the side.  They’re hard core!”  

Carvahal was agitated, the words spilling out in the presence of the one man he trusted.  “The state government is full of committed Marxists, I mean real live communists, and you know how the commies were always in sync with the Middle Eastern terrorists.  Now they call the Southwest their ‘Palestine’, they call it ‘occupied territory.’  When they say they plan to reconquer Aztlan by any means necessary, they’re comparing it to Palestine and Israel.  They’re talking about using terrorism to get what they want, if that’s what it takes.  And man, they sure brought over that old-time Jew hatred.  There’s even a training camp just for Muslims, north of the town of Española.  Dar al Harb, it’s called—the House of War.  That was the one camp we didn’t visit, but the word is that the graduates from Dar al Harb aren’t staying in New Mexico—they’re heading north.”

“You didn’t get any pictures, did you?”

“No, that’s just what I heard them talking about when we drove past the place. I couldn’t have pulled a camera out, and anyway, a picture would have just shown trees.”

Garabanda sighed.  “And now these Aztlan lunatics are running New Mexico.”

“It’s amazing. Even they can’t believe it.  They can’t believe they’re in power.  And I’m not even talking about the ‘Old New Mexicans’ either, far from it.  The ‘Old New Mexicans’ are some of the most loyal Americans in the state—it’s not them, it’s all the illegals!  Probably a half million of them are illegals—or they were.  But now they all have ID’s, they all have New Mexico driver’s licenses, and they damned sure all vote straight Democrat.”

“What a bunch of suckers we were, for so long…”

“You know Alex, I guess we should have seen it coming.  I mean, looking back, it was all so predictable!  The New Mexico Democrats thought it was all up-side political gain for their party, letting the illegals vote.  Hell, that’s what ‘motor voter’ was all about, right? No photo ID’s being needed to register to vote, all of that.  Even at the Herald, illegal alien voter fraud was always off limits.  Every ‘undocumented worker’ crossing the border was going to be another good little Democratic Party voter, so why rock the boat?  Legal, illegal, what’s the difference? Anybody with a pulse could vote in New Mexico, and half of the dead in these graveyards voted too!  And that’s how it worked, for years and years.

“But then it started to change.  The illegals became a voting bloc, and then they became THE voting bloc.  They took over the state party.  The tail grew stronger than the dog!  Almost every year there was another amnesty.  The federal government just couldn’t resist, so every year there were more amnesties, and more ‘citizens’ were made out of illegals.  And that’s when the flood gates really opened up, and the momentum became unstoppable.”

Garabanda said, “I remember.  They were holding those mass swearing-in ceremonies every week in sports arenas like The Pit at the university.  Five thousand at a time, all in Spanish.  Raise your right hands, and become instant citizens.  Sign your voter registration card on the way out.”

“Yeah. I guess the Democratic Party thought they could have a steady flow of new voters coming across the border, just enough to keep control of state politics.  But sometimes trickles become floods, and floods don’t always stop where you want them to, do they?  They develop their own dynamic—and sometimes they just wash away the old riverbed.  They carve their own new channel, like the Mississippi.  And that’s what happened in New Mexico, once the flood of illegals became unstoppable.”

“Completely unstoppable,” agreed Alex Garabanda.  “And then came Ortiz.”

“Yeah, Ortiz sealed the deal.  Whammo!  Sixteen million brand new illegal alien voters.”

“With five anchor babies each.”

“At least,” agreed Carvahal.

“Who could argue against ‘no taxation without representation’?”

“Not the Supreme Court, that’s for sure.”

***

Fernando Ortiz was an undocumented “landscape engineer”
who had demanded the right to vote, on the basis that he had been paying state and federal taxes for ten years, while living and working on Long Island. Actually, he had been stopped from casting a ballot by an alert poll watcher who had suspected his citizenship status, and (illegally, as it turned out) demanded proof of his identity and legal qualification to vote. Ortiz won a multi-million dollar settlement against the Republican Party of New York in the subsequent “racial profiling and ethnic intimidation” civil suit, but he did not stop there.