The Milagro Beanfield War (86 page)

Of course, neither could I accept being a social realist.

So I compromised between the two … and floundered.

*   *   *

In 1969, feeling almost insane from the tension of the war and urban stress, I left New York. Two days before Neil Armstrong reached the moon, my wife Ruby, son Luke, and I departed the Apple and headed for Taos, New Mexico.

Almost immediately, in Taos, I began writing for a muckraking journal,
The New Mexico Review.
The pay was minimal—I never received a cent. But the journalism gave me a sense of doing both my politics and my art.

My new hometown was in as much turmoil as New York City. There was a Moratorium committee and a Nuclear Freeze. I soon became most active in a group called the Tres Ríos Association, an alliance of irrigation ditch systems from across the valley. The association was challenging a proposed conservancy district and the building of a large dam—the Indian Camp Dam—a few miles south of town. The Tres Ríos leader was an elderly gentleman named Andrés Martínez, who soon became a good friend of mine.

In the conservancy struggle I functioned as a researcher and a publicist. Most small farmers opposed to the dam understood the project would drown them in new taxes and other socioeconomic problems. But they were up against the state and federal governments, the Bureau of Reclamation, the local business community, and a legal system geared to promote this sort of “progress.”

Andrés Martínez and company held firm in their anti-dam position. They knew the odds. Rarely had a major irrigation or conservancy plan along the Rio Grande watershed been defeated by local citizens. And all such projects usually disenfranchised local, financially marginal people in favor of development and agribusiness interests.

In Taos, however, the Tres Ríos Association put up a major fight. I chronicled this struggle in
The New Mexico Review.
For a spell, almost every issue featured an article about the controversy. Each week I attended meetings and listened to Taos farmers and ranchers talk about their lives, culture, and the history of the valley. Our community was under siege, torn between the old ways and “progress, American style.”

I learned a lot of Taos lore, culture, and personality in a very short time.

The conservancy battle lasted nearly a decade. Unfortunately, the
Review,
an all-volunteer operation, had a shorter life span. Born in 1968, it died on November 1, 1972, because we who ran it were broke and exhausted and needed to find paying jobs.

The board had wanted to kill it earlier, but I couldn't bear to watch the paper die. Forget that I'd never earned a nickel—the
Review
had kept alive my identity as a writer. So I volunteered to save the
Review,
and was its editor for the final three issues. The friend who helped me put the paper together was a woman named Rini Templeton.

To whom I owe more than I can ever say.

*   *   *

A graphic artist and a fine sculptor, Rini was also a political being who profoundly shaped my own beliefs. She lived in a rustic cabin without running water at a beautiful location south of Taos on Pilar Hill. Immediately outside her door a wide mesa dotted by juniper and piñon trees stretched to the horizon, pure and undefiled. About four miles due west extended a deep crack in the earth, the Rio Grande gorge. During breaks from the
Review,
Rini and I often walked over the mesa to the gorge rim. We gazed down at the river below. Sometimes we tramped across the snow-laden plain at night under a full moon and plentiful stars, while all about us coyotes yapped and cackled.

It was no easy task, that paper. But we both loved it. More than anyone I have known, Rini was a tireless worker. She drank coffee and smoked countless Mexican cigarettes. She was patient, humorous, and no-nonsense about theories of type style, structure, composition, design. We had endless discussions about content, editing, advertising and graphics, political ramifications, editorial policy. It was a lonely and exclusive task, and I wish it could have continued forever.

But we had no money, and we too reached the end of our resources, and so finally the
Review
became history.

Almost the day after Rini and I called it quits on the muckraking front, I began writing
Milagro.
By now I was a literary has-been, a forgotten writer. If this last gasp failed, I would have to get a job,
any
job.

Naturally, I was going to write yet another “political” novel. And I still hoped to elucidate the nature of class struggle, and also to speak about cultural genocide. I wanted my words to inspire people to organize for their human and cultural rights. But I also figured, This book had better be readable. And so, for the first time in years, I bent over backward to be humorous as well as politically correct.

I hadn't planned out the novel; I just started typing. My friend Mike Kimmel scornfully (and affectionately) calls this the “blam method of writing.” It can be very sloppy, of course. The one great virtue for me, however, is that in fairly short order I accumulate pages. In this way, the book becomes “real.” Then I rewrite until the cows come home.

With luck, the first-draft writing flows. More often my initial manuscripts read like a Fellini movie shot by Russ Myers, Ken Russel, and the old Dennis Hopper. That is, the writing is full of energy and invention but largely incoherent. With
Milagro,
happy to say, I got very lucky.

For all of November I blammed my ass off. I literally pounded into submission my tiny green Hermes Rocket, the original “disposable” typewriter. (I used to buy 'em for forty dollars, and toss their remains after almost every novel. Since 1975, though, I have worked exclusively on an archaic Olympia portable that I'm sure will last until I die.)

In forty days I created a five-hundred-page book. I corrected the manuscript in about three weeks, and spent another three weeks typing up a clean copy. This I promptly sent off to my agent, Perry Knowlton, at Curtis Brown. Perry gave the novel to Marian Wood at Holt, Rinehart and Winston. And Marian bought it for ten thousand dollars.

Wow.

The whole process, start to finish, had taken about sixteen weeks. I was flabbergasted.

Holt allowed me about six months to rewrite. So throughout 1973 I added and subtracted, making endless revisions. I worked often at Rini's cabin. Rini read the book and offered comments and suggestions. She also did a series of drawings to illustrate the novel and its cover.

Despite poverty and a confused marital situation, the year that went into the creation of
Milagro
became a great time in my life. I had no car, and often hitchhiked or took a bus down to Pilar Hill. Rini was sculpting then in a small, cold shack behind her cabin. Late at night we made cheese tacos and drank Dos Equis beer, and Rini smoked her Delicados. We sipped wine, also, and downed many cups of chicory-flavored coffee. It was a feverish working time for both of us, and also a joyful and passionate sojourn that has defined how I've tried to live ever since.

It snowed late into that spring. There were always magpies and Steller's jays and ravens and coyotes near the cabin. After the thaw, we went fishing and camping in the nearby high country. I remember one day skinny-dipping in the icy Little Rio Grande, and I can still hear Rini's gasping shouts echoing down that verdant canyon.

Milagro
just kept on writing itself. None of my other books have come so easy. I daresay the process was close to “effortless.” I used to laugh at my own jokes as I typed. On occasion Rini said, “Cut that, it's just
too
stupid.” But jeez, I was having so much
fun.

Meanwhile, in real life, the conservancy and the Indian Camp Dam looked like a shoo-in. No matter, my fiction could defy the odds. And, given the jubilant mood I was in, of course the citizens of Milagro defeated that conservancy and Ladd Devine.

Only years later did life imitate my art. But in the end, the Tres Ríos Association also scored a unique triumph that paralleled the resolution of
Milagro.

*   *   *

When this book was published in 1974, not much happened. It received good reviews and rotten reviews. Only Ballantine made a paperback offer, and I believe they paid $7,500. (Ten years earlier Avon had coughed up $37,500 for paperback rights to
The Sterile Cuckoo.
) Though recommending
Milagro,
Book-of-the-Month Club didn't buy it. Holt did a small second printing, but then had to remainder quickly for lack of interest.

And my next two novels were rejected.

Worse, my friend Rini effectively disappeared by moving to Mexico City.

The good news was that
Milagro
went out on film option even before publication. Not for a pile of money, but in those days $4,500 constituted a major fortune to me. The producers tried for six years to realize a movie. They never succeeded, but they tried like hell. Bob Christiansen and Rick Rosenberg were also real good guys, and they kept me alive in the process. Their option payments allowed me to write, and eventually I scored another novel,
The Magic Journey.

Which hit bookstores all over America (with a whimper!) in 1978.

Like most writers, though, I am a tenacious bloke. I estimate that if all the various drafts of books I have done were counted up, I have probably written seventy or eighty since the age of seventeen. I have only published fifteen. So despite reversals of fortune after
Milagro,
I simply kept on plodding ahead, the quintessential tortoise, and by 1982 I had actually published three more novels and a couple of nonfiction books. None sold well, but I seemed to be developing both a career and a “reputation.”

If you believed the newspapers, a decade after its publication
Milagro
had become an “underground cult classic.” It was being used in high school and college sociology, literature, and Chicano studies classes. Ballantine had kept it in print in paperback, and for that I bless them.

But no foreign publisher (aside from Andre Deutsch in Great Britain) had brought out an edition. And although the book had been on film option for ten years, I'd still have bet the farm that a movie would never be made.

In 1980 I myself began working on films. My first effort was a rewrite of the picture
Missing
for Costa-Gavras. According to
Missing
's producer, Eddie Lewis,
Milagro
got me that job. The novel's politics and its humanity had caught his eye, so he made a call that launched my film career.

Missing
was successful, and Costa and I worked on a couple of other films together over the next five years: neither saw the light of day. I also wrote multiple drafts of a
Milagro
script for the L.A. producer Moctesuma Esparza, and for his eventual partner, Robert Redford. I produced scripts for Louis Malle and Karel Reisz. And I spent two years developing a CBS miniseries about the life of Pancho Villa and the Mexican Revolution.

During this fruitful time I also published three nonfiction books and another novel,
American Blood
(in 1987). So by the time
Milagro
actually became a film, fifteen years after the book's debut, I could say that I had held together a writing career for almost twenty-five years.

Thanks to the film (a 1988 release), translations of
Milagro
appeared in Danish, German, Dutch, Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese.

And the albatross had become firmly established around my neck.

I won't say much here about the moviemaking process. The hoopla surrounding this book during its filming in New Mexico triggered the most intrusive and traumatic period of my life. I dealt poorly with all that publicity. Yes, I had my fifteen minutes of Warholian fame, but I didn't much like it. I was very happy when the brouhaha subsided.

The film itself is a lovely and compassionate work of art, and I'm indebted to Bob Redford for putting it together with such a gentle and timeless sensibility.

*   *   *

My friend Rini never saw the movie. She died in Mexico City in 1986. She was only fifty-one. Her death is a great loss in my life, and in the lives of many people whom she worked for, touched, and inspired. Rini was a dear friend and a powerful mentor to me. She was also the political and cultural worker that I most admired in the movement.

Too, she was probably the most unselfish person I have met. She grew up with money, but rejected it in her adult life. She lived simply, and did most of her work for free for people organizing on behalf of human rights and economic justice. Her dedication to the causes she believed in was total. Rini literally worked herself to death. But she left behind a shining body of art, and a lifetime of commitment to the struggle for a better world.

After her body was cremated, the ashes were brought north to New Mexico. We put together a ceremony at her cabin on Pilar Hill. Many friends and comrades from Mexico and the United States gathered to honor her work and her memory. After all had spoken their thoughts, a few of us took small handfuls of her ashes and went out on the mesa to scatter them in private.

I recalled the walks we had taken thirteen years earlier while I was working on this book. I scattered a few ashes and bone chips at the gorge rim, then I sat in the shade of a juniper, weeping because she was gone. I licked the chalky residue of her bones from my fingertips.

Much of
Milagro's
insouciant vitality I owe to Rini. She made me joyful in a difficult time, and it sure showed in the writing. Discovering her, in 1973, has reverberated in my life and work ever since.

*   *   *

My friend Andrés Martínez lived to a ripe old age. He was still president of the Tres Ríos Association when the New Mexico Supreme Court overturned a district court ruling and threw out the Taos conservancy district. After that, Andrés continued to act as an organizer and spokesperson in many conflicts over land and water rights in northern New Mexico.