Getting the Microstory of the Mexican Revolution

 I have been asked to join a panel discussion on October 30 at The El Paso Central Library, part of their celebration of the Mexican Revolution centenary. The host of the discussion will be David Dorado Romo and that is what this post is about. He is a very interesting man, author of “Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juarez, 1893-1923.”

The fascinating thing to me is Romo’s approach to uncover the underside of the Revolution, the characters who made a difference, but seldom make it into the history books. That is what I like to do and what my book, “Dos Gringos” does in its own way. And Rome focuses on El Paso, my hometown, and its critical role in the happenings in Mexico. I very much look forward to the meeting and the panel discussion.

 For more on the book and the author see http://www.sergiotroncoso.com/essays/eptimes/05-1113/index.htm and a youtube NPR interview  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGm61qvnAI0

Buy a copy of “Dos Gringos”  here.

The St. Patrick Battalion

It is amazing what develops out of the exercise of writing a novel. Things you never thought about come to mind. If you had been watching TV or at the gym instead of secluding your thoughts into your story, it simply would not happen.  In writing “Dos Gringos” I quickly realized that the story was a peek into a history of much grander happenings that just the lives of these two unlikely partners in the midst of the bloody Mexican Revolution. One of these is the historic relationship of Mexico and Ireland.

In the story, the relationship of the red-headed Catholic Irishman Flaherty with the idealistic young peasant revolutionary boy with a tall gun evokes memories of the famous “San Patricio Battalion” of Irish who fought with Mexico against the Americans in the Mexican-American War of 1846. What made this largely Irish outfit exceptional was that it was composed almost entirely of deserters from the United States Army who, after defecting, fought on the Mexican side in five major battles and with great heroism.

These men, fleeing the Irish Potato Famine were often pulled of the boat in New York and sent into the army to fight in the Mexican war. Killing other Catholics was not exactly why these starving men had fled Ireland, hence, that religious loyalty, along with mistreatment by their army superiors, prompted their desertion. They were appalled by the American troops treatment of the priests and nuns. After the war, these Irishmen were tortured and executed by hanging.

Yes, it’s amazing what you learn when writing a novel.

Read more about Mexican history. Buy a copy of “Dos Gringos”  here.

“Dos Gringos” for Latinos

The interest in “Dos Gringos” amongst the Latino community is growing.   As Dena Burroughs writes in the “LatinoLA” and earlier in “LA Arts Examiner,“  the story in Dos Gringos is of particular interest this year as November 2010 will mark the centennial of the onset of the Mexican Revolution.”

She points out, “While World War I created havoc on the other side of the world, civil strife went on in Mexico for ten years in a war that became known as the Mexican Revolution. Those years saw a simple bandit become a revolutionary man whose name is today a Mexican icon – Pancho Villa – in a war fought between two sides supplied with arms by one same foreign outfit. It was also the time, says Frederick R. Andresen in his book Dos Gringos, when a Norwegian and an Irishman found themselves hired in El Paso, TX, to work at a gold mine in the town of Parral, Mexico.

The adventures of Arthur Johannesen and Michael Flaherty, amidst gun fire and colorful country sceneries, are what Andresen describes in his book based on the tales told to him years later by his 70-year-old father – the Norwegian of the story.”

Dena Burroughs recommends, “Dos Gringos is an entertaining read presented in 28 short chapters. It feels familiar with the names of real towns both north and south of the US/Mexico border and by the use of…Spanish sentences within the dialogue. It is likewise a tale of immigration – Europeans who left their land to come to the Americas in search of work and tranquility and who married, worked, built, and made this continent their home and a home for their children.”

I am pleased this little episode in that crazy and dangerous time finds an appreciative audience with our Latino friends.

See http://latinola.com/story.php?story=8814  for the whole article

The Jews of El Paso

 Popular Dry Goods

Someone ought to write a book about the Jews of El Paso. When I grew up in that Texas border town, I was very aware of the Jews. My mother bought our shoes at Given’s Shoe Store. Some of the leading Jews were 32^nd  Degree Masons, as was my dad. The top department store was Popular Dry Goods founded in 1902 by the pioneer Adolph Schwartz. From a small village in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he landed in New York in 1883 with fifteen cents in his pocket and somehow made it to El Paso and opened the Popular.  As a high school student I worked on Saturdays in the Popular, manning the Boy Scout Department, and working for Willy Wildstein and Ed Smallberg.  But there were Jews before Schwartz.

Adolph Krakauer migrated from Bavaria to New York in 1865 and 1869 moved to San Antonio, Texas, where he went to work for Louis Zork, a leading merchant. He moved to El Paso in 1875, at a time when the town’s population was listed as seventy-five Mexicans and twenty-five Anglos. There he clerked in the firm of Sam Schutz and Son and became manager when the business was sold; later he became a partner. In 1885 he sold his interest in the firm and organized the firm of Krakauer, Zork, and Moye with his brother-in-law, Gustave Zork. That firm was the main hardware store in El Paso my entire life there. It also was a main source for arms to both sides in the Mexican Revolution as you may read about in my family story of that time, “Dos Gringos.” My grandfather, Friedrich Müller (not Jewish)was the salesman and I used to have pictures of him in Mexico with the Villistas with their sombreros and guns. Krakauer was voted Mayor of El Paso, but could not take office as he had neglected to become an American citizen.

There were many others. The Jews made their mark and were important contributors to the success of that town on the Rio Grande. When I visit El Paso today, I stand across from where the Popular was, in the square with the fountain where the alligators used to be, and I miss the Jews, who made that border town so livable. In fact there have been several accounts of the El Paso Jews: See The History of Jewish El Paso

Texas History Rewritten

Napoleon said, “History is what men have decided upon.” When I saw a PBS television show a few years ago about The Battle of the Alamo, I knew what he meant.

 As a high school student in El Paso, Texas, we dutifully learned all about the founding of The Republic of Texas and the famous 1836 Battle of the Alamo.  But we never were taught about the thousands of Hispanics who lived there long before its settlement by the migrating Anglos from what were later the southern states of the new United States of America. These Hispanics were the Tejanos, an independent frontier people who immigrated from the Spanish Canary Islands originally in 1731 and settled in San Antonio which was then northeastern Mexico. This was long before the stories of Davy Crockett, James Bowie, or John Wayne. They were farmers and merchants, who rebelled from Spain, and produced leaders such as Juan Seguin who commanded a force that fought Santa Ana and helped establish an independent Texas.  And there was Jose Antonio Navarro who signed the Texas Declaration of Independence.  

I am glad to now know, after all these years, about this small but brave people who settled Texas, fought for its independence and died along the famous names we learned about  in the Texas history books.   We read now again in Texas the identity and role of the Tejanos is being dismissed in their textbooks. Napoleon was right.

Read more about Texas. Buy a copy of “Dos Gringos”  here.

Pancho Villa in “Dos Gringos”

Readers of “Dos Gringos” know that the infamous Pancho Villa is not a major character in the story. But surely his side of The Mexican Revolution is very much there, and represented by “The Hawk” who personifies the spirit of the revolution and is the savior of the common man for young Tomás. Villa killed his first man at 16, a man who had raped his younger sister. He worked in the mines near Parral, Chihuahua, where much of the “Dos Gringos” story takes place. He soon tired of the laborer’s life and added bank robbery to cattle rustling and murder on the list of crimes for which he was wanted by the Díaz government.

He  joined Francisco Madero’s revolutionary forces, thereby making a historical transition from bandido to revolucionario. The charismatic figure was able to recruit an army of thousands. Villa also became something of a folk hero in the U.S, and Hollywood filmmakers as well as U.S. newspaper photographers flocked to Northern Mexico to record his battle exploits–many of which were staged for the benefit of the cameras. Villa ruled over northern Mexico like a medieval warlord. During fiestas the mustachioed legend would dance all night with female camp followers, although he didn’t drink. According to one of Villa’s last surviving widows, he officially married 26 times.

He attacked Juarez and my Norwegian grandmother, after she and my grandfather moved there to be near my newly wedded father, told me of Villa’s cannon ball landing in her front yard, which I remember was a quite small piece of ground.

In 1923 he was assassinated while returning from bank business in Parral. Today Villa is remembered with pride by most Mexicans for having led the most important military campaigns of the constitutionalist revolution. Don’t underestimate the respect his name still garners in Mexico. If Villa in not personally in “Dos Gringos,” his spirit surely is.

Buy a copy of “Dos Gringos”  here.

German Texans in the “Dos Gringos” Story

Beautiful Pauline in El Paso, Texas, is the love interest of Arthur, the immigrant Norwegian mechanical expert who in “Dos Gringos” risks his life to raise a few dollars to buy a wedding ring. He volunteers, with his Irish partner, in the midst of The Mexican Revolution, to fix a gold mine in that warring country. Pauline comes from a German Texas family.

The history of the German immigration into Texas is a fascinating story. They came during the mid 19^th century for various reasons, mainly to escape the wars between Germany and France, and to find a new life. They settled mainly as farmers and small businessmen in their settlements, mainly around San Antonio and Austin, which have later produced some notable leaders, like Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, of Fredericksburg, who led the U.S. Navy in the Pacific in World War II.  New Braunfels, Schulenburg,  Boerne, are a few of the many other German Texas towns.

The immigrants were of all faiths, but mainly Catholics and Lutherans. But there were also Jews and these German Texas Jews and their major El Paso hardware store figure largely in the “Dos Gringos” story.  

The Pauline Müller character is based on my mother who came from a line of Germans, originally from Alsace and the Rhine Valley, ranging back to the 1600s. Family names included Keller, Fest, Curlin, Bihl, and others.  In reading “Dos Gringos” you learn a little European/American immigration history, too.

Enjoy.

Buy a copy of “Dos Gringos”  here.

The El Paso Times reports on “Dos Gringos”

Ramón Rentería of  The  El Paso Times wrote: “Fred R. Andresen recounts the early life of his Norwegian immigrant father in “Dos Gringos,” an action-adventure novella set in El Paso and the ore-rich mountains of Chihuahua in 1916, as the Mexican Revolution still flared.”

Renteria summarized, “… a penniless Norwegian and an Irish drifter meet in an El Paso bar, where a Pittsburgh con man hires them to fix a gold mine in Mexico. Andresen’s easy, quick read also touches on other historical aspects of intrigue during the Revolution: spies, gunrunners, and Germans in Mexico determined to try to keep the United States out of World War I.”

“Andresen, an international businessman was born and raised in El Paso. He grew up in…a brick house in the desert north of El Paso, where his father worked for many years as an expert machinist with El Paso Natural Gas Co.”

His first book, “Walking on Ice: An American Businessman in Russia,” a collection of essays based on six years he spent working in Russia, was widely praised.

 For the whole article please see http://www.elpasotimes.com/ci_15285818?IADID=Search-www.elpasotimes.com-www.elpasotimes.com

Buy a copy of “Dos Gringos”  here.

“The Zimmermann Telegram” and The Mexican Revolution

 One of my favorite books is Barbara Tuchman’s “The Zimmermann Telegram,” about Kaiser Germany’s wild attempt to keep America out of World War I. The Americans were quite happy with their isolation from all that death and destruction in Europe. But, we were shipping guns and supplies to England and the Kaiser didn’t want to pull America into the war by torpedoing one of our ships. So Zimmermann, the Foreign Secretary for the German Empire, sent a telegram to the German Ambassador in Mexico City, via Washington, to offer the President of Mexico that if they sided with Germany, when the war was over, Germany winning of course, they would help Mexico regain Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.

Those wily Brits in the famous Room 40 intercepted the cable, broke the code, and told the Americans. For the Germans, as is often the case in the affairs of men, it achieved just the opposite of its intended purpose. Even before this strategic event in January, 1917, Germany was financing the guns being supplied to both sides of the Revolution. Much of those guns and ammunition came from a big hardware wholesaler in El Paso, Krakauer, Zork, and Moye which figures into my book “Dos Gringos,” as does the black suited man who traveled about Mexico delivering the arms to both the Federáles and Pancho Villa. That man was my grandfather, for whom I am named. Read “Dos Gringos” for more of the story, and read Barbara Tuchman’s book, “The Zimmermann Telegram.” Trust me.

Buy a copy of “Dos Gringos”  here.

Would you like to have a personal reading? About “Dos Gringos?”

Last week I had my first “reading” of “Dos Gringos” for a living room full of intelligent people who had been told I had something to talk about. They apparently were not disappointed, but also I enjoyed the opportunity to share and to explain the thinking behind the story. For the reading from “Dos Gringos” I chose portions that underlined the vast differences between the main characters. I started by summarizing the chaotic world of 1916 beyond the Mexican Revolution.

 It would be hard to get two immigrants more unlike that of a Norwegian and an Irishman. So I underlined how those differences were overcome by the unfolding and threatening events. Then I mentioned Carlos, the Mexican boy who so identified with the ideals of the revolution and the developed bond between the boy and the Irishman. I also gave background on the under-story of the German attempts to keep America distracted and out of the war by selling guns to both sides in the Mexican war.

Everyone seemed to enjoy it and they bought many books, which I signed. The evening was enjoyable with yummy deserts and hot Mexican chocolate and good conversation. There were about thirty-five people there. I would be happy to do reading and book signings in other venues. The most convenient of course would be Southern California where I live.

Buy a copy of “Dos Gringos”  here.