El Paso ~ where “Dos Gringos” starts and ends! And another gringo discovers his home.

I have just returned from four days of book signing and speaking in El Paso, Texas, where my newest novel, “Dos Gringos,” starts and ends in an El Paso bar. This week was the local celebration of the centenary of the Mexican Revolution and there were exhibits and events all over. I was there to talk, but I learned so much. This is my home, El Paso. But as a teen, I learned little about the history of Mexico—it was all about Texas. This visit was an experience that the publishing of this story of my father’s experience in the Revolution has become the event that brings me back home—after over fifty years.

 The interest in my book was impressive. I spoke at the El Paso Museum of History, Barnes and Noble, The El Paso Central Library, and met interesting people, recognized historians, writers, and others. The response from audiences was enthusiastic, and lots of books were sold and signed. They loved the humor of the story, but also the historical setting and environment. The growing knowledge, on my part, of the larger picture of the revolution was of unexpected value.

I was so impressed with the cordiality, the helpfulness, the sincere interest of my sponsors and presenters. In fact I find the people of El Paso amongst the nicest I have met. “They are as warm as the desert they live in,” one said. I surely agree.

The story of the two mismatched foreigners loose in the midst of the Mexican Revolution totally hit home with so many as that period of time created so many unusual and unpredictable stories. It was a great experience for me and my “Dos Gringos.”  If you have any questions about El Paso, ask me and I will send you to one with the answers.

Buy a copy of “Dos Gringos”  here.

“Dos Gringos” heads for El Paso (Uno Gringo, anyway,)

This week I will be in El Paso, Texas, my home town, to speak and sell and sign books at a number of places as part of the centenary of the Mexican Revolution there.  Talks are scheduled for the El Paso Museum of History, Barnes & Noble, and the Central Library. I hear all this is well advertised so I expect reasonably good audiences. I will be talking about the story behind my book, “Dos Gringos,” and about my father and grandfather’s part in all of that. I look forward to this as I have myself learned from giving the talks. I realize how much is into the story that comes from within. Underneath my father’s actual story, are known historical stories and some implied intuitive behavior. I am sometimes surprised at what is there, having come out from under the blankets of the past.

I will also be meeting old friends and making new ones. Coming “back home” after 50 years is a real experience. On my first trip back there three years ago I found so much had changed and so much was the same. This will be especially so in El Paso this time, rated the 2^nd safest city in America, and across the Rio Grande is Juarez, Mexico,  the most dangerous city in North America due to the drug cartels and the murders. So discussing the revolution of a hundred years ago within the present bloody atmosphere across the border will be interesting. I will have something for this space on that when I come back for sure.

Buy a copy of “Dos Gringos”  here.

Another Pancho Villa Story

Since writing “Dos Gringos,” the stories and characters from the Mexican Revolution keep creeping out of the cracks.

 I got a call from El Paso from a man about my age, who told me about his great- grandfather who was a building contractor in Ciudad Chihuahua in the 1890s. A young man he had hired fell off a ladder and hurt his leg. He was bnadaged and kept on the job. When the cast was removed the man left the job, but returned in a few weeks with some men and told his former employer he was going to change the world and wanted support. He was refused, but he returned in a few weeks with more men and again was refused. Then after some weeks he showed up again, with lots of men with guns. The contractor couldn’t refuse the young man who was, as you guessed, Pancho Villa.

 Villa was born in 1878 as Doroteo Arango, but at age 16 Arango changed his name to Francisco Villa after he shot and killed a hacienda owner who had reportedly assaulted his sister. The rest is history, and stories—and more stories. Some of them have got to be true.

Buy a copy of “Dos Gringos”  here.

The Rio Grande~Pathway of the Colonizers

The Rio Grande River is the border between Texas and Mexico, the fifth longest river in the United States, and many simply don’t know about it. But Don Juan de Onate and an army of soldiers and colonists knew about it and in 1598 crossed it and then followed through the mountain pass which became known as El Paso del Norte, today’s El Paso, Texas, my home town. The Rio Grande plays a role in the novel based on my father’s tale “Dos Gringos.”

As a kid and a Boy Scout, we used to splash in the river, known to be “a mile wide and an inch deep,” actually a muddy waterway about knee-deep. But, in Onate’s day it was crystal clear and a life-saver for his army. From there he marched north with his soldiers, horses, and mules, fighting Indians and eventually founding Santa Fe, now the oldest continual state capital in the United States. The Rio Grande flows out of the San Juan mountains of southern Colorado and streams straight south, splitting New Mexico, to El Paso where it forms the American border with Mexico and then on to the Gulf of Mexico, a total of about 1900 miles.

North of Santa Fe, near Taos, New Mexico, I recently visited this river of my youth, but there near its source, the river was a noisy rushing stream in a rocky deep canyon. Beautiful.  What a piece of history.

Buy a copy of “Dos Gringos”  here.

Jewish Lady breaks horses for Pancho Villa

Some years ago, at a summer camp in Maine, I heard a story I have never forgotten. A lady, hearing about my father’s story in the Mexican Revolution, now the published book  “Dos Gringos,” told me about her Jewish grandmother and Pancho Villa.

It seems the woman was a recognized horse-breaker during those hectic years, living in central Texas, maybe San Antonio. Determined to meet Pancho Villa, she drove her Cadillac sedan into Mexico to find the infamous revolutionary leader. She found him and, as you can imagine, he didn’t know what to do with this American. I understand he gave her his toughest horse, one which the men had failed to break. And she succeeded to break that horse. I don’t remember what the lady in Maine told me after that.

I would dearly like to know the whole story of this. If anyone reading this post has any ideas who this woman might be and reliable details of this really humorous story, I would really like to know. The Jews of Texas were historic and accomplished many things in those days. But a Jewish grandmother breaking a horse for Pancho Villa is indeed historic—and a bit unusual, don’t you think?

Buy a copy of “Dos Gringos”  here.

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

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.