The Milagro Beanfield War, By John Nichols
Henry Holt and Company, 1974
Milagro
“Yet Milagro was a town whose citizens had a penchant not only for going crazy, but also for precipitating miracles.”
So begins the author’s description and invention of this tiny town in northern New Mexico. And Milagro is a fabulous invention. John Nichols creates a town, its citizenry, its history, its geography and even its language.
Although Milagro is a North American town, most of its residents have a last name that end in a vowel or in zed, (roll those r’s when you read this) : Martínez, Hernández, Córdova, Archuleta, Armijo, Montoya. That is to say, Milagro’s roots trace back to Hernan Cortez rather than to John Smith.
Milagro means miracle in Spanish and that is, in part, the identity of the town. Almost from its founding Milagro has had an unnatural and steady stream of so called miracles that, in a way, have defined the town. From El Ojo de Cleofes Apodaca to El Brazo de Onofre Martínez, Milagro had a shared experience of strange occurrences, miracles, legends, and superstitions.
Cleofes Apódaca was a nineteenth century sheep herder who claimed he had El Ojo – an “evil eye.” Mothers and pregnant women exercised extraordinary caution to avoid El Ojo lest their children should “sicken and grow a hump” or their babies should be born without an arm or a leg or some other important appendage.
El Brazo de Onofre is a living legend. Onofre Garcia is a one-armed ornery old man who bombs around town in a mottled green 1953 Chevy Pickup with an ornery old three-legged German Shepard standing on top of the cab. Onofre is not only one of the novel’s characters, Onofre is a character. Nobody in town can quite remember when Onofre lost his arm yet quite a few explanations or myths had grown up around it. Onofre takes great pleasure in tipping his hat to the ladies with his nonexistent hand (a trick of the scalp) and, it seems, Onofre’s phantom arm gets credit for most of the anonymous shenanigans around town. If a young girl returns home from a date without her panties, El Brazo de Onofre is blamed. If somebody’s goat drops dead one night – El Brazo. Mothers of small children coerce their children into obedience not by threatening a late visit by El Cucuy but rather a visitation by El Brazo de Onofre.
The largely illiterate population of Milagro often relied on Onofre to write love letters for them. Then they relied upon Onofre to read the love letters to their object of affection. Onofre couldn’t remember when he’d learned to read and write but his ability to write seemed to exist only the arm that he had lost. Hence, with Onofre’s literary arm gone, the romantic intentions of many young Milagro-ans floundered.
Onofre had, at one time, been an excellent piano player but with his right arm gone, he could only play the boogie-woogie bass runs on the piano. And yet, the citizens of Milagro swore that late at night, they could hear beautiful melodies and bass runs wafting out over the valley from Onofre’s piano.
Spanish is the predominant language spoken in Milagro. The author goes to lengths to explain that the Spanish spoken in Milagro is an evolved version of Castilian Spanish rather than a Latin American Spanish. And Milagro's Spanish is based on the immigration patterns to the tiny town of Milagro. Expressions such as “El Brazo de Onofre” or “Pacheco’s Pig” had worked their way into the local dialect and it reminded me of how much language is a shared experience. When a local referred to the “Smokey the Bear Santo riot,” another local would usually exclaim: “Ai Chihuahua!” but an outsider would have no clue what they were talking about. It seems to me that it is somehow appropriate that “Milagro” has now made it into the idiom of that region of the United States. John Nichols writes about this in the Afterword to the second edition:
“But nowadays the word milagro has been unceremoniously pizzafied and deified to a humiliating degree. In my home town there’s a Milagro art gallery and a Milagro bed-and-breakfast. A Denver company running tourists down to New Mexico calls itself Milagro Tours. I have heard of stores featuring radio ad campaigns offering prizes in merchandise for astute listeners able to guess the number of Milagro beans in a jar…”
The Beanfield War
“What’s that little half-pint son of ***** want to cause so much trouble for?”
And so begins the story of The Milagro Beanfield War. One day for reasons unknown even to himself, José (Joe) Mondragón, “suddenly decided to irrigate the little field in front of his dead parents’ decaying west side home (which Joe still owned – in itself a miracle) and grow himself some beans. And yet irrigating that field was an act as irrevocable as Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Castro’s voyage on the Granma, or the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, because it was certain to catalyze tensions which had been building for years, certain to precipitate a war.”
In the arid Southwestern United States, it’s all about who has the water – or who has the water rights. Not surprisingly, people with money or power get the water while people without money or power get the shaft. John Nichols crystallizes this dynamic in his novel.
For a related history, try googling the Los Angeles Aqua Duct, the draining of the Owen’s Valley and the much vilified LA water commissioner, William Mulholland. For a related comic novel, try The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey.
The Blam Method of Writing
I’ve always found the creative process fascinating. (probably because I am totally void of it) Where does the drive come from? Where do the ideas come from? How long did it take? What were the mechanics involved? Hunter S. Thompson’s Proud Highway is a collection of his letters and some early articles; the reader can trace his development as a writer from his high school years to the publication of Hell’s Angels. Similarly, Earnest Hemingway’s A Movable Feast is a rare glimpse into his development as a writer. I absolutely love to watch the director’s comments on a DVD after watching a good movie. I want to know what they were thinking when they created this scene or that one. Try Mel Gibson after Apocalypto or the Cohen Brothers after No Country for Old Men or Tommy Lee Jones after Three Burials of Melquades Estrada.
John Nichols wrote about his creation of this book in the Afterword to the second edition. When he sat down to write The Milagro Beanfield War, he was in his early thirties and broke. He had recently moved to northern New Mexico from NYC, and was in the middle of a dissolving marriage. In his new community he’d gotten involved in a water rights political action group called the Tres Rios Association and he was writing political commentary for a local left wing newspaper. He knew that for a novel about water rights to reach any number of people at all, it would have to be funny, so he set out to write a comic novel.
He wrote much of the novel in the rustic cabin of his friend, Rini Templeton. She did those wonderful illustrations for the book. She was a few years older than Nichols and it seems that he was quite taken with her. She was probably the inspiration for the Ruby Archuleta character. Sadly, Templeton died young. Nichols gives her a heartfelt eulogy in the afterword.
As for Milagro, he said that one day he just sat down and started typing – no outline, no character sketches, no plot summary, no nothing. A friend of his called it “the blam method of writing.” He wrote the first draft in about forty days, then he edited for three weeks, then he took three weeks to type a clean copy and submit it to a publisher. Henry Holt and Company bought the manuscript for 10,000 dollars. The whole process had taken sixteen weeks.
Nichols must have written with a tremendous amount of exuberant energy to produce a 445 page novel in that short period of time and I could feel that exuberance while reading the book. It was fun to read and eventhough some of the vignettes were predictable, in the sense that things happened in a way that I wanted or expected things to happen, it was a fun read. It felt really good.
At any rate, I enjoyed the book immensely. It’s not exactly the kind of deep philosophical literature that guys with thick glasses and big foreheads like to read, but never mind that, it accomplished what the author set out to accomplish and it was a pleasure to read. My copy of the book has a photo of Nichols on the back cover. He is standing on a high mesa, presumably in northern New Mexico, and smiling an infectious smile. I appreciate a photo like that much more than the norm - where the writer is trying to look serious and cerebral, even to the point of scowling at the camera.
Well, there you go: Another ten hour flight and another long-winded book review by Sancho for the Literature Net. Writing a book review is much more fun than watching the inflight entertainment system and damn I wish the stew’s would stay off of the P.A. and stay out of the isles and quit bumping their wide asses on my seat.
