Alamos Sonora Mexico

Geologic timeline… street posters… ruins with no roofs… on Calle Delicias in La Compana… blue painted houses… history of Mexican political parties… Missionaries of Fatima, Mexican army base and Nueva Esmeralda… our winter film crew… Tebeto… auto icons… children at play and work…

50… A step back in time starting with the coming of the age of mammals….

So much of Alamos-Sonora-Mexico.com is about history. In that spirit let us peek at the region’s geologic history, stand earth time. The Sierra Madre Occidental and the Rocky Mountains began to form 90 to 30 million years ago along the west coast of North America. Ocean levels were much higher than today, back then there was no Florida. The age of mammals started 66.4 million years ago. Sierra de Alamos was beginning under great pressure deep in the earth along with what would become Aduana’s silver deposits.

Northwest Mexico, including Alamos, was buried under thousands of feet of ash, cinder and lava flows. Volcanic eruptions began 25 million years ago and continued another 12 million years, give or take a day or two. The Sea of Cortez began to form 12 to 3 million years ago as the Basin and Range block building was underway. Sierra de Alamos was still underneath a layer of all things volcanic. Over time erosion cut into ash flow plateaus creating landmarks like Barrancas del Cobre, Copper Canyon, whose materials were washed away and deposited near Sierra de Alamos. The rising mountain was still cover by blankets of earth.

As time marched on climate changed. The region began to cool 15 to 30 million years ago. Two to four million years ago it was warming up and raining. Most of the past two million years has been an ice age with 15 to 20 glacial periods. And now the planet is warming again. From a distant gallery it may look as if earth’s climate ebbs and flows like clockwork as the solar winds race past our blue planet, a molten rock with the thinest of crust and atmosphere.

Today, Sierra de Alamos rises thousands of feet above its surroundings. And many have visited Alamos to research the region’s geology, flora and fauna. Josephine Scripps was asked by the San Diego Natural History Museum in the 1940’s to lead a group of six young men, none who spoke spanish, on a natural science expedition to Alamos. They were to bring back a rare mountain sheep’s skeleton and hide. Josphine, 1910 -1992, was the granddaughter of Edward Scripps, founder of the Scripps – Howard newspaper chain. Her life-long pursuit of collecting mineral specimens from across the planet began on that trip to Alamos.

49… Revolutions and concerts have been heralded with street posters….

There is irony here: the giant cottonwood hosting this poster to save the trees fell victim to Hurricane Norbert in 2008. The Alameda’s shade forest were all toppled by gale force winds. The humble poster’s message is alive, and hopefully, gaining strength – ” No perdimos el eden, lo estamos destuyendo”. Alamos is at a convergence of habitats, each with its own flora and fauna. Together, they are a rich tapestry of natural experiences. I understand that now an organization leads Saturday community bird watching expeditions. In 1996, there was little ecological public sensibility. The international world was aware, and concerned, about this rare, and endangered, environment. Locals like Stephanie Meyers and the MacKays took every opportunity to share their surroundings with the Alamos. But there were few ecology street messages in Spanish. My Mexican acquaintances saw this poster as a sign of change, a precursor to a new way of seeing and doing. As example, they questioned the perpetual burning dump several miles southeast of town. Their voices were uniting, there must be a better way.

The Sunday, March 17th, 1996, 7 pm performance of The Alamos Gringo, a play in two acts, presented by The Alamos Players is sold out! Sorry! The venue is a small theater in the Museo Constumbrista de Sonora on the Plaza. There is a romantic notion to North American community theater in Alamos. The arts always help keep a sense of cultural community in community.

Election time is an emotional time: neighbors sharing a common wall can loudly promote opposing political parties and fervently advocate different policies. And then the elections will come to a close, egos adjust to the vote’s finality, and neighbors are neighbors again.

48… There are open floor plans and then there are open ceilings…

Beautiful, important, historic… This photo was taken in 1984. The last time I saw it, 1996, crews were moving building materials up by hand through a window into the roofed second floor. This is downtown Centro Alamos, the street name says it all, Calle Comercio. Could this building still be unused? I would hope not. During my visits to Alamos folks would speak of running on Alamos time. The reality is everywhere runs on human-nature-time influenced by available materials, skills, events and weather of yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Cerra Cacharamba, a 3,700 above sea level volcanic plug, towers over Aduana and the rich silver beds that made Alamos what it was back then and lingers on today. Stately Cacharamba, framed like this through many west facing Alamos windows, is a clear reminder that here are powerful deep rooted forces at work. In 1908, the famed German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt visited Aduana mines, and like Vasquez de Coronado 258 years earlier, noted that this land was an exceptional place. We do not really know what spoke to Vasquez in 1540, we do know Humboldt was struck by an abundance of silver under Cerra Cacharamba.

Old Promontorios, Quintera, Santo Domingo. and Zambona were established productive mines in 1908. Clarboya, San Jose, San Clemente, Plats-Pina, El Ultimo, Parra, Olvidos, Pulpito and Nueva Promontorio were developing mines in 1810. These names, some unforgettable – some forgettable, speak of miners, burros, owners, agents, suppliers, teamsters, women and children. Today mining is a dangerous occupation. Think of Aduana back then with quicksilver, accidents, greed and disease spilling across the land.
Night is coming. Some will go outside, and as entertainment, stare at the changing sky until they saw their first satellite passing overhead.

47… A house with a carved lion standing guard at its entrance…

Here one can see all the way to Chihuahua, and today one can see the sheer power of a summer thunderhead building over the Sierra Madres Occidentals. Notice the yellow blooming tree in the middle foreground. We are going to visit this neighborhood, near the panteon – cemetery.

California landscape designer Joe Delgado and wife Jacueline Delgado built a new home in the traditional Spanish colonial style on Calle Delicias. Joe had at one time worked with Disneyland and was skilled at creating large scale landscape projects. He was proud of their Alamos house. He was proud of how it was built and how it looked. He was proud of his “perfect” arches.

We are now at the entrance looking in as help sweeps the pool area. I remember a visit here in 1996 seeking the comforts of a shower. The area of town I was staying at, Calle Comercio and surroundings, had been without water for a week due to a busted water main. And a storm had come through the region flooding the arroyos. Water everywhere but not a drop for my shower. I had seen Jacqueline in town and told her my plight and she graciously invited me over a long awaited, and needed, shower and coffee.

The previous night was one of expectation and wonder. A photo shoot on Sierra de Alamos with a group of botanists had been in the planning for several weeks. Apparently many people had to approve our going up the mountain in the summer with cameras. We were to leave at 2 am to beat the heat. The goal was to be near the top by sunrise. At 1:30 am another photographer was on the street outside my window calling my name. He was nervous and distraught. The trip had been cancelled. There were problems in town and I was not to say a word to anyone about why our plans were cut short.

More details will be revealed in my coming collection of twelve Alamos short stories.

So I wandered across town, disappointed and bewildered. The small blue-bottomed pool greeted me and promised there was water for a long awaited shower, hauling cameras around during the summer is a sweaty task. During our short coffee conversation, Jacqueline handed me a printed circular about certain American residents, and their possible shady connections, being passed around town. The flyer spoke of contested land-ownership issues and recalled, in detail, a tragic evening three years earlier. Secrets, imagined, invented or real, swirled in the humid winds, landing where they landed. And now I was traveling with my own Alamos secret. In a way, I had arrived.

46 … The color aqua can be seen on homes throughout Alamos and Mexico …

A peaceful moment on Calle Hildago. No one passing by, to and from Centro Alamos, no trucks, no bus, no cars, no bicycles, no cow herds, no packs of dogs, or children playing in the street. Just the street and homes and sky and air and birds singing and the sounds of everything listed above, but at a muffled distance. And then the parade that is Calle Hildago, returns. Work resumes on a remodel, a taxi turns the corner, groups of people pass in animated conversation, an old man sings to himself, a flatbed truck loaded with supplies heads out north to surrounding ranches.

The aqua painted home to the left hand of these four homes on Calle 16 de Septiembre is featured in Journal entry 35. The mountain’s dark greens and brilliant white clouds against an endless blue sky sing this is summer. The boy could be returning home from Centro Alamos, another world, a mere minutes away. The air is cool, but that will change as shadows shorten and high noon approaches.

The dog is going somewhere and PRT came and went. And what is PRT you ask?
The following excerpt is from Wikipedia:
The Workers’ Revolutionary Party, Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores, PRT, was founded in 1976 by the merger of two Trotskyist groups: the International Communist League, associated with the United Secretariat of the Fourth International and the Mexican Morenists.
In 1977, the Marxist Workers’ League, associated with the Organising Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International, joined the party. In the following years, other small groups of Trotskyists also joined the PRT.
From their base in the 1968 student movement, the PRT grew quickly, soon gaining bases of support among some telephone, electrical, nuclear, and hospital workers. By the 1980s, it was the largest far-left party to challenge the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). In 1981, the federal government recognized the PRT as an official nationwide party. In the 1982 general elections, it was also the first Mexican party to raise gay rights as a campaign issue; the party fielded several openly gay candidates for the Chamber of Deputies.
During the latter half of the 1980s, the PRT began to face a series of crises and in-fighting as its progress slowed. It has been alleged that the ruling PRI sent agents into the PRT to disrupt its activities. During the 1988 presidential election, the PRT lost ground as an electoral party because of the campaign of leftist Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, who soon formed the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD).
In 1996, after losing federal recognition, what remained of the PRT formed Socialist Convergence.

Can you find the aqua item in this photo? I am trying to keep the aqua theme alive – it is the girl in the foreground’s purse. The following is a summary from Wikipedia of active Mexican political parties in 2011:

National Action Party (Partido Acción Nacional, PAN) – a right of center party member of Christian Democracy.
Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, PRI) – the dominating party, under different names, at the municipal, state, and national levels for most of the 20th century.i It is currently the dominant party in the Chamber of Deputies and at the municipal and state level, second in the Senate. A part of the Socialist International, it is now considered as a centrist party, with prominent members leaning from both the left and right, and supports a policy of mixed economy and nationalized industries, both of which are longstanding Mexican practices.
Party of the Democratic Revolution (Partido de la Revolución Democrática, PRD) – a left of center party.
Labor Party (Partido del Trabajo, PT) – a laborist political party formed in 1990. It is often allied with the PRD for electoral purposes.
Ecologist Green Party of Mexico (Partido Verde Ecologista de México, PVEM) – a minor party with an environmental platform.
Convergence (Convergencia, formerly Convergencia por la Democracia) – a social democratic party, formed in 1997.
New Alliance (Nueva Alianza) – originally created by academics of the Autonomous Technical Institute of Mexico and members of the National Educational Workers Union, the largest union in Latin America.

Mexico, and Alamos, have a long history of emerging factions and disappearing political movements. Enough with the politics. We are now back to the color aqua adorning calles de Alamos, Sonora, Mexico. The streets remain the same, it is who is leading the parades that changes.

45 … The year is 1996, high on spirited breezes we sail over Alamos …

After four years of planning the Missionaries of Fatima, founded in Fatima, Portugal arrived in 1977 by invitation of the Bishop of Sonora in Cuidad Obregon. He recommended the order visit Alamos, Sonora, Mexico. My research indicates six priests and four seminarians are based behind these high walls. They serve southern Sonora with several programs helping those in need across a vast landscape including towns in Yaqui Valley and Social Readaptacion Center internees in Navajoa.

The army barracks are here in the old slaughter house. Low profile army jeeps patrolled Alamos a couple of times a day. All of the soldiers were from other areas of Mexico. I was told a soldier was never stationed in his home town. At night, from atop Sierra de Alamos one could see flashing lights at army and police checkpoints on the road north to San Bernardo, the old El Camino Real. Military activity was more visible during my 1996 summer shoot. At times, there were dented local police pickups, pristine purple Sonoran state police SUVs, and green-dust-covered army jeeps and trucks on the go from the airport out to the graveyard. Occasionally, helicopters landed and offloaded to waiting military trucks at the airport.

Off to the north of Calle Hildago, as one approached the airport, was a new community of poor shacks and basic shelter. Area locals told me people living there, Sonochihua, were displaced refugees from floods in Sonora and Chihuahua. Today, the barrio is called Nueva Esmeralda and a section to the west is Sin Nombre, without numbers. I am interested to know what this neighborhood, after 15 years, has grown into. This is a chapter in the saga of modern Mexico.

44 … A multi-faceted crew for a sparkling season, Christmas 1993 …

Calle Aurora connects the two busiest areas in Alamos: Alameda and Plaza de las Armas. It is an one-way street for cars and two-way passage for pedestrians, bicycles, and animals. It is my favorite street in Alamos, long and narrow with a gentle climb to the Plaza. Most of the night it can be still, homes sleeping as peaceful ghosts come out to loiter and reminisce. This is our crew doubling for ghosts and providing scale and detail to a night portrait frozen in time.

From left to right: Chaco Valdez, painting of Christina Vega by Jim Wison, Anders Tomlinson,
Gary Ruble, Donna Beckett, R. L. Harrington, Robert Ganey, and the Nuzums: Jolene, Kit,
Elizabeth and Pember. At this moment we were all together and thankful.

Gary Ruble took slides, shot 16 mm film, primarily single-frame time lapse, and helped with audio recording. He also disappeared into the arms of Alamos. Often the question would be asked, ” where is Gary?” and the answers were ” we last saw him headed off with some folks”. This is a good example of a ruin’s interior. Since our 1993 shoot the population of Alamos has nearly doubled. Looking at Alamos from space with Google maps I can see new construction and new neighborhoods. Alamos has been part of the southwest’s now dormant building boom. Another factor for Alamos’s growth is the same as its beginnings – silver. A large silver mine to the north reopened in 1999. I wonder how many ruins are still available for purchase and renovation?

The crew was staying in two places a ten minute walk apart separated by Cerro Guadaloupe. In Alamos, the greatest joys maybe the unanticipated twinklings en-route to a preconceived destination. For R.L. Harringto, Robert Ganey, Donna Beckett and Anders this was one of those moments as they came out of cool winter shade at Puerta Roja and walked into warm sun as they approached Alamos Centro.

Within in every artist there is a child that will not be silenced. At times, the child will take control and a sense of humanity is produced. This is one of those moments: human shadows dancing across a wall of time. There was the wall, the sun was setting, why not dance holding hands? This recreated a moment from a 1983 Alamos film shot by Anders and Kit of kids dancing by the camera, holding hands, with their shadows racing across the ground.

Christopher, his friends know him as Kit, Nuzum first introduced me to Alamos. We met on a beach while filming and helping with a preproduction setup of a Suzanne Lacy public art performance, Whispers, The Waves, The Wind, featuring white covered tables with white chairs and women, all over the age of 65, dressed in white discussing their lives. The women’s reflections would be broadcasted over speakers up on the bluffs surrounding the cove. An interesting moment in time of age contemplating time.

A couple of months later, spring of 1985, he invited me to go on a Mexico road trip. All he said about Alamos was that he knew I would like it. We arrived in Alamos hours before sunrise. Driving up Calle Aurora into, and around the Plaza, to Calle Comercio #2 and entering the front courtyard of the Casa Nuzum was a step into a place I had never been before. Kit walked me through three garden areas, fountains gurgling under the stars, to a guest room waiting for me in the back. I went to sleep in a dream, I awake to Alamos.

Today, 2013, Kit is outside Puerto Varas, Chile living off the grid and brewing beer.

43 … Tebeto, the most viewed artist in Alamos …

On any given school day more people, kids are people, view Tebeto’s work than any other artist in Alamos. It is safe to say more his work is seen by more than church, museum, gallery or home art. Tebeto’s sister worked as a hospital administrator and was instrumental in getting him the playground art grants. These kids look up to, and at, Tebeto and his work.

Viva Musica! Mexico is a musical lifestyle. English says music, Spanish says musica. The language is lyrical. Expressions, emotions, and gestures take on import akin to a music conductor’s energetic direction. Tebeto, a quiet man with a quick smile, expresses himself in many medias and none is more important than song. He knows his way around a guitar. His favorite bands, at the time, were Pink Floyd, Beatles and Rolling Stones. Coming off the mountain late one afternoon we were greeted by three generations of women sitting on their humble porch, first house on the trail to town, no electricity, listening, magically, to Canned Heat. Musica was, and is, everywhere.

Baron Richard Flach de Flachslanden, born and raised in Minneapolis, was Tebeto’s patron. The house had Tebeto’s work at every turn, wall, nook and cranny. The gregarious, fun-seeking Baron was known around town for his yearly Costume Ball. Tebeto enriched the Baron’s lifestyle, such is art’s nature. Chon, who guided me up the mountains several of times, was Tebeto’s brother. In a future post we will visit Chon as he worked restoring a ruin on Calle Arroyo Barranquita for Tebeto to live in. Their family home, where the brothers lived, was a short distance away.

42 … Rolling icons ran and worked and played and worked and ran and …

The Black Power was on the streets, always recognizable, during the 13 years span of my Alamos project. In late August 1996 it was the platform for a wonderful project over several nights. Victor, owner of The Black Power, Antonio Figueroa and yours truly went on a tour of the barrios and projected my slides onto a wet sheet nailed to a homemade frame on the truck’s flatbed. The best shows were in the arroyos: kids sat on rocks, mothers in folding chairs and men stood in the back swaying in the sweet night air. We asked each audience to help us identify people in 80 projected images. We were able to write names for 50 pictures into a small pocket notebook. That notebook has become an important reference element for this journal effort.

A good time was had by all. The audiences enjoyed seeing their friends, families, barrios, plazas, mountains and all things Alamos. The Black Power, a wet king-size sheet, 80 images, a 200 ft extension cord, slide projector, boom box and beautiful open air theaters, under the stars, came together for a special week of spontaneous entertainment. Our light projection team enjoyed watching audience faces and hearing their reactions.

Is this the car that Levant Alcorn drove into Alamos in the mid 40’s? I was told so, but who told the person that told the person that told my friend that told me? I do know Levant had owned and operated a farm and antique shop in Waterford, Pennsylvania before setting off to Mexico. He attended Cornell University but didn’t graduate. The first two Alamos properties he purchased were a packaged deal for $3,000 USD with the Bours family. And that began a new life for Levant, who at the time didn’t speak Spanish, and Alamos – Levant understood and put a value to the ruins. The last time I saw this car it was braving its way across a flooded arroyo with a trailing wake quickly washed downstream by fast flowing water. I wonder if it is still running, or if any of its parts are still being used?

A fancy of man and engineering, this stretched Beetle is. Talk about a mixed metaphor. And my questions are, what became of this hybrid? Was the body finished off and painted? Did it run then and is it running now? And when was the moment and what was the creator doing when he visualized stretching a VW Beetle. And how long did it take him to realize this dream? Salud!

41 … As one group after another came to conquer and plunder Alamos children played …

The year is 1687, a year earlier the first recorded date was entered in the parochial register, August 28, 1686. Father Kino visited Alamos in February 1687. He would use Alamos silver to help create a chain of missions running north into Arizona. This was also the year Tarahumare Indians revolted and the Spanish effort against them was headquartered in Alamos. Miners from around the world learned of the Aduana silver veins. Visitors, with assorted agendas, arrived from the south and west. 1687 would have been a rough year to be a child on a burgeoning frontier.

1737 through 1741 were years of Yaquis and Mayos attacking the Spanish. In 1740, Yaqui leader Calixto Muni burned Camoa and Baroyera taking Spanish women and children as hostage. Alamos miners held off 6,000 advancing Indians. Not an easy year for children to be playing, but what do children do but play and learn. 1741 was a bloody year amongst bloody years. 3,000 Yaquis and Mayos died at the hands of Spanish reinforcements at the “Hill of Bones”. And then the drought came lasting from 1741 to 1744. Staking out a fortune in Alamos came with a price.

Alamos was growing in a lawless new west. Don Jose Rodriques Gallard, Inspector General of the Interior, reported in 1748-49 that Alamos had no jail, municipal buildings, plazas, street grids… etc. It was time for Alamos to become a town with streets laid out by design, houses built conforming to plan, government buildings established and a jail erected. Civilization, regulation and taxation was gaining a foothold. 30 years later Alamos will have reached its zenith with as many as 30,000 inhabitants. Through all of this turmoil and growth children played and helped their families with chores and errands. Children needed to be careful, look in all directions, listen for trouble, chose their friends wisely and be aware of everything going on in their surroundings. At times children needed to be little people not kids, and then it would be time to play again.

Return to Journal entries 31-40 or forward to Journal entries 51-60

©2010 Anders Tomlinson, all rights reserved.