The Blood of the Tigua
Officially, the issue tearing apart the West Texas' largest native American tribe is one of lineage. Who is and is not a member. But the real dispute is over money—earned in unimaginable amounds at the casino on their reservation and coveted by rival factions willing to risk everything.
Belen says: Pamela, Great article, my Great Grand Mother is full blooded Tigua. Thank you so much for taking the time to write this. It really helps me and my sisters who live in California to put things together. God bless, Belen (January 2nd, 2009 at 3:35am)
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If not for 77-year-old El Paso attorney Tom Diamond, the tribe would most likely have ceased to exist. “There is a saying in El Paso,” says James Speer, the counsel for the local water utility that the tribe is currently suing, “God created the world, but Tom Diamond created the Tigua Indians.” In the mid-sixties Diamond was urged by a friend who was familiar with the tribe’s dire living conditions to seek economic support for the Tigua from the Texas Legislature. He initially approached the task with some reluctance since he was skeptical about the tribe’s ancestral claims. “But I went down there with an anthropologist friend of mine, Bernard Fontana, and he said the chief’s house was the finest Indian museum he’d ever seen. That was enough for me. Of course, I had to get a white man to tell me they were Indians!” Diamond roars. Suspicions about the tribe’s authenticity did not prove to be a hurdle in winning state recognition, since Diamond, then the chairman of El Paso County’s Democratic Committee, was able to persuade the state’s most powerful politicians to take up the Tigua’s cause. Then Congress had to be convinced as well. “[U.S. senator] Ralph Yarborough took a bottle of whiskey to one congressman who was reluctant to vote for the bill. They stayed up all night talking and drinking, and by the time the sun came up, Yarborough had his vote,” Diamond recalls with a throaty laugh. “Whiskey was a very important part of winning the Tigua their recognition.” Texas assumed guardianship of the tribe in 1967, and twenty years later, when state funds for Indian tribes began to run low, Diamond sought, and then won, federal recognition for the Tigua—transforming their sliver of land into a sovereign nation.
Such backroom politics have earned the Tigua a measure of distrust in El Paso, where some residents believe that tribe members are simply Mexican Americans masquerading as Indians for the sake of federal entitlements: “Mestizos with good lawyers,” in the words of one local attorney. Most of the adults I met on the reservation were only one-eighth Tigua, their Indian features so blurred by generations of Mexican American parentage that they were indistinguishable from their neighbors. Under federal law, anyone who is at least one-eighth Tigua—that is, descended from one great-grandparent who was full-blooded—is recognized as a member of the tribe, though the Tigua are trying to pass legislation that would lower the blood quantum to one-sixteenth, so that their children can reap the same financial benefits. The 1,282-member tribe is by no means exceptional for its diluted Indian blood; the Cherokee Nation, for example, has no blood quantum requirement and includes anyone who can demonstrate even the most distant of lineal connections to the tribe. Cynics may dismiss the Tigua as opportunists, and there is no doubt that there are those among the tribe—the “program Indians,” as they are called on the reservation—who are interested solely in financial benefits. But after talking with many tribe members, I was struck by their tremendous and seemingly genuine pride in their Indian ancestry, no matter how remote. The blood quantum, some suggested, is an insulting colonial artifact that bears little relevance to their lives. “You have full-blooded Tigua who know nothing about tradition, and you have people with one-sixteenth Tigua blood who have such reverence for the old ways,” one man explained to me. “So how do you determine who is a ‘real’ Tigua and who is not?”
THE MAN LARGELY RESPONSIBLE FOR bringing gambling to the reservation—and, his critics would say, for the discord that has followed—is Vince Muñoz, the 48-year-old governor of the tribe, who has helped transform the barrio into a thriving economic center. It measures just one tenth of a square mile and still shows remnants of the tribe’s streak of hard luck: the abandoned mud jacals; the walled-in cemetery with fallen wooden crosses; the dirt lot where, if one looks closely enough, one can see hundreds of old pottery shards lying among the broken beer bottles. More visible than the signs of a dying culture, however, are the signs of a rejuvenated one. Old Pueblo Road, once a desolate spot where outsiders dared not venture, is now a busy, palm tree—lined street that is home to the casino, the tribal council’s offices, an upscale restaurant, and Running Bear Gas Station—the first of the Tigua’s new chain of convenience stores, whose logo features a grinning cartoon Indian clad in buckskins and yellow moccasins, sprinting with a gas pump in his hand. Three blocks away lies the tribe’s housing development: a subdivision of modern adobe homes shaded by juniper trees and mesquite, with a few scattered hornos, or beehive ovens, for baking Indian bread. The new tribal courthouse and police station, both spacious adobe buildings with pine floors and sweeping Western landscape paintings, sit across the street, and down the road lies the Tigua Cultural Center: a collection of souvenir shops arranged around a shaded courtyard where young tribe members don feathers and moccasins on weekends, performing the Fancy War Dance for white tourists who snap photographs and clap delightedly at the natives in their midst.
Muñoz’s carefully maintained sweep of black hair and magnanimous smile are signs of a new type of Tigua leadership—one that is sophisticated, media-savvy, and above all, outwardly welcoming of the white man’s world. Descended from one of the tribe’s great chiefs, Muñoz, like many of his contemporaries, speaks little Tiwa and is only one-eighth Tigua by birth. Though he has effortlessly transformed himself into a polished player of big-league politics, he still remembers a time in El Barrio de los Indios when he went barefoot to preserve his one pair of shoes for school. “We didn’t have shoes, we didn’t have clothes. Two pairs of pants were a luxury,” says Muñoz, wearing a tailored navy-blue suit and a diamond-studded gold ring, as he sits in his well-appointed office with a view of the casino. “We had no running water, no food. My mother worked in the cafeteria at the public schools, and it was a treat when she brought home something to eat. When I was very young, I said to myself, ‘I don’t want to live like this for the rest of my life.’” At the age of eleven Muñoz tried his hand at entrepreneurship, opening a makeshift snow cone stand next to a popular baseball diamond in the neighborhood; he shaved ice off a block and flavored it with fruit juice, selling cones for 10 cents apiece, and soon turned a profit. After a four-year stint in the Navy following high school, he returned to the reservation in 1974 and opened a cafe in the tribe’s new cultural center. It flourished, and in the mid-eighties, when he opened another successful restaurant, this one with a wine list and linen tablecloths, he quickly ascended to the top tier of tribal leadership.
By the early nineties, over the objections of some tribal elders, Muñoz argued that bringing a casino to the reservation would ensure self-sufficiency for the tribe. Congress had passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act a few years earlier, opening the door for tribes to negotiate gaming compacts with their respective states. In 1993 Ann Richards spurned the Tigua’s requests for a casino, but the tribe pressed forward anyway, opening a large bingo hall on the reservation later that year, and soon adding poker and blackjack, pull-tabs, and in November 1996, slot machines. Muñoz became the gaming commissioner of Speaking Rock Casino, and under his leadership the tribe would assume full control; Seven Circle Resorts, the Swedish company that loaned the Tigua start-up money and taught them the gaming business, was cut out of the management team following a disagreement over the tribe’s decision to add slot machines. Muñoz paid out the five-year, $8.2 million management contract in only six months. “They were shocked,” he recalls with evident pride, “because they realized that they had lost a very good investment.” Precisely how good of an investment Speaking Rock is remains a mystery, since there is no external oversight of the casino. Only Tigua are privy to the books, and when pressed for specific figures, tribal council members just smile obliquely. Most of its profits are reinvested or put into trust for the future; in the present, they provide salaries, subsidized housing, free health care, tuition for college, and an annual stipend for each Tigua that amounted to $15,000 last year—one reason Muñoz often refers to Speaking Rock as “the new buffalo.”
The casino is nevertheless a risky venture, given the state’s opposition; the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 1994 that the law that granted the Tigua federal recognition explicitly prohibits any gambling on the Tigua reservation that is also prohibited in Texas and therefore takes precedence over other federal statutes that allow Indian gaming. But Muñoz has confidence in Tom Diamond’s interpretation of Indian gaming laws: Any state that allows a particular form of gambling cannot prohibit tribes from practicing the same form of gambling on their reservations. “The Texas lottery is a giant slot machine with ten thousand terminals around the state,” says Diamond. “People pay money to play, and a random number generator determines whether or not they’re winners. All we’re doing at Speaking Rock is mimicking what the state has been doing for years.” Thus far, the authorities have been reluctant to press their case. Last spring Governor Bush asked then—attorney general Dan Morales to shut down the casino—“You are in violation of our law,” Bush told the tribe through reporters—but he quickly fell silent on the subject when the Tigua sued him for slander. (The case was later dismissed for lack of jurisdiction.) Morales’ office declined to sue the Tigua, saying that the casino was under federal jurisdiction; meanwhile, the U.S. Attorney’s office in San Antonio declared that it was state, not federal, authorities who had the prerogative to pursue the case. Thus far, Attorney General John Cornyn has taken no action. It is a wildly lucky, if precarious, legal loophole for the tribe, which now operates a casino that is arguably illegal but which seems in no imminent danger of being shut down.
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