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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In the meantime, Muñoz has epic plans for the tribe’s future. The tribal council, which he directs, is currently weighing proposals for building a luxury hotel on Interstate 10, a wind-generated energy plant on the Sierra Viejo escarpment, and a cowboys-and-Indians-themed dude ranch in West Texas for European tourists. There is also a new Tigua-owned oil and gas trucking business, Big Bear Oil, and there are plans to open 25 Running Bear gas stations around El Paso with adjacent, tax-free smoke shops. The construction of a $40 million Tigua housing development, which will include luxury homes and an Olympic-size pool, is already under way, as is a public relations campaign to revamp the tribe’s image and highlight the $3 million it has given to local causes. Most significant, however, is the Tigua’s newfound sense of manifest destiny, which has resulted in nearly a dozen lawsuits over land and water rights, as well as the purchase of the Chilicote Ranch in Valentine: a 68,000-acre spread that sits atop El Paso’s contingency water supply. Because of Tigua lawsuits seeking control of the city’s irrigation ditches, which the tribe claims its ancestors dug, and of the city’s water reserves in New Mexico, some city officials believe that the tribe is positioning for control of the Rio Grande—and ultimately, for El Paso’s supply of drinking water. Muñoz denies such speculations, though his ambitions for the tribe have sparked controversy. El Paso’s mayor, Carlos Ramirez, took the Tigua to task during the mayoral election this spring; “El Paso,” stated one full-page newspaper ad criticizing the tribe’s prodigious campaign contributions, “Is Not for Sale.”
As the casino has exerted a greater hold on the tribe over the past several years, the Tigua’s aging chief, Santos Sanchez, has become a mere figurehead, and Muñoz has moved center stage. Although Sanchez is the tribe’s spiritual guide and its absolute authority until death, I rarely heard his name mentioned on the reservation, and I saw him only once, in passing. Muñoz, on the other hand, has ascended in political prominence as the casino has grown in economic power. Once an elected official who oversaw the tribe’s day-to-day operations and the council, the tribal governor now also directs the casino, and by extension the Tigua’s fortunes. “The governor,” says Marty Silvas, “now has more power than the chief himself.”
MARTY SILVAS LIVES ONLY A FEW paces from the reservation, next to the cemetery’s fallen crosses, in a modest home whose walls are lined with eagle feathers, ceremonial drums, and the remnants of a culture in which he is no longer welcome. He has a fierce gaze, the intensity of which is difficult to meet for long, and his deep brown skin, heavy features, and jet-black hair are unmistakably of Indian origin, though he too is only one-eighth Tigua. Tattooed across his chest is the tribe’s most revered icon, a pictograph from its sacred grounds at Hueco Tanks of an arrow pointing northward, encircled by the sun; it is also, much to Silvas’ displeasure, stamped on every brass coin that comes out of Speaking Rock’s slot machines. “It is not meant as decoration for coins or the tribal council’s fourteen-karat gold tie clips,” he says indignantly. “It is a sacred symbol.”
As a boy growing up in El Barrio de los Indios, he learned from the elders how to play the juanchido, or sacred drum, practicing by thumping on hollow oil cans; in 1990, when he was only 27 years old, he became the war captain, or the safekeeper of the drum, an honor that had never been bestowed on a tribe member so young. The juanchido, or “one who speaks with great thunder,” is the tribe’s most sacred relic, brought by the Tigua to El Paso del Norte in 1680. Believed to be a living entity, it is fed dried corn and tobacco through a small hole on its side; it is also consulted on weighty matters, since it is thought to be a means of communication with the tribe’s ancestors. But for the past five years, Silvas had hidden the drum—the “soul of the pueblo,” in the words of Vince Muñoz—despite the tribal council’s pleas for its return and a reward that eventually reached $1 million.
The feud between Silvas and the tribal council began soon after the Tigua opened their bingo hall in 1993, when tribal leaders began jockeying for control of the money flowing into the tribe’s coffers. During a heated argument over whether Marty Silvas’ brother Manny—then the tribe’s lieutenant governor, who was accused of misappropriating $70,000 in tribal funds—should be allowed to run for re-election the following year, Enrique Paiz, who was then chief of the tribe, stood behind Silvas. (The charges against Manny Silvas had not been proven, argued Paiz.) The tribal council promptly stripped Paiz of his office. “The chief is the ultimate authority, and everyone must respect his authority,” says Marty Silvas. “No one had ever thrown a chief out, ever. It was unthinkable.” Outraged, Silvas demanded that the tribal council step down; the juanchido, he said, would remain hidden until they resigned. They refused, and the following June, when the tribe massed in front of the mission church to celebrate its most sacred holiday, the Feast of Saint Anthony, the drum was absent; Silvas, along with the ousted chief and a large group of their supporters, had taken it to the tribe’s sacred grounds in Hueco Tanks to perform an alternate ceremony. This infuriated the tribal council, which pronounced the event a “sacrilege,” and in May 1996, when Silvas again refused to participate in the preparations for the Feast of Saint Anthony, he was taken off the tribal rolls and thrown off the reservation.
“The tribal police came to my house with guns drawn,” he recalls. “They threw my eagle feathers and my ceremonial clothes on the floor, and they pointed their guns at me and demanded that I tell them where the drum was. I refused, and they put me in the back seat of a police car and drove me to Socorro Road. They said, ‘You’re no longer part of these people. You don’t belong here anymore.’”
The tribe’s loyalties were soon split between those who supported Marty Silvas and those who stood by the tribal council; the divide was so deep that at Ysleta High School, teenagers whose families fell on opposite sides of the rift refused to speak to each another. Soon after Silvas was kicked off the reservation, the council—now led by Vince Muñoz, who was voted in as governor on New Year’s Eve, 1995—held a reservation-wide meeting, where it was announced that tribe members’ blood quantums would be rechecked for accuracy. The tribe voted in favor of the measure, but Silvas’ supporters felt uneasy; they worried that the tribal council, enraged over their perceived disloyalty, had devised an elaborate ruse to expel them from the tribe.
Of the hundreds of tribe members whose heritage would be questioned, 46-year-old Grace Vela was an unlikely candidate; she had lived on the reservation for eighteen years and had worked there since 1977, directing many of the tribe’s social service programs. Her mother, 68-year-old Natalia Lopez, was the godchild of the revered Tigua chief Mariano Colmenero and had grown up in a small adobe house shaded by pomegranate trees in a part of east El Paso that later became reservation land. Vela was included in the tribal rolls when they were first compiled in 1967; twenty years later, when the Tigua received federal recognition, she was again listed in the tribal rolls—a register that the Texas Indian Commission had spent seven years researching and described as “the most thorough, exhaustive, and complete determination of who is and who can legitimately be considered a Tigua.” Yet in 1997 Vela, her mother, and their extended family received certified letters stating that the tribal council’s census department had determined that they lacked Indian blood. “After so many years with the tribe,” Vela’s mother told me, “I was sick.”
At first, Vela thought she could persuade the census department that it had made a terrible mistake. She began an exhaustive search into her family’s background, and after months of combing through documents in El Paso and Juárez, she found what she believes is conclusive proof of her family’s Tigua ancestry, most compelling a 1873 Tigua land survey headed “We the Indians” that was signed by her great-great-grandfather and a 1895 tribal compact signed by her great-great-grandmother’s brother. The tribal census department, however, rejected her claims, arguing that such paperwork did not establish ancestors’ blood quantums, or for that matter, Indianness all, since Mexicans may have also signed them. “These documents are the very same documents that other tribe members have used to confirm their Tigua lineage,” Vela fumes. “Our ancestors’ names are written right next to their ancestors’ names on the page. I am still recognized as an Indian by the federal government, but not by my own tribe.” She began to suspect that the real issue was not one of bloodlines, but of a blood feud: Her family had opposed the tribal council in past elections, and her brother was a friend of Marty Silvas’. They stood in the way, Vela contends, of the tribal council’s desire for absolute power and wealth. “If there are fewer tribal members,” she says, “everyone gets a bigger piece of the pie.”
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