NOGALES

Nogales BY PHYLLIS BALESTRERO

Have you ever wondered what kind of town Nogales, Arizona is? For some it has always been a place you go through to get to "old Mexico," a little city on the International Boundary with a few stores and a set procedure for Americans-You approach the line; the Mexican authorities either wave you through, murmuring, "Pásele," or sometimes ask, "Buenos días. Adónde va?" or "Where are you going?" On your return, the American customs officers ask, "Hello, folks. Where were you born?" or "All U.S. citizens? What have you brought back from Mexico?" and sometimes, "How far have you been?" They may ask you to open the trunk of your car or look casually into the back seat. If you have been farther south than Nogales, Sonora, they ask, "Do you have any fresh fruit or vegetables with you?" For us the conversation usually winds up with the officer saying, "OK. That's all for 32 days." We started for Nogales one April Sunday with plans no different than for any other trip into Mexico. U.S. 89from Tucson to Nogales is a fine four-lane highway, and on any Sunday you find yourself a part of an auto armada all bent for the border. Traffic moves fast. You have to

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"VIEW OF AMBOS NOGALES" BY JOSEF MUENCH. 4x5 Linhof Super Technika camera; Ektachrome; f.11 at 1/25th sec.; 5½" Zeiss Tessar lens; April, sunny morning. View taken from the eastern hills overlooking the two cities of Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora. Set in hills that shut off parts of both cities, the border towns of Nogales, Sonora, to the left, and Arizona, to the right, can never be seen in their entirety from any one point. The one in Sonora happens to have the larger population and boasts the biggest building, a hotel. The Arizona Nogales is the largest port of entry in the state and traffic flows easily and briskly between Ambos (both) Nogales twenty-four hours a day.

"INTERNATIONAL BOUNDARY, NOGALES" BY JOSEF MUENCH. 4x5 Linhof Super Technika camera; Ektachrome; f.18 at 1/10th sec.; 6" Schneider Xenar lens; April, sunny day. View taken from a hilltop along the fence between the border cities of Nogales on U.S. 89. The photographer does well to get as high as he can to command an overview at this spot-showing little difference between the two cities. The fence shown here divides Mexico from the United States, Arizona from Mexico's second largest state, Sonora.

A city to buy products made in Mexico from Garrett Wray's store in Nogales, Arizona. Katherine W. Johns, manager of this fine importing establishment on U.S. 89, smiled when we looked astonished at this statement. She explained, "Mexican citizens will buy products locally which are made in their own region, but it is easier for them to get to Nogales, Arizona, than to other sections of their own country."

The west coast states of Mexico are separated from the rest of the country by the Sierra Madre mountains, a high, nearly impassable range stretching from Nogales to Guadalajara. Now, the new west coast highway is paved all the way from Mexico City to Nogales where it joins U.S. 89. This highway has brought a tremendous economic growth to the little border city.

The late Mr. Wray established his store twenty-five years ago. Now Mrs. Wray and Miss Johns direct a very efficient staff of clerks and packers in their importing and exporting business. Mrs. Wray still makes extensive buying trips to all parts of Mexico and to Central America to find the fine products the store sells. On both a wholesale and retail basis, Garrett Wray's ships products to all parts of the United States, to Canada, Hawaii, and to Europe.

Nogales is a history townIt really has two histories, since it began with the Franciscan priest, Fray Marcos de Niza who first lifted the "cactus curtain" on what is now southwestern United States. Fray Marcos entered this territory at the site of a tiny settlement on the border called Lochiel, went exploring all the way to the northeast boundary of modern Arizona, and returned to Mexico City by way of the Santa Cruz Valley. It seems that Fray Marcos had a vivid imagination since it was his story of having found the mythical Seven Cities of Cibola that sent Coronado off the following year, 1540, on a trek which took him as far east as present day Kansas. Failing to find the wealth and fortune he sought, Coronado returned after two years to Mexico City, and that was that for another 145 years. Then, in 1687 Padre Eusebio Francisco Kino, the Jesuit missionary responsible for a series of twenty-one missions in Sinaloa, Sonora, and southern Arizona, began his explorations. After Father Kino's christianization of the Indians the curtain never really descended again, for silver was discovered near present day Nogales, and the rush was on.

The second period of Nogales' history, the history of the town itself, began a few years after the Gadsden purchase. In 1880, Jacob Isaacson, a San Francisco merchant, decided that a trading post was needed at the border on the stage route from Tucson to Guaymas. Isaacson also knew that a railroad was being planned along this route which would be an extension of the service from Benson, Arizona. The railroad was to meet a Mexican line being built from Moreno Station, a point about forty miles north of Guaymas, Sonora. Mrs. Ada E. Jones, one of Nogales' old-timers, writes in a manuscript now in the archives of the Arizona Pioneers Historical Society in Tucson, a description of this first Nogales building,"A man by the name of Isaacson had a trading post on the ground about where the Southern Pacific depot is now located. The building was made of ocotillos, the

The following account of this attack,

"On the day of the Peck slayings Charlie Owen was riding toward the Peck Ranch with Mr. Peck when a band of Indians swooped down on the pair. In an exchange of bullets, Charlie Owen was instantly killed, and Mr. Peck's horse was shot from under him. Peck was captured, but the horror of the experience so affected his mind the Indians thought he was crazy. They stripped him of his boots and after telling him to stay away from his ranch, rode away.

Peck walked barefoot to his ranch where he found his wife and child slain. Putting his loved ones on a bed, the grief-stricken man then walked ten miles barefoot to Calabasas for assistance, leaving behind him three pairs of boots in the house."

In 1893 the town was incorporated, and after some disagreement about the name, was finally called "Nogales." This is the Spanish word for "walnut trees," and in the early days a walnut grove had furnished shelter for travelers from Sonora who followed the trail of Father Kino. It became the custom for weary wayfarers through the pass to make camp at "los nogales," the site of the present business district.

The first church built was the Trinity Congrega-tional in 1886. In the following year the Sacred Heart Catholic Church was constructed. Years later in the troubled revolutionary days of Mexico when the government closed the churches and exiled the clergy, American custom officials became accustomed to seeing a long parade of Sonoran women, their heads veiled in black lace mantillas, their prayer books clutched firmly, cross the border to attend services in their regular Sunday defiance of the government edict.

Relations between the two nations have been outstandingly friendly at Nogales when one considers the atmosphere today at some international boundary lines. There have been some periods of upset, principally during the Mexican revolutions. The Americans were often sympathetic to both sides as Mrs. Jones says, speaking of the defeat of the Federals by Generals Obregon and Cabrel in 1913, "It made one feel sad to see those Mexican soldiers come over the line without their coats and caps and stack their guns. They had taken off their coats and caps (of the Mexican Army Uniform) and left them in a heap on the steps of the Mexican Custom House. A large number of the soldiers who surrendered (to the American army sent to protect American property) were members of the crack Mexican Rurales."

At the same time, Mrs. Jones describes seeing the "Victorious army of Cabrel take possession of the town, the women and children (wives and children of the soldiers) marching along on the side keeping up with the soldiers, some of the women carrying bundles on their heads, and the children carrying kettles and cooking utensils. It was the custom in Mexico for every soldier to cook his own food. This man Cabrel had been a pupil in my room when I was teaching in the Public School in Nogales in the 90's."

Pancho Villa with his threats to "shoot up Nogales, Arizona" stirred things up again in 1916 to the point that the American army's 12th Infantry under Colonel Sage moved into Nogales, and in an exchange of fire across the border, drove the Villistas south into Sonora.

The last major disturbance was the Manzo-Topete rebellion in 1929 against the government of President Calles. But the normal good natured relations between the two countries are aptly described by Mrs. Jones, "The Peace officers cooperated in those days as well as at the present time. When the authorities of Nogales, Arizona, ordained a dog tax serious trouble was anticipated as the Mexicans are very partial to dogs. Strange to says, Nogales, Sonora passed a similar law, the first time in the history of Mexico, and requested that their dog tags be respected in the U.S. territory. As it was not fair to expect dogs to observe the niceties of International treaties it was agreed between the two cities that the dog tags should be mutually respected."

This, then, is the spirit of the Nogales, both of them-a spirit of friendly cooperation between people having mutual interests and problems and with a similar culture and heritage, since many of the citizens of Nogales, Arizona, are of Spanish-American descent. Both cities love a celebration, for, best of allNogales is a fiesta town.

Whether it's a family party, the opening of a new department store, or the famed Cinco de Mayo (the celebration of the defeat of the French forces on May 5, 1862 at the fortified city of Puebla in their march on Mexico City), Nogales loves a fiesta when beautiful young ladies in fluffy nylon and tulle ride elaborate bedecked floats; when the gates of the International Fence are opened and the people for a time mingle freely without inspection by border guards; when excited children run whooping and hollering in two languages through the streets; when the old ones sit smiling and nodding on the benches in the parks and give their blessings to the bright festivities; when you can forget, for a short while, frantic worries about nuclear weapons and economic crises and just have fun as people.

For the thousand years of the Venetian Republic, but for the Indians of Tumacacori, it is all of history.

The Spanish Crown wanted wealth and believed it lay ready to be plucked from this newly discovered land. The Cross was to fan out, beyond the possible spread of the sword, "civilize" its inhabitants and bind them to the throne, making a groundcover of grass roots to control the erosion of independence or desertion to another power. Whether or not the Catholic Church also saw ultimate wealth as a goal, her dedicated priests, first Jesuits and then Franciscans, labored fervently for the salvation of souls. Tireless, inspired but practical, they planted, irrigated and nurtured the vines of Christianity. Painstakingly they taught the Indians to use seeds and plants brought with them and how to make adobes of mud and straw to be cured in the sun. We have slim records of babies baptized, couples united in marriage, loved ones buried and "souls saved." What the Padres were really doing was to build, generation after generation, a heritage of faith in the Southwest and the Cross is still deeply imbedded in that soil, whether rocky or fertile.

In the eyes of the Padres, who kept hoping for more than mere promises from Spain, the work went slowly. The natives, expecting nothing, found themselves possessed of new kinds of crops in expanding fields, cattle to raise and eat, exciting new handcrafts and perhaps some glimmering of what the Cross and Sacrament meant to their robed teachers. The first church, however simple Father Kino may have found it, was almost a miracle to these people. Mostly under his guidance, when he could be there to oversee it, the Indians raised it, adobe row by row. That their mission was merely a visita to a larger establishment to the south at Guevavi, with a priest coming only occasionally, could not possibly have been disappointing to them.

In 1751 a Pima Indian, with ego inflated by Spanish praise for aid against the Seris, led a rebellion. Many churches were destroyed in the region and one hundred people killed. It was, no doubt, a terrifying time, but fields must still be cultivated and the adobe walls would be built up again.

In the wake of the revolt came soldiers to Tubac, three miles north of Tumacacori, establishing Arizona's first Spanish settlement. The villagers learned to look to them for protection against the Apaches, now raiding everywhere that Spanish cattle or goods might be had for the grabbing. Spain was providing not only something to steal, but horses on which to make sudden darting attacks and then be off out of reach of guns or swords. "Civilization" also brought diseases that swept in epidemics through the villages, probably including Tumacacori.

At this time there seems to have been about two hundred Indians in our village. Some of them had built adobe houses for themselves near the mission. Each year more Pimas and Papagos learned new ways of the white man to make life easier in the Valley. The momentous events of 1776 which loom so large in our minds had no meaning for them, but the next year, when the long arm of Spain plucked the Jesuits away, they must have thought their world had come tumbling down.

If any of them saw their priests stealthily remove the fine bells and transport them out into the desert where they were buried, they told no one. Or did the tired, discouraged Padres promise to come back some day and put the bells in place again? To this day, though many have searched, the old Spanish bells have never been found.

To this legend of the bells can be added others-the inevitable stories of lost mines. Through the years people have refused to believe the patent fact that the busy priests had no time to dig for gold, silver and maybe now uranium will be added to the list. Of course, the argument goes, when the Jesuits were dispossessed, the mine entrances were buried or the map to them hidden. The carefully laid old floors of the church at Tumacacori have been ripped up in the silly search. Somewhere, not too far away back in the hills, there is a massive oaken door. When you have wrenched off the rusting padlock (after locating the right spot) you will find fabulous treasure. Maybe so, maybe so. But it is hard to fathom why the Fathers, so enthusiastic about building their churches, could not have spared a little of all of this wealth when they needed it so desperately.

Still more priceless, if it could be located, would be a complete record of Tumacacori, of how her churches were built, the Indians taught, who painted pictures on the walls and whose hands shaped the lost statues.

The departure of the Jesuits didn't stop the roll of the seasons, the birth of new babies or the death of old folks. And the next year brought the Franciscans with a new Saint, Joseph, to replace the earlier San Cayetano, to Tumacacori. By then the Pimas and Papagos were accustomed to new faces and found their new teachers not very different from the Jesuits. There was always work to be done. Now Tumacacori was head of the district and Guevavi as well as Calabasas reduced to visitas. The church was rebuilt, after an Apache raid reduced it almost to ruins while most of the soldiers at Tubac were on the Anza expedition-founding San Francisco. Many of the villagers had been frightened away by the ruthless assault and their simple homes ravished.

Since arms had failed to subdue or even hold off the Apaches, a new policy of appeasement was begun. The giving of trinkets and "poor grade" guns and ammunition would seem a dubious course, but there followed a number of years of comparative peace.

Another new and vigorous Franciscan, Father Narciso Gutierrez, arrived in 1794. He found the church "split open in two parts," and was eager to begin thebuilding of a new and larger one. As a measure of how slowly things went on this frontier, it was eight years before we heard that the work had actually been started. It was Gutierrez' life work, still in the building when he died in 1820.

The massive church stands yet, a noble ruin and main feature of the Tumacacori National Monument, ranked as one of America's most historic landmarks. From the some one hundred Indians left in the village, the Priest drew his builders. He himself was architect and teacher, overseeing every detail while carrying on the multifarious duties among his people. A few dimensions and the type of construction are necessary to give an idea of the immensity of the task and of how the impossible was performed.

The plan of the mission shows the shape of a capital E (minus the middle arm) one hundred and one feet along the spine of the E from entrance, through nave to sanctuary, and approximately fifty feet across the ends. The arms contain the baptistry on the ground floor, choir loft above crowned by bell arches on the third floor in one and the sacristy in the other. The lantern on the domed colonnade over the sanctuary is forty-one feet from the ground.

Foundations were set some five feet below the surface, using huge river boulders, dragged up from the Santa Cruz and set in mud mortar. On top of this were laid the thick walls, nine feet through to support the bell tower and tapering to five feet in other places. They were built with a core of rubble masonry-more river boulders set in mud mortar-and protected by two rows of adobes inside and another two outside. Fire-lime, water and riversand was applied in several layers as a finish. Capping the walls for added strength-in a cornice around the top of

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"TUMACACORI MISSION AND SANTA CRUZ VALLEY" BY JOSEF MUENCH. 4x5 Linhof Super Technika camera; Ektachrome; f.25 at 1/5 sec.; 15" Schneider Tele-Xenar lens; April, sunny day with shifting clouds. From a hillside to the west of the Mission Tumacacori the spread of Santa Cruz River Valley can be seen with the Santa Rita Mountains rising in the background. On U.S. 89 between Tucson (forty-eight miles to the north, left in this picture) and Nogales fourteen miles to the south (right in the picture). Ranches and fields are seen along the nearby Santa Cruz River.

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"GOLDEN YEARS OF TUMACACORI-A DIORAMA" BY JOSEF MUENCH. 4x5 Linhof Super Technika camera; Ektachrome; f.11 at 1 sec.; 3" Eastman wide-field lens; April, indoorsdiorama artificially lighted. One of the dioramas in the museum at Tumacacori Mission National Monument. Prepared by the National Park Service Western Museum Laboratories at Berkeley, California, this diorama shows a service in the fine old Church as it might have appeared about 1820. The restoration is a result of exhaustive research and even the tiny candles on the altars twinkle. The figures-smaller toward the altar-add to the perfect sense of proportion and a button in front of the diorama starts music, such as might have been played for the service. The artist who made the figures (name not given) has shown himself as a Spanish don, the largest figure at the extreme right-foreground.

"TUMACACORI MISSION, REAR VIEW" BY JOSEF MUENCH. 4x5 Graphic view camera; Ektachrome; f.18 at 1/10th sec.; 6" Ektar lens; afternoon, early May; sunny day. Late afternoon light brings out the interesting texture of the fine old walls of Tumacacori Mission. Prickly Pear (Opuntia Engelmannii) in the foreground suggests semi-arid region in which Mission is set.

The nave, for the sanctuary dome and the vault of the sacristy, the adobes were first fired to hardness. No doubt, Gutierrez would have used these for the whole structure if there had been sufficient labor and money to hire it.

The inside walls were coated with gypsum plaster, a white on which decorations could be painted most effectively. The floors were a six to eight inch lime mortar and broken fragments of burned adobe brick, painted with the deep red of ferric oxide. Six by six inch beams of Ponderosa Pine timbered the roof of the entrance and nave, resting on an inside cornice. They were covered with a mat of Ocotillo stems, a mortar-tight matting of grass or wheat stems and a final coat of lime mortar and brick fragments to seal out the rain.

Those timbers and others used throughout the buildings, had to be cut high in the Santa Ritas, under continual threat of Apache attack, and dragged twenty miles before they could be put into place. It is estimated that over sixteen hundred cubic yards of material went into the church building.

Babies were born to the sound of construction and grew up to do their share of building. Beginners in masonry must have developed into "master craftsmen" and the horizon of the whole village widened as the walls grew in stature, as the dome and arches took shape. The final dome over the bell arches was never put on,or the mortuary completed, but the interior was decorated and furnished. Within the nave were four side altars, for that hoped for time when mass might be said by several priests at the same time. Above each was a high window and between them, two ceiling-high pilasters with statue niches, one above the other. There There was the pulpit, suspended in one corner which the priest entered through an archway up steps from the sacristy.

We can assume a statue of the Madonna over the sanctuary altar and one of St. Joseph, patron of Tumacacori. There were also reliefs here and there, pictures and painted designs on the walls, among them the particularly meaningful crossed palm fronds-symbol of martyrdom.

Along the walls of the sanctuary twelve rectangular outlines indicate where pictures of the apostles were fastened. In this, the most highly decorated of the rooms, remnants of designs give an idea of colors used in the painting. There was indigo blue (probably from Spain via Mexico) charcoal carbon for black, red from cinnabar, green of copper compounds, yellow and orange from iron oxides. Mesquite gum, now entirely gone, may have been the pigment carrier.

Though the great church was never finished, probably neither its priest nor Indians, when they gathered there, thought of the missing tower or dome. As they kneeled in the spacious nave, and incense, choir voices and the chant of prayers prayers filled it, the miracle that was a desert mission "cathedral"-worlds away from Spainwas complete. They had built it-priest and Indian-out of mud and straw and their own life fabric.

The lands of San José de Tumacacori, enlarged in 1807 to 52,000 acres (how flourishing the cattle and horse raising must have been) was now to be sold as "abandoned pueblo lands." That the villagers still lived on them seems not to have mattered. Manuel Maria Gandara, several times governor of Sonora, paid $500 for the whole parcel, mission and all.

A priest came when he could spare time from at least another eight ravished missions in his charge, to baptize babies and record the fact in the church record. The last notation was made on September 3, 1847.

As though Nature herself wanted to add a final blow, came the unheard of intensity of the winter of 1848-9. Crops were lost, stock died and the villagers of Tumacacori finally gave up, leaving their homes to join kinsmen at San Xavier.

In 1854 the Gadsden Purchase transferred all of Southern Arizona, south of the Gila River to the United States. The mission church here, as elsewhere, fell into ruin. Travelers camped in the sacristy, smoking its walls and ceiling with their cooking fires. Timbers gave way; roofs fell in.

Only after the civil war, the end of Apache warfare in 1886 and the turning of the new century, do we find swelling interest in the fine old mission.

On September 15, 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed 10 acres, including church and most of the village site, the Tumacacori National Monument. It was administered by the Forest Service until 1916 when the National Park Service was established. There were still difficulties over the title, reaching clear to the Supreme Court, and the land was given twice to the government before it was completely settled in 1917.

In the new era of her history, Mission San José de Tumacacori has been partially repaired. There is no plan for complete restoration, only stabilization and protection. Visitors who come on paved U.S. Highway 89, the fortyeight miles south from Tucson or the eighteen miles north from Nogales, must do their own restoration.

National Park Rangers will guide them through the mission church and garden (or they may use the excellent little self-guiding tour booklet) where they must rebuild for themselves its domes and refurnish with stout hand-hewn furniture, repaint the weather-stained walls and replace the missing statues. Each must be his own priest and neophyte in the nave and sanctuary.

The fragrant Rose of Castille, Olive and orange trees of Spain, and other flowers and shrubs which may well have flourished under the hands of often home-sick Jesuit or Franciscan grow anew in the pleasant garden.

No longer is this region the most dangerous and hostile frontier on the globe. In Tucson and on the road leading to it are working dude ranches, auto courts, motels, hotels and all the friendliness of a great resort. Lively Nogales, largest port of entry on the Arizona-Mexican border, is still closer, offering glimpses of its twin-neighbor across the line.

Since no facilities exist at Tumacacori, it will be to Tucson and Nogales that visitors turn when they come to help the Valley of the Santa Cruz celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Monument this September.

Many will come, for more people have stepped into the big church since it was a monument than had ever entered it at the solicitation of the earnest Fathers during the previous eighty-six years of its existence. Now no threat of savage raid or rebellion comes to disturb the peace of the place. Church and empty workshops, garden and staunch adobe walls are recognized and treasured as monuments to the Indians and the priests who laid here some of the foundations of our own present prosperity.

The vintage wine has been bottled and saved-for us to sip, with all its delicate bouquet and its heart-warming, fine flavor of the Golden Days of Tumacacori.