Nogales

Border Gateway to Old Mexico Somewhere south of Tucson Amado, maybe, Tubac for sure, you can feel the nearness of Nogales Pass. San Xavier, northernmost of Father Kino's missions, lies half an hour behind. The white dome and crumbling adobe of another Kino mission, Tumacacori, are coming up. Interstate 19 leads you oh, so gradually from the 2400-foot floor of desert at Tucson, to a markedly fresher 3600 feet full of scrub-covered hills. To the left, the 9000-foot peaks of the Santa Rita range, cold, piney, spectacular in the snappy, sunny wake of winter snowstorms. To the right, the shoulders of the Tumacacori and Atascosa hills

And those mountains 'way ahead to

Like the two cultures themselves, Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, converge rather than collide. The ancient pass where they meet has been called by many names and served many purposes in its long existence, from the time of the Conquistadores, when it was a gateway to Pimería Alta to today's escape route to the charm of Old Mexico for busy Americans. . . . Latin America comes to vivid life in the shops and boutiques, left and right, lining the teeming Old World streets of Nogales, Sonora.

Looking much like a gingerbread house with fairy-tale children, this scene captures the peaceful, unhurried mood of the Morley Street border crossing station. Here, as at other crossing points, U.S. visitors enter a lookingglass land of Old World charm. J. Peter Mortimer text continued from page 3 the left? That's Mexico. The western Sierra Madre picks up at the ragged end of the Rockies, leading ever higher, ever more rugged, until it reaches the geologists' paradise and engineers' hell of the Mexican heartland. Along the Sierra's edges are Alamos, Guasave, Culiacán and so many other strange-sounding cities of a “whole 'nother” nation; a land of musical language, intriguing customs, and delightful folkways all woven into the complexities of nowaday nationhood.

So much of that begins in Nogales, and that's only a few more miles make that kilometers; the distance signs since Tucson have been metric: 100 kilometers, mas o menos, from the Old Pueblo to where Arizona meets Sonora.

Nogales, if you're in a Spanish frame of mind; no-gal-us to the gringo and gringo is no fightin' word in these friendly frontierlands, especially if the guy who says it is smiling, and chances are he is.

Nogales. You'll likely see the Sonoran side of this barely divided community before you know you've arrived. 1-19 propels you past the Arizona part, then turns you abruptly eastward as you zip through a cut at the crest of a hill and wham! You're face to face with Latin America.

There, across the draw, are blue, yellow, orange, and pink houses, stacked manfully, if tentatively, around the steep hills alongside more mundane dwellings. The paint jobs proclaim the individuality of the homes' owners one of many charming characteristics a traveler will notice from here to Tierra del Fuego.

And for thousands of travelers a year, exposure to Latin America first takes place in the hills of Nogales Pass.

These hills were part of what early Spanish explorers called the Pimería Alta, the Pima Indian highlands. Fifteen hundred miles of arduous travel lay between this territory and Tenochtitlán, yet the Pimería Alta later on would figure in the Spanish Empire's defense plans.

In 1752 a royal presidio was built at Tubac as protection for Father Kino's chain of missions, draped like a rosary across the high Pimería.

This was treacherous terrain, perfect for staging ambushes. There was no land so terrorized by the Apaches as was the Santa Cruz Valley, whose bottomlands invited farms and ranches, and whose surrounding hills held out their gold, silver, and copper to prospectors willing to risk their lives for it.

As early as the mid-18th century, gold was found just southwest of Nogales Pass, at a place called Arizonac, whose name was applied to the 48th State which one day would become a geopolitical reality not far away. The brief flurry of mining that followed, was one of many that would scatter dirt through the hill-country jutting between two stretches of forbidding desert.

The Santa Cruz Valley was a good route into today's Arizona, but there were better ones west of the Atascosas, where the low-lying Altar Valley offered a continuum of flatland between the deepwater port of Guaymas and the burgeoning presidio of Tucson. The Nogales Pass provided a shortcut for the stout-hearted muleskinners who could live with the threat of Apache attacks along the Magdalena River running south and the Santa Cruz swinging north.

The 19th century brought Manifest Destiny and the Mexican War. When the shooting stopped and Mexican dictator Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna had cut his last deal with his erstwhile enemies, the surveying started on what is today's border. It crossed the Santa Cruz-twice-in the vicinity of Nogales Pass, named after the walnut Nogal trees nurtured there by a mountain spring.

Despite the lingering Apache danger, the pass saw its share of forty-niners, who made their way to California by such diverse routes as Cape Horn, Panama, Tehuantepec, and Salt Lake City.

Why Nogales Pass? Well, for someone coming west from Texas, it was as good a place as any to duck back into the U.S. after a southern swing to avoid most of the Apache suzerainty. As some would discover, even this far west was too far east to avoid the Apache.

Many a miner lost his shirt in California but some remembered the borderland hills where gold and silver could yet be found, albeit in quantities less spectacular than the bonanzas of the Sacramento River. They returned to the Pimería Alta, first as prospecting loners, later as Eastern-financed, full-bore mining venturers. Ore began flowing from the area, first on wagons rattling toward Guaymas, then on a railroad running through none other than the Nogales Pass.

Jacob Isaacson, an itinerant merchant, was there when the line was being surveyed. He set up shop in a tent, then expanded into an ocotillo-walled shack. The year was 1880.

The store drew some settlers. So did a Mexican customs house which went up that same year, anticipating the arrival of the Mexican portion of the railroad.

The settlement became Nogales, which has spent the past year celebrating its centennial. Concerts, art exhibits, and fiestas filled the year, which also saw the old city hall occupied by the Pimería Alta Historical Society Museum.

Its curator is Susan Clarke, who brings a wealth of experience and education to the job. Energetic and in her early-30s, Clarke typifies the active folks who make Nogales anything but a sleepy Southwestern border town. She and her husband, Bill Spater, are up to their necks in community activities. Spater is an executive with Cambridge Thermionics-Cambion, one of many “twin plants” thriving in Nogales and at other points along the 2,000-mile Mexico-U.S. border.

They're assembly plants, and they take advantage of the low cost of Mexican labor for certain stages of manufacture. In huge, modern industrial parks on the south side of Nogales, Sonora, workers many of them young women put together intricate electronic circuits or sew clothing, and text continued on page 36

Spanglish The New Language of the Border Welcome to the United States Bienvenidos a los Estados Unidos

Aspirina, farmacia, carro, qué cute! Sound the least bit familiar?

These are part of a wonderfully expressive, sometimes baffling, but always challenging patois called Spanglish. The lengua franca in Nogales, Arizona, and its twin city Nogales, Sonora. And for that matter, any other town along la frontera, the 2,000-milelong border between Los Estados Unidos and Mexico. It is a medium of conversation that cheerfully defies etymologist and grammarian alike. Its word origins and verb forms are often difficult if not impossible to explain. For most people of Mexican ancestry along the border, it is as easy to slip into either English or Spanish as it is for an automatic transmission to shift gears. But occasionally the gears get stuck.

The result is Spanglish.

If there were any rules of grammar, one would surely be: If you can't think of the Spanish word, pick an English one and add a vowel appropriate to gender, as in car-ro, for car. Another rule would be: If you can't think of the Spanish verb, put a Spanish conjugation on the end of an English one and change the spelling a little, such as parquear - to park your carro.

Suppose you had a headache. You would want an aspirina, of course, so you would go to the farmacia, which handles all kinds of drogas, right? Or at mid-day, if you were hungry and didn't have time to go out to lonchi, you might have them send in un hamburger y Coke, no?

Along the border, Spanglish is known as Caló, but the very name itself is an example of the enigmatic quality of this language medium. No one is sure where the name comes from whether it is a derivation of calle, meaning street, or an abbreviation of Californio, meaning Californian.

According to Pedro Choca, Ph.D., a Phoenix psychologist who uses it in his practice every day, Caló also is a culture, a philosophy of life.

As you may have noticed, phonetics plays a big part in Spanglish. Some other examples are breka for brake, troka for truck, tren for train, metcha for match, chanca for chance, and wifa for wife. Those are the easy ones.

Some of the street slang expressions, however, are a real challenge to the powers of comprehension. An example is ya estufas, which translates out to something like "already stoves" but means stop. Or ponte trokas, which says, "Make yourself into a truck" yet means be alert. These are nonsense words that are made up on the street and somehow become accepted into the dialect, Choca says.

Going in the other direction, idiomatic expressions also suffer in translation. "Don't get carried away" is said "no se aviento," (Don't get blown away), and "no way" is simply "nil," (nothing).

Spanglish cuts a few corners from the ultra-polite Castilian Spanish by following the more direct American syntax and more informal style of address. For instance, creo que sí, meaning I think so, is now said simply creo sí. The expression so-so used to be said, así, no más, (so, no more) but now is said así-así.

More than 50 years ago, H. L. Mencken recognized the changes in spoken Spanish in the Southwestern United States in his book, The American Language. Noting that a dialect close to Castilian was spoken at that time in New Mexico, Mencken saw that "the Spanish pronunciation is preserved, but in the adjoining states it is fast succumbing to Americanization."

Mencken added that both dialects show a great resemblance to American English: "There is the same tendency toward the decay of grammatical niceties, the same hostility to loan-words, the same leaning toward a picturesque vividness, and the same survival of words and phrases that have become archaic in the language."

Spanish language publications along la frontera closely follow the word order of their American counterparts. La Opinión, a respected voice of the border, published in Los Angeles, reported, "Las deliberaciones del jurado entraron el segundo día," (The deliberations of the jury entered the second day).

On the sports pages, the cutline under a picture reported: "Pesando 250 libras," (Weighing 250 pounds) Muhammad Ali needed to reduce. And "Los Gigantes de San Francisco, lideras de la Liga Nacional," seemed to be in trouble. There also was a story about "el boicot" of the "Olympicos."

Spanish language radio and television programs, especially, use the argot of the border, exhorting their listeners to buy various commodities, such as lamps, sofas and other muebles (furniture) all in Spanish, and then end the sentence with something like "al (at the) San Francisco Warehouse." Or an announcer might might say, "Y ahora viene (and now comes) rock y rolla."

Advertising, too, follows the American style of word play, as in a whiskey ad which in English says, "Smoo-oo-oo-oo-th." In La Opinión, the same ad reads, "Sua-a-a-a-ave."

On the Mexican side of the border, fewer English words are used than on the American side, of course, and the farther you travel into the interior the more important it is to know the correct Spanish words. Mexican-Americans from Phoenix say they often have difficulty communicating in Mexico City because all the words in a sentence there are in Spanish.

Incidentally, it is best to refer to persons of Mexican ancestry on the American side of the border as Mexican-Americans until you find out their preference about ethnic labels. Chicano, which the younger people use freely, is not popular among the older generations, and among some Mexican-Americans, especially in the Detroit area, hispanic is repugnant, even though federal agencies are pushing its use.

The term Chicano originated in the barrio of El Paso, Texas. An Indian tribe in the days when Texas still was part of Mexico could not pronounce the word Mejicano (May-he-cahno) and said it Mechicano. The name was shortened to Chicano and only in the last two or three decades has it come into wide usage among the young people, largely as the result of the Chicanos por La Causa, an affirmative action group. Headline writers are fond of the term because it is much shorter than Mexican-American, of course.

In the meantime, as Mencken and others have said, language is a changing medium that reflects constantly changing conditions. Certainly Spanglish is doing its part to describe the social interaction and commercial transactions of a vibrant society.

As the denizens of the border country plunge fearlessly forward into the jungle of crossover nouns and impromptu conjugation, there is new word coinage every day, and many of them evoke smiles on both sides of la frontera.

An example of this, which also demonstrates the ease and spontaneity with which the two languages are blended, is demonstrated by the comment of a young Nogalenca in front of a shop window. Seeing a pair of shoes that pleased her, she squealed, "Qué cute!"