Concha Rosales had perhaps sixteen years the day she sent her bay gelding up into the portales of the Rooster’s Soul pulqueria to confront a bocon (loudmouth) who had insulted her. No one could remember any female ever doing something like that. And certainly it was hard to recall seeing such a mature, short-tempered male challenged like that by a sixteen year old. Just about everyone who knew the Rosales family well thought Concha was fiften or sixteen; they didn’t really know for sure.
Because the child who became Concha was the sole survivor when a rattling, hard-used bus that went over the mountain side of a zig-zagging dirt road, no one really knew her age, or her name. Nine days after the accident, Guadalupe (“Lupe”) Rosales had gone to the presidencia municipal (county seat), to see if anyone had claimed the wreaks’ single survivor. An unscathed female infant had been found in the ruins of the naufrago. Because it was the end of the wet season and the driver’s seat, the steering wheel, motor and several passenger seats had landed in a rain-filled arroyo, the Guadalajara journalist who wrote a vivid report of the bus-wreck used a shipwreck noun to give some flavor to the story. He was probably bored by yet another bus wreck. They were very common occurances then, especially during rainy season.
Lupe and her husband, Chema Rosales — then an acquaintances of mine —had a friend working in the presidencia, and they were given the infant. The child had been temporarily placed with a relative of the presidente municipal. But that woman had nine children, including a baby of her own — which was why she could breast feed the bus wreck survivor. And why she was pleased to pass the infant orphan along to someone else.Those circumstances became the veiled, and odd, “birth story“ of Concha in the Chema Rosales family. An exceptional beginning.
I didn’t know any of this until later, when I was working with Chema. Concha, early on as small girl, was said to have a suspicious relationship with “duendes.” Duendes are elf-like beings that hung out in thickets of brush. Legend said that they were most active, and often dangerous, in the rainy season. They could cast spells, sometimed good, sometimes evil, on those that attracted their attention, or aggravated them somehow. But when Concha was thee or four she played in the portil (colt pasture) near the barn. It was a field that had thickets of brush lined with long-spined huisache bushes growing along the fencing.
Lupe and many of Chema’s relatives, like most campo Mexicans in those days believed in duendes, but Chame said he did not. However, the child, who had just learned to walk and run, often tumbling among the stones of the horse lot, and inspecting the brush along the fence line, worried Chema. His thirteen-year-old son, Lalo, was supposed to watch Concha, but he believed in duendes and kept too far a distance from the child. Chema scolded Lalo, telling him the pasture also had snakes in it. He finally told one of his daughters, Lula, to take care Concho — with about the same results. When Concha did get bitten by a snake, Lula saw only a dark form slithering back into the brush. Lupe rushed Concha to a bruja/curer she’d often used. The child was sweating and seemed barely conscious. The bruja worked her elaborate oocult ways. When the child woke, she grasped the bruja’s little finger with surprising strength and said a word she’d recently begun to use: “Sister.” The bruja jerked her hand away. “That’s a strange reaction to a snake cure,” she told Lupe, squinting at her small patient.
These were “tales,” Chema and Lupe told me when Chema and I began a minor partnership in raising cattle both for milking and for beef. Concha seemed “about” sixteen then. And an unusual, observant young girl. I hadn’t seen her in some time before the pulqueria incident. But that event had impressed me. By then, of course, Concha had learned all the traditional “female” chores young women heading into puberty — and thus marriage — were taught. She helped her mother, Lupe, grind corn on a stone metate for the day’s tortillas early every morning, brought water from the ranch’s well for the family, filling numerous jarras (clay waterjugs). The reddish ones were for drinking water only, the dark gray ones were for everything else: bathing, moping floors, washing dishes. Concha changed the children’s bedding when needed, mopped the ancient tile floors, changed the clothes of the smaller children when necessary. She would pick lice from their hair later in the day. Older women of Chema’s extended family nodded at the calm, unchildish energy with which she performed her chores — and the fact that she never seemed to complain. By fifteen, she had become athletic. Not lumbering as boys her age did, but as if practicing an unobtrusive private dance of some kind, moving smoothly from one piece of a task to another as if she’d learned it long ago. That’s because, I decided, she was a watcher, noticing how the quickest, least excitable of family did their jobs. Lupe, Chema and a few others, moved easily without calling attention to their homely skills.
But as her younger “sisters” became old enough to master the traditional list of “women’s” chores, Concha’s presence in the corral increased — at the side of the farrier nailing horseshoes on a touchy bronc which she helped sooth, and practicing heeling calfs with the rope I’d got her, all the while plying Chema to let her have exclusive use of a dark bay gelding she called Castaño, Spanish for the color chestnut. (It was the mount she’d been riding that day at The Rooster’s Soul, when she knocked over most of the tables, including mine.)
“Es demasiado jugueton,. O sea, retozon” — meaning, “he’s too frisky.” But she flashed a bit of “little girl” charm — though she clearly was no longer seen by most people as a little girl. Chema finally gave her the gelding.
But it was her forwardness that bought her trouble. Though she didn’t seem to pay it much mind, she tried to dole it out scantily. Being a full-time watcher now, she sensed the danger of this matter. She knew her behavior was contrary to what most of Mexican society at all levels expected of a fifteen-sixteen-year-old girl. Still, some folks just shunned her. I guessed that Concha expected that. She’d been long testing her boundaries in small ways, and a certain amount of disapproval came with that.
There was a sense that this wasn’t just teen-time mischief, or an acting out of a “rebellious phase.” Concha, it seemed, simply had been quicker than most people realized in figuring out much of what made both her peers and a lot of adults around her tick.
That didn’t mean she understood it all. Her experience wasn’t that wide. It was just what things and people were like.
This was shortly after the May 23, 1962, assassination of Rubin Jaramillo, the widely popular agrarian chieftain and his entire family, including his pregnant wife, by Federal Judicial Police and members of the army under the rule of Adolfo Lopez Mateos, who Mexicans in the city were praising for his progressive ways that favored “the people.”
Jaramillo’s official assassination became infamous — among “the people,” especially campesino ranchers and farmers — especially after Carlos Fuentes went with several other reporters to the death scene with some of Jaramillo’s fellow agarian leaders. Jaramillio’s death, which made news world wide, grew after Fuentes‘ bitterly eloquent and condemnatoiry article in “Siempre!” magazine and was reprinted throughout the Republic. U.S. singer Phil Ochs wrote a song about Jaramillo. Here, villages and schools were named after him. But no one was ever charged with the killing.
That gave some people the idea that crimes against agriculturists would not be punished.
Suddenly, farmers and ranchers became targets of harassment and thievery, in some places taking the form of outright public murders. In some venues it took a family, traditional form: An outbreak of rustling.
Ranchers such at the Rosales‘ and the many branches of their extended family, became better armed, and much more vigilant. Though part of the Rosales ranching operation functioned under different surnames, that occurred because of marriage. Despite that bit of difference it was a pretty tightly woven band scattered across as series of foothills, arroyos, valleys, plateaus, ridges, mesas, palisades surrounding what they called el cumbre, — the peak — though all of it was referred to generally and somewhat geologically inaccurately as Cerro Alto. If there were some families that felt it was either too loosely, or comfortably well knit, now it became very tightly woven.
Patrols worked this rough terrain at night. Easy access from ancient brecha — trails — first formed long ago by foot, next by burros, more recently a few by wagons. But all of them now either closed by easily available boulders, or fencing festooned with tin cans filled with pebble or stones, or other lively sounding ornaments.
Of course, Concha asked for night duty, which most individuals of her age shunned. Concha liked it because it would keep her eyes, her hearing, her sense of smell sharp, and that other sense that seemed to Chema, Lupe, and some other who knew about, insluding me and an enviable, if curious, instinct that some of her family didn’t even know she possessed: a greatly unnoted instinct when people were approaching her. It is really not all this unusual. We are all, or at least, most of us, born with such instincts. But they apparently get educated out of us. That’s what she told Chema and Lupe. She wanted to study, to learn many things, but she didn’t want to lose neither her “ordinary” senses — sight, smell, hearing, taste, and so forth. But she didn’t want lose her other “senses,” which she never really itemized, out of her instinct of feeling things around her, even without being able to see them. And the future was about to test all the senses she had, whether she spoke of them or not.