fea I >. • - Desert Magazine of the Southwest

TIGUAS
Continued from page 51
edges the fact that their presence
testifies their profound contrition for
sins committed during the year and
their gratitude for blessings they have
enjoyed.
On other days, skilled hands roll the
red local clay into fat strips and coil it
into the slowly emerging shape of a pot.
I watch these rites and routines and I
ponder.
In that deliberate, watchful processthere
is no other way I can say it—something
tribal begins speaking in me.
Though I am an Anglo newcomer here
on the Tiguas' ancient preserve, I sense
in myself a pleasure in ritual, in tradition
maintained through the long past,
in the Tiguas' quiet facial expressions
that seem to acknowledge the fact of
their own mortality, yet manifest to the
world a sense of their own extension in
time, both past and future. They are
sustained by broader meanings that we
clock-ridden folks can't quite perceive
in our present dictates and pressures.
At the Tribal Center, in their crafts
workshop •and herb gardens, the Tiguas
welcome visitors. Having just written
the word "visitors," I recall something
Tom Diamond senses in his contacts
with the tribe's oldest man. "You know,
according to him," says Diamond, "a
'visitor' is what everybody is, who drops
in for a look at the Tiguas. But he
doesn't just mean to the reservation, he
means to this desert land and this valley.
After all, according to things as he sees
them, the Spaniards, they came and
they went. The Mexicans, they came
and they went. And then, the old
Tiguas pauses and squints at us Anglo-
Americans and says nothing."
Maybe the Tigua elder does have a
point about us European drop-ins, who
come to snap a few pictures and buy a
real Indian pot. But, it could be that he,
for all his tribal wisdom, misses a point
about himself and all other men.
In the changes that life unavoidably
brings to us all, it is the traditional
peoples, preserving their myths, crafts
and sense of roots that may have the
most valuable truths to share with all of
us temporary folks, us global visitors.
A few months ago, 750 million people
watched a simple tribal rite—a family
reunion and a wedding, no less—televised
to the world. The pageantry,
color, music and England's remarkable
skills at arrangement and order accounted
for much of the pleasure we felt
in watching its bride and groom approach
the door of its church, pass in
and kneel while its elders declared the
young pair the start of a new family
unit, inside the tribe.
When England's symbolic new family
emerged from the church, we cheered—
along with the tribe. Cheering and
matching their smiles with ours, we
celebrated something beyond one single
tribe's unique events. We cheered, I
think, life's renewal made grand and
grandly patterned through established
ceremoney.
For 300 years, young and old Tiguas,
the brides and grooms, the wearied, the
grieved and the deeply contrite have approached
the Tiguas' church door and
altar, motivated by faith, instructed by
ancient mores. Among Tiguas now, I
sense a deep hunger still for meaningful
order and form in their arts and rites—
partly as religious believers, partly as
Tiguas—but mostly as human beings
sustained by an order that helps them
exert some patterned control over time.
Driving back onto I-10,1 glance again
at the huddled community, dug in and
clustered around its plaza. Here in my
time and vast everchanging city, I am
encouraged to know that the Tiguas still
dance—to one ancient drum. R3
INTERSTATE 10
North Loop
V
TIGUA INDIAN* S ««»-
RESERVATION
» \
7
Avenue'
of the
Americas
V
—
.]
7
!It
The Tigua Indian Tribal Center is a
mere 10-minute drive from downtown El
Paso.
Joseph Leach is
Professor of American
Studies at the
University of Texas
at El Paso. His interests
beyond teaching
involve the
Spanish colonial
arts, native cultures
and lore of the American Southwest and
desert and wilderness conservation. His
travels have taken him to the Far East—
meaning Connecticut (for a Yale Ph.D.)
and Japan for army service after World
War II—all the countries of Europe, Mexico
and North Africa. His travel plans
now point him south, for the Amazon and
Cape Horn.
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