Cheyenne Life

FROM July 27, 2004

Marie and I are exploring downtown. I photograph a man wearing a period sheriff's costume, and holding a shotgun. We turn away; the gun goes off. We duck and cover. The last time I heard a gun so intimately, the ex-drug dealer on my block was killed. The cowboy is theatrically reenacting a duel.

We visit the only independent record store in town, where they proffer Che T-shirts and "smoking glass." The punk kids behind the counter are cute, bored, and 17, and sense immediately we are not from 'round here. Because they would have known us already. If they are anything like I was at 17, they will think about us later, longingly. There's a world outside and we are evidence.

I am standing by the trash can in the PR office. A cowboy comes over and spits in some chaw.

My aunt also grew up here but was born in 1931. She has been revisiting Steinbeck, and realizes the people she knew as a child could have been characters in Tortilla Flats: Rosarita La Ciega, the blind alcoholic; El Chotin, the man who played guitar but was always in jail; her Tia Andrea, who knew the medicines and gave them sage teas. She tells me about living in a cowboy town with real outhouses, where the two main inhabitants--poor Mexican immigrants and rich white ranchers--never mingled until WWII. She thinks the stereotypes hearken back to the Mexican-American War, when Anglos in power asserted superiority to make way for dictionary-entry colonialism. That it was easier for them to take land from a people they called lazy, meek and stupid. This is only her theory, she says, but it is something tangible when she remembers entries refused and services denied.

I am not allowed to make disparaging comments about GW Bush under my mother's roof.

We go to the "Indian Village," where several different tribes are dancing and selling turquoise jewelry, pelts, and fry bread. A man from Vancouver, BC, called Dances with Lightning, does a 20-minute long Navajo hoop dance; he manipulates woven hoops to represent the sun, the earth, the snake, the wind, the eagle. We all gather for a Lakota friendship dance, in which we hold hands and stomp rhythmic steps in a circle. We can hear the echo of gunshots from the rodeo.

My cousin is nearly 18 and being stalked by El Army. The recruiter truck, a hummer painted "YO SOY EL ARMY," rides by in the parade. His sister screams out, "Stop calling my brother! He's going to live at home until he's 105!"