The New Mexico Trilogy by John Nichols

First published:The Milagro Beanfield War, 1974; The Magic Journey, 1978; The Nirvana Blues, 1981.

Type of plot: Magical Realism

Time of work:The Milagro Beanfield War, the early 1970’s; The Magic Journey, the 1930’s to the 1970’s; The Nirvana Blues, the late 1970’s

Locale: Northern New Mexico and southern Colorado

Principal Characters:

• José (Joe) Mondragòn, a jack-of-all-trades in Milagro
• Nancy Mondragòn, Joe’s wife
• Bernabé Montoya, the sheriff of Milagro
• Carolina Montoya, Bernabé’s wife
• Ladd Devine III, a landowner and developer in Milagro
• Charley Bloom, a transplanted Eastern lawyer
• Linda Romero Bloom, Charley’s wife
• Onofre Martìnez, a one-armed poet and balladeer
• Kyril Montana, an undercover agent for the state police
• Herbert Goldfarb, a member of Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA)
• Dale Rodey McQueen, a landowner and developer in Chamisaville
• April McQueen Delaney, Rodey’s daughter
• Icarus Suazo, a Native American from the Chamisaville Pueblo
• Claude Parker, Chamisaville’s only undertaker
• George Parker, Claude’s son, a schoolteacher
• Virgil Leyba, a Chamisaville lawyer, born in Mexico
• “Junior” Leyba, Virgil’s son, also a lawyer
• Joseph Bonatelli, a mobster
• Joe Miniver, a garbage collector and former advertising man
• Heidi Miniver, Joe’s wife
• Eloy Irribarren, an elderly Chicano farmer

The Novels

In his preface to The Nirvana Blues, John Nichols recalls,

When I sat down to begin The Milagro Beanfield War, I had no idea the story would grow into a trio of books. . . . All three novels are set in mythical Chamisa county, where the folks, the situations and the landscapes resemble parts of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. Should they survive, I suppose future interested persons might refer to these books as his New Mexico Trilogy,’ even though the name of New Mexico never appears in any of the texts.

By the end of the decade, as if by self-fulfilling prophecy, the three novels had already survived several printings and were collectively if informally known under the title suggested by their author.

With The Milagro Beanfield War, John Nichols laid claim to a vast but remote portion of the American West only partially explored by Richard Bradford in Red Sky at Morning (1968) and So Far from Heaven (1973). The territory surveyed, ceded to the United States by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), tends to resist American influence; the indigenous population is largely descended from Spaniards who first settled the region in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Nichols points out throughout his trilogy, the entrenched Hispanic subculture remained largely unchanged until early in the twentieth century, when improved travel and technology brought in English-speaking invaders from all over the United States. That invasion and its consequences, most fully documented in The Magic Journey, provides the theme and context for the entire trilogy, in which the indigenous Hispanic population of the area is threatened with extinction because of claims and counterclaims regarding land and water rights.

In The Milagro Beanfield War, successfully filmed in 1988 by Robert Redford, one man’s impulsive act brings to a head a number of conflicts that have been slowly building for years. Joe Mondragòn, a handyman, small-time farmer, and occasional petty criminal, one day decides to dislodge the barrier that keeps water flowing past his small plot of land instead of into it. Almost at once, Joe’s gesture takes on unintended and unexpected symbolic significance, alerting the Anglo power brokers to possible subversive activity among the natives. Ladd Devine, hereditary proprietor of the ranching conglomerate that has been acquiring land in and around Milagro since the late nineteenth century, has moved into full-scale development, with several resort projects already completed; to defend his interests, he has a coterie of local henchmen and hangers-on, not to mention valuable contacts in the state capital. Whatever land Devine does not own is now the property of the U.S. Forest Service, the “Floresta,” having been acquired from its original Chicano owners over the years by means no less devious than Devine’s. Joe Mondragòn’s deed thus attracts the attention of the state police, most dangerously present in the person of one Kyril Montana, a plainclothes agent who seeks to discredit Joe and his cohorts, if any, by fair means or foul.

As it happens, Joe has no cohorts at the outset; most of his fellow “natives,” including a couple of Anglo transplants, see his action as potentially provocative and try to distance themselves from it. The local sheriff, a Chicano named Bernabé Montoya, does his somewhat ineffectual best to maintain order without choosing sides; Charley Bloom, a transplanted Boston lawyer with a Chicano second wife, has handled cases for Joe in the past but is quite hesitant to involve himself in the currently brewing scandal. Before long, however, Ladd Devine and his various allies have made it quite clear that they intend to neutralize Joe through entrapment, accusing him of some crime other than the irrigation of what used to be his own beanfield. Battle lines are drawn, as are petitions asserting the existence of the Milagro Land and Water Protection Association, headed by a fiery middle-aged woman mechanic named Ruby Archuleta. The “war” of the title, in which only a few nonfatal shots are fired, ends in a stalemate, yet it is clear that things in Milagro will never again be the same.

In The Magic Journey, Nichols focuses on the somewhat larger town of Chamisaville, not far from Milagro, framing his narrative in historical perspective. During the period covered, from the time of the Great Depression to that of the Vietnam War, the native subculture, a reasonably harmonious mix of Hispanic and Native American elements, will be permanently dislocated by the combined forces of venture capitalism and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. At the center of the tale is Dale Rodey McQueen, an itinerant salesman and confidence man from Texas who happens to be driving through Chamisaville en route to Colorado with a truckload of stolen dynamite one day in 1930 when his truck hits a pothole and explodes, exposing a natural mineral spring. Ever the opportunist, McQueen, with the help of several locals and a Denver banker whose daughter he soon marries, turns the spring—-and the surrounding area—into a major tourist attraction, an economic “boom” in the midst of the Depression. Success breeds success, and a new influx of outsiders join McQueen and his “Anglo Axis” in buying up or otherwise controlling all the land and water rights in Chamisa County.

By the end of World War II, McQueen and his cronies have built themselves an empire, creating just enough jobs for the locals to preserve a state of uneasy truce. By that time, however, McQueen is at least dimly aware that he has also brought into the world his most implacable adversary, his daughter April.

Born around 1931, reared in increasingly privileged circumstances as her father’s empire has developed, April McQueen matures from a curious, difficult, but charming child into a brilliant, headstrong, and beautiful young woman. From childhood, she has been familiar with all social strata in and around Chamisaville, increasingly sensitive to the injustices perpetrated by her father and his way of life. At sixteen, she runs away from home, seeking fame, fortune, and adventure amid the literary and artistic ferment of the late 1940’s and early 1950’s; she comes of age on the fringes of the Beat generation. By the time hippies appear on the scene in the 1960’s, April is there to meet them on their own terms; her consciousness has long since been raised. In 1963, April returns to Chamisaville for a visit, just in time to observe her parents’ response to John F. Kennedy’s assassination; five years later, she settles in Chamisaville for good, bringing the two children from her failed third marriage to a radicalized African American academic named Matthew Delaney.

As April Delaney, Rodey McQueen’s wayward daughter will raise fresh hell with her father’s empire, writing subversive articles and circulating petitions on behalf of the newly disfranchised of Chamisaville. She will also return to certain old loves, such as the aging lawyer Virgil Leyba and the schoolteacher George Parker, a high school classmate. Curious as ever, April seeks and finds all manner of corruption surrounding such local development projects as the electrification of the Native American Chamisaville Pueblo, too engrossed in her discoveries to notice signs of encroaching illness.

The political situation, meanwhile, continues to heat up, with April at its center, attracting the attention of state and federal agents. While investigating a suspicious murder, April, already doomed to die of cancer before her fortieth birthday, is abducted and murdered by federal agents called in by the “Anglo Axis,” her body left to rot by the roadside. “Yet April’s constituency was all but gone by the time she died,” observes the omniscient narrator, the “Anglo Axis” having displaced those young enough to survive.

The action of The Nirvana Blues takes place in Chamisaville less than a decade after April Delaney’s death, yet true to the narrator’s observation, few familiar characters survive; one of the few is Joseph Bonatelli, a gangster whom April first saw at her father’s house in 1963 but whose connection to the “Anglo Axis” remained mysterious.

By 1980, the area has become a mecca not only for tourists but also for all manner of well-heeled, well-educated dropouts desperately fleeing one American Dream in search of another. Joe Miniver, a former advertising copywriter now self-employed as a garbage collector, has chosen as his private dream one of the few Chamisaville farms still in indigenous hands, less than two acres belonging to eighty-three-year-old Eloy Irribarren. To finance his dream, Joe has become involved in a wild scheme involving a shipment of cocaine, although he himself has managed generally to steer clear of the Chamisaville drug “scene.” Over five days, Joe will break his marriage vows for the first time—but with three different women—and have strange run-ins not only with the mobster Bonatelli but also with a locally based sect combining Asian mysticism and monkey worship. During that time, Joe will also forge a strong if bizarre bond with Eloy Irribarren, whose land and water rights may not, in fact, be his to sell, as encumbered as they are by conflicting legal claims.

The cocaine, when finally located, turns out to be five pounds of sugar, but by then time has run out for both Joe and Eloy; following a botched bank robbery, the two men are gunned down by police while attempting to restore the original irrigation ditches adjoining Eloy’s property. Progress, only slightly delayed by April Delaney’s machinations a decade earlier, has triumphed at last.

The Characters

In undertaking what would become the New Mexico trilogy, John Nichols adopted a mode of storytelling different from his earlier and later novels, a mode similar to that of the “proletarian” novels of Upton Sinclair and John Steinbeck. The trilogy derives much of its tone and texture from a host of minor characters, many with colorful ethnic names and too numerous to be singled out for individual attention. Against such a background stand characters whose actions in time will prove remarkable, whether by accident or by design. Joe Mondragòn emerges as a most unlikely central character in The Milagro Beanfield War; even at the end of the novel, he feels quite unprepared to be a leader or a symbol and is much more at ease with the simple role of troublemaker. Bernabé Montoya, the sheriff of Milagro, tries to avoid conflict whenever possible; Nichols’s portrayal of Bernabé, although generally sympathetic, often borders on caricature. For example, the sheriff often appears in an emergency situation with his boots on the wrong feet. Charley Bloom, a fugitive from the Eastern law establishment, comes across as a conflicted, often weak, but generally admirable character, perpetually at odds with the upwardly mobile ambitions of his second wife, Linda, a Chicana from Colorado who resents Charley’s involvement with the local Hispanic population.

The “Anglo Axis,” meanwhile, is portrayed close to caricature, a crowd of latter-day robber barons and their acolytes totally ignorant of the population that they are displacing. Ladd Devine III is a ruthless capitalist, married to an alcoholic “trophy wife” who carries on an affair with one of his foremen. The undercover agent Kyril Montana is scheming and sinister, intent on discrediting Charley Bloom with false gossip and quite prepared to gun down Joe Mondragòn in cold blood, if need be. Herbie Goldfarb, a VISTA volunteer posted to Milagro for reasons that are never quite made clear even to him, is likewise drawn close to caricature, yet he serves as an outside observer when not providing comic relief in his search for feminine companionship and pest-free shelter.

In The Magic Journey, Nichols’s characterizations grow sharper and deeper, as does the shape of his tale. Rodey McQueen, the stereotypical “snake-oil salesman,” settles all too easily into the role of later-day robber baron, both more dimensional and potentially more dangerous than his predecessor Ladd Devine III. The Native American Icarus Suazo, who in the 1930’s aided and abetted McQueen with some of his schemes, hardens and matures over forty years into a true revolutionary, complex and inscrutable. Virgil Leyba, born in Mexico at the turn of the twentieth century, took part in the Mexican War with Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata before settling in Chamisaville for his health. Trained in the law, Virgil remains a revolutionary at heart, doing his best to conserve what is left of the Chamisaville natives’ land and dignity. Virgil’s son Junior, a Harvard-trained lawyer uneasily married to a New England Yankee, has long since sold out to the “Anglo Axis” and is truly his father’s nemesis.

Most remarkable of all, however, is Rodey McQueen’s daughter April Delaney, whose brains, beauty, and adventures at times come close to straining the reader’s credulity. Thorns and all, April is a rose born and bred in the desert, returning from her twenty-year formative absence ready and willing to undermine her father’s exploitative empire. Three times married and divorced, with numerous other romantic entanglements dating back to her early teens (including both Leybas, father and son), April in her mid-thirties has become more than her father’s match, having inherited his drive even as she scorns the fruit of his ambitions. So great a threat does she pose to the “Anglo Axis” that federal agents, in league with Rodey McQueen’s business interests, carry out what is in effect a political assassination, little suspecting that April has little more than a few months left to live.

Joseph Bonatelli, a shadowy presence in The Magic Journey, emerges somewhat from the shadows in The Nirvana Blues, controlling such enterprises as a dog-racing track, a resort community, and quite possibly the local drug trade as well. In his encounter with Joe Miniver, he emerges as a stereotypical gangster, with buffoonish behavior that makes him no less menacing. Like the earlier volumes, The Nirvana Blues owes much of its effect to the presence of numerous minor or incidental characters; here, however, Nichols’s narrrative gains considerable power by focusing on the octogenarian Eloy Irribarren, one of the indigenous subsistence farmers whose type forms the crowd in the trilogy taken as a whole. By the late 1970’s, Eloy has become the last of a dying breed, resourceful, proud, and independent, yet literally dispossessed from his home turf. Knowing that he must give up his land, Eloy has settled reluctantly on Joe Miniver as his buyer of choice, even as he doubts Joe’s ability to close the deal. In the touching final scene, having all but given up their plans, the two men join forces in a symbolic, suicidal exercise of revolt. Joe Miniver, meanwhile, is a somewhat less convincing character, a transplanted urbanite whose physical instincts take hold of his reason after years of self-control. Joe’s wife Heidi is somewhat more convincing, both humorous and healthily assertive as she attempts to take control of an unforeseen crisis in her life and marriage. Joe’s death, however amply prepared, lacks the force of April Delaney’s; although Joe makes a valiant last stand, he is less hero than fool, a man who simply happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Eloy, by contrast, achieves with his death a martyrdom equal to that of April Delaney.

Critical Context

The three volumes that make up the New Mexico trilogy are something of a sport in the canon of John Nichols’s published novels; although wry humor and offbeat characterizations have been typical of Nichols’s fiction from the start, he has never elsewhere attempted the technique of Magical Realism, nor has he taken on a project as vast and potentially daunting as the trilogy, which comprises a total of more than fifteen hundred pages in the original trade editions. From the start, the trilogy seemed to attract a readership somewhat distinct from Nichols’s usual audience, taking its place among the works of Upton Sinclair and John Steinbeck as representative samples of proletarian American fiction. Unlike the two earlier writers, however, John Nichols is blessed (or cursed) with a frequently broad sense of humor that, even as it may seem to take the edge off of his social criticism, serves also to breathe fresh air into what might otherwise seem like political polemic.

Bibliography

Nichols, John. If Mountains Die: A New Mexico Memoir. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. A partial autobiography with valuable background comment on the trilogy.

Wild, Peter. John Nichols. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1986. A critical overview stressing the importance of the trilogy in Nichols’s collected works.