Rambling Boy – The secret history of Big Bend, part III

By LONN TAYLOR

This is the third installment in my ongoing series about the secret history of the Big Bend and the people who have recorded it. By secret history I mean the history of the Spanish-speaking people of the region, which has been omitted from most published histories of the Big Bend. Albert Alvarez of Pecos is today’s featured secret historian. He has spent his working life as a juvenile probation officer and has never published a book, but he has recorded reams of the secret history.

Alvarez is a short, solid man with a broad face that is crinkled with smile lines. You can tell at once that he instinctively likes people. He was born in Brogado, now part of Balmorhea, in 1945, in the adobe house that his great-grandfather built when he came to Brogado from Julimes, Chihuahua, in the late nineteenth century. Alvarez’s grandfather and father were also born in that house, but when Alvarez was about to enter the first grade, his family moved to El Paso, and Alvarez went through public school there, graduating from Bel Air High School. But – and this is the key to understanding his love of history – he spent his summers in Pecos with his widowed grandmother, chopping cotton and digging irrigation ditches. When he was about fourteen, he told me, he started asking his grandmother, who was born in Pilares, Texas in 1888, questions about her life and writing the answers down in pencil on brown paper grocery bags. “I asked her about little things,” Alvarez said. “What did you eat? How did you cook it? I asked her so many questions she used to call me el pregunton, the inquisitive one.”  From his grandmother he moved on to the old men who lived in her neighborhood, men who had been cowboys or farmers or railroad workers. “They took me in and told me their stories,” Alvarez said, “and I wrote them down.” At some point Alvarez graduated from writing on grocery bags to writing in big bound ledgers, the kind you could buy in five and ten cent stores, and he now has a footlocker full of these in his study, along with a file cabinet full of papers and a closet crammed with photographs, records, and notes. He has been talking to Mexican-Americans and writing down what they told him for fifty years.

Alvarez has three essential attributes of a historian: innate curiosity, an ability to get into a conversation with anybody, and an incredible memory for dates. In telling me about his military career (he joined the Marines when he graduated from high school and served two hitches in Vietnam) he mentioned meeting a Vietnam buddy at the Marine base in Quantico, Virginia. “He had been wounded next to me on a patrol on October 24, 1965,” he said. A few minutes later, showing me a photograph of his Combined Action Company taken in the jungle in Vietnam, he said, “That was taken on July 3, 1967.” Alvarez told me that his stint at Quantico was the best job he had in the Marines. “I was attached to an officer candidate school, where I demonstrated machine gun fire. An officer would lecture to a class about the different types of fire, and then he would point to me and I would pull the trigger and show them what he was talking about. I didn’t have to pick the brass up; I didn’t have to clean the weapon; just pull the trigger. I think my finger is still bent,” he said, holding up his right hand and grinning.

When Alvarez got out of the Marines he came back to El Paso, married Ester Gallego (a cousin of Pete Gallego), and started looking for a job. He found one at the El Paso County Juvenile Probation Department. “I started there as night janitor, working ten hours six nights a week, and I retired forty years later as chief juvenile probation officer.” Alvarez explained that in the early 1980s he left El Paso and come to Pecos as chief probation officer for Reeves County, and then in 2001 returned to El Paso to become chief probation officer there.

It was during his years as probation officer in Pecos that Alvarez started drawing on the material in his notebooks to write an occasional column called “Recuerdos de Mi Pueblo” (“Memories of My People”) for the Pecos Enterprise. He read me one about his experience chopping cotton in Pecos as a boy. It is the best thing I have ever seen in print on the subject. Alvarez describes how the labor contractors’ trucks would drive through the Mexican section of town before dawn, picking up the workers; how occasionally someone would shout from a house, “I’m not going today,” and the men in the truck would shout back, “You’d better get up, you lazy bastard;” how when they got to the field each man would try to get his favorite hoe and choose the easiest row to start on, or at least a row next to one with a pretty girl working in it; how they would keep one eye on the weeds in front of them and the other looking out for the migra, the Border Patrol, so they could warn the illegal aliens working with them; how on Saturday mornings the contractors would drive around the Mexican section with a shoebox full of cash, paying each worker off at the rate of sixty cents per hour, less a dime per hour for the contractor’s commission. The piece is written with telling detail and it records an experience that was at the core of life for many Texans but that few have troubled to describe.

Alvarez wrote over a hundred columns like this. He told me that several years ago someone at an archive at Princeton University called him and asked if he would send a disk of them to Princeton. “I don’t know what you mean by a disk,” he told them. “I wrote them in pencil on sheets of paper.”

Alvarez is a remarkable man, a close observer and a fine writer with a sharp sense of humor. His friend Reeves County Court-at-Law Judge Lee Green used to tell him that he was the Mexican Mark Twain. His newspaper columns, like Twain’s, should be published as a book.

Lonn Taylor is a writer and historian who lives in Fort Davis. He can be reached at taylorw@fortdavis.net.