Stand at the Border, and Remember a Borderless Age
Written: Dec 27 '01 (Updated Dec 27 '01)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Scenery: |
 |
|
| Crowds: |
|
|
| Time needed for visit: |
 |
|
|
Pros: Fine, short hike to spectacular view from Coronado Peak. Complex relationship to the border.
Cons: Coronado never walked here.
The Bottom Line: Read the review!
|
|
|
| Urbanist's Full Review: Coronado National Memorial |
Among the many mountain ranges that rise like stabbing knives from the grassy high plain of southeast Arizona, the Huachuca range is one of the most dramatic. Brilliantly colored in many hues of orange, the Huachucas soar thousands of feet to sharp pinnacles, offering only a small space for the "sky island" ecosystems of pine and juniper that normally cling to Arizona’s mountaintops. Like most of the short, sharp ranges in the West, the Huachucas run north-south, and their southern tip just pricks the border with Mexico. Right there, where a natural barrier slams into a manmade one, is Coronado National Memorial, surely one of the oddest sites in the National Park system.
Coronado probably never set foot in the land that makes up the Coronado National Memorial. In 1540, as an emissary of Spain, he led an expedition to find the fabled golden "cities of Cibola." Embellished by rumor (perhaps especially by those who had come this way and wanted others to suffer as they had), the golden cities turned out to be riches of an unfamiliar kind: the Pueblos and other Indian "cities" of what is now northern Arizona and New Mexico. They were grand, certainly, but they were not the El Dorado of Spanish fantasies. In other words, they offered no plunder of gold or silver that was readily convertible into the coin of the realm.
Like many of the "great explorers" that I was taught to admire in elementary school, Coronado had his share of tragedy before ending up as farce. Setting out from Culiacàn at the northern edge of Spain’s known realm (now the capital of Sinaloa, just north of Mazatlan), Coronado’s men marched the whole length of what is now the State of Sonora when he passed somewhere east of the current park. Supplies sent up the Gulf of California never reached him, partly because he wandered further inland than he intended. If you recall what passed for maps in this period, you’ll understand his confusion.
In the end, after encountering the Hopi, Navajo, Zuni, and Apache cultures with interactions ranging from violence to friendly ridicule, he got a tip that the real golden city lay out to the east. The hapless Spaniard and the remains of his proud corps followed a guide out into the middle of Kansas before the guide confessed that it was all a hoax. The Spanish crown had spent a fortune chasing rumors, and had gotten what it deserved for its credulity.
So why isn’t the Coronado Memorial in Kansas? Actually, other National Parks do note Coronado’s passing as his team wandered through the various Indian nations. But the People Who Decide These Things wanted a monument to hope, not to despair, so it was necessary to commemorate an early part of Coronado's journey, before his fortunes became too, well, ridiculous. And the earliest part of the journey that Congress could mark was Coronado’s entrance into what is now the United States. This crossing probably happened somewhere out in the valley east of the Park, between modern-day Sierra Vista and Douglas.
Centuries of cattle have long since erased Coronado’s tracks from the valley itself, and the land down there is valuable rangeland anyway, so the park-makers settled for a mountain viewpoint. They chose the southern tip of the Huachucas, right on the Mexican border, where you can stand on a 6000’ minipeak and see vast plains sweeping into the distance in three directions. This outward-looking memorial is clever. Nobody really knows exactly where Coronado passed, and he almost certainly did not climb these mountains or set foot in what is now the park, but the 100-mile range of your view probably encompasses his path, wherever it was.
So to sum up: the Coronado National Memorial marks a point somewhere near where the first official Spanish explorer crossed a line that wouldn’t be drawn for another 300 years. In fact, this bit of the US-Mexico border is one of the most recently drawn bits of the nation’s edge, a final expansion that completed the familiar shape of the continental USA. In fact, even after the Gadsden Purchase that drew this line, railroad magnates from the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad, and the members of Congress they owned, were contemplating erasing it. They dreamed of annexing Mexico’s State of Sonora to the US, so that they could serve a Pacific port at Guaymas on the Gulf of California. It took a long time for this border to be drawn, and even longer for everyone to take it seriously.
Today, of course, this is a serious border indeed. But unlike the solid wall that marches across the hills and valleys of the Tijuana Estuary at California’s Border Field State Park (see my review), the border here is ephemeral, sometimes fading in and out of visibility like a trick of the light.
By all means, take the 0.4 mile hike to the top of Coronado Peak, at over 6000’. This southern tip of the Huachucas places you on a high viewpoint overlooking golden plains that stretch in three directions. Eastward, you can see the twin towns of Douglas, Arizona and Agua Prieta, Sonora, though you certainly can’t tell them apart. From there, running almost straight toward you, is a line – a fence presumably – that marks the Border. Directly beneath you, somewhere on the steep 4000’ drop to the plains, the Border collides with the mountainside. Now look straight ahead, south, perhaps 100 miles into Sonora, where the plain sweeps to the horizon between other north-south ridges much like the Huachucas on which you stand, except that they’re in Mexico and you are in the USA, whatever that means from this height.
Now look west. You look in vain for a continuation of the border fence, as the line you know must be there runs across another valley to another mountain range. Look right there, right at where the border must be, and you see nothing but the undulating grassy plain, no sign of the ruler-straight line that marks the edge of your map. Because the grassy plain is all that’s really there.
And that’s all that was really there, 50 years before the age of Shakespeare, when a band of Spaniards wandered this unmarked land. At the top of Coronado peak, as you look at this magnificent undulating plain whose organic shape just erases all idea of straight lines, an interpretive sign invites you to further acts of erasure:
From Coronado Peak, the ranks of distant mountains seem to march across the plain. In silent procession they vanish over the horizon -- and with them seems to go the urgent, pulsing time that man uses to count the years of a life or an age. In this perspective, past centuries blend with a timeless present.
Far below, where the green-banded course of the San Pedro River marks the valley floor, the expedition's advance party crawls across the immense landscape. The marching line can barely be seen, so insignificant is it upon this spacious stage.
Perhaps you follow this rhetorical move and "barely see" a meandering movement on the shimmering floor of the valley. Are they in Mexico or the USA? If you really follow the spirit of the (bilingual) sign, they are in neither, and neither are you.
But the Park Service can’t leave its American visitors hanging in such a space. So the sign continues by bringing us down to the present in a crash of value judgment:
It is good that those dusty men below -- fading now into distance and heat shimmer -- are Spaniards. For they and their successors bring into North America a passionate culture that enriches our lives with rhythm and color, form and food.
We can understand the spirit in which that was written, and many visitors may appreciate it. But although these signs are all bilingual, with Spanish on the left as though it’s the primary language, one can’t help but wonder if "form and food" is the sad product of a floundering writer who knows he’s on ideological thin ice and hopes alliteration will forgive all cultural sins. I can understand how rhythm, color, form have suffused our culture from the south in ways that enrich us, but are we really expected to forgive the ravages of colonialism in return for the FOOD? Restauranteurs out there may disagree with me, but I’d like to be able to sit down to a good Mexican meal without sensing that the extraordinary spiritual and artistic traditions of pre-contact Hopi culture have been pounded like so much rubble into the wheat powder of my tortillas.
Is it "good" that Coronado led the way for the great push of Spanish power and religion into the region? Did the signmaker ask the descendents of the highly advanced native civilizations – the Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, and Apache – before making this value judgment in the voice of the US Government? And was it good that Coronado represented a Crown that was concurrently destroying the highly advanced cultures of Mesoamerica?
What does it mean to assign "good" or "evil" to events almost half a millennium past?
It IS good that the signs are in Spanish, with English to the right as though it’s the second language, because that is today’s reality on both sides of the Border. And it is good, too, that you cannot tell from here what parts of this grandeur are in Mexico as opposed to the USA, because everyone on both sides is americano. (Only we self-absorbed norteamericanos use the term "American" to denote only US citizens.)
On the other hand, if it weren’t for the border, the Coronado National Memorial wouldn’t be where it is, perched on the knifepoint of the Huachuca range as it slices through a governing but ephemeral line. It is a fitting place to commemorate an age when the only straight lines in this land were these: Spears. Falling water. The patterns on Navajo textiles or Hopi kachina figurines. The flatness of mesas and their parallel sediment lines. And the upthrust lines of the orange peaks that rise behind you, indifferent to what country they happen to be in for the current split-second of their geologic "lives."
Recommended:
Yes
Best time to go: Anytime
Review Topic: Overview
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
Urbanist
|
|
Location: San Francisco
Reviews written: 78
Trusted by: 72 members
About Me:
Streetwise, academically credentialed gay renaissance man. For real bio, click "more" in profile.
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.