D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
November
2008
Luis Pérez: Apache Warriors
Page: 2Pérez's interest in Emmet Mills is, in part, linked to the 51 years the historian spent living and working in El Paso. The Mills family is prominent there, as evidenced by a statue, building and street commemorating the clan's contributions to the city. Pérez learned of them while a reporter for El Paso newspapers. Later, he and a partner launched a tourism publication that served the Southwest for 15 years, prompting the bi-national publisher to explore the area thoroughly.
"I got to know the Apaches pretty well," Pérez recalls. "I visited all of their reservations and I knew about them from my travels in Mexico, too. That's when I first started writing about the Apache wars."
Pérez allows that he has "always been interested [in the border states] and in high school I was a history ace who knew all the answers. . . . I had a knack for the subject and read a lot, in Spanish as well as English."
One influence was certainly Pérez's own family, which played a significant role in turn-of-the-20th-century Chihuahua, the sprawling Mexican state that was the initial destination for New Mexico's silver and copper. Pérez's father was a politically involved businessman from an important mining district near the Sierra Madre. He served as a senator in Mexico's congress and once was grandmaster of the country's Masonic Lodge. Because of their friendships with presidents, generals and other key players who came out on the losing side in the Mexican Revolution, family members were forced to escape to El Paso in 1929. Luis Pérez's father eventually opened a business college in Jurez and commuted to work across the Ro Grande bridge.
"My dad could not work for a salary in the States," Pérez explains. "We were political exiles — thrown out of Mexico."
Toward the end of our visit, Pérez shows me some treasures handed down over the generations. There is an ancient clay pot from the Tarahumara region, a .44-caliber 1856 revolver and a collection of dusty Spanish-language books. Downstairs, Pérez shows off a model airplane — he is an aficionado of military aircraft — and faded photos of Apache leaders. He has a roomful of research materials, enough for scores of articles on historical topics.
By now I am convinced that this man's own life story would make an interesting book. But this is not in the works.
"Why would I want to write about the Mexican Revolution?" he laments. "It has been done to death. I wish people would quit writing about it." This from someone fit and vibrant at 81, who remains a living link to one of the most important epochs in regional history. Pérez allows as much at one point in our conversation.
"My grandmother was 15," he says, "when she remembered seeing the remnants of Victorio's band being brought through the streets of Chihuahua City. My grandfather used to run mule trains hauling silver; he talked about the Apache all the time. . . . My grandparents had three old stagecoaches on their ranch we used to play on as kids."
Pérez points out that many people from his family's homeland in Chihuahua, a major mining district, relocated north to Silver City during the town's early years. A number settled in the barrio of Chihuahua Hill, while others established ranches in the Mimbres Valley. Still more moved north during the Mexican Revolution, from 1910 through 1928, when violence was rampant in the state of Chihuahua. Reaching back farther still, Pérez reminds me that the first formal copper mine at Santa Rita was established in the early 1800s by an army colonel who hailed from northern Mexico.
"When the Mexican government agreed to the Gadsden Purchase," a 1854 treaty whereby Mexico sold part of southern Arizona and New Mexico to the US, "some families stayed and became US citizens while others went to (old) Mexico and settled in many places down there," he says. Then, as now, it appears the border was not considered an obstacle.
Neither was it a barrier for the Apaches, who moved with ease across political boundaries and managed to live in a traditional manner in the Sierra Madre as recently as the 1930s. Some of their patrimony is preserved in books and articles, as well as on the existing reservations of the Southwest. But the long-standing Apache presence is largely invisible in southwestern New Mexico, something Pérez would still like to see changed. He is not alone.
"Luis has done a great job in his research," says Dale Giese, a retired WNMU history professor who has studied the Apache. "I am for the monument he proposes."
But such sentiments are few and far between. Luis Pérez has not abandoned the idea, but shakes his head when asked about the likelihood that any sort of public memorial to the land's past inhabitants will be erected. "A lot of people suffered here from the Apache raids," he muses. "But you could live here for years and never hear about them. I'll never understand why this is so."
Southwest Storylines columnist Richard Mahler is the author of 11 books, including The Jaguar's Shadow: Searching for a Mythic Cat, to be published by Yale University Press in 2009. His byline has appeared in publications including New Mexico Magazine, Santa Fean, Los Angeles Times and Arizona Highways, and on columns for the Albuquerque Journal and Crosswinds. He lives in Silver City.