SOURCE: "Pastoral, Myth, and Humanity in People of the Valley," in The South Dakota Review, Vol. 28, No. 1, Spring, 1990, pp. 5-18.

[Blackburn, an American novelist and critic, was the founding editor of Writers' Forum, launched in 1974, and has been especially interested in promoting new talent from the American West. Regarding Waters as one of the world's preeminent living writers, Blackburn has supported Water's nomination for the Nobel Prize for Literature, campaigned to establish a Frank Waters Prize in Literature, and written the book-length study A Sunrise Brighter Still: The Visionary Novels of Frank Waters (1991). In the essay below, he examines mythic and symbolic aspects of The People of the Valley, which he feels raise the novel above the level of a pastoral melodrama.]

The land and people of the remote Mora valley in northern New Mexico formed the inspiration for Frank Waters's People of the Valley (1941). But when Waters moved to Mora in 1936 to live there off and on for two years before he settled in Taos in 1938, he brought with him vivid impressions of the rise, elsewhere in the West, of a new technological civilization of which Boulder Dam on the Colorado was the symbol. While it was being constructed on the bed of the river in 1932, he had seen the dam, had even marvelled at it, but had sensed something monstrous in the proceedings. He recalls the scene, as follows, in The Colorado (1984 edition):

I stood on the bed of the river. The vast chasm seemed a slit through earth and time alike. The rank smell of Mezozoic ooze and primeval muck filled the air. Thousands of pale lights, like newly lit stars, shone on the heights of the cliffs. Down below grunted and growled prehistoric monsters—great brute dinosaurs with massive bellies, with long necks like the brontosaurus, and with armored hides thick as those of the stegosaurus. They were steam shovels and cranes feeding on the muck, a ton at a gulp. In a steady file other monsters rumbled down, stopping just long enough to shift gears while their bodies were filled with a single avalanche, then racing backward without turning around.

These images of an inhuman and insatiable force omit its meaning. But when Waters describes a dam in People of the Valley, he uses the consciousness of Maria del Valle to spell out, at first whimsically but later symbolically, that the machine of Progress, of which the dam is symbol, ultimately means spiritual death:

So this Máquina, this monster, labored to give birth to a dam there….

Steam shovels squatted in the fields, careful attendants to feed it. Great trucks rolled down and up the long macadam bringing more supplies. The Mofres' little powerhouse was being built to warm and light it. Shops and a tool house became its nursery. A long mess hall and bunk-house spewed nurses in dirty denim. The old inn held its doctors, filling with engineers and construction bosses and vapid wives to gawk at its souvenirs and bewail its lack of plumbing.

All waiting, like the people, to see born this child of progress, this new dam of the Máquina.

Ay de mi! Nature travails alone in the thicket, being hardy and not to be denied. But the machinery of progress needs much attention; it has no faith, anything may break down.

Later, Waters enlarges upon the metaphorical meaning of the dam when Maria, like an aged Demeter companioned with a young Persephone, imparts her wisdom to Piedad, her granddaughter:

'There is no dam but, in the end, is wrong; the dam of stone which would obstruct the flow of water, the dam of harsh morality which would retard too long the flow of life. But this flow must be sanctified by your faith in it or it is equally wrong.'

Maria condemns the dam on psychological grounds, viewing it as any obstruction, retardation, or repression that is excessive in domination of the elemental, unconscious, and evolving flow of life. Her condemnation is not shrill, nor has imagery of the dam been presented as a conventional obscenity, nor has Waters (through Maria) denied to the machine of Progress its power to bring social benefits. The issue has simply been elevated from a social to a spiritual plane: the machine represents an excessively rationalistic, materialistic civilization that produces an impoverishment of life, whereas the way of the people who derive faith from their relationship to the land rejoins them to the archetypal mother's creativity.

The people of People of the Valley are Mexican-Indian. Despite an overlaying topsoil of Christianity, the meaning of their lives stems directly from the land, possession of which is to them an alien concept. Waters is careful and precise in portraying the history and ways of these unspoilt, uneducated, and unsophisticated people whose lives are pregnant with the universal values that spring from specific fact: his stance toward the people is both affectionate and detached, neither condescending nor overly protective, and he doesn't exploit them as a comical proletariat (as John Nichols does the Hispanic-Americans in The Milagro Beanfield War, a novel published in 1974). In brief, Waters's people are descended from colonists who in the seventeenth century pushed northwards from Mexico along the Chihuahua Trail and established settlements in the mountainous region between Santa Fe and Taos and between the Rio Grande and the Sangre de Cristo mountains. The settlement pattern was determined by two considerations: conversion of the Indians and the availability of water. Because Indian villages had also been located near the best water supplies, the Mexican colonists often lived in close approximation to people whose presence on the land goes back for untold centuries; and the resulting mixture of races in an extremely isolated region produced a people with a powerful sense of community and with an equally powerful regard for personal independence.

In most respects the culture was and is of a type found throughout Latin America: people are aligned to the family as the principal unit and to the father as the principal authority, and it is difficult for adults of either sex to maintain self-respect unless they are united and have children. Yet personalism permits one's idiosyncrasies and intensity of being to become the basis of assessment rather than status or roles, and customs are not always binding. Therefore it is quite possible for an unmarried woman to attain to some special authority based upon the people's perception of her wisdom or unusual powers (for instance, as a curandera or healer). Because Maria del Valle is precisely such a character, this particular point is worth emphasis, for Waters has drawn her portrait from life: she is a distinct type of quick-thinking, wisely-speaking Hispanic and Mexican-Indian woman revered for her knowledge in villages from northern New Mexico to the Strait of Magellan.

The plot of People of the Valley shows two alien cultures, that of the Mexican-Indians and that of the Euro-Americans (Anglos or gringos in the regional parlance), gradually coming into conflict during the span of a century. The crisis is reached in the nineteen-thirties when the American government undertakes to construct a dam in order to control periodic floods in the valley. Ironically, this progressive plan that seems to be for the benefit of the people will really require the eviction of the people from ancestral lands. The people miss the irony; Maria does not. She tries to stall the government's plan long enough for the people to recognize the necessity of their way of life, how the new ways will destroy it, but in the end, when the dam is built, Maria can save her people only by sending them to another valley which she has secured from them.

Although Maria is naturally gifted, she has to learn to become a leader, and much of the plot is devoted to this process of learning. Maria's mother, a Picuris Pueblo Indian, dies in childbirth, leaving the infant to be found and raised by two old Mexican goatherds. These "philosophers" try to divine correlations between the patterns in goat skulls and those of the moon and stars. Even though they try to deceive people with their prophecies, Maria sees through the deceptions yet still founds her life of wisdom upon the core of truth in their teachings, namely the interrelationship of macrocosm and microcosm. "The great dome of the midnight skies, and the dome of the earth rounding from horizon to horizon: both forever repeated with the triangles and squares of stars … upon the lesser, miniature skulls of beast and man." Unwittingly, the goatherds also provide her with a lesson in the dangers of abstracting life from its inner reality. Having fortified their mountain home with a rampart of stones, they are drowned when a flood breaks it down. Maria then lives in a hut high in the mountains until she is fifteen, at which age "the goat girl" visits the village of Santa Gertrudes where she is enchanted by the sound of the gringo soldier's music box. Mistaking the "master" of the box for the "master of the song" of sexual desire, she has a casual affair with the soldier and soon gives birth to a child, Teodosio. She has learned "that there are some things one cannot escape" such as "harvest and fulfillment." She has not yet learned that the "power of the blood" must be joined to the "power of the mind" to produce detachment from the "valley of illusion."

At eighteen she moves from her hut to live with Onesimo, a young muleteer and religious fanatic "like a martyr tied to a cross and searching the heavens for an echo of his faith." Institutionalized Christianity is, to her, a "meaningless outward form" of "incomprehensible ritual," but Onesimo wants their new-born child, Niña, to have a legally sanctioned name, so Maria agrees to marry him. The padre of the local church, however, refuses to perform the ceremony because Onesimo, is, one, poor, and, two, a member of an outlawed sect, the Penitentes. Maria has now been meanly instructed in the economic and political considerations of a secularized institution. She respects, though, the symbolic meaning of the death and resurrection of Christ inasmuch as the mythic pattern repeats the seasonal one of the earth. Yet when Onesimo dies in the Penitentes' reenactment of the Crucifixion, she is sure that faith does not come from a search for self-transcendence in "pitilessly empty" heavens but from being within "the power of the earth below." It is her faith in the earth which pulls her through years of poverty and the people's distrust of her as an unwed, single woman with a penchant for producing children from chance encounters with nameless men. Hoarding seeds of grain, she sells them to improvident farmers; collecting herbs, she becomes respected as a curandera; consulting goat skulls, she gains a reputation as a fortune-teller. By the age of fifty she is for the people a feared and respected figure of authority who has added to her native and growing sagacity a shrewd comprehension of Anglo civilization's economic, legal, and political machinery. She sees to it that her children are legally named and thus entitled to possess their lands under the jurisdiction of the United States. Her one weakness is pity for a lonely old miser, Don Fulgencio, who wants to marry her. Suspecting that he wants to gain control of her property and its water rights, she nevertheless goes through the ceremony, and, after the wedding, he ignores her. She returns to her hut on the mountainside, but not before Don Fulgencio's sister has given her gold pieces from a buried box. Presently a flood drives Maria and the people into Santa Gertrudes for shelter. Seeing Don Fulgencio's protecting of his box of buried gold, she attempts to save him, but he knocks her unconscious with a shovel, dislodging all her teeth save one. He is drowned; she, recovered, leads the people to the safety of high ground, a foreshadowing of her later role as their protector and savior.

At eighty she first hears of the dam. Suspecting fraud, she learns that Don Fulgencio has been in league with the Mofres (the Murphy brothers from Ireland) to control all water rights in the valley and to profit from sales of water and electricity after construction of the dam. Whereas most of the people have lost land to Don Fulgencio they never knew they owned, Maria, educated in the ways of an alien culture, refuses to sell hers. But she must prepare the people in defense of the values by which they have endured. She revives old customs, dispossesses of his land her own son Antonio in order to demonstrate the meaning of homelessness, and gets herself arrested for rallying the people to their faith. When it comes to a vote at a water district meeting, Maria is not even present except as the people's "common conscience, the invisible and invincible backbone of their solidarity." The people refuse to sell their land and believe that Maria has led them to victory. She is not deceived. For the next ten years, her tactics only delay the inevitable construction of the dam, time enough for her to prepare Piedad as her successor and to set aside land for the people in another valley. When the government has the land appraised and condemned, Maria advises the people to accept payment only in gold and silver and to bury the coins according to custom. Some of the people, ignoring her advice, squander government checks in a city forty miles away and become destitute and angry. The Mofres' store is burned down. But on the final day, when the people are evicted, most of them have their buried coins available for starting a new life, to which Piedad leads them while Maria, dying, remains behind in her hut. Placing pieces of gold on her blind eyes and wrapping herself in an old burnt-orange blanket that has been with her since infancy, she dies just before the valley is to be inundated, converted into a lake behind the new dam.

Considered as a pastoral novel, People of the Valley might be little more than a melodrama of social and political protest, a New Mexican Grapes of Wrath. It is curious, however, that Waters distributes moral responsibility about evenly between the opposed forces of Machine and Garden. At first, the encroachment of the modern world, like the gringo soldier's music box, is nonthreatening. Perhaps an allusion to "Bishop Lamy's new church" hints at something sinister to come, especially if Lamy is regarded as an empire-builder instead of as the saintly hero of Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, but the corrupt padre who refuses to marry Maria and Onesimo seems almost inoffensive when the violence of the Penitentes comes to the foreground of attention.

Gradually, of course, technology comes into or near the valley—a railroad, rattling tin automobiles, the dam in all its component parts—and a bank and new courthouse in Santa Gertrudes certainly represent legal, political, and monetary systems foreign to the people of the valley. But, again, the agents of the Machine, impersonal as they may be, seem relatively nonviolent; the police never fire a shot. By contrast, the Garden is rife with violence: the natural violence of floods, self-mutilations by Penitentes, Don Fulgencio's assault upon Maria, the burning of the Mofres' store. And some of the people are themselves corrupt: a midwife tries to extract from Maria information about the gringo soldier in order to blackmail him; Don Fulgencio and the county recorder, Sanchez, make fraudulent land deals; the shopkeeper, Pierre Frontier, tricks Teodosio into surrendering Maria's valuable burnt-orange blanket from Chimayó. If, then, savagery and a transient regard for gentleness and mercy characterize the people of this Garden, the coming of the machine almost appears as, in the long run, a civilized necessity, like Prospero's control of Caliban in The Tempest. Even Maria admits before Don Eliseo, and educated and fair-minded judge, "I do not oppose the dam, new customs, a new vision of life," and she acknowledges the possibility of "benefits." Perhaps, we might think, the defeat and dispossession of the people is just an inevitable continuation of American history on the frontier, a sad but somehow justified implementation of Frederick Jackson Turner's celebrated hypothesis. We might think, too, that the people's removal to a new land is adequate compensation, albeit an unsatisfactory artistic resolution of a pastoral fable.

The creative mythology of People of the Valley refutes this way of thinking about it. Maria is a mythical character with an authority that allows her to exist in time and space and, simultaneously, to transcend time and space. The events of her life interact with both social reality and a reality of a higher order.

The novel's implied author or narrator establishes a point of view that preserves Maria's mythical dimension within a realistically bucolic frame. There is no incompatibility between his discourse and her story. As her ally, he tells of, and her actions show, the mystery of ever-flowing life as an enduring reality beyond the illusions of time. This alliance with the inward and essential character of Maria permits him to portray humorously but without condescension the outward and inessential aspects of her character. She is wise but illiterate, occasionally benevolent and compassionate, more often a wild, promiscuous, cruel and dictatorial crone with a cigarette clamped by her single remaining tooth and with a voice like a low rumble or hiss. She is indifferent to the naming of five bastard children until she understands the legal ramifications of this neglect: Teodosio, described as "a listless, loose mouthed man with his fly unbuttoned," is named by the midwife; Niña is generic; Antonio de la Vega is identified because he watches the cow in the pasture, and Refugio Montes because his father took refuge in the mountains! These details do not disturb Maria in her mythical dimension.

The point of view of the implied author also functions to invest the valley with symbolic meaning. Synonymous with Maria del Valle, it is a landscape of Mother Earth with the Goddess Mother herself seated at its hub. A third function of the implied author's point of view is to resolve the contradictions between nature and culture. The archetypal pattern of journey to a sacred source and return to the world is completed in and through him. He has, as it were, come to a pastoral center from a modern, complex culture that is fragmented and spiritually impoverished, and he offers, by way of return, the message of revitalization.

Maria is likened to the natural world through imagery, but she is also associated with ritual and folk observances that resonate with a history extending to neolithic times and beyond. On the Day of St. John the Baptist, she immerses herself in an icy stream in order to "be immersed in the one living mystery, the waters of life," a baptismal ritual of obvious antiquity. When she lies down to die, she places gold coins over her eyes, and this practice is a partial survival of the ancient and widespread custom of burying all a man's valuables with him in order that he may pay a toll for being ferried to the land of the dead and that he might not return as a ghost to haunt his home vicinity. Maria's divination from goat skulls is an especially striking example of a ritual performed by shamans, augurs, and astrologers from early times. In fact, the Bronze Age civilization of the Shang centered around bone divination. According to F. David Peat [in his Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind, 1987], "The pattern of cracks, together with their interpretation, formed an 'acausal parallelism' with events in nature and society, so that the microcosm of the act of divination formed a mirror in which were reflected the patterns of the macrocosm." Such synchronicity is still sought today in the remote mountains of China but has also been reported from the American Southwest. All of these examples of archaic survivals in People of the Valley have the artistic effect of identifying Maria with the constant and enduring, making her a symbol of uttermost beginnings.

Maria as a symbol of uttermost beginnings presupposes that she be born an orphan, the Primordial Child in whom the origin first was and from whom everything is springing up, the archetype representing, according to [C. Kerényi in "The Primordial Child in Primordial Times," in Essays on a Science of Mythology, 1963], "the divine principle of the universe at the moment of its first manifestation." Like the archetype of the divine child who comes into being from the womb of Mother Earth, Maria is associated with boundless water and with the imagery of sunrise and is equipped with all the powers of nature to be invincible, which is to say, in [Carl] Jung's words, "a wholeness which embraces the very depths of Nature" ["The Psychology of the Child Archetype," in Essays on a Science of Mythology]. Accordingly, she should be expected to unite pairs of opposites—the Primordial Child has an androgynous character for this reason—and to be self-contained, without a master, a divine presence uniting male and female, time and eternity. Maria fulfills this expectation. In her, traditionally masculine and feminine characteristics merge, the powers of mind and blood, of leadership and fecundity, of Father Sun and Mother Earth. Thus, when the men of Mora want to know Maria's opinion about the proposed dam but fear to approach her, they are described as "Satellites swarming around a common sun, but at a respectful distance lest they be scorched." With the cigarette she always holds or demands from men, she appropriates a sort of phallic symbol of authority. She also learns that waiting for a master is futile. "Like the land," we are told, "she had been fruitful and enduring, ever waiting for a master," but her partners, from the gringo soldier to the impotent Don Fulgencio, cannot dominate a primal being who is, mythologically considered, antecedent to the division of sex.

Maria's authority, then, is ultimately cosmic, and she focuses it in herself. Such a centered character is to be found in most of Waters's novels (with the exception of Pike's Peak, the protagonist of which seeks identity outside of himself), and the symbolization of Maria is therefore a significant aspect of his visionary art. As explained by Joseph Campbell [in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1968], the symbolic hero in mythology is at the creative center of life:

The effect of the successful adventure of the hero is the unlocking and release again of the flow of life into the body of the world…. The torrent pours from an invisible source, the point of entry being the center of the symbolic circle of the universe, the Immovable Spot of the Buddha legend, around which the world may be said to revolve…. The tree of life, i.e., the universe itself, grows from this point…. Thus the World Navel is the symbol of the continuous creation: the mystery of the maintenance of the world through that continuous miracle of vivification which wells within all things.

Such an Immovable Spot, World Navel, tree or axial rock—in the Navajo mythology explored by Waters in Masked Gods the world-axis is a Rock—appears in People of the Valley as Maria herself, as her hut, and as the 9,000-foot crag from which she looks down upon the valley. She is "a rock beaten, smashed and worn by waves but still jutting into the promontory beak of nose." She lives where "jutting cliffs" mark the "handle" of the "curving bow" of the blue valley to the north and to the south, thus at the hub of the two "crescent" shapes, symbols of birth and death (i.e., the waxing and waning moon) at her command. When Maria goes to church, "all this sound and smell and movement beat vainly, like waves, against the jutting altar"—vainly, because she is herself the shrine or altar at the inexhaustible point of creation. Once, when she is looking at her hut, her "eyes saw it in time as well as in space, saw it as the point of a completed circle," presently identified as "the point of her completed circle." It is she who is the center of the symbolic circle of the universe; it is she who is the cosmic woman through whom pours the mystery which changes yet is changeless.

The most down-to-earth symbol of Maria's authority is, however, the humble burnt-orange blanket to which there are recurrent references. It belongs to her mother and is said to bring "life and color." It is taken momentarily away from Maria by an art dealer who vaguely apprehends its magic: "His mouth watered when he saw it glowing in the sunlight, felt its weave and wonderful softness." It gives Maria strength in time of decision: "wrapping herself in the soft burnt-orange blanket … she was philosophizing." As she prepares herself to die, she wraps herself in it. Over the years abused and ignored, it, like Maria herself, comes to stand for the integrity and continuity of her life. Its burnt-orange color suggests the creative solar power that covers the earth. Above all, it is a symbol of law. When Judge Eliseo visits Maria, he declares, "'In me you see a personal man robed with the impersonal authority,'" but Maria's blanket robes her with the authority of a law that is not secular but divine. Like the Prophet of the Koran who wrapped himself in a blanket when he uttered divine verses, Maria attests to a reality which endures, whatever the mantle, blanket or flesh, of the passing world of phenomenality.

The female protagonist of People of the Valley is not in conflict with herself nor, for the most part, with her people. Living as a single woman, until her fifties, in a Mexican-Indian community where matriarchy is the exception, not the rule, Maria is isolated, both feared and revered, and only when the people believe that she has triumphed over the government in the matter of the dam do they "almost" call her "Santa Maria." The primary conflict in the novel is the conventional pastoral one between a rural way of life and a complex modern culture with its dominating technology. Maria and the people, it would seem, are defeated by the machine of progress. There then opens up a disillusioning prospect for human survival. Can the enduring nature of earth and of people organically attuned with it be communicated in [a] positive manner? The evidence of People of the Valley is affirmative: a conflict that cannot be resolved satisfactorily at the social level of significance has been shifted to the province of myth, which opposes constants to a world of flux. In Maria del Valle, Waters symbolizes a correlation with earth and its attendant archetype, the Goddess Mother of the universe, the Eternal Feminine.

At this juncture a critical problem in the characterization of a female protagonist arises. Whereas oneness with the Eternal Feminine affirms the endurance of humanity, stress may fall upon fertility and instinct as being fundamentally better than any aspect of culture and mind. Such an emphasis defines cultural primitivism and makes sexist stereotyping of women and minority figures highly probable. The white, male novelist who produces an affirmative type in a woman who also happens to be an Indian risks losing sight of her individuality; she remains "other," separated from the human community by gender and race. One doubts that Waters even foresaw this problem—but he solves it. Seeing all entities as an inseparable unity of mind and matter, he disposes of the philosophical separation of "male" mind and "female" matter. In fact, Maria represents the androgynous ideal. It is true that she is at least partially identified with the power of the blood and wholly with the flow of life, and these identifications, taken out of psychological and religious context and placed in a sexual one, could be misinterpreted. But the stress in People of the Valley lies not upon the biological role of a woman in assuring continuity of the race but upon self-fulfillment and emergence within a numinous world, thus quite emphatically upon a woman's (or any person's) individuality. Still, as an "object" of veneration, Maria may seem to some readers to live outside the meaningful life and to be engulfed by all that she symbolizes. That view, I contend, is invalidated by one's experience in reading the novel: Maria is a flesh-and-blood female character, a complex human being who assumes an authoritative role for the good of her family and people, who is wise yet simple and illiterate, sometimes uncertain about herself and superstitious, often lonely and vulnerable, with a forthright and dignified style of bearing and with a heart that silently bleeds.

Maria's humanity bleeds to a prick. One detail must here suffice to reveal her world of feeling. It appears in the scene after Onesimo's crucifixion. His empty shoes are delivered to Maria, who has been to this Jesus both nurturing mother, as befits her name, and lover:

The sudden meaning of their appalling emptiness stabbed her like a knife. It carved out her heart and bowels and mind. She stood more empty than the shoes, one hand clawing at her face, holding her breast, then pressing against her belly.

Teodosio and Nina were gulping goat's milk from wooden spoons. Maria bent down to her own bowl, and lifted a hair from the milk with her forefinger. Suddenly she straightened. With a fearful howl she flung open the door and rushed out into the night.

It is one human hair, one thread, but it is enough. By such a tiny thread, Waters is showing us, the whole fabric of passionate humanity is knit together.