The Milagro Beanfield War - John Nichols

Holy crap, what a great book.  It took me a while to get through it, mostly because I didn't dedicate the time to it that I wanted.  I'm so glad to have finally finished it though!  But I'll miss some of these characters.  And, truly, John Nichols' writing style.  It's so creative, so rich...He really knows how to create an entire world, and to give it such depth and feeling.  For instance - and bear with me, this is a longer quote than what I would usually do, but it's well worth it - this is how he introduces us to Ruby.

     For years many stories and quite a few unconfirmed rumors about the Strawberry Mesa Body Shop and Pipe Queen tycoon, Ruby Archuleta, had circulated between Milagro and Doña Luz.  Some folks swore she was a witch; a few misguided harpies insinuated she had poisoned or otherwise murdered the three husbands who had died on her.  Various highly impeachable sources suggested that Eliu Archuleta, her eighteen-year-old son, was actually the offspring of an affair between Ruby and the expatriot santo carver who had disappeared right after the Smokey the Bear statue riot, Snuffy Ledoux, a clandestine relationship that supposedly occurred while her second husband, Sufi Menopoulous, a Greek who had owned the Eagle Motel on Route 26 leading east from Chamisaville, lay dying of cancer at St. Claire's Hospital in the capital.  Then again, for years a few hardcore gossips had whispered that Eliu was actually the product of a virgin birth.
     Getting down to more verifiable facts, though, Ruby Archuleta was an uncertified midwife who had been safely delivering babies since 1940.  She also qualified as one of the best fishermen in the area and was a deer hunter supreme.  And whenever raspberries ripened in the local canyons a thousand jars of Ruby's raspberry jam appeared almost instantly on the shelves of Rael's store in Milagro, Benny's in Doña Luz, and the Flowering Wheat Health Food Store in Chamisaville, and she raked in the dinero hand over fist.
     This dynamo measured five feet two inches tall, was forty-nine years old, and her misty red hair had mostly turned to gray.  With her son Eliu, her gigantic lover, Claudio Garcia, and a roly-poly hillbilly mechanic named Marvin LaBlue, she lived in a mud-plastered railroad tie house situated on a hill overlooking the Body Shop and Pipe Queen, an enterprise inherited from her first husband, a charismatic hustler named Ray Mingleback, who had drowned on Halloween night, 1958, when his Rolls Royce dove off the north-south highway into the Rio Grande about twenty miles below Chamisaville.


All of that to introduce Ruby.  And, quite frankly, I love it.  It helps bring us into this world inhabited by all of these different people; it helps to make them real and to me us want to spend time with them.

The story - well, it's a simple enough premise.  In the little town of Milagro, mostly "Chicanos" as they call themselves, have lived for generations.  They are poor and have little to their names.  Even their water has been taken from them; the nearby river is off-limits for watering crops, and will be used to help build a new community and golf course...making the rich richer, and the poor poorer.  Well, one day Jose Mondragon decides to go out, tap into that water and irrigate a bean field.  And that begins the war - the war over water, over pride, over cultural identity, over money.  It's a symbolic gesture that Jose just decides to do for the heck of it; he doesn't mean it in any symbolic way.  He doesn't want to start a war.  He just wants to grow beans.  But of course it's so much more.

There's such complexity to this story.  It's about a clash of cultural identities: Chicanos versus Anglos.  It's about classism.  But it's also about understanding your actions, and what your role is in your world.  And it's about trying to figure out if you know who you are, what you want out of your life, and where you're going. And having the courage to stand up for what you believe in.

A great, amazing story.  Go read it.