New Mexico in Focus; Part 2; The Last Conquistidor: Interview with Filmmaker John J. Valadez

We're here with John J. Valdez, writer, director and producer of the last conquistador, our long special POV documentary you've made in 2007 regarding the Onyate statue in El Paso, Texas, the controversy surrounding it, and part of our charge here at Channel 5 is to explore these issues a little more deeply. Of course, we're going to have a panel discussion about all this featuring some of the folks that you actually had in the film. But I want to get to you a little bit. How did you get into documentary filmmaking? What was the beginning for you? Oh, boy. Kind of a long story. I actually dropped out of college out of the University of Washington, I grew up in Seattle and went and lived in India for a year where I taught photography at a small rural village school in central India. While I was there, I decided that I got an interest in documentary filmmaking. Actually, what had happened was it was in a

small village one evening some of my students took me to this village called Sussara and the people there had built a big bonfire and they'd pulled their beds out and would gather around this fire and they were telling me about the story of how their village was created about the gods and goddesses, Hanuman, Ganesh, Lakshmi, Krishna, and it was fascinating. And so that evening, as we're walking back to the school, it occurred to me that I began to wonder how come in the United States, how did we lose our ability or the interest in gathering around the fire where we would tell our stories? You know, somehow we'd become disconnected from that process. And the more I began to think about it, the more I began to realize that we do gather around a fire. We gather around a burning box and that burning box is television

and we gather around a burning wall and that burning wall is cinema and it is through that burning box or that burning wall that we tell the story of our people every day and every night and it's through those stories that we define for ourselves what it is to lead a life well lived, what it is to lead a life squandered, what is important to us, what we hold dear, what we fear, what we aspire to, what would be the best of who we are. And I thought, wow, you know, that would be great to be, and this is how it came into my head, to be one of the people who is the keeper of the sacred story of our people, right, to put it in sort of the parlance of, you know, that I heard in India. And so I decided to, you know, learn documentary filmmaking and I went, got a job working on a fishing boat in Alaska to try to make money. Of course, I didn't make any. But while I was on the fishing boat out in the Aleutian

Islands off the coast of Russia, or this, you know, and I applied to film school at NYU, to school of the arts. And I was accepted. And so then from, you know, ADAC and the Aleutian Islands, I, you know, flew back to the lower 48 and then on to New York City to Greenwich Village. And I started my studies at NYU Film School. And just to add a little bit more, the first film that I started making at NYU, you know, you know, it was a film about a former leader of the Black Panther Party who I had heard was incarcerated in upstate New York. And he was claiming that he had been falsely imprisoned by a notorious secret program that the FBI had engaged in called Co-Intelpro, the counterintelligence program. So I began making a film about him. He was incarcerated at the time. And in the middle of me making the film, he got released. The New York State Supreme

Court ruled that ordered the immediate vacation of his conviction because of prosecutorial misconduct in his case. And so that student film then became funded by PBS. And so my first film ended up on POV, the documentary series that this same film is airing on now some 15 years later. Fate had a plan for you with PBS clearly. I don't know if it was fate or just luck, but anyway, so it's kind of come full circle. And in the interim, you know, I produced a lot of films for national broadcast for public television and also of work for CNN. How did the story of the last conquistador come to you? When did it first come to your consciousness that a huge sculpture of Oniate was planning to be built in the El Paso area? What was that initial thought there?

I just, you know, I'm a voracious reader. I read the newspaper and sometimes many newspapers every day. And I kind of scour for stories. There was an article in the New York Times. And it was one of those, you know, maybe it happens to me twice a year. I come across something where all the pieces kind of come together. And I thought, yeah, this story would really fly. It has a lot of meat on it. And it's complicated. It's not simple. It's about culture. It's about race. It's about class. It's about history. It's about how people see different things and look at reality through different lenses. And ultimately, it asks very difficult questions about who we are as a community and as a nation. And, you know, and I saw it all very quickly right away. And so, now, were you in El Paso at that time when you saw that New York Times piece or no? So you went

back to El Paso. And as El Paso was it a place you had some familiarity with? Did you know the city? How did that all work? Your entry there? Well, we should mention real quick. I, you know, I made this film with my producing partner, Christina Ibarra. Christina's from El Paso. She grew up there. I also have roots in the area. And my grandmother's from town just outside of El Paso called Isletta. And as it turns out, and I didn't know this till recently, you know, but my family came to El Paso, you know, in the late 1700s. And so, I have roots that go back in that area, you know, quite a ways. Interesting. Take us through some of the characters. If I could use that word loosely in the film. It revolves around an artist, Joan Hauser. We've got some other folks involved. But start with the artist and where how you saw him and what his goals were when you wanted to approach him and tell his story as a documentarian. Yeah. Well, John Hauser comes

from a family that has been involved in art for a long time. His father was one of the sculptors who carved Mount Rushmore. And so from an early age, John had it in his head that he wanted to do great, grand, monumental work on a heroic scale. And John is an extraordinarily talented artist. You know, he paints, he sculpts. He spent most of his life being something of a vagabond traveling all over the world, basically painting and sculpting and sort of following his muse. And but John is a brilliant man. You know, he loves fine wine. He knows music. He reads history. He knows art inside and out. And he's somebody who is just really, really well versed and knows a lot about a lot of things. So he's not, you know, he's no dummy. I mean, he's very thoughtful and introspective.

And but, you know, the story in essence is really about him because nothing would happen if it weren't for he's the force that causes everybody else to react to his action of building this statue. And everybody else is just responding to him. John is the son and everybody else in the film are the planets, you know, going around his orbit. But the thing that struck me from the beginning was that he was building a statue of a man who had accomplished some extraordinary feats, brought the horse to North America, explored much of the continent from the plains of Kansas to the Sea of Cortez, a generation before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, who had founded the capital of New Mexico, who had brought European culture, who had brought European religion,

Christianity, and who had really, in some sense, brought Hispanic culture to, you know, to North America. But there were other accomplishments that I thought were equally important. He had brought genocide to North America. He had instituted a system of essentially a taxation system that was much akin to slavery. When Onyat they first came to New Mexico, there were some 90 or so Indian communities or Pueblos along the Rio Grande, and within the first 80 years of the Spanish incursion into the region they were reduced to something like 24. It was sort of the, as one historian said, the Holocaust period for Native Americans. So many of them were wiped out because of disease, because of conflict, because of the heavy taxation

system. And Onyate had even not only killed a lot of Native Americans, but he had killed his own colonists, right? And then he had, in some cases, had tried to cover it up so that no one would know what had happened. He was put on trial by the King of Spain for essentially what we would call today crimes against humanity, completely on, you know, nothing like that had ever really happened before, to such a high political and military leader of the Spanish Empire. He was recalled, he was convicted, he was banished for life from New Mexico, and banished for five years from Mexico City. He had taken children from their families at Acoma and shipped them to Mexico, later many of them sold on the slave market. So he had all of these accomplishments that are

larger than life. And I wasn't interested in making judgments about good or bad or right or wrong. I was interested in exploring those aspects of his career. They just seemed really interesting. I think once we came to New Mexico and El Paso, we found people who were more interested in categorizing those things as right or wrong. But that wasn't my approach. I was interested in elucidation and illumination. I wasn't interested in advocacy particularly. It's a tough job for an artist for sure. And my sense of it watching the film was you weren't making any judgments, particularly not about Onyante, but about the participants in the film. You're not judging them either, the city counselors. And talk about that a little bit. How the machinations of how El Paso came to decide to go ahead and do this, they had a bit of an enlightenment period. It seems like where a lot of the counselors learned everything you just spoke about about

Onyante after the decision was made, which is very interesting. And a lot of things start to spool very quickly in the documentary after that, after those decisions are made. Well, it's quite complicated. And I'm not sure I understand exactly what the dynamic is to this day. But listen, El Paso is the 10th poorest city in America. It's a place that has suffered economically. It's a place that, you know, where people are really hurting. And the city decided that they wanted to try to do something about that. They solicited for ideas that would try to revitalize downtown, that would bring in business and help improve the lives of El Pasoans. And that was the original vision. And so they, you know, there were various proposals. John Hauser submitted a proposal. And his idea was to create a kind of a sculpture walk

through history. He would create 12 statues of figures that had played some role in the history of the region. And he would make these great and grand works of art. And it would highlight the unique history of El Paso as a kind of crossroads of culture. It would, tourists would come to see great art. People would learn about history. And it would help become a kind of a tourist magnet and a motivator for, to bring businesses back to the downtown, which would like fled the strip malls, you know, in the surrounding area. And it was, you know, and so I think there were really these great intentions, you know, behind it in many ways. They built the first statue, which was an early missionary to the area of Freigarcia, the San Francisco. And then the second statue that was picked was to be Juan de Oñate. And it was picked by a committee working with

the city council. And and Juan de Oñate was picked because he was the one who named the area. When he came through in 1598, he called the area El Paso del Norte, the Paso de North, on his way up to New Mexico. And so he's kind of in some sense one could say a kind of a founding father of modern day El Paso. You could argue that. And so that's what they were really thinking about. The other thing they were thinking about is that 90% of the people in El Paso give or take, you know, maybe 85, I'm not sure, but but but the vast majority of people in El Paso are Mexican-American. And for a lot of those people, there has always been a feeling that the Mexican that the Mexican contribution to the building of the American West has always been minimized, ignored, trivialized, pushed to the side. And a lot of people felt that their heritage and, you know, has been that they've been discriminated against basically. And this is true.

And so they felt it was an opportunity to proudly proclaim a Hispanic founding father. And to kind of take pride in the accomplishments of Hispanic people. Now, unfortunately, you know, El Paso is one of the least educated cities. Well, actually, it's the least educated city of its size in the country. The college graduation rate is 11%. That means about 90% of the people in El Paso haven't gone to university. Also, they have a dropout rate that is, you know, in the 50, 60% range, right? So half the population, there's never even made it through high school. When you go to the high school, because, you know, Mexican-American can haven't really been valued as an important part of the American experience. The, you know, one day on Yate in the early

Spanish colonial history, a lot of, a lot of that has just kind of been, it's just kind of briefly gone over. And people knew very little about on Yate was kind of like ignorance was rampant because it wasn't that history wasn't really valued. But when you're talking about that, you get to the level of a city council. And these are the folks making in the committee itself. Yeah. Our assumption could be that these folks are college-educated and they did know or presumably would know about on Yate in this history. But they still made the decision to go ahead and do so. And at some point, at one point in the documentary, when the information starts to come in that, oh, despite our intent, we've got this consequence. What do we do now? That was a very interesting part of the film. Now, you also highlight one of the city council's, I want you to tell me about him, who has his own internal struggle with his decision as a city councilor who had first approved the project. Well, he's emblematic of how many people in El Paso felt. When Anthony Kobos heard about this

statue, he supported it for all of the reasons that I mentioned. But the more he began to learn about the history, the more he began to read up about on Yate, he realized that it wasn't as clear cut as he had first imagined. When he started coming across some of the more brutal aspects of his career, he found himself kind of appalled, actually. Appalled by his own ignorance, appalled by his community's ignorance, and appalled that he had been part of the city government that had embarked upon memorializing the man who brought genocide to North America, essentially. At the same time, he was getting information from Acama, Pueblo folks. Not just historical information was coming to him, the amount of hurt in real time for folks at Acama was starting to come into his consciousness as well. But it's important to remember that one of the factors

that early on was important here is that El Paso, and I would argue much of the southwest, is a land divided. People don't necessarily speak to one another. Most of the people on the city counsel maybe don't really know people from the Native American community, and it never occurred to them to consult or speak to them. There are these boundaries of culture, of class, of race that are deep, and unless you make an effort to overcome those divisions, they just remain. So there was a lack of understanding between cultures. Cobal slowly began to get this information, and so then he turned against the project and decided, after much soul-searching, decided that this should not be the icon of our city, because what it stands for is really dark and terrifying, and we don't want to inspire people to look at this statue and come to the conclusion

that when you make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs. We want to portray our city in a way that represents the best of who we ought to be. He turned against it, and when he was up for re-election later on, he lost the election and sort of paid a penalty for taking a principled position. But you know what's an interesting point you bring there about that position. Use the word heroic in the beginning of this interview. It struck me watching. It could be viewed that he was taking a very heroic stand himself by acknowledging his inner feelings, acknowledging his change, and in what could be the climax of the film, if he choose to see it this way, a very impassioned speech from the day of city council on why this should not be, and he was swimming against a huge tide, you can almost feel exactly what was coming, which was he was going to

lose his city council seat in the next election. But he was making his stand on a moral, printable place. And again, emblematic, as you said, of the duality of what was going on in the city at that time. So that begs me to ask you a question. As a filmmaker, you had this very dramatic element at your feet. And I'm curious how you brought in the native side of the story, the Acoma, folks from Acoma, and all those kind of people that had a big problem that we're starting to show up in El Paso to protest, to let their feelings known. Had you contacted them for their reaction, did folks come to you? Did they know the film was happening? No. We went to Acoma. And we started asking around, we asked people, what do you think about that statue? What does ony out they mean to you? What does it mean to your community? When you look at that statue, and you know, and there were already images of the McCat and so forth, what does that make you think? How does that make you feel? What does this all all mean? And you know, I got to say,

everybody we talked to, they were devastated. I mean, they were just like, it was just really, they, they, somebody one person took us up. If you go up to Acoma, it's up on this Mesa, this is beautiful picturesque valley, and there's a church, a Catholic church up there, and there's a graveyard in front of it, right? And around the graveyard is this adobe wall, right? And somebody pointed out to us that at the southern part of the wall, there's a hole in the wall. He said, you know what that hole is for? I don't know, you know? And he said, well, you know, when ony out they was here and he destroyed our village, and you know, there were about two, maybe 2,000, 2,500 people here by the time ony out they was done, it's reduced to maybe 200, but, but there were a lot of children had survived, and ony out they took the children and took them to Mexico, and we never saw them again, took the children of our entire community.

And so, you know, that hole is so that their souls can, you know, find their way back home, you know, and they maintain it to this day. Interesting. And, you know, and I was so moved, you know, because for them, history is not something that happened a long time ago, history is something that is lived. It's something that we live today, and I began to look at the statue and the whole situation that way for the people who are the supporters of the statue, history is very much alive, for Hauser, for Kobos, for everybody, history is not something, is not an academic exercise that exists in some dusty book on a shelf at the University of New Mexico Library. You know, history is in our DNA and it's in every fiber of our being, and you really begin to run into problems when people don't acknowledge one another and don't communicate with one another.

So, yeah, that was our experience, and folks at Acoma, led by virus Chino, began to organize and began to voice their opposition to the statue and what it meant to them. And in some ways, I think that, you know, if Anthony Kobos is a hero to Mexican-American people, I think, you know, virus is a hero to Native Americans as well. They're both people who acted on their conscience and who stood up for what they believed was really right. And I'll say this, but was right not for Indian people and not for Mexican-American people, but what was right for all of us, because the idea of somebody who kills a lot of people in principle, no matter whether it's black, white, Asian, Indian, non-Indian, it's a moral stand and it's taking a position of human rights and of life over tyranny, essentially. And not to discount all of the other

accomplishments on Yacht they did, but it was, you know, they were doing it, I felt, for all of us. Let me say, it's a tremendous effort. I really tip my hat to you. It's a wonderful film, thought-provoking, it's dramatic, I felt my gut tightening at many times during the film, and you really did a great John John Veledades, and we really thank you for stopping by here, a can of me for a little bit. Great, thank you so much. You got it.