Cíbola Spring: The College Years

By Andres C. Salazar

It is 1960 and Reyes Cordova has just completed an important leg of his coming-of-age journey in Cíbola, a New Mexico community isolated from twentieth-century America. Now that he has graduated from high school and gained confidence, Reyes is ready to embrace a new chapter at Coronado State University.

At college, Reyes encounters the best and worst of human behavior hidden behind the curtain that separates academia from normal society. While faculty demands an unholy worship of esoteric knowledge, Reyes finds comfort in new friendships. Meanwhile, his cousin, Claudia, and high school friend, Marla, wrestle with demons of their own. Claudia is skeptical of the college dream. Marla is a mystic who scares people into thinking she can read minds. After Reyes finds hope in a fatherly figure, the man eventually reveals the loss of his beloved wife is clouding his judgment and perhaps his sanity. As Reyes finds part-time work that brings new issues to light, he soon discovers his name still connects him to Cíbola and the discrimination that surrounds his identity.

In this continuing tale of courage and struggle, a young Hispanic man becomes more Americanized as he enters college and attempts to break away from the tentacles of ancestral norms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Oct 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9781480893023

Andres C. Salazar

Andres C. Salazar has had careers spanning decades in industry, education, and literature. He is the author of several books that include Seasons, a poetry book selected as a finalist in the New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards in 2016, and Release from Cíbola, the first book in the Cíbola trilogy.

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Copyright © 2020 Andres C. Salazar.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Archway Publishing

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-9603-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-9302-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020917585

Archway Publishing rev. date: 10/19/2020

Contents

Chapter 1 The Last Look - Thursday, September 1, 1960

Chapter 2 Sacred Grounds - Friday, September 2, 1960

Chapter 3 Warning Shots - Friday, September 16, 1960

Chapter 4 Cousin Claudia - Sunday, September 18, 1960

Chapter 5 The Price of Trust - Sunday, October 8, 1960

PART TWO

ASCENT

Chapter 6 Of Learning and Study Groups - Sunday, February 19, 1961

Chapter 7 Harold Diamond and Mother Nature - Sunday, April 22, 1961

Chapter 8 Eliosa Ortega - Sunday, July 2, 1961

Chapter 9 Lack of Candidates - Wednesday, October 11, 1961

Chapter 10 Mirth and Sadness - Friday, May 11, 1962

PART THREE

THIN AIR

Chapter 11 The Payne Challenge - Monday, October 15, 1962

Chapter 12 Fight for Land - Saturday, April 6, 1963

Chapter 13 Temptation in the Garage - Sunday, July 14, 1963

Chapter 14 Wearing Different Clothes - Saturday, September 21, 1963

PART FOUR

LAUNCH

Chapter 15 College According to Señor Ortega - Sunday, November 24, 1963

Chapter 16 Marla & the Art of Teaching – Wednesday, March 11, 1964

Chapter 17 Interview in Waiting – Friday, April 10, 1964.

Chapter 18 Commencement – Friday, May 15, 1964

Glossary

Reader’s Guide - Author Interview

Dedication

For Cíbola classmates in New Mexico

1

The Last Look - Thursday, September 1, 1960

… He was saying goodbye to her, keeper of the past, teacher of patience, guardian of hope for the unending quest.

Defiant and afraid Reyes walked away from Cíbola, the only home he had known. There was nothing to remember. It was better that way. He never understood why people were still there, after the endless wars, what could have been – had there been gold or greener fields. It was over for him. Tired of tales of want, the quest for title, to be somebody, to make meaning of scarcity– that was no quest - it had led to this day of hot sun and dusty gloom.

It was a walk of freedom, not from shackles that time and birth places on you but from custom, the acceptance of fate that others endow on the innocent mind. It was flight from safety of heritage, where flying in that feathery group of elders keeps the blood and direction the same and where uniformity in creed and color is paramount.

Declared a castaway and victim of heresy, he was walking on new ground, a new order, seeking refuge within the limits of sanity. He had accepted the target of learning but he wasn’t sure he could tell the difference between wisdom and prattle. The goal was to discover that knowledge of facts and strings of eventful steps that lead to newness, to solving problems, to probing the unknown, or the reordering of things for insight. That was the promise, articulated convincingly by so many of his high school mentors, whether or not they had found what their youthful dreams had sought.

There was this fear, slowly melting his feet as he walked, that he, an interloper, would be caught and sent back. It would be declared a mistake; his admission to the school would be re-assessed and declared invalid. Send him back! The words felt real as thorns - back to desert land with Spanish names where they fear devil worship and nightly beasts of self-doubt and fateful death!

It was the nightmare of sunbaked poverty, of having to visit the past again and again, the land now depleted, the debts of lineage piled up with no plan of escape. He had been born midst the glory old men tell, of a past that never happened, a tale to overlook the mottled skin, bristly hair and droop in spirit that failure endows. Reyes knew the Cíbola survivors who live listlessly in mud huts, trailer parks and pressboard shacks, accepting the lies that keep them there.

They look at him as another generation, another hopeful link in search of Cíbola’s treasure where the seed can finally yield the bounty that kings were promised, said kings whose names now mistaken for those of saints. Our blood is in you, they would say, although your name is not within the law of king and church. You are still our son if you find the gold, gain a title and ask for the right to walk among us and speak our tongue.

Survival was not enough. He was to promote and believe in a culture of ancient dogma, to live in the separate world, celebrating the colony that never bloomed, pretending that the aim of Cíbola was still alive, that there was hope things would work out in the end and lost riches in the new land would be found. The journey to the desert valley with inspiring mountain views and a miraculous river had been over; but after three and half centuries the flame was still alive, despite the dust storms, biting winters and relentless summer sun.

The church was still the same, holding captive the hope for a magic child, a better harvest, and a life filled with song and peace. And the language of psalms had transcended time, recognizable, written, spoken, and still holy, while corrupted by distance and indigenous sounds for it linked him and others to an ancient world, orphans as they were, waiting for relatives that never came. The crops and animals had followed and struggled in the new land, alive for generations despite the thin air and windswept days. But now, with tired soil and dwindling streams, the lambs now gone, this generation was being crowded out, still untrained for a mechanized age under an American flag. Only English is spoken here.

Los indios had preceded his kind and they had tried to live together, accommodating for the differences, the fires of enmity calmed down but not conceding that both had become the same under the sun, drinking from the same well and taking from a shared but stingy land. The blood of each side became thinner, the hair straighter as the beards receded. The difference was still there, the eyes and skin telling them apart. The chants were taught in sacred rooms; they learned their prayers in church and recited secrets with beads in front of roughened images, too crude for art but hewn of faith and form of divinity.

The time had come, far and away from ocean and displaced from kings and ancient lands, to take the vow of a foster father land, ready to enter a household which was reluctant in its welcome. At least for Reyes, it was the day to take leave of the valley and its search for nobility, becoming then a refugee in the occupied colony. He was to live with those who wore the badge of American dominion, the heirs of Mayflower religion and legacy of tobacco commerce, those who recognized ownership only through selfish power.

But could he learn from them and feast on clues that led from a murky past to an open future that could offer livelihood and safety? Could he cross the bar and pass undetected at least some of the time? No one from San Isidro had done it before. Language was the key to entering the new kingdom. It was the first move, the crucial step to mixing among the crowds, parroting utterances that passed the test, the speech without an accent, his gestures revealing no allegiance to an alien region or papal God. English words held the secret passage, the code for concealing his fear of falling away from the vanquished land.

¿Qué idea tienes? No eres nadie. Quien te va ayudar? Quesque el mundo está por acá.

Reyes Cordova had reached the campus, still thinking of pilgrimage, the fear of failure still evident in his step. School was not in session. The campus was a deserted town with rounded pueblo-style buildings, earthen colored, amid hovering clouds of acrid, stinging dust assaulting the massive walls, the same ether that dries the throat and bedevils the eyes. He approached Palmer Hall, the general classroom building which according to his high school mentors, had newly minted prayer rooms of learning. Here they said an infusion would occur, pooling over time, the hypnotic spell coming first, the drips of Americana entering the bloodstream, the cells of ancestry disappearing slowly, the rate being timed to avoid alarm and human resistance. Dialect would become non-descript as the passage proceeded, eyes opening unto a new dawn, arriving as a child from a cultural re-birth, a trans-ethnic renaissance with a ticket to a twentieth century life. He would listen to the prayer chants and wonder to himself. Could every Cíbola gene be rooted out? Could the blood be filtered for reaching complacency to the church bell, the olden songs of the village, the lilt of his mother’s voice?

He was to leave the years in San Isidro, shedding the skin of sheltered youth including any debt to a generational mother, who cradled him in flesh and spirit, while supremely loyal to Cíbola with its siren call to history and servitude. She had lectured him repeatedly on the obligation of prayer and requisite gratitude for life to serve family, faith and land.

By being here on alien grounds, Reyes was saying goodbye to her, keeper of the past, teacher of patience, guardian of hope for the unending quest. He had been her hope for reciprocity of care, the Cíbola tradition fulfilled by the youngest child. She had found the abandonment of a husband a burden undeserved with days and nights of worry as to how tomorrow would be any different. The toil for a few dollars of washing floors, ironing clothes, and making beds had dissipated her of youthful bloom and any carefree smile, although she retained her slim figure and a face that had not totally lost the enviable radiance it once had. She abstained from selling herself, not from any moral judgment but from a deathly fear that she would lose Reyes when he would understand what she was doing.

But Reyes had seen the distant look that fear instills and tension bears down on the little resolve one can muster within depths of despair. He had felt it when she hugged him a little more tightly than before, the touch of her cheek on his head lasting longer than the breath he was holding. It was as if she wanted to say something that she knew he didn’t deserve to hear and that he wouldn’t understand anyway.

Reyes had felt the frustration despite her comforting scent, long instilled in him as a symbol of love and safety. Words were not necessary to remind him that he had been part of her and the embrace was simply a vain attempt to recapture what she had given away in birth. Her choices had led to nowhere special. She now relied on hard work coupled with long hours of dedication to any task she mastered. This strategy dragged her from one day to the next, no season any better than the last, no year giving hope that things would improve despite prayers and candles lit with spare pennies at random chapels. Reyes followed her in church affairs, admittedly his faith far weaker than hers, partly because he had not realized how far down they were in the ladder of life. But her tenacity to rise up and try again instilled in him that the only way out of their hell was a steadfast refusal to accept failure, the permanent kind that drowns any spark that a morning may offer. He never saw her give up without a fight, showing him a resolve he hoped to match someday.

Tienes que trabajar. No hay descanso para los pobres. ¿Qué te llama el atención? ¿Porque quieres irte?

Me canso de seguir así, desesperado día por día.

Pues, así lo es. ¿Qué no entiendes?

On a workday winter morning she would get up to start a fire in the bedroom heater and another in the kitchen stove. Eventually, a faint but pungent odor of burning cedar or piñon would rouse him from a bed with handmade doubly quilted covers that felt as heavy as bearskin rugs. For her, it was but the start of another day figuring out the means of covering the expense of daily life. After providing him with a breakfast of re-heated leftovers, she would slip into one of her work outfits, like the ancient dress made from a durable fabric whose pattern had faded but had enough of a flared skirt to allow her to work on her knees with agility on floors only the wretched would clean. She would wear no stockings and her shoes were nothing more than leather-strapped sandals she could easily slip on or off as needed. To this day she would pray to San Antonio, her patron saint, while faithfully fulfilling the duty that destiny had laid out for her.

She was silent when he showed her the one-way ticket to mainstream America. It was the dread she had sensed many years before, becoming a hurt that would flare up occasionally but would never totally go away. The boy had first felt it when she had sent him off to first grade, not knowing that English would soon take him away from her, every new word a step she could not follow. He spoke only in Spanish to her, using the address of respect and honor inherent in the language, and in a tone that connoted the calmness and courtesy he felt she deserved. But the boy had been tough to manage since he had learned the language of the occupier, a tongue still alien to her and many others in the valley. The more he learned it, the greater the uncertainty, the distance between them becoming more profound, as if he had morphed into a person she barely recognized.

"¿A dónde vas?"

"Me voy a estudiar. Deseo puesto que page,"

"¿Y qué pasará de mí?"

Con tiempo le puedo ayudar. Confié en mí.

La vida viene de la tierra. No vale la pena de ir a la escuela. Verdaderamente, Dios nos cuida. Es la voluntad del cielo.

She had taken sick and couldn’t come with him to Valderon, the village surrounding the Coronado State University (CSU) campus. She stayed behind with his sister Ida, living in a rented house, her devotion to the rosary taking her from one day to the next, like an inexorable journey with destination unknown. The last organ removed from her had changed her outlook. It was not the same fateful attitude of past years. A string of maladies had created a form of numbness. With the loss of every organ her energy had diminished, dimming the spirit he had admired, even as her life was being extended. The doctors had been persuasive in promising a longer life in exchange for another organ and another medical payment from the welfare agency. She had been told again and again that physical flaws could be healed or at least tolerated.

His departure only made the lack of sensation worse. It would not be the last time the youngest son would leave Cíbola. In her mind there could not be a change in her fortune because distance was an enemy. His absence was the test of faith she dreaded for years and it had come to pass. On his departure, her last act was pushing a crumpled five dollar bill into his hand as she went for the bittersweet parental hug, her teary eyes instinctively causing his to water also. Apparent was that silent, umbilical bond of mother to child, invisible but intensifying nonetheless over the years, the result of the deep connection of warmth and love there from the moment the child first appears. There was nothing she could do, no arguments she could make, to change the course of their lives at this point.

America was going to lure him away from Cíbola. It wasn’t clear he could be successful in the new world. She had not known anyone in the family who had mastered the transition, crossed the divide and come back even for brief visits to bask in the valley sun. Leaving town was abandoning the communal home, the memory of an ancient past, a past that many believed merited respect and allegiance, a past that could not be separated from the soul of someone born there, the inherited genes nourished by the rarified air, bathed by the infrequent rain and destined to propagate the dreams of ancestors who came in search of Cíbola. He did not fit the pattern of valley tradition, the heir now being mutated by Anglo teachers, his attitude re-oriented toward America with a dream-like vision, and he had become too much of a stranger among the faithful and he was all but ineligible for re-conversion.

Still she believed in him as she believed in the salvation of her own soul, as she fingered the beads at night, her wrinkled lips moving slightly through the stations, akin to days adding up to years. Yes, he continued to violate tradition, to discard age-old customs of respecting elders, the craving of land, embracing the Catholic service, and humbly serving relatives with duty and honor. She defended him stoically and she believed, silently, deep inside as an unspoken hope, in the course he had chosen. But the change was far beyond what she could explain to herself, his arguments irrelevant in logic and foreign to the Cíbola world. It all came down to trust. She realized it one day and actually said it. She had to trust that he was choosing to do what was best for himself and her, probably in that order, again contrary to Cíbola tradition whose truth and way of life were centuries in the making.

She had sung to him a family song. Over the years he had memorized the words. They haunted him and would come back to him when he thought of her. The voice and her scent would be part of him forever.

Niño bello

Vienes de camino celestial

Alegría que me traes

Como sueño de los santos

Me calmas ansia de la vida.

Tanto serás de mí

Pobre madre con pena que no calla

Andaba en busca del sentido

Sufriendo duda de mi ser

Y llegas sino regalo original.

Contaba sola con rosario

La inquietud que llena mi vida

Sabía menos del placer que eres tú

Mis brazos son la cuna temporal

Cumplas el tiempo que Dios me da.

Niño bello,

Te llevas tesoro de mi seno

El cariño compartido

Más inocencia de juventud

Me dejas el orgullo final.

She had tried to understand as a faithful daughter of Cíbola but she had seen the spark in him that would not yield. She had disciplined him, pulled ears, escorted him to confession, lectured him and cried when she saw it was no use – the carefully nourished soul had fled, Faustian in promise, through the curtain that separates a dream from reality. The canons of Cíbola meant little to him now. He was to leave the mountains of her ancestors, declare the valley tongue a language and not a faith and show allegiance to himself and not the past that led to a world that could not and would not prosper. He could not make the rounds in the churchyard with the faithful; his bones would be buried elsewhere.

He had said he was as good as anyone else, heresy to elders who demanded unquestioned respect. He could do anything an Anglo could do, eliciting laughter from those who continued to kowtow to the new rules. He could read, speak and write English as well as anyone else, a blasphemy among those who were proud of their archaic Spanish or worse, an insult among those who believed you had to be eastern-born and naturally able to speak the King’s English. The exorcism didn’t occur overnight, the winning of a soul taking years of whispered doubts and classroom-altered history. Cíbola had given him time to repent, to see the error of his ways and return, asking forgiveness, making amends and kissing the ring of encircled promise, whose serpentine power comes from feasting on youth’s fervor and curiosity. They had seen it before. An upstart shoots his mouth off, starts to go off track and then finds he’s unable to compete in the new world and then expects the elders of Cíbola to take him back like a prodigal son.

He could still hear them whisper. He’ll be back, you can count on it. He needs to learn his lesson. He’s one of us and he won’t accept it until he’s beaten and humiliated like others who left us. He doesn’t have a chance. Where’s his father? A boy can’t do anything without his father. The Anglo world is another planet, another universe. Why leave? This is our place. It was good enough for our ancestors. Generation after generation has been here. Cíbola is our home. It is an honor to carry on our traditions, our religion, our language and our culture. There is no room for another master. The key was to engender a sense of hopelessness. It is easy to lead him who has a spirit dampened from alienation and from gazing at the chasm appearing to be deeper and wider every year.

Too many teachers had convinced him that he could be accepted, that there was room for those who believe in themselves, enough to overcome the inherent suspicion of darker skin, an unmistakable accent, and elevated pathos.

Reyes tried the door to Palmer Hall and found it locked.

2

Sacred Grounds - Friday, September 2, 1960

The holy spirit of wisdom known to Quetzlcoatl, Apollo, and Saraswati would descend to earth here and change everything… – Reyes Cordova

Located south of La Bajada trail, the Coronado State University campus was established in 1730 as a sanctuary and place of study for the padres and missionaries who came to the Rio del Norte area of New Spain in the resettlement period after Don Diego de Vargas’s 1692 re-entry into Santa Fe following the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Because the campus was close to the encampment site of Coronado’s expedition in the winter of 1540, it was known as the Cuarteles de Coronado. The site was located on the left bank of the river where the ground was high enough back in those days to escape the spring floods of the Rio del Norte. It had a small creek, el Rito Frio, running through campus whose flow became but a trickle in the late summer after the snow melt from the Ortiz Mountains was virtually gone.

The original building of the sanctuary housed a small chapel and a dormitory that could hold up to twenty holy men. Made out of adobe it was torn down and replaced with a structure made from reddish sandstone in the mid 1870’s during the tenure of Archbishop Lamy. The structure, sacred and massive, featured tapered walls with splotches of lichen creating a patina of aging. Maintained by the Catholic diocese of Santa Fe it was used as a seminary with the addition of several other buildings until 1890 when the territorial government took it over. The original building was named Fray Benito Hall after the nineteenth century scholar who had written a history of the re-conquest and who had documented the genealogy of many of the Oñate settlers of New Spain.

A village named Valderon had been built up around the seminary campus that had been encircled in later years with a stone wall about four feet high. Valderon became a stopping point on the Camino Real linking Santa Fe and Mexico City during the Spanish colonial era started in 1598 by Onate at the confluence of the Chama and Rio del Norte located about 25 miles north of present-day Santa Fe. After the U.S. occupation of the New Spain lands, later known as New Mexico, by U.S. General Stephen Kearny’s takeover of Santa Fe on September 9, 1846, the church in New Mexico underwent re-organization with the appointment by Pope Pius IX of Jean-Baptiste Lamy as Bishop of the new territory. Arriving in Santa Fe on August 9, 1851, Bishop Lamy quickly visited the Bishop of Durango – José Antonio Laureano – informing him of the new vicariate of Santa Fe consisting of all territory now ceded to the United States by the Guadalupe-Hidalgo Treaty. Within two years the vicariate had been declared a diocese. The village continued to serve as a modest trading post and its village church – San Sebastian - was re-built during the territorial period.

The campus was used to establish a state teacher’s college in 1890 by the territorial government; one year after the University of New Mexico (UNM) was founded in Albuquerque. The college was known then as the Coronado State School and its charter was mentioned in the state constitution ratified in 1912, the year the state finally joined the union. During the New Deal years, the college was the beneficiary of the Roosevelt’s PWA program when several more buildings were erected – an administration building named Wilson Hall, a classroom building later designated as Palmer Hall and finally, the Brody Auditorium, all named after early college administrators or retired faculty members. The architecture of the PWA buildings matched the stark sandstone exterior of Fray Benito Hall. Over the years the college had grown in enrollment from a few hundred students to five thousand today, exceeded in student population only by NM State with seven thousand and UNM with eight thousand.

Reyes had looked at last year’s CSU yearbook. There were 145 full time faculty members with 30 administrators including President Corcoran, Provost Obenchain and the academic Deans and Department Chairs. None of the administrators had Spanish surnames. There were two Hispanic faculty members, both in the Spanish Department. Previously, when Hispanic legislators asked for an explanation for the vast discrepancy, college officials claimed no qualified faculty or administrator candidates with Spanish surnames could be found in almost any field being taught. As a result, just as was the case with the national laboratories in New Mexico – Los Alamos and Atrisco – few Hispanic professionals could be found on their respective permanent staffs. The vast majority of faculty in the state colleges and technical workers in the national laboratories had been imported from other parts of the country. When state appointed panels of experts were set up during the 1950’s to investigate whether ethnic discrimination was at work in hiring professionals for state or federally funded positions, the conclusion was always the same. There were no qualified candidates, despite the fact that a fair number of Hispanics were being graduated from state schools in a variety of fields including math, science and engineering. Another study of the problem showed many of the Hispanic graduates were accepting jobs located out-of-state, presumably at higher wages and benefits.

CSU was known for its lack of diversity in both faculty and students. It had been like that for decades, possibly since its founding. But Reyes wanted to come here. It had a decent engineering school. He had attended science summer camps in Utah and Montana the previous two summers at which he was the only Hispanic student. He had done well, not great, but good enough. He wasn’t scared of being the only engineering student with English as his second language. After all, the village of Valderon was heavily Hispanic. It supplied most of hourly workers to the college – secretaries, clerks, gardeners, janitors and maids. The campus police had no Hispanic officers, however. Few professionals from the college administration or faculty ranks lived in town, preferring to commute from either the southern edge of Santa Fe or the northern edge of Albuquerque, both cities a mere 25 miles away in opposite directions over US Highway 85. The few college professionals who lived in Valderon preferred to reside adjacent to the grassy campus where the streets were tree lined with tall American Elms, presenting a look that was out of place for the high desert surroundings of chamisa, Apache Plume and scrubby junipers.

Valderon had become the typical, small college hamlet more commonly found in the American Midwest. The main street, as well as several others, was paved although the extremes of hot summer days and icy winter nights had produced snake-like cracks in the aging macadam that made for bumpy rides for student bicyclists and cars with stiff suspensions. Downtown Valderon was only four blocks long with the usual small-town establishments – laundromat, hardware store, barber and beauty salons, variety store, pharmacy, bus station, and a coffee shop and two restaurants. There were two bookstores, the post office, two banks and an ice cream shop that catered to the student population. On the north end of town was the modest-sized Catholic church – San Sebastian - and across the street, a Congregationalist meeting place, the halleluiah church as the natives called it.

The college had started as a normal school, dedicated to the training of teachers in the two languages officially used in the state. The majority of Valderon residents spoke Spanish but English was the official language mandated by the territorial government set up by the United States Congress in 1848. Spanish was also accepted as an official language by the state constitution that was ratified by Congress when New Mexico was finally admitted into the union in January 1912. Over time other degrees besides teacher education were offered by the college including liberal arts, nursing, business, biology, chemistry, physics and engineering, the latter two first offered in 1948, a few years after the establishment of Los Alamos as a nuclear research facility. Scientists and engineers from that facility who lived in Santa Fe occasionally taught at CSU on a part-time basis. Although engineering classes were small, ten to fifteen students graduated annually with baccalaureate degrees either in mechanical or electrical engineering. The graduates fared well in the national market, especially after Sputnik’s launch in 1957. NM State and UNM also had engineering schools which had been started decades earlier but CSU was the school closest to Los Alamos and the only one in the northern half of the state. Although CSU only had 150 undergraduate engineering students, it had 250 graduate students about half of whom commuted either from Albuquerque or from Santa Fe. Foreign students numbered about one hundred, many of whom worked for the ten full time professors as graduate research or teaching assistants. Reyes had read about the demographics of the school but it didn’t deter him, not immediately anyway. He could pass for a foreign student, certainly one from Latin America, the Middle East or maybe Eastern Europe.

Reyes was an inch or two short of six feet and at one hundred and twenty-five pounds, too thin for varsity sports despite his quick reflexes and agility. He had a broad face, prominent nose, large recessed eyes with long eyelashes and a skin/hair combination that was too light to be Indian-toned but too dark to be confused with Anglo blood. Fatherless and raised by a protective mother with an independent spirit typical in the Cíbola culture, he had taken too long to develop enough self-confidence to protect himself from the taunts of others and the pushing and shoving that youth encounters. But he used his intelligence, quick wit and skepticism as a protective shield when necessary, perhaps a little too often so that his demeanor was now distrustful of others, causing him to develop an introverted personality that he constantly had to suppress in school. Regarding the challenges he would face at Coronado, he thought about the parting words of his mother and his response.

¿Y que si no puedes?

La caída no duele si el premio vale la pena.

He had taken the entrance exam. Verbal skills and math, critical thinking, English and abstract reasoning, idioms and logic, whatever you call the pair, it was a three-hour tortuous scan of memory and analytical prowess. That’s what they thought they were testing. It determined freshmen placement to Coronado State University, CSU or Corn U or Nado U as some out-of-state students called it. Hispanic students were a little more diplomatic but not by much, few as they were. Of the 60 or so students who took the entrance exam with him this morning, five had responded to Hispanic surnames during roll call. He didn’t know any of them. They were probably from Albuquerque, sons and daughters of merchant families of the South Valley. New Mexico’s population of 950 thousand souls in 1960 was 60% Hispanic but the corresponding student enrollment at CSU was only 12%. There was no bilingual version of the exam although the state still had Spanish as an official language. College officials maintained that all non-language courses were going to be taught in English, so why bother. It was the new currency and without it there was little hope of making inroads to the new American economy, focused now on machines, electrical energy and continental commerce. You could choose to live off the land the old way but the efficiency and size of mechanized farms in the Midwest and abroad would keep you poor in mind and spirit. It was hopeless. The era of a hand-labored farm was over except for those who still believed that irrigated land could yield crops with healing powers. Reyes was not one of them.

Before the exam they had gotten a short speech from the Provost, Dr. Rollins Obenchain. Short, bespectacled, portly with frizzy, white hairs sprouting from a balding, roundish head and ruddy-complexioned, he wore a frumpy, gray, double-breasted, suit with a thin woven tie. His suspenders groaned at keeping his pants at a modest level as his generous girth also put an unnatural strain on lower shirt buttons. He spoke in stentorian English, often pausing unexpectedly in mid-sentence while he fumbled with some notecards he held in his left hand. Despite his attempts toward public humility, Reyes saw that the Provost carried himself with the bloated arrogance and pomposity of the stereotypical school administrator who brandishes the dominion of empty power his office gives him.

"Welcome to Coronado State University. We are proud and extremely pleased that you have chosen us to guide you in your post-secondary studies. We have many fields for you to consider as a major. The exam you are about to take will place you in the most suitable freshmen courses in Math and English. The answer sheets require that you fill in the bubble next to the correct answer for each question with the number two pencil