Los Alamitos: a Novel

By Al Stotts

Los Alamitos is a coming-of-age story. Set in New Mexico in the late 1960s, a small town university journalism student meets and falls for a bohemian music student from New York City. They share interests in rock and classical music and politics, but the beautiful violinist is dedicated to a solo career in both music and life.

With the political turmoil and music of the 1960s as a backdrop, Tristan and Charlotte begin a tentative relationship as they are drawn into student protests over an attempt to ban sexually explicit poetry and opposition to the Vietnam War. But Charlotte’s attraction to a militant Weather Underground organizer threatens their relationship.

Familiar names of the era are also central to the storyline: land grant activist Reies Lopez Tijerina, Dr. Martin Luther King, U.S. Senators Bobby Kennedy and Fred Harris, President Richard Nixon, poets Sylvia Plath and Lenore Kandel, and rock singer Jim Morrison of the Doors.

But the underlying story of Los Alamitos is Tristan’s other love interest – New Mexico. Arriba Nuevo México!

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 8, 2024
• ISBN: 9781663262295

Al Stotts

Al Stotts lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is the author of four previous novels: Pont Marie (2011), No Angels in Montmartre (2013), Oligarch Games (2016), and Mountain Road (2019).

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Copyright © 2024 Al Stotts.

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.

Certain characters in this work are historical figures, and certain events portrayed did take place. However, this is a work of fiction. All of the other characters, names, and events as well as all places, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-6632-6228-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-6229-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024908075

iUniverse rev. date:  04/18/2024

CONTENTS

For Serena And Alfred

Author’s Note

Los Alamitos

Tierra Amarilla

1968

Neither A Barbie Nor A Hippie Be

Vivaldi, Plato, Tijerina, Van Gogh And Nixon

Poetry And Tear Gas

War, What Is It Good For? Absolutely Nothing.

Charlotte’s Web

El Malpais, El Morro, Turquoise Mountain

Star-Crossed

Here again is the problem of history and the novel, or rather of that indeterminate territory that lies between the two….History is fascinated by the ease and ambiguity of the novel, which creates character by small borrowings, petty thefts, fragments of bits and pieces, thus making reality from artifice and truth out of error and lies -- or rather its version of the truth.

~Louis Chevalier, The Assassination of Paris, 1977

FOR SERENA AND ALFRED

Special thanks to Steve Baca, Maureen Baca, Michael Bustamante, Eric Hajas, Cody Rhodes, Jim Danneskiold, Liz Dineen, Tami Moore, and Marian Tanau for reviewing initial drafts of this story.

Additional thanks to Maureen Baca, Marian Tanau and Roberto Minczuk for their insights about classical music and musicians. And extra thanks to Steve Baca for reviewing multiple drafts and providing many helpful suggestions.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Los Alamitos references real people who played prominent public roles in the late 1960s. Direct quotes are attributed to some of them. They include:

Senator Robert Kennedy’s April 4, 1968, statement on the assassination of Martin Luther King, which was excerpted from a document available from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

Comments by Senator Kennedy at a 1968 University of New Mexico political rally are from a New Mexico Daily Lobo report about the event.

Passages from Senator Fred R. Harris’s 1968 eulogy for Senator Kennedy came from the Congressional Record.

Statements attributed to Reies Tijerina were sourced from They Call Me King Tiger by Reies Lopez Tijerina, The King of Adobe by Lorena Oropeza, and Grito! by Richard Gardner.

Alamitos had little to offer, and that little could all be seen: a few shabby buildings, the cottonwoods for which the town was named, the loafing cowhands. What startled her was the sky. It was enormous and blue, more blue than any sky she had seen, the vast sweep of it something she could scarcely grasp.

~ Louis L’Amour, Flint, 1960

LOS ALAMITOS

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A dirt road that led to the top of a mesa captured Tristan Wilson’s imagination as a child. He would stand in a field near his family’s ranch style home, look at the crooked path etched into the face of the distant mesa and wish he could follow it to the top.

It seemed odd to him that the mountain top had somehow been lopped off. He imagined that it was perfectly flat on top and covered with long, wild grass. He was sure it would be a wonderful place to play and to explore. But his parents told him he was too young to scale the precipice. He would have to wait until he was older.

With junior high school friends, he did get to the top and was not disappointed by how flat it was. But instead of tall, thick grass it was a shortgrass prairie. Its slopes had some shrubs and small trees. In a science class he learned that mesas were created by erosion of soft rocks from the tops of hills, which left more durable stones known as caprock on top and resulted in steep inclines on all sides.

Because the flat mountains looked like tables, the Spanish word mesa became the common designation for them in the Southwest. Some mesas had natural water sources, like at Acoma Sky City and El Morro National Monument. Both had been inhabited by Native Americans over the last thousand years.

Western New Mexico’s cultural history along with its compelling landscape and the beautiful blue sky fascinated and comforted Tristan as he grew up in the uranium mining community of Grants in the 1950s and 1960s. Mount Taylor, the Cibola National Forest, Lobo Canyon, the prairies north of the housing development where he lived, the arroyos, and the mesas that wrapped around his world soothed the soul of an active boy and an awkward, shy teenager.

His only regret was that his hometown had not retained its original name, Los Alamitos, the little cottonwoods. Families from Seboyeta and Santa Rosa founded the settlement between 1862 and 1872. They named it after the cottonwoods they planted in a spring-fed area near the volcanic lava flow the Spanish called El Malpais, the badlands.

Los Alamitos was a pleasant, humble, and evocative name. The Hispanic settlers didn’t name it for themselves, but rather for a beautiful tree that was sacred to Native Americans as well.

Names were important to Tristan’s family, particularly his mother Serena. She was an opera fan who had named him for the Breton nobleman character in Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. His father Alfred was a union-member electrician in the uranium industry who would have preferred that his son be named Franklin after one of his heroes, former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, instead of an operatic aristocrat. But he gave in because his French mother was a Breton and would likely have approved of the name Tristan.

So, it was a major disappointment to Tristan when he first learned from a local librarian that the community’s founding name had been supplanted over a period of decades by its current name. Grants was a word that fell flat when pronounced out loud. It was a proper noun that seemed improper to him. Kids in neighboring towns pronounced it as Grunts as a way of demeaning its high school football and basketball teams when they played away from home. It didn’t help that the land-locked high desert school’s mascot was a pirate. No such sarcasm would have been possible if the teams had been known as the Los Alamitos Conquistadores.

And years later at the University of New Mexico, he would have been spared embarrassment and disappointment at a freshman class mixer when a very pretty brunette got excited because she thought he said he was from France.

No, not France, he explained meekly. I’m from Grants.

Oh, she said disdainfully as she walked away.

How did Los Alamitos become Grants?

With the arrival of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad in 1882, three Canadian brothers – Angus, John, and Lewis Grant – were the culprits. The siblings won a contract to build the railroad through Los Alamitos and they built a line camp for the 4,000 men whose muscle and sweat would eventually extend the railway west to California.

The campsite became known as Grant’s Camp. When the railroad station was completed, it was called Grant’s Station. Eventually, the whole community was also referred to as Grant’s. In 1937 the U.S. Post Office dropped the apostrophe.

Los Alamitos had been erased from the map, at least until acclaimed Western novelist Louis L’Amour published a book in 1960 about a tough nineteenth century financier-turned-cowboy named Flint that was set in Los Alamitos and El Malpais.

But even that worthy resurrection of the community’s original name didn’t get much recognition. Tristan thought when post office officials removed the apostrophe from Grants, they should have replaced it with an asterisk and a footnote that said the real name was Los Alamitos.

True, if the name Los Alamitos had endured it would have had to compete with Los Alamos, the famous northern New Mexico town where the Manhattan Project produced the atomic bomb and gave birth to Los Alamos National Laboratory. But that would have only caused minor geographic confusion. Ironically, the discovery of uranium in the Grants mineral belt during the 1950s provided fuel for the nuclear weapons designed at Los Alamos.

The brothers Grant left nothing of themselves in Grants except their name. Angus, the eldest, continued to be involved in real estate and business development in Albuquerque. Lewis and John moved to Los Angeles. They were transients in western New Mexico and there was no indication that they felt any affection for the town that acquired their name through a process of benign neglect of its actual history. Tristan reluctantly accepted the name and its soubriquet Grunts but in his own mind he had grown up in Los Alamitos.

Had Grants remained Los Alamitos, would it have developed differently, he wondered. If the town had remembered and celebrated its true founders – the Antonio Chavez family from Seboyeta and the Jesus Blea family from Santa Rosa – maybe the architecture and culture would have been more firmly grounded in New Mexico traditions and its high desert environment would have been more appreciated.

He imagined what the town would have looked like if there had been a more significant number of flat-roofed adobe or sandstone homes with parapets, vigas and porches constructed around plazas and placitas. Territorial style homes with pitched corrugated tin roofs would also have enhanced the character and quality of the community.

Perhaps groves of cottonwoods would have distinguished the community’s landscape. Cottonwoods grew well near watercourses and waterholes, but weekly watering could sustain them away from such sources. Their green triangular leaves would have fluttered pleasantly all over town in the spring and summer and turned bright yellow in autumn. The cottonwood’s broad, widely spread branches would have provided plentiful shade throughout the town.

Tristan tried not to torture himself too often with thoughts of what might have been. Afterall, there were three powerful developments in the history of Los Alamitos/Grants that significantly determined its future: the coming of the railroad in 1882, the discovery of uranium in the 1950s, and the decades-long development of the Chicago to Los Angeles interregional highway that brought Route 66 through the town.

A 1946 song about getting kicks on Route 66 by songwriter Bobby Troup had been included in a 1964 album by the Rolling Stones, which brought it to the attention of Tristan’s generation. He thought Los Alamitos would have been a perfect name for Troup to use in the popular road trip song and he agreed with Troup’s wife who was quoted as saying she couldn’t believe he didn’t include Albuquerque in the lyrics. Instead, Troup chose to immortalize Gallup, New Mexico, which was settled in 1880 as a stagecoach stop and later named after a paymaster for the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad.

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Long before Route 66 beckoned travelers through Grants, however, western and northwestern New Mexico contained prehistoric roadways that connected hundreds of Pueblo communities with Chaco Canyon, a major center of Anasazi culture from AD 850 to AD 1250. It was, in fact, the first road system in America.

Less than two hours north of Grants, Chaco Canyon was a remarkable place that Tristan visited as often as he could. The remains of large ceremonial and public buildings and multi-story great houses constructed by the Anasazi with sophisticated sandstone masonry left him in awe after each visit. There were great roads that ran north and south from Chaco. The southern great road went through Chacoan towns between Grants and Gallup.

Tristan thought of Chaco Canyon as a mysterious place because the polis had flourished for four centuries before the Anasazi abandoned it. Archaeologists could not agree on why. Conceptual drawings of what Chaco’s multi-story dwellings would have looked like reminded him of photos he had seen of Taos Pueblo and of the great residential buildings of modern-day Manhattan in New York City.

The first Europeans to travel through Grants were Hernando de Alvarado and a small group of Spanish soldiers dispatched by Francisco Vasquez de Coronado from Zuni Pueblo on an exploring expedition in August of 1540. Coronado himself led a larger contingent through the area later that year.

Juan de Oñate, New Mexico’s first Spanish colonial governor, passed through in 1598 and again in 1605. At El Morro’s Inscription Rock, he carved his name in the sandstone boulder and memorialized his 1605 visit with a message: There passed through here the vanguard Don Juan de Oñate from the discovery of the sea of the south.

Fast forward to the twentieth century. John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath described Route 66 as America’s Mother Road. It was the first fully paved highway in New Mexico, but perhaps no more sophisticated than the thirty-foot-wide Chaco thoroughfares built by Anasazi engineers that featured raised shoulders and included some divided roads.

The two-lane stretch of Route 66 between Albuquerque and Grants had a communication feature the Anasazi did not incorporate in their highways: dozens of roadside advertising billboards. Many of them warned travelers they were entering a desert so they should stock up on water.

Vehicles with out-of-state license plates would pass through town with canvas water bags strapped all over them, presumably to be used for filling radiators and sluicing parched passengers while traversing the desolate wilderness.

The water bags grift allowed service stations and trading posts to make small fortunes from Mid-Westerners and Easterners who feared they might die of thirst during the 90-minute trip between Grants and Albuquerque. All they really needed to stay hydrated was a snow cone from a Dairy Queen on Central Avenue in Albuquerque or Santa Fe Avenue in Grants.

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Local livestock, lumber and agricultural businesses benefitted significantly from the arrival of the Santa Fe railway. Pens, corrals and loading facilities were built by the railroad, which enabled the shipment of sheep and cattle to national markets. In the 1920s a Michigan lumber company built a connecting railway to the Zuni mountains that shipped timber across the U.S. Zuni logging played out by the 1930s, but the vegetable industry took its place in the 1940s, facilitated