There are deep Indian influences in his DNA: Navajo ancestors on his father’s side and Chiricahuas on his mother’s side. The second route is the one that ties him to the Apache leader Geronimo. Alfonso Borrego (1956 – El Paso / Texas) defends a story in which the Spanish do not “come out so badly”.
I know you just disembarked from the Carnival Celebration cruise ship at the Santa Cruz de Tenerife, who has lush gray hair and wears a shirt with small blue and white checks. Little more. Those are the only clues to find Alfonso Borrego (1956 – El Paso / Texas), a great-grandson of the mythical Apache shaman Geronimo (1829 – 1909) who fought with a knife against the Mexican and American armies. Locating the president of the Cultural Heritage Society among so many tourists is presumed to be almost as difficult as finding a needle in a haystack, but suddenly he appears on a pedestrian crossing that joins the link walk with the Port Authority dikes and the lake located in front of the Cabildo de Tenerife. Alfonso? I ask, not being one hundred percent sure of his identity. One of his companions turns and it only occurs to him to say: “They already arrested me,” he says between laughs. The meeting is arranged with a person residing in Gran Canaria and his first words are of astonishment. “Are you Jorge?”, adding “how fast you grabbed me!”.
Borrego is on the Island on a technical stopover – he is traveling on a cruise ship that departed from London and has touched the ports of A Coruña, Vigo and Funchal – for about seven hours before heading to Miami. His face exudes unmistakable mestizo features and a singsong voice betrays that his roots are closer to the homeland of Pancho Villa than to General Custer’s Montana. “Was Franco here before the Civil War?” asks one of Borrego’s squires. Yes, the caudillo passed through here, but that’s another story. That of the descendant of Geronimo is associated with the Spanish presence on the Indian reservations. «I am not going to say that the Spaniards have not committed abuses and mistakes [sobre todo en la conquista] but history must be seen and interpreted with the eyes of then, not those of now”, points out an engineer who does not find it hard to confess that “he has never lived in a reserve and I have not had a native ID either”, adding that “I don’t know what it’s like to live like an Indian, but I do feel like one of them.”
“The United States has put us in the middle of nowhere, in a place where there are no vipers”
The grandson of Indians who migrated to Texas and participated in the construction of the railroad, he is clear that his community has never counted. «Hollywood portrayed the massacre of the Indians like no other; the bugles sounded and we had to go for them », he says about some crimes that many historians want to endorse the Spanish. “They left us an agricultural heritage unknown to the indigenous people, which not only contemplated cultivation techniques but also irrigation techniques that were applied in the missions,” he clarifies in a phase of the conversation in which he highlights his theory: “The Spaniards were not cruel in the American Southwest. Surely they did some evil, but it was the English who killed all the Indians. Borrego’s confession materializes less than a kilometer from the point where the English admiral Nelson suffered his great defeat. Life is so capricious. Gerónimo’s relative denounces the massacres of the British in Massachusetts –they arrived 22 years after Juan de Oñate y Salazar took control of New Mexico– in the same scenario in which the deed of July 25, 1797 grew. «I do not want to change history, but if you go to Arizona, California, Florida, New Mexico or Texas you can find several Indian reservations in places where there was a large Spanish presence. However, if you do that review in Alabama, Iowa, Mississippi, North Carolina or Ohio, which are the points where the English troops acted, there is nothing. Where are the Wampanoag? (Massachusetts). They are not here, they were exterminated by the English », he betrays before making a point about Oklahoma. “There are Indian reservations there (29), but that has an explanation,” he advances.
To Oklahoma they took the most “nervous”, the Indians who generated the most headaches for the American soldiers. Geronimo died at Fort Sill at the age of 79 – historical records point to pneumonia – but long before that he fought relentlessly in Sierra Azul – in northern Mexico – for more than three decades. «The story is very different from what we have been told, he was not a chief, but he was a shaman or a leader who convinced the members of the tribe to fight with their weapons… From the mountains they came down to steal food and weapons: it became a symbol of the resistance”, Alfonso clarifies before, now, revealing that those who were sent to Oklahoma were those who posed a threat to them because they had the soul of a leader or, simply, they were their collaborators. That is why they have survived to this day.
In the middle of nowhere. This is how Alfonso Borrego describes the “unpopular” reserves that exist in the United States. “Some, the most privileged, have their casinos, hotels and other luxuries, but normally they have no water or electricity. That, in the year 2022, violates all human rights. Geronimo was caught and taken to Florida to avoid riots, but four or five generations later, things have not changed: they have put us in the middle of nowhere, in a place where there are no snakes. A place where we do not disturb.
