1. The Governor

In mid-May, even as clouds of thick, grey Mexican smoke were drifting over Austin, casting the entire city into a torpor, a disturbing letter arrived at the Governor's mansion. An expedition had been commissioned to travel some 800 miles to the West, and latter-day explorer Kimberly Kiplin, of the Texas Lottery Commission, had discovered a newly-founded Cibola at "Speaking Rock": the Casino of the Tigua Indians. Reporting back to the Governor, Kiplin wrote of untold riches - cascading through hundreds of slot machines - and complained that this aboriginal wealth is in fact the rightful property of the Crown: "Since Texas law prohibits casino-type gaming, I do not understand how the Tiguas' casino-type activities are lawful."

One can only imagine what tremors of moral consternation must have stricken the Governor upon reading such a sentence. Surely George W. Bush - who just a moment earlier had been, perhaps, drowsily reviewing his latest remarks on the slight increase in respiratory complaints due to airborne particulates - awoke with a jolt. As he is a careful and benevolent ruler known to seek frequent counsel, the Governor must have called for a round of closed-door meetings, strategic deliberations, extended phone calls, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, before taking action. Nevertheless, it was not long before he summoned the capitol scribes, and extended a long, accusatory finger Westward through the Smog. On Sunday, the seventeenth of May, townspeople could be seen scurrying out into the miserable haze to retrieve their Austin American-Statesmans, then retreating into their air-conditioned kitchens to read an extensive report on the Governor's latest mission, by Capitol Bureau Chief Ken Herman. "I don't think they [the Tigua] ought to be having casino-style gambling in their buildings," Bush declared to Herman. "There ought not to be casino gambling in the state of Texas, any shape or form of it."

Although the Governor assured Herman that his decision to attack Speaking Rock was not politically motivated ("My job is to enforce the law. I can't make political decisions when it comes to enforcing the laws, and I won't.") interested parties and observers alike immediately began speculating as to his motives. Bush's denunciation of the casino has been variously described as: (1) an attempt to appeal to the Baptist bloc of the Republican Party (this according to Democratic gubernatorial candidate Garry Mauro and Tom Diamond, the tribe's attorney); (2) a favor to Richard Rainwater, a former business partner and current campaign contributor of the Governor's, who owns several Las Vegas casinos that stand to lose Texas business because of Speaking Rock (according to San Antonio Express-News columnist Carlos Guerra); (3) an action taken on behalf of the Texas Lottery Commission, which likewise might lose business to the casino (according to various commentators).

Maybe El Paso developers asked Bush to do it: the Tigua are undeniably a litigious group, having filed various claims of titular and usage rights to large tracts of land, and to 100 miles of canals and ditches in El Paso County. This has alarmed area property owners and title insurers, since new deeds now note that property may be subject to claims by "any Indian or Indian tribe, including but not limited to the Tigua Indian Tribe of El Paso."

Or maybe Bush wants to quash a potential source of campaign funds for Democrats: the Tigua gave $10,000 to State Representative Gilbert Serna (who lost in the primary), and have contributed to other El Paso candidates.

The first three explanations, for the moment, are more likely than the last two, since Bush's War on Gambling has not just targeted the Tigua. Back in November of 1996 - just as the Tigua were about to introduce slot machines at Speaking Rock - the Governor's general counsel wrote to U.S. Attorney Bill Blagg of San Antonio, asking that he investigate Indian casinos. (The Kickapoo tribe had opened a casino on its Eagle Pass reservation, earlier in the year.)

Blagg did not act, and Bush turned his attention to the thousands of "eight-liner" gambling machines that have proliferated in truck stops and shopping plazas throughout the state. Last year he unsuccessfully tried to persuade the Legislature to outlaw the machines, and in January, Attorney General Dan Morales issued an opinion declaring the eight-liners illegal. A Dallas appeals court has since ruled that Morales lacked the authority to do so, but law enforcement actions have been taken nonetheless. One evening in early May, for instance, eighteen officers of the Garland police department and the Texas Department of Public Safety stormed into Gold Touch, a Garland strip-mall arcade. No resistance was offered by the two customers present, or by the co-owner and attendant, who were taken into custody. Twenty-three eight liners were discovered, along with several artistic renderings of dogs engaged in gambling. Officers confiscated bundles of five-, ten-, and twenty-dollar bills as evidence.

2. The Casino

By denouncing the Tigua casino, George Bush initiated one of those ceremonial skirmishes that politicians ritually perform via the media: Bush opponent Garry Mauro declared himself more or less in favor of the casino (though against gambling itself); Bush spokeswoman Karen Hughes likened opposing the casino to opposing illegal drugs; Mauro accused Hughes of comparing the Tigua to drug-dealers. Meanwhile tribal attorney Tom Diamond filed suit against Bush, alleging that "George W. Bush and his political agents are interfering with the federal legal rights of the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo through deceitful and untruthful statements to the press....."

A cloud of political smoke had appeared over the Capitol, mingling with the Mexican conflagration, and obscuring whatever it was that Kiplin had discovered in El Paso. I was curious about the source of so much grandstanding, and I set forth in search of it.
I arrived at Speaking Rock at midday on a Friday, at which time business was brisk. The casino edifice, an adobe hybrid of fortress and convention center, occupies a large chunk of the Tigua "reservation" - bits and pieces of land, about fifty acres total, in the town of Ysleta, east of El Paso. All day and night (Speaking Rock never closes) vans shuttle passengers back and forth between the casino and the parking lots. These vans are decorated with the unlikely image of a Chippendales-worthy, half-nude eagle dancer, rising triumphantly out of a pile of coins and cash.
Though the casino now has poker, blackjack tables, and over 400 slot machines and other so-called amusements, in 1993 it opened with bingo only. When you enter, the bingo room is still the first thing you see, and the bingo players seem more or less representative of the Speaking Rock clientele, albeit slightly older, on average, than the poker crowd. Bingo players sit for hours at long, narrow, salmon-colored tables, inside a banquet room whose walls have been burdened with pastel Western landscapes. This Western theme, though echoed by the antler chandeliers, is basically overwhelmed by the illuminated displays of numbers and letters, the television screens, the electronic advertisement for something called the "Eagle Dancer Jackpot," and the giant, forlorn-looking stuffed animals (Bugs Bunny, a flamingo, the Sugar Smacks frog, the Tazmanian Devil) propped behind the number-caller's podium. During the games the players, most of them middle-aged Hispanic women, observe a nearly perfect silence as the number caller, a mellow-voiced man wearing a tuxedo shirt and an embroidered purple vest, purrs each number-letter pair into his microphone.

Early on in my visit to Ysleta I attended the Saturday breakfast bingo session, where $20 buys an entry for eight rounds of bingo - with a chance to win $500 each round - and all you can eat from the buffet of burnt pancakes, fruit, biscuits, bacon, and some sort of chick pea stew. Having never played high-stakes bingo before, I was assisted by the stolid, friendly woman sitting across from me. (Bingo is a pretty straightforward game, but certain technical terms indicating winning board patterns - "double corner postage stamp," "2 wild #'s" - require explanation for the uninitiated.) I was playing manually, using a special oversized blotting marker (price: $1) to mark two game sheets containing six bingo grids each. My adviser, who plays several times a week and loses, by her estimate, an average of $70 each visit, had bought electronic entries. This meant she did nothing but watch the game progress on a portable grey device that automatically records which pairs have been called.

Bingo as played at Speaking Rock doesn't occasion much conversation. Sitting next to me was another woman, marking her sheets by hand, who said she was no great fan of bingo. She'd stayed up all night playing slot machines; giddy and exhausted, she was winding down with the bingo session. A native of Panama whose husband, an oil company engineer, doesn't think much of her gambling, she'd been to casinos in other countries, "but nothing like they have here." Before I could learn her name, the two of us were scolded by my adviser, who returned from the bathroom to find that the round had begun and neither of us had noticed. We returned to our game sheets.

As the game wore on I found myself watching two players at the next table: a wearily handsome old man in a faded guayabera and, a couple seats over, an intent old woman with a toiletries case full of hot pink bingo markers. The man languorously smoked his way through a pack of Pall Malls while he marked his sheets; the woman, an intermittent smoker, attacked her sheets after each call. They never looked at one another, but occasionally one would mutter something sideways. After a while, I assumed they were married.

3. The Tigua

A short walk from the casino is the Tigua housing project, built with the help of a federal Housing and Urban Development grant in the mid-1970s. Brown stucco houses with wooden carports line a few quiet blocks, and in one of these houses lives Joe Sierra, who is listed in the El Paso phone directory as "Indian Joe." At fifty-five, he has eleven grandchildren, and his demeanor is grandfatherly. I met him on Sunday afternoon in the dirt yard behind his house, which contained two large igloo-shaped ovens, a pile of mesquite branches, a few plastic chairs, and a barking dog. He wore his long hair bound in a ribbon. Sierra gets up before dawn to make Pueblo-style bread, which he bakes in the ovens and then sells to the casino. He has enormous hands and forearms, suited to the job.

Speaking Rock, he says, has been hugely beneficial to the Tigua. "There has been some opposition, but that's internal to the tribe. As far as the casino, it's increased our quality of life." The tribal rolls currently list about 1,400 members, 500 of whom live in Ysleta. Not long ago, most were welfare recipients.

The Tigua originally migrated to the Rio Grande Valley from New Mexico in 1680, after other Indian groups rose up against the Spanish in the Pueblo Revolt of that year. The history of the Tigua tribe in Texas has never been entirely agreed upon, beginning with the circumstances of that migration. Three hundred seventeen Tigua Indians from the homonymous Isleta Pueblo, near present-day Albuquerque, accompanied Spanish Governor Antonio de Otermin in his retreat from Santa Fe to El Paso. The following year, after an unsuccessful attempt to reconquer the pueblos, Otermin returned to the Texas settlement with a second group of Tiguas. It is still debated whether these two groups of Indians accompanied Otermin willingly, or were forced to go in chains. (Next to the casino lies the reconstructed seventeenth-century Ysleta Mission which, according to a 1936 Texas Highway Department plaque outside it, was "Maintained By Franciscan Missionaries for the Civilizing and Christianizing of the Tigua Indians, Pueblo Revolt Refugees." Next to that plaque, a 1970 State Historical Survey Commission marker simply states that the Indians "accompanied fleeing Spaniards," and on the other side of the mission, a more recent National Trust for Historic Preservation sign diplomatically asserts that "Spanish records show that during the escape south, some Indians joined Governor Antonio de Otermin in flight to the Pass of the North. History as recorded by Tigua oral tradition maintains that Indians were forced to accompany Otermin.")

Because the Ysleta Tigua lived in Texas, they were not accorded federal tribal recognition along with the New Mexico Pueblo Indians, who were recognized by President Lincoln. They remained unacknowledged for most of this century.
When he was growing up, Joe Sierra remembers, the Tigua lived like other colonia residents along the border - in run-down shacks, scrounging for food and work. "There were three kids, and we lived in a two-room house with no utilities, no plumbing, a dirt floor," he says. "We ate leftovers from Camp Zaragoza, the prisoner of war camp Sÿ and from the pig farm." Sierra remembers picking through the city dump with the other children; adults worked as farm laborers or highway construction crew workers.

Sierra began serving on the Tribal Council as a young man, during the sixties, and says that over the years, "Mostly I've seen politicians try to use our people to gain something." The United States finally acknowledged the Ysleta del Sur Tigua in 1968, when President Lyndon Johnson signed into law an act that recognized the tribe and relegated the administration of its affairs to the state of Texas. The trickle of state aid the Tigua received after that wasn't enough to lift the tribe out of poverty, Sierra says. Every so often a legislator came along with some plan supposedly intended to help the Tigua. Some years ago, for instance, the Tigua had a chance to reclaim Hueco Tanks, a popular rock-climbing destination whose stone walls bear Indian inscriptions. A rancher had sold the land to El Paso County, which in turn had given it over to the state, in anticipation of its eventual transfer to the Tigua. "In '69 or '70 there was a state senator who didn't have a state park in his district," says Sierra. "And he came to us and he said, 'If you give us Hueco Tanks - which is a sacred place for us - if you give me Hueco Tanks, I'll give you the whole budget, whatever you're asking for.'

"So we were caught in another shuffle of the cards, thinking, which card are we going to play? Do we take money for the kids to be educated, or the state park? We didn't have a choice," Sierra says. The tribe took the money - it wasn't enough to provide for better education, according to Sierra - on the condition that the park would hire Indians. But few Tigua were ever hired, he says, since most of the applicants didn't meet minimum educational requirements for the jobs. "Their [politicians'] mentality is, let's give them a little and they'll be happy forever."

Last year the tribe distributed $8,000 of casino profit to every man, woman and child listed on the tribal rolls; casino money has also funded the construction of a day care center, a health clinic, a senior citizen center, a new tourist center, and new tribal government offices. The money distributed to the children is put in a trust, and, Sierra says, "If they don't close our casino the kids will be fixed for life - the best education they want, the best lives they want."

Sierra is employed by the Texas Film Commission as a location scout. He's worked for a number of movies, including Last Man Standing and Courage Under Fire, and likes Chuck Norris much better than Bruce Willis. He's not directly involved in the casino operation, but the casino seems to have encouraged entrepreneurial ambitions among the Tigua: Sierra is the original proponent of the tribe's plan to buy a 68,000-acre ranch in Valentine, which would double as a tribal hunting preserve and a dude ranch for European tourists.

The Tigua's current governor is Vince Muñoz, who took the job in December 1996, following a bitter struggle for the position that ended in the ejection of several former officers from the tribal rolls. If Sierra is the elder statesman, Muñoz is the corporate officer. "I'm responsible for all the tribal programs, the federal programs, and I'm also responsible for all the business aspects of the tribe," he says. "Basically, it's like a C.E.O. position, and I oversee everything."

Muñoz, one of ten siblings, grew up two blocks from the tribal government building. A smiling, heavy-set man, he wears thick gold rings and expensive-looking shirts, and his office looks like a C.E.O.'s, with a big shiny desk and executive swivel chair. He even has his own public relations consultant, a man named Marc Schwartz, who sits in on my interview with Muñoz and offers occasional comments.

"He [Muñoz] was the one who started the actual casino. He was the gaming commissioner that started it," Schwartz tells me.

"I don't like to give myself credit sometimes," laughs Muñoz. "Actually the whole casino started out from a cultural center and a restaurant. Wyngs [the restaurant] being my brainchild at that point in time, back in 1985."

"He started all of those," says Schwartz. "He's kind of the business - well, let's put it this way, the marketing guru of the tribe."

In 1992, after viewing presentations from over forty companies and visiting other Indian gambling facilities around the country, the Tigua struck a deal with 7 Circle Resorts to manage its casino. The next year the tribe opened a bingo hall, adding poker tables and a blackjack-style game in 1994, and slot machines in 1996.

The casino now employs 900 people, 110 of whom are tribe members. (Muñoz estimates that of the 500 Tigua who live in Ysleta, there are about 250 adults of working age. Because of the casino and other businesses which depend on the casino, such as cleaning services and gift shops, unemployment within the tribe is low - Muñoz claims it is 2 percent.)

Muñoz won't disclose the casino's annual revenue, but it's probably about $600 million. (The tribe recently renewed its offer to return a certain percentage of revenue to state and local government, an offer it originally made in 1993, when Ann Richards refused to negotiate with the Tigua. In newspaper reports of the renewed offer, the 3 percent share going to the state was quoted as being worth $1.8 million, which would put the total revenue at $600 million.) The tribe has opened a gas station, "Running Bear," next to the casino, and plans to become El Paso's Mobil distributor, building twenty more gas stations in the process.

Governor Bush's threats, however, have caused the tribe's lenders to hesitate over those plans, since the casino is its one substantial piece of collateral. The Tigua lawsuit against Bush is, in large part, an effort to stop him from making statements that threaten their business.

4. The Lawyers
It was Tom Diamond who helped the Tigua push for federal recognition in the 1960s, and he has represented the tribe ever since. "It's almost as if someone had preordained this as my goal in life," he says of his work with the tribe.

Diamond, who trained as an engineer and served in the Army before going to law school, first encountered the Tigua on July 4, 1963. "I went down to San Elizario for a party of the teachers' union," he says. "Jack Salem, who was news director for Channel 4, started talking about how they needed a lawyer to help these Indians."

"I'd never heard of them," Diamond says. "I thought, the government takes care of Indians." But Salem persuaded Diamond to go meet tribe member Pablo Silvas, who also said the Tigua needed a lawyer to help get government recognition. Diamond met a second time with Silvas "and two other old men. They looked very Indian to me, but hell, I didn't know."

Diamond called Bernard Fontana, a University of Arizona anthropologist, for help. "Of course I had to get a white guy to tell me these were Indians," says Diamond. "We arranged to meet at the chief's house. This house had a dirt floor, no windows, a ladder to the roof, a shrine, and paper bags full of medicine. And there was a rooster outside in a cage."

After the two of them had left, Diamond queried the scholar: "'Dr. Fontana, are these Indians?' And he said, that is the best Indian museum I've ever been in my life." According to Fontana, the beat-up white rooster was in keeping with a now-extinct tradition, in which the chief keeps a caged eagle in front of his house.

Over the course of more than thirty years, Diamond has amassed what he calls "the best archive there is of an Indian group" - much of it now housed at the U.T. Center for American History - whose 30,000 pieces include explorers' accounts, Spanish surveys, nineteenth-century monographs, extensive chronologies, and newspaper articles. Persuading Texas to declare the Tigua an Indian Tribe, in 1967, and getting Congress to do the same a year later, was only the beginning. Diamond has continued to file claims on behalf of the Tigua. Through him, the tribe has asserted title claims to much of El Paso, and aboriginal usage rights to six counties - Hudspeth, Culberson, Jeff Davis, Brewster, Presidio, and El Paso - in all, an area in excess of 21,000 square miles.

Within the same downtown El Paso building where Diamond works, seven floors above his firm's suite, is the office of Jim Speer, attorney for the El Paso County Water Improvement District Number 1. The Tigua sued the water district this spring, seeking control of a large portion of the county's water system. "There's a saying around here that God made the world, but Tom Diamond made the Tigua Indians," says Speer.

Diamond has, at least, established one version of Tigua history, and because all Diamond's lawsuits have been filed in Federal Judge Lucius Bunton's Pecos court, known for its "rocket docket," the defendants have just a few months to try to counter years of research. (One rather strenuous sentence in Speer's answer to Diamond's complaint reads, "Alternatively, if Plaintiff ever established any aboriginal right, which is denied, Defendant denies that the United States has never extinguished such aboriginal right, because, in fact, the United States has extinguished any such right, if it ever existed (which is not admitted but still denied).")
The point of all the Tigua's lawsuits, Speer suggests, is not actually to possess all of West Texas, but to use the claims as leverage to buy land on favorable terms and annex it to the reservation. The tribe, for example, sued officials of the Texas Department of Transportation after it heard the department would seek bids from prospective buyers for a small piece of land near the casino. The tribe has offered to settle the suit by buying the land at "fair market value" - that is, without bidding. "They're buying more and more land," says Speer, "and [the Tigua hope] it all becomes reservation."

To Diamond, criticisms of the Tigua from George Bush or anyone else are simply the latest in a centuries-long series of attempts to deny the Indians their due. Before white people showed up, "Texas had more Indians than any other state in the Union," he says. "The name of the game here has always been, get rid of the Indians, all the Indians."

After all, the governor, as the Tigua are fond of saying, oversees a slot machine with 10,000 terminals: the state lottery. The thrust of Diamond's argument, that Bush is beating up on the Indians for political purposes, seems accurate enough. Unless the Governor manages to shut down the casino at once, however, the tribe won't need to play the downtrodden victim. At long last, the Tigua - or is it Tigua, Inc.? - have more than just right on their side.

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