Scattered by Gunfire

Scattered by Gunfire

Photography: Greg A. Cooper
Story: M.E. Sprengelmeyer
Reprint by Permission Ventura County Star
April 6, 1997

JAMAY, Mexico – Back in Oxnard and here in Mexico, several generations of the Mares family still talk about how their course was changed by a burst of gunfire on May 31, 1950.

It was back in the pueblo of Jamay, four miles from Ocotlan, where young police comandante Tranquilino Vargas was on patrol during a fiesta. He was from the Jalisco aristocracy, only 28 years old and already pondering a run for presidente municipal, or mayor.

The comandante received word of a disturbance on the plaza and someone directed him toward a tarp-draped booth. When he pulled back the tarp, a hit man inside fired a bullet that pierced his jaw.

The chief’s men ran down the assailant and pumped 27 bullets into his body. The comandante was rushed to a hospital in Guadalajara, about 60 miles away, but he didn’t make it back.

The ambush started a chain reaction that has left an imprint on both the family and the place where Vargas’ survivors eventually landed, Ventura County.

Carmen Magallon crochets inside her Oxnard mobile home under a portrait of her late husband, Tranquilino Vargas, a police chief in the Mexican fishing village of Jamay.

His assassination in 1950 set off a chain reaction that eventually led the family to Oxnard.

In the aftermath of the slaying, the comandante’s widow, Carmen Magallon, broke an unwritten law. She fell in love again, and far too soon.

Only 15 months after her husband’s death, she married a campesino from the outskirts of the pueblo. The chief’s brothers and brothers-in-arms called it the ultimate betrayal and threatened to kill the new groom.

So the newlyweds fled, first to the nearby pueblo of Tototlan and later to Tijuana. Eventually they crossed the border – legally – for jobs at Hueneme Ranch, just south of Oxnard.

Looking back on it all, Carmen Magallon can hardly believe her family’s odyssey. At 75, she lives in a mobile home in south Oxnard. The centerpiece on the living room wall is a framed, hand-tinted photograph of the late comandante.

“If he had not died,” she said, “we probably would still be back in Ocotlan or Jamay.”

Like millions of other families uprooted by choice or by circumstance, she and her husband came to California. They came to work the fields, then made the transition toward bigger jobs and a berth in the middle class.

As they did, they changed the face of communities across the state. But even after decades, many retain strong ties to Mexico and some have decided to go back.

They include Guadalupe Mares, the daughter of Carmen and the comandante. She and her husband, Ramiro Mares, now live in Ocotlan, just down the road from the spot where her father was killed when she was 4. Their house is across the street from the one where Mares was born.

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The city has changed.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Ramiro Mares lived in a small house on the outskirts of town, near the huge tree known throughout the state as “Salate.”

It stood not far from the two-lane road connecting Guadalajara with Ocotlan, Jamay, La Barca and points south. In Mares’ mind, it was hundreds of feet high, the center of all life and a good deal of death.

It was where folks gathered for summer festivals and rodeo games steeped in ritual.

In one country tradition, people would dig small holes along a course near Salate. They’d put live chickens in the holes and pat dirt around them so only their necks would stick out of the ground. The boys would mount their horses and race along the course, trying to scoop up chickens as they sped past.

“If you got a chicken, a girl gave you a kiss and you got to dance with her,” Mares remembers. “I didn’t like to do it, but I liked to dance.”

Once in a while, when his mom would take the kids into town, she’d take them the long way around to avoid passing Salate. That’s because it was also the place where vigilantes would hang thieves and others who transgressed.

“They’d hang people and put a little note saying why,” Mares said, “and nobody asked questions.”

By the time Mares turned 16, he was already looking for a wife. He met Guadalupe, a 14-year-old from the rich side of el rio, as the locals would say. She was from a prominent family in Jamay.

She had lived there with her grandmother in the decade since the comandante was killed and her mother left for a new life with a new family. Her relatives, while not quite rich, did not approve of her suitor, a boy from the country.

One night she packed her suitcases and he sneaked to her house. Family legend has it that her uncle chased them with a shotgun as they ran through the darkness toward a new life together.

They married in Ocotlan but she missed her mother. Soon they too decided to head north, first living in Tijuana, then splitting time between there and Oxnard.

“I never would have gone to the U.S.,” Mares said, “but when you marry, you get a new boss.”

In Oxnard, Mares found seasonal work at Nakamura Farms. He picked strawberries, celery and tomatoes, and drove the bounty down the country roads that surrounded Oxnard. Soon he was struck by a fierce realization: “I didn’t come all that way to be a farmer.”

That’s when he took up the life of a blacksmith, like his grandfather back in Jalisco. He got a job as a welder and through the 1960s learned how to twist metal, first into farm machine parts, then into furniture, fixtures and other useful works of art.

Over the years, Mares and a partner started Chapala Iron & Mfg. Co. near El Rio, named for the lake near his hometown. It still exists under different ownership. Later, Mares opened a shop back in Tijuana, where they crafted, among other things, the chandeliers that hang at The Esplanade mall in Oxnard.

In the 1980s, he started Ocotlan Iron & Mfg. Co. on Oxnard Boulevard, which in its heyday employed about 80 people. Most were young Mexican immigrants trying to find a foothold in the United States.

Using Old World smithing techniques, they made one-of-a-kind gates, banisters and other items. Clients included the likes of Johnny Carson, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In the living room of their Ocotlan home, Mares shows off photographs of his work the way other grandfathers show off baby pictures. Lupe rolls her eyes.

Those were the days, he says, but they ended in an unexpected way.

Because so many Oxnard residents hailed from Ocotlan, the two places became sister cities. Accompanying a group of Oxnard dignitaries on a visit, Mares had just arrived at the Guadalajara airport when some relatives pulled him aside. They told him that his mother had died earlier that day.

Mares was heartbroken. Over the next months back in Oxnard, family members recall, he stopped eating, stopped drinking. He was torn apart by stress over his business, which was struggling. He dropped so much weight that friends hardly recognized him.

He had been hit hard with diabetes, the doctor said. But a big element of the diagnosis was also homesickness.

“The doctor said, ‘My friend, do you really want to die? You don’t need medicine. You have to relax. Go home.’ ”

He and Lupe went back to Ocotlan two years ago.

Mares never met his wife’s father, the comandante, but he can show you the spot where he died. It was over on the edge of the Jamay plaza in the shade of the ornately carved white pillar that honors Pope Pius IX.

A few blocks away is the baseball field where Mares spends his Sundays instead of at church. It’s not much to look at, a sandlot with a backstop and a row of crumbling plaster buildings as the home-run target in left field.

“You see a big difference between the fields here and the ones in Oxnard,” Mares said, looking out at the rocky infield. “Here, you’re watching for a bad bounce all the time.”

Mares recently started a baseball league that lets teen-age boys play on teams side-by-side with their fathers and even grandfathers. It’s the same as Oxnard, he explains. Kids just need more stuff to do. And after a busy life up in Oxnard, so does he, Mares jokes.

Back in Ventura County, these have been busy times for Martin Mares, son of Ramiro and Guadalupe.

He runs Mares Wrought Iron, a spinoff of his dad’s old company in Oxnard. He and his workers recently moved from a ramshackle ironworks behind a house in Montalvo into a new warehouse along Ventura Avenue in Ventura.

Workers were finishing off an ornate spiral staircase. It was supposed to be delivered to “What’s-her-name,” the owner of the St. Louis Rams football team. Football player-turned-actor Brian Bosworth had ordered some custom-designed fence posts. And they were trying to finish up all sorts of other orders in between.

On the wall of the old office was a yellowing newspaper clipping showing one of Martin’s workers taking down the ornate fence designed for reclusive millionaire Charles Probst in Thousand Oaks. That fence sparked a bitter rift among Probst, his neighbors and the city. Martin would rather forget about the whole mess.

Martin Mares looks like his father, with the same full cheeks and bushy, black mustache. His fledgling company isn’t as big as the old Ocotlan Iron & Mfg., but it’s on its way, Martin says.

Martin remembers how hard it was shuttling back and forth between Oxnard and Tijuana as a child. “We were people without a country,” he said. “We’d go down to Mexico and they’d say, ‘Go back to your country.’ We’d come here and they’d say, ‘Go back to your country.’ ”

The family will always have ties with both California and Mexico, but Martin is now a U.S. citizen and says he is in Ventura County to stay.

“Man,” he said, “we’ve come a long way from where we used to be.”

[Part One][Part Three]

 

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