Dr Alberto G Garcia

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AMERICAN FASCISM and ANTIFA Part I

February 13, 2021 by Brad Rockwell

Contemporary Fascists in Austin, Texas, and the Deadly 20th Century Fascism supported by some of my relatives through The Texas Company

On a Saturday afternoon in or around 2012 at the SxSW international music festival, I was with my nephew on a closed downtown street.  We looked up and were startled to see coming down the street towards us a grim and silent group displaying an array of long guns, as well as a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag.   Some were dressed partially in military camouflage.  In this festive urban environment full of revelers from around the world in jeans, shorts, and t-shirts, the camouflage served to highlight rather than hide the marchers’ military purpose.  

The complete lack of visible police presence was notable.  I had participated in many protest marches, some even during SxSW—and there was always a significant police presence. Occasionally the police would arrest or attack protesters.  During the annual state high school track and field competitions, which drew a large number of African-Americans from around Texas, the police presence was draconian, as if they were preparing for an invasion.  But on that Saturday afternoon, not a single member of the police force was to be seen near this armed group resembling some of those who would in 2021 march on the US Capitol to try to attack and kidnap members of Congress.   

This armed military display at SxSW seems to have been a spectral harbinger, a soundless dirge amidst the loud music. 

Right-wing Violence and Intimidation Escalates in Austin

Since then, armed right-wing groups made their presence increasingly known in Austin, targeting people on the Left, as well as the black and brown communities in East Austin.  They attacked and beat-up marchers celebrating May Day.  They occupied a park in East Austin, and intimidated others from using it to distribute free food.  

Armed fascists showed up to support the gentrification of East Austin, at a time when the gentrification process there was the most intense in the country. One morning in 2015, Sergio Lajarazu recounted, “I was driving by like any other day, taking my daughter to school. That’s when I saw it: my life’s work under the bulldozer.” His landlord, without warning and in the middle of a lease, bulldozed Sergio and his wife’s Jumpolin piñata shop.  The Mexican American tenants apparently were an obstacle to Austin developers’ displacement of Mexican Americans from their affordable homes and leases. The landlord characterized his actions as a form of beautification, comparing it to a clearing away an infestation of “roaches.”

The quick demolition of Jumplin by the landlord.

In subsequent months, I joined demonstrators organized by Defend Our Hoodz and others on the sidewalk outside to protest the Blue Cat Cafe business brought in by the landlord to replace the piñata shop. 

One of many protests and pickets outside of Blue Cat Cafe. The camera caught me in the back unwittingly holding my sign upside down.

The neighborhood continued to picket the cat café.  Paul Gray, the brother of the owner of the Blue Cat Café, was a military veteran and member of the Neo-Nazi military group called Vanguard America; he soon would join an offshoot called Patriot Front. Gray brought his friends and was joined by others recruited by local media rageaholic Alex Jones to confront the anti-gentrification protestors.  These military-trained fascists intimidated and assaulted anti-gentrification protestors.  The police tasered an anti-gentrification protestor and seemed to offer little protection from the fascists who were trying to disrupt these regular demonstrations.  

Paul Gray

The Patriotic Front apparently are book burners too.  In November of 2017, the Patriot Front showed up in front of Monkeywrench bookstore in Austin, a gathering place for leftists and known for hosting Marxist intellectuals like Gayatri Spivak, activists from El Salvador, and brave young Dalit women from India. 

An Antifa Response

While police did little to protect people from fascists, anti-fascists took action to make it clear fascists were not welcome in Austin.  Neo-Nazis and their local employers were identified.  People were encouraged to call the businesses giving employment to fascists and as a result it appears that some were fired. 

Around the time Paul Gray showed up at the Blue Cat Café, he scheduled a neo-Nazi rally at the Texas Capitol.  He described it as an effort to support “Gov. Abbott’s and Pres. Trump’s policy on enforcing border protection, helping the Border Patrol and police forces in their service, and all our Texas congressmen who want to put America first.”  Antifa groups sounded the alarm and I answered the call to surround the neo-Nazis with the counter-protestors.  We outnumbered the fascists, made a lot of noise, and made sure their rally was frustrated. 

A small gathering of Vanguard America and other fascists at the Texas Capitol on June 17, 2017. Organized by Paul Gray.
Antifa participants surrounded the fascists and drowned them out.

Within a few months, neo-Nazi demonstrations organized by Paul Gray’s group Vanguard America occurred in Charlottesville Virginia, where one of the white supremacists drove his car into a crowd of anti-racist counter-protestors, killing one of them. 

Police, Military, Fascist and Corporate Cooperation

A massive hack of regional police data sharing centers in July of 2020 demonstrated police collusion with corporate and right-wing violence.  This hack, which included the Austin Regional Intelligence Center, revealed that the police were targeting Muslims, American anti-fascists, and people lawfully protesting police violence. The police were defining these kinds of people as terroristic threats.  Right-wing domestic terrorists were largely ignored as threats.  In some respects, the fascists were considered allies.  A black anti-police-violence protestor in Dallas was arrested and placed in jail for five months before the charges were dropped; the basis for his arrest had been a video prepared by Alex Jones’ Infowars.

The hack showed that the police cultivated a secret network of citizen informants from churches, security agencies, and other sources, reminiscent of the actions of the FBI in the 1940s and 50s when they enlisted 100,800 members of the American Legion at 16,700 posts to spy on left-wing Americans in their own communities. Documents from the police regional surveillance centers show an interest in bizarre conspiracies favored by the right such as so-called efforts to install Sharia law in the US.  The hack revealed the close allegiance between the nation’s police and big oil companies and big banks like Chase Bank.  Targets of “anti-terrorist” police surveillance in Austin included anti-fossil fuel activists.  

When the Austin police killed Mike Ramos, the Mike Ramos Brigade was formed. The Brigde and many others organized large demonstrations downtown and near the police station in 2020.  At one large demonstration at the police station, police casually fired many rounds of so-called “non-lethal” projectiles into the anti-police-violence protestors, causing permanent brain damage to one protestor and permanent loss of an eye by another.  Dozens suffered less serious injuries. Right-wing extremists with guns showed up to support the police.  A few of the protestors against police violence also carried weapons to protect themselves. 

 

During one march on Congress Avenue, within a few feet of some of my friends who were there, a military sergeant arrived in a car, seemingly intent on repeating the murder and mayhem from Charlottesville.  He drove up to the march, stopped, and then accelerated his car directly into the crowd, holding his steering wheel with one hand and a pistol in the other.  When protestors approached the car to try to stop it, the driver quickly shot into the crowd, killing protestor Garrett Foster. 

The driver turned himself in to police who briefly interrogated him and accepted and repeated to the public his lies about the incident.  The police released him within hours, without questioning any other eye-witnesses.  The police even hid the identity of the shooter from the public.  Activists were able to identify the killer as Sgt. Daniel Perry.  The elected head of the Austin police union made statements indicating that Daniel Perry gave Garrett Foster what he deserved; the police union blamed Foster’s death on the activists who opposed police violence. According to the police union head: Garrett Foster “was looking for confrontation and he found it. The Feux Mike Ramos Brigade needs to be stopped. The only people out of control during this incident was the Feux Brigade.”       

         

It was not surprising to me that violent right-wing fascist groups grew and become emboldened enough to stage a violent attack on the US Congress on January 6, 2021.  Paul Gray’s Patriot Front was there. So were the Proud Boys, although its leader, Enrique Terrio, was revealed to be a longtime police informant.  Members of local police forces as well as the US military participated in this insurrection. I was not surprised when the head of the Chicago police union, elected by its 12,000 members publicly defended the violent insurrectionists and expressed sympathy for them.  The insurrectionists were encouraged by President Trump and funded by oligarchs.  

With this act, finally these fascist groups who have been terrorizing people in Austin and many other parts of the country began to be recognized as the terroristic threat that they are.

Skeletons in My Family Closet: Oil Companies and Fascism

I do have a unique perspective on fascism and of the support that exists for fascism among US oligarchs.  More than ten years ago, I had opened a door to a family closet and found some skeletons, hidden away in the Fox River Valley of rural small-town Illinois where I grew up.  

In the 19th Century, my great aunt Harriet Rockwell of St. Charles, Illinois, had married grocery clerk Ed Baker who by a strange quirk of fate inherited in 1918 half of the John W. Gates fortune.   His niece, 15-year-old Dellora Angell, inherited the other half.  This surprise inheritance put them among the top .0001% of Americans in terms of wealth. When Dellora reached 19, she married Lester Norris, a St. Charles classmate from public school, who was trained as an illustrator. 

Newlyweds Dellora and Lester Norris.

Despite Ed Baker and the Norrises being a regular part of my father’s family gatherings when he was a child, I had never met them and knew little about them. I grew up on the other side of the tracks in a town near to their homes in St. Charles.  In the second decade of the 21st Century, I became curious and learned that the bulk of the Gates fortune inherited by these two was in shares of The Texas Company, known by its brand-name Texaco.  Ed and Dellora inherited enough Texaco shares to make Baker and the Norrises collectively the largest shareholders in the company.  I also learned that in 1927, Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini sat to have his portrait drawn by Lester Norris, a portrait that Norris kept on the wall of his office in St. Charles. 

Portrait of Benito Mussolini by Lester Norris

Lester Norris was elevated to the Board of Directors of Texaco in 1933 and served until 1973—making him the longest serving member of the Texaco Board.  During his tenure, my research revealed to me that Texaco had provided oil for Hitler’s navy, assisted Nazi espionage, and provided all the oil necessary on credit to General Franco to make his fascist coup in Spain a success. Texaco supported various fascist coups around the world.  Fascists have been installed in governments with the blessings of some of the most powerful people in the United States.

In my attempt to understand the phenomenon of Lester Norris and Texaco, of Dr. Alberto G. Garcia and his life, and of the recent eruption of an aggressive US domestic fascist movement, I have developed some understanding of how fascism comes about and what measures against fascism have been shown to be effective in the past. 

What is fascism?  Fascism is a type of political gangsterism leading to terroristic dictatorship where non-white racial groups and left-wing groups are scapegoated and persecuted to perpetuate a capitalist society.  Fascism is ultranationalist and relies on certain religious or quasi-religious doctrines to justify itself. It also relies on a fun-house mirror of appropriated left-wing rhetoric.  Fascism is what oligarchs support when they feel their privileges and power are threatened by liberal or left-wing democratic political movements.  Fascism can be appealing to middle classes whose status and prosperity are threatened when monopoly capitalism destroys small businesses.  For example, since the demise of the Farmers Alliance and the Peoples Party in the 19th Century, monopoly capitalism has forced off the land more than 60% of farm owners, and employed Walmart and other international franchises to destroy rural small businesses.  These rural areas are where Donald Trump has proven to be most popular. Most of the people facing charges from the Capitol insurrection had prior money troubles, including bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, bad debts, or unpaid taxes.  “Resentment and revenge are fascism’s prime emotions,” according to historian Alexander Reid Ross.    

An early and continuous financial supporter of the German Nazi Party was Henry Ford.  Other US corporations and oligarchs over time provided funds and other forms of support to the German Nazis. 

The first fascist government was imposed on Hungary in 1919. Among those who helped bring about the Hungarian fascist coup was US intelligence operative Allen Dulles.  Dulles would go on to support Nazism as an international lawyer for major corporations and as an intelligence operative with the OSS. Later, after he became a top official and then director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, Dulles organized and supported fascistic coups in a number of countries.   In 1954, to give just one example, Dulles working with the oligarch Averell Harriman organized the overthrow of a secular social democratic government in Iran in order to protect the interests of US and British oil companies.  Dulles bankrolled and directed Iranian Nazi and fascist leaders, whose members had supported Hitler and Mussolini in World War II.  The new Iranian dictator imposed by Dulles was induced to retain Lester Norris’s man—the former Texaco Chairman Torkild Rieber—as his oil minister.  Although Rieber had been staunchly supported by Texaco director Lester Norris, the majority of other Texaco directors in 1940 forced him to resign when the press began to discover and report on Texaco’s assistance to Hitler.  Secular democracy has never returned to Iran.


Lester Norris’s man: Torkild Rieber, Chairman of the Boord of Texaco, on the cover of Time magazine.  After Hitler’s invasion of Poland had caused England and France to declare war on Germany, Rieber in 1939 traveled to Germany where he spent a weekend during the Christmas holidays with Hitler’s second-in-command Herman Goering at his hunting lodge.  Rieber had earlier agreed to provide Texaco oil to the German navy in exchange for Germans building tankers for Texaco.  In 1936, Rieber had offered to Spanish General Franco oil to fuel his fascist insurgency against the democratic government of Spain.  Texaco also provided a home in Scarsdale and an office in the Chrysler Building for a German spy who came to the US in 1940 to stoke sympathy and assistance to Hitler among the US elites.      .

Diego Rivera painting memorializing the overthrow of democratic government in Guatemala by the US.  CIA Director Allen Dulles is portrayed in dark suit with money pouch standing behind his brother Secretary of State John Foster Dulles who is shaking hands with the new dictator who is prepared to create a dictatorial banana republic favorable to United Fruit Company.  The Dulles brothers were both lawyers and United Fruit had been a long-time client.

Torkild Rieber’s wife either jumped or was pushed to her death from their home in a Manhattan penthouse during the height of Rieber’s infatuation with Hitler. By 1954, Rieber was happily ensconced in an office at the Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. That year, Rieber hosted the daughter of the fascist dictator of Spain, Francisco Franco, flying her on his private jet from Washington to New York to San Francisco and then to Los Angeles where they were guests of honor at a party thrown by Hollywood mogul Jack Warner.

Rieber died in 1968, after Ed Baker but while Lester Norris was still on the Texaco Board. They are all dead now. Texaco owners Ed Baker, Dellora Norris and Lester Norris are entombed in the same St. Charles, Illinois cemetery where my father is buried. My great grandfather Henry Rockwell shares a large and spacious tomb with Ed Baker.

Fascism has long been deeply embedded in US society and government.  In part II of this blog post, I look back at the Antifa actions of Dr. Alberto G. Garcia of Austin and others.  In the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, Labor unions, a free press, and left-wing organizations were able to offer working class Americans alternatives to anti-democratic, fascist organizations and help position the national government to be anti-fascist.  Of course, it took war and enormous amounts of violence to defeat the fascism that had arisen in Europe with the essential help of German oligarchs like Kurt von Schroeder and Fritz Thyssen and US oligarchs like Henry Ford, the Rockefellers, the Harrimans, the House of Morgan, and my relatives at Texaco. 

In part II I also identify oligarchs who have supported the insurrection and attempted coup or autogolpe on January 6, and draw conclusions from history and experience as to what can be done to stop fascism in the United States.

Sources

Brad Rockwell, unfinished manuscript history of Texaco; Alexander Reid Ross, Against the Fascist Creep (2017); Michael J. Roberto, The Coming of the American Behemoth (2018); Stanislav Vysotsky, American Antifa: The Tactics, Culture, and Practice of Militant Antifascism (2021); Dustin Ray Hamby Exposed as Nazi Leader Chef Goyardee, blog of the Screwston Anti-fascist Committee (Sept. 20, 2019); Defend Our Hoodz, Facebook page; Centex Fascists, Autonomedia website; Shelley Seale, Conflicting stories surround controversial demolition of East Austin piñata store, Culture Map (February 15, 2015); Micah Lee, Hack of 251 Law Enforcement Websites Exposes Personal Data of 700,000 Cops, The Intercept (July 15, 2020); John Anderson, APD’s Secret Informants Eyeing Neighbors for “Suspicious” Activity, Leaked Documents Reveal; APD intel center puts spies among us, Austin Chronicle (July 24, 2020); John Anderson,  Austin Regional Intelligence Center’s Secret Informants Show How Profiling Works; “Middle Eastern”? Your info might be on file at Austin’s fusion center, Austin Chronicle (August 7, 2020); John Anderson, ARIC: Black Marchers With Guns? How the Huey P. Newton Gun Club got caught up in Austin Regional Intelligence Center’s snitching program, Austin Chronicle (Sept. 11, 2020); John Anderson, Local Activists Call Out Police and Find Themselves Flagged as Threats, Austin Chronicle (Aug. 28, 2020); Todd C. Frankel, A majority of the people arrested for Capitol riot had a history of financial trouble, Washington Post (Feb. 10, 2021); Carolyn Dimitri, Anne Effland, and Neilson Conklin, The 20th Century Transformation of U.S. Agriculture and Farm Policy, United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service (2005).

Filed Under: Austin Texas History, Brad Rockwell Tagged With: Antifa, Austin, Benito Mussolini, CIA, domestic terrorists, fascism, John W. Gates, Lester Norris, Militia, Patriot Front, Racism, Texaco, Texas, The Texas Company, Torkild Rieber

Pedro Friedeberg

December 27, 2020 by Brad Rockwell

Triptiko Triptiko Triptikstiko

A Surrealistic path from Austin to Mexico City to San Miguel de Allende.   

In The Life and Times of Alberto Garcia, I note Dr. Garcia’s probable contact and influence with University of Texas student Anita Brenner.  In my last blog post, I described how 17-year-old Anita Brenner’s experience with the occult, perhaps at the home of Dr. Alberto Garcia, caused her to leave the University in 1923, after her freshman year, and return to Mexico.  A voice at this séance predicted great things for her in Mexico, and with astounding swiftness the teenaged Brenner made friends with the artistic and political luminaries of the day.  Anita over the decades had an immense influence in making the world aware of Mexican art and in securing refuge for those persecuted for their race or their political beliefs.  

Mexico City architectural student Pedro Friedeberg during the 1950s worked for Anita Brenner’s magazine Mexico This Month. She encouraged him to quit architecture school and become an artist.  A few years later, in June of 1966, she featured him on the cover of Mexico This Month.   

The author of the world’s first surrealistic manifesto, André Breton, came to consider Pedro Friedeberg and Frida Kahlo the only two great surrealists in Mexico.  Only Pedro survives.

André Breton, Diego Rivera, and Leon Trotsky. Pedro Friedeberg’s mother served as a translator for Trotsky while he lived in Mexico.

Pedro’s recent comments on architecture perhaps prove the sagacity of Anita Brenner’s career advice:

“I admire everything that is useless, frivolous and whimsical. I hate functionalism, post modernism and almost everything else. I do not agree with the dictum that houses are supposed to be ‘machines to live in’. For me, the house … is supposed to be some crazy place that makes you laugh.”

Architecture degree or not, Pedro Friedeberg in 1961 did design a lotus house for Edward James surrealist compound in the mountain jungles of eastern San Luis Potosi.  The roof was lotus-shaped because James instructed Friedeberg that the house “should close during the day because the sun is so hot, and at night it should open so you can see the stars.”

Lotus House designed by Pedro Friedeberg for Edward James

Pedro’s parents were Jews who fled fascism in Europe and arrived in Mexico in 1939.  “I was born in Italy during the era of Mussolini, who made all trains run on time. Immediately thereafter, I moved to México where the trains are never on time, but where once they start moving they pass pyramids.”

His mother was a leftist who loved glamour.  The gardens of Pedro’s family home in Mexico City were designed by the architect Luis Barragan.  He recollects: “At an early age I was influenced by theosophy, Catholicism, atheism, Eastern customs and religions.  I was always fascinated by religious architecture: cathedrals, Aztec pyramids, synagogues, Gurdjieffian temples, and so on.”  But now he claims no interest in religion.  “I’m not really mystical,” he says.

In 1959, Pedro got his first gallery show, at Galeria Diana in Mexico City.  Today, Galeria Casa Diana in the colonial town of San Miguel de Allende permanently has his art on display.  Before I was aware of Pedro’s prominence and history, I was a regular visitor to this small and beautiful gallery that used to be the residence of him and Diana.  It is next door to the entrance to the bull ring that dominates a block near the center of this old colonial town.  Coming from the street into the gallery, Spanish colonialism meets Mickey Mouse, 21st Century pyramids, and op art.  The space invites transformation.  A couple years ago, on the Day of the Dead, I went to the gallery to silently gaze in the eyes of strangers and to be taken blindfolded through a vocal musical improvisation—all organized by a young Burning Man impresario.

            This is how Pedro Friedeberg greeted me one time at his gallery. 

Pedro Friedeberg

I once brought Dr. Alberto Garcia’s granddaughter Kay to Galeria Casa Diana.  At the time, I was not aware that Anita Brenner had in 1923 been invited to Dr. Garcia’s parties for Mexican students at his home in the south Austin neighborhood of Travis Heights.  Nor was I aware of the personal prophecy given to Anita during a séance at the home of Dr. Garcia or some other Austin occultist.  And I was not aware of Brenner’s role in encouraging and promoting Friedeberg. 

Dr. Alberto G. Garcia’s granddaughter Kay at Galeria Casa Diana

Sources

Brad Rockwell, The Life and Times of Alberto G. Garcia: Physician, Mexican Revolutionary, Texas Journalist, Yogi (2020); Alan Grabinsky, 10,000 Hard-Boiled Eggs and the Art of Pedro Friedeberg At 82, the Mexican artist isn’t done collecting junk in his irrational house, Tablet Magazine (May 4, 2017); Pedro Friedeberg: Inventor of alternative realities (April 12, 2019), https://www.christies.com/features/In-conversation-with-Pedro-Friedeberg-8677-1.aspx; Philip Alvaré, Hands Down, Pedro Friedeberg’s Mexico City Home Is a Surrealist Delight\The eccentric artist’s abode is a veritable cabinet of curiosities, Introspective Magazine (February 16, 2020); Tessel M. Bauduin, Surrealism and the Occult (2014); Patrick Lepetit, The Esoteric Secrets of Surrealism: Origins, Magic, and Secret Societies (2014); Laurinda S. Dixon, review of Guggenheim exhibition Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose+Croix in Paris, 1892–1897, Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide, Vol. 16 (Autumn 2017). 

Official website of Pedro Friedeberg:

Pedro Friedeberg

Filed Under: Austin Texas History, Brad Rockwell, Mexican History Tagged With: Anita Brenner, Dr. Alberto G. Garcia, Edward James, Frida Kahlo, Luis Barragan, Pedro Friedeberg, San Miguel de Allende, Surrealism

The Texas Séance that Transformed the Life of Anita Brenner

November 2, 2020 by Brad Rockwell

As a 17-year-old in the year 1922, Anita Brenner enrolled in the University of Texas.  Her experience of Austin had quite an impact on her and motivated her to return to Mexico, the country of her birth.  There, with renewed confidence and the mentorship of J. Frank Dobie, she immediately embarked on a broad range of activities that would quickly gain her international acclaim and influence.  Austin’s Dr. Alberto Garcia’s role in this has been briefly alluded to in my book The Life and Times of Dr. Alberto G. Garcia: physician, Mexican Revolutionary, Texas Journalist, Yogi.  Here I provide a fuller account of how Austin’s occultists, including perhaps Dr. Garcia, changed Ms. Brenner’s life. 

Childhood witness to the Mexican Revolution in Aguascalientes

As a child living in her birthplace of Aguascalientes, Mexico, Anita’s nanny, Nana Serapia, opened her eyes to the world of spirits and ghosts.  When Anita was five years old, the Mexican Revolution broke out following the celestial display of Halley’s Comet.  Anita remembers Nana telling her that these comets heralded terrible things to come. Under the leadership of the Spiritist and yogi Francisco Madero, however, the victory of the Mexican Revolution over the dictator Porfirio Diaz was swift.  The year after Halley’s Comet, when newly-elected President Francisco Madero set foot in Mexico City, an earthquake shook the ground and put cracks in the National Palace which had been the headquarters of the tyrant Diaz.  Nana told Anita that this earthquake meant that a wicked era was over.  Madero participated in séances and engaged in a type of automatic writing; through these activities, spirits had predicted his unlikely ascendency to the presidency and also predicted his later downfall.

President Madero was assassinated less than two years after assuming office, however, by generals in league with the United States Ambassador.  The Mexican Revolution started back up again to oust a new dictatorship.  Anita’s childhood eyewitness accounts of the revolution as seen from her parents’ home in Aguascalientes were quite vivid.  Her father was a Jewish immigrant from Latvia and had been successful enough to own and operate a ranch.  Anita became an admirer of Pancho Villa after his army, the Division of the North, arrived in Aguascalientes.  She was ten years old. 

They came confident still, singing ballads of their triumphs…..  The Division of the North traveled in the manner classic to Mexican revolutionaries.  Troop trains scrambled and trudged in ceaselessly, bristling with soldiers, gorged to the windows with women and spoils that spilled out on the roof and the ground…. 

They camped in front of our house, a soldier to a tree.  His woman unrolled the blankets and spread a petate on the roots, drove nails into the trunk for hats and dug out a niche for an image.  If you adventurously walked the avenue you had to be careful or you’d step on somebody’s baby and dive into somebody’s stew.  Sometimes when the women quarreled … they rolled over and over in the dust, their hands buried in each other’s hair, biting scratching, dirty skirts flying and beads scattering, till the men, tired of this amusement (which didn’t end, like a cock-fight) roughly pushed them apart. 

There was always the sound of bugles and the shuffled march of sandaled feet; always the smell of scorching frijoles and prickling chile, always the rattle of gossip, always the patter of women’s hands making tortillas and never a moment there was not the wail of a new child and the haunt of an old song……

A great tourist hotel across a field from our garden was turned into a hospital.  One day we had the medical staff and some officers to lunch.  The doctors, odorous of their make-shift calling ate hardboiled eggs out of the shells with their knives, and told tales…tales of limbs gangrened and hacked off in the quick, without anesthetics (there were none) with a flip of a machete ……

This last paragraph gives a flavor of what the practice of medicine was like for Dr. Alberto Garcia during the Revolution.  He worked in field hospitals serving Venustiano Carranza’s army two years earlier, in 1913, at a time when Pancho Villa was aligned with him. 

Anita Brenner attends the University of Texas in Austin

The Mexican Revolution continued without resolution, and Anita Brenner’s family fled to San Antonio, Texas.  This was a year after Dr. Alberto G. Garcia and his family had fled to Austin from Mexico on a horse-drawn wagon.  Starting from scratch, Anita’s father sold plants and sundries, slowly building a large nursery and the San Antonio’s first major discount store.  He became the owner of the Continental Hotel. 

Anita Brenner, photograph by Edward Weston 1924

When Anita was 17, she enrolled in the University of Texas in Austin, starting the fall semester of 1922.  She was very unhappy there.  Austin’s government was in the process of being taken over by the Ku Klux Klan, with its hatred of Mexican immigrants and Jews.  Landlords operating rooming houses, refused to rent to Jewish UT students.  She was a social outcast, later writing: “I was a lonely, absurd awkward person.  I felt ugly and stupid.  I was ignored.  I resented and hated everything.  A bewildered, unhappy nobody.”    

Ku Klux Klan on Congress Avenue, Austin, 1921

There were bright spots that highlighted Anita’s intellect and presaged her future careers.  Anita took an English writing class from folklorist J. Frank Dobie and he became her lifelong friend.  She also joined the staff of the UT student newspaper, the Texan.

Four years earlier, Dr. Alberto Garcia also had taken journalism classes at UT and had also written for the Texan.   He then created La Vanguardia, a weekly that was the first Spanish-language newspaper in Austin.  La Vanguardia ceased publication a year before Anita Brenner arrived in Austin.  Anita certainly would have known about La Vanguardia.  And Dr. Garcia was well known for his fearlessness in resisting the Ku Klux Klan, for his supportive coverage of the Magonistas, Zapatistas, and other Mexican Revolutionaries, and for his denunciations of United States imperialism. Like Anita, Dr. Garcia had experienced the Mexican Revolution first-hand.  It is hard to imagine that Anita Brenner and Alberto Garcia would not have met each other. 

The homesick Anita Brenner would have found solace at Dr. Garcia’s large two-story 19th-Century home on Newning Avenue in South Austin at the literary and social events hosted by him and his wife Eva for Mexican students at UT and St. Edwards College.  Dr. Garcia provided coverage of one of his parties the year before in his own newspaper: “the informal social gathering of young Mexicans from the university and young ladies from the Mexican neighborhood of Austin at the home of Dr. Alberto G. Garcia” was initiated by the singing of the Mexican National Anthem.  “Other Mexican songs were sung by some of the young people in attendance.  Tamales, atole, and capirotada bread pudding were served.”  Dr. Garcia may have provided Anita Brenner with her first introduction to vegetarianism. Dr. Garcia had been raised in the home of America’s most influential vegetarian, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, and received his initial medical degree from Dr. Kellogg’s medical school.  Later in life, Anita too would become a vegetarian.

Alberto and Eva Garcia with their children, 1922

Voice of a Prophetic Spirit

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The home of Alberto G. Garcia, 1214 Newning Avenue, Austin, Texas

After the end of her second semester at UT, Anita Brenner attended a séance at a home she later vaguely described as being at the edge of town.  Dr. Garcia’s home was on the other side of the River from UT and most of the rest of the town, surrounded by empty wooded lots and a mere nine blocks from the southern city limits. Some of the neighborhood public school students arrived barefoot from shacks along the creeks and hills outside the City limits; they were children of the clannish cedar choppers who spoke an Elizabethan English dialect.  Dr. Garcia indeed lived at the edge of town.

Dr. Garcia probably was one of Anita’s few trustworthy social contacts.  It is possible that the séance took place in the Garcia home, and if so, it would have been appropriately discreet for Anita not to identify the eminent Garcia’s as the hosts.  Dr. Garcia had long been an astrologer and now was initiating a serious but secret life-long interest in such things as yoga and magic rituals evoking spirits and gods.

            Anita arrived at the séance after it had begun.  A voice called out to her:

You do not believe, and your pain is greater because you have no faith.  Your heart is rebellious, and you set your own spirit as the only reality. 

Today life is terrible for you, you are a rebel in futility.  But you shall go to a strange land, and there many men will want you, and you shall see many men will want you, and you shall see many things that only lofty spirits know.  You will reach truth if you have faith….  Through your hand you will tell to the world many radiant things, for you have the gift and need only your faith.  Peace be with you.

When the séance was over, Anita went home and immediately made arrangements to leave Austin.  She returned to her family in San Antonio, and after her 18th birthday moved to Mexico City. 

               Within weeks of arriving in Mexico City, Anita wrote to Austin friend Geraldine Aron about her new community of artists, “sculptors, writers, socialists, musicians, poets …. No snobbishness, prejudice, of any sort—racial, monetary, apparent.”    Among her many Mexico City friends and acquaintances were the painter Jose Clemente Orozco, Mexican Feminist Party founder Elena Torres, balladeer Concha Michel, and Maria Sandoval de Zarco, the only practicing female lawyer in Mexico.   Friends Edward Weston and Tina Modotti used her as a model in some of their iconic photos.  She developed a close and long-standing friendship with Diego Rivera, and later became friends with Frida Kahlo. 

Rivera had deep connections to the spirit world.  Present at his birth was his mother’s uncle, a Spiritist.  In the 1920s, Rivera was a member of the Mexico City Rosicrucian lodge, and as Anita Brenner noted, Rivera’s “sister is a clairvoyant and he believes in apparitions and ghosts.”  The sister was a folk healer and performed limpia ceremonies on Anita to remove evil spirits. 

Anita Brenner, photographed by Edward Weston, 1924. This photo has been displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Whereas in Austin, Anita had been a wallflower, many men in Mexico did want her professionally and personally, as predicted by the Austin spirit prophet.  “That love is free is a matter so accepted that no one ever thinks to bother to state so,” she wrote. The prominent artist Jean Charlot pursued Anita and she enjoyed flirtations and seductions with boyfriends.  Not that she was the most attractive or alluring woman in Mexico City.  In a diary entry she expressed envy of Tina Modotti and the diffuse joy Tina received from her “numerous cohabitations.” 

Tina Modotti, photograph by Edward Weston 1923.

After a lunch with her friend Concha Michel, Anita wrote the following:

We have the same philosophy, which recognizes sex as the key to things, and the plane upon which woman’s position is placed—and should be.  Since it is creative energy, it is for her to direct it.  To be able to do so, she herself must be physically pure.  Therefore vegetarianism.

Like Concha, Diego Rivera, Edward Weston, Mexican Communist Party head Rafael Carrillo, US Communist exiles Bert and Ella Wolfe and others (including Dr. Alberto Garcia) with whom she broke bread, Anita became a vegetarian

Anita Brenner, photograph by Tina Modotti 1926

In Mexico City, Anita Brenner became a prolific journalist, an art critic, and an assistant to Manuel Gamio, who was the top anthropologist in Mexico and a Rosicrucian.  At the age of 21, three years after leaving Austin, Anita Brenner began researching and writing a pathbreaking book that when published three years later would become both influential and acclaimed.  Idols Behind Altars celebrated and explained to the world Mexican art and its underlying indigenous spirituality.  One of the Mexican artists Anita wrote about was Fermin Revueltas, who had attended St. Edwards College in Austin for one semester in 1917. Another book followed—a history of the Mexican Revolution called The Wind That Swept Mexico.

Anita went to Columbia University in New York in 1927 where she became friends with fellow student Margaret Mead.  Anita earned a Ph.D. in anthropology under Franz Boas (the leading anthropologist of the era) – all without first ever having received a college undergraduate or master’s degree. 

In 1929, while a New York student, she picked up a Bible to see what it might have to say about the ancient history of Chaldea and Babylonia.  Spontaneously, out of nowhere, Anita was seized by a profound transcendent experience. 

I had the queerest of sensations, which mentally were translated into question and answer, much as this: Question: But what exactly must I do with my abilities….  Answer: Pick up the thread of uncompromising spiritual and ethical thought, which means fight against almost everything in modern thought around you … which also means keep yourself as pure and lofty of mind as you can.  [The experience] grew and grew and I had feelings of faintness and a tremendous sensation of being out of the world….  If I had seen anything “supernatural” I would not have been in the least surprised.  That was my mood….  And then I got a sensation of reluctance, because I realized the full implications of what the proposal was … and I nearly said aloud, “No, no, I am just an ordinary normal craftsman,” and I got burning sensations in my mouth … and not until I “submitted” did it stop; after which I was thoroughly exhausted.       

Anita continued spiritual pursuits.  After her friend and former Pancho Villa lieutenant Manuel Hernandez Galvan was murdered, she contacted him and carried out a conversation with him through a Spiritist automatic writing technique. 

In June of 1926, Diego Rivera had come over to her Mexico City apartment and the two had a long talk.  She wrote, “At midnight I was exalted and converted.”  She had become a revolutionary.  In 1932, Anita read the Bolshevik Leon Trotsky’s autobiography: “What a book and what a man. Inevitably getting more and more interested in things Marxian.”  The next year Anita interviewed Trotsky in Paris where he had gone to avoid Stalin’s assassins.  Trotsky predicted “a great war (I do not speak of a small preventative war)” initiated by a rearmed Germany.  And the transition from capitalism to socialism, prophesied Trotsky, would be measured in generations, not years.

From New York Anita Brenner devoted herself to international efforts to get a fair trial for nine African American boys convicted by an all-male and all-white jury in Alabama of raping a white woman.  In reversing the convictions, the U.S. Supreme Court established new precedent in recognizing both the constitutional right to counsel and the unconstitutionality of the exclusion of African Americans from juries.  

In 1933, Anita was interviewed by a female journalist who wrote that the petite, “vivacious, dark-haired Anita Brenner looks more like a college girl than a full-fledged author, registered anthropologist with a Ph.D from Columbia.  She greets her guests in green lounging pajamas, topped with a brightly flowered coat.  She bubbles with girlish enthusiasm, talking eagerly and shaking her short curls.”  That same year, Anita Brenner went to Spain as a war correspondent for The Nation and the New York Times Magazine.  The newly-established democratic government of Spain was threatened by fascist and other right-wing forces.  She found in Spain a country similar to Mexico, but in a continuing state of revolutionary transformation.  The Leftist government was supported and armed by the government of Mexico.  She wrote:

The most thrilling thing in Spain are the workers.  Revolution and all that really means something here.  Makes all our [United States] intellectuals’ committees and the ILD look awfully silly, because from this perspective it is plain that we were doing everything in a vacuum, and all the people who were doing it were miles away from being workers.

The genocide perpetrated by General Franco’s fascist forces (and fueled by Texaco oil and equipped by Adolph Hitler’s Germany) took a horrific toll on the Spanish democratic forces.  If this were not enough, Anita Brenner (now pregnant in 1936) took note that Joseph Stalin’s Communist newspaper Pravda had announced from Moscow: “As for Catalonia, the purging of Trotskyites and the Anarcho-Syndicalists has begun; it will be conducted with the same energy it was conducted in the U.S.S.R.”  Anita publicized the clandestine prisons and the assassinations managed in Spain by Stalinist operatives like Tina Modotti’s lover Vittorio Vidali. Anita exposed some of the activities of her former friend Tina Modotti as a Stalinist agent.

Returning to New York City in 1938, Anita and her husband threw a famous Day of the Dead Halloween Party attended by Frida Kahlo, philosopher-educator John Dewey, artist and designer Isamu Noguchi, and the ghostly Whittaker Chambers who had just left the Communist Party and was hiding out, fearing assassination.  During this time, Anita was also writing a column for Mademoiselle magazine. 

Frida Kahlo, photograph by Anita Brenner

Anita Brenner defended and sought refuge for many socialists targeted by Stalin and Hitler.  She played a critical role in helping protect Stalin’s greatest opponent, Leon Trotsky.  When she learned that Trotsky’s latest country of asylum had a new government with a Nazi SS Minister of Justice, she contacted Diego Rivera and convinced him to petition the President of Mexico to grant Trotsky asylum.  Asylum was granted and Trotsky moved into Diego Rivera’s and Frida Kahlo’s home in Mexico City.  Following an affair with Frida Kahlo, Trotsky moved into his own compound, where one of Stalin’s agents finally breached his security and killed him with a pickaxe as he worked at his desk. 

Leon Trotsky in his Mexico City home, at his desk where he was later assassinated

Anita Brenner never forgot Austin.  The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas holds a first edition copy of Anita Brenner’s 1943 book The Wind That Swept Mexico: The History of the Mexican Revolution.  The book is autographed by her and inscribed to J. Frank Dobie. 

John Lomax (who popularized Ledbelly, Woody Guthrie, and Muddy Waters) with J. Frank Dobie.

The racism, anti-Semitism, and parochialism of Austin during the years 1922 and 1923 had made Anita miserable.  Yet an Austin séance she attended showed her a way out, filled her with confidence, and instantaneously propelled her into a future unforeseeable to anyone outside of the spirit world. At the séance, a spirit’s voice acknowledged her deep alienation in Austin and called her to greatness in another land where “many men will want you, and you shall see many things that only lofty spirits know” and “tell to the world many radiant things.” Whether she heard this voice in Dr. Alberto Garcia’s home or heard it in the home of one of the Spiritualists, Theosophists, Rosicrucians, Hermeticists or Oddfellows inhabiting Austin during those years, the prophecy turned out to be both accurate and transformative for Anita Brenner.

In the last years of her life, Anita returned to her family farm in Aguascalientes and revived it.  After her death, Anita was not forgotten in Aguascalientes.  Some years after her passing, an apparition said to be her was reportedly observed, according to her daughter, “about three feet off the ground…playing with children at the low-income housing project built on the farm’s orchards.  [S]he instructed the children to plant trees, to love and respect the earth.” 

Sources

Brad Rockwell, The Life and Times of Alberto G. Garcia (2020).  Susannah Joel Glusker, Anita Brenner: A Mind of Her Own (1998); Margaret Hooks, Tina Modotti (1993); Mexico Modern (Albrecht & Mellins, eds., 2017); Austin City Directory (1922).

#AnitaBrenner #AustinTexas #JFrankDobie #MexicanRevolution #DrAlbertoGGarcia #TinaModotti #Edward Weston #Frida Kahlo #DailyTexan #LeonTrotsky #Spirits #seances

Filed Under: Austin Texas History, Mexican History Tagged With: 'Leon Trotsky, aguascalientes, Anita Brenner, Diego Rivera, Edward Weston, Frank Dobie, Frida Kahlo, Ku Klux Klan, Mexican Art, séance, Tina Modotti

NIGHTHAWK Jorge Luis Borges and Dr. Alberto Garcia in Austin, Texas

September 20, 2020 by Brad Rockwell

Surrounded by space-age automobile tail fins at midcentury-modern Nighthawk restaurant on Austin’s Guadalupe Street, an elderly upper-class Latin American man named Jorge Luis Borges, dressed in suit and tie, was often found holding court in the Fall of 1961.  This steak and burger restaurant was a hangout for University of Texas faculty and students.  Borges was a visiting faculty member and had his office nearby at Batts Hall.  His presence was a big deal. All “his lectures were filled to capacity.”   

Fourteen years later, Borges would published a short story called The Bribe about a UT professor who had his first lunch with his academic antagonist at the Nighthawk in 1969. As a point of pride this professor let it be known that he forbid his students to come to class “dressed like hippies.”

Dreams – and memories of La Vanguardia & Bécquer

Austin made a deep impression on Borges and he would come to call himself “a citizen of Geneva, Montevideo, Austin, and (like all men) Rome.” The rest of North America meant nothing to him.  Asked why he liked Austin so much, he replied “I dream well there.”  

Borges once wrote of a lucid dream, engaged in night after night, where the dreamer with assistance from the god of fire labors to dream up a real human.  The dreamed man awakes in the dreamer’s dream and slowly comes to realize that he is a mere appearance. This realization provokes existential terror but also relief in the knowledge that the fires apparently threatening him are as imaginary as he is.    

Did Dr. Alberto G. Garcia ever meet or hear Jorge Luis Borges when he was in Austin? 

Dr. Garcia loved Spanish literature.  In his Austin newspaper La Vanguardia, the Mexican immigrant and new US citizen Dr. Garcia 40 years earlier had serialized Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer.  Borges, in 1962, would reach for Bécquer’s image of a harp to describe the magic of books.   

Both Borges and Garcia loved libraries. Dr. Garcia would often go to the University’s library in the tower not far from Batts Hall, a tower tall enough to loom over the Nighthawk.

Latin American Spokesmen

Borges was a Latin American dignitary, an intellectual giant.  In decades past, Dr. Garcia would be one of the hosts welcoming any such personage coming to Austin. But in 1961, Dr. Garcia was no longer a public intellectual, and no longer a Latino spokesman. He was humbly pre-occupied with administering to his sick patients, practicing astrology and yoga—and enjoying the last year of his life. 

Dr. Alberto Garcia, by 1961, was almost deaf.  Jorge Luis Borges was almost blind.  

Time and Yoga

Blindness brought to Borges an enjoyment of solitude, a solitude where sometimes “I simply don’t think and am merely content to exist.  I let time flow past me, and it seems to pass differently.”  In A New Refutation of Time, Borges recalled an ecstasy in a “holiday from thought” and “vertiginous silence” where he experienced “eternity.” After reviewing treatises written by Buddhist yogis, Borges wrote: “Time is a delusion: the difference and inseparability of one moment belonging to its apparent past from another belonging to its apparent present is sufficient to disintegrate it….  And yet, and yet…Time is the substance I am made of.  Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river, it is a tiger which destroys me; … it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.  The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.”  

In solitude, Dr. Garcia went to rest in silence and existence unmanifest. He applied certain teachings of the Yoga Sutra. One section of the text describes an enlightenment where “Sequence, which depends upon moments, is liberated at the final end of transformations.”  Dr. Garcia wrote: “The momentary phenomenon, isolated for study and observation is recognized as an instant coming from the unknown and going to the unknown.  It is a crystalized expression of God.”  Yet Dr. Garcia too could not ignore his identity and agency in the successive movement of Time out of moments: 

Moments are like the atoms of fuel which I ignite.

Like fairy creatures, they rush and whirl about me, 

seeking an outlet for their flash expression. 

How they express depends upon me…. 

It is I who generate them into objective being;

It is I who assist or retard them in their ideal attainment.

They are infinite in their number and variety.

I may choose, but why choose?

Let each one come in its time; I will express them

  In all their resplendent beauty and variety.

Theosophists guided Dr. Garcia in his yoga. Borges hoped for a Theosophical realm of eternal memory, but he doubted the existence of such a thing.   

Dr. Alberto G. Garcia
November 1961
at the Maximilian Room of the Driskill Hotel

William F. Buckley Sr. & Jr.

An Austin oil tycoon named Will Buckley had been an adversary of Dr. Garcia’s, disrupting his life, his father’s life, and causing untold suffering among his fellow Mexicans.  The son of Will Buckley, William F. Buckley Jr., once flew to Argentina to interview Borges for his television show.  

Hermes and Hermaphrodite

Borges described the “illusory library” of “that one god, Hermes Trismegistus,” consisting of “variously estimated number of books (42, according to Clement of Alexandria; 20,000, according to Iamblichus; 36,525, according to the priests of Thoth, who is also Hermes), on whose pages all things were written.”  The description of God as Pascal’s sphere found within “the Hermetic books almost enables us to envisage that sphere.” “Almost” –because for Borges existence was a riddle, a contradiction and perhaps an impossibility.  

Dr. Garcia closely read a book attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. And in his home in Travis Heights, Dr. Garcia perhaps was a conjurer of Hermes and Hermaphrodite.  

Jorge Luis Borges and Dr. Alberto G. Garcia would appear to have had much to talk about in the Fall of 1961.  

Yet Borges, “unfortunately,” was Borges.

Borges had espoused pro-slavery beliefs.  He believed that blacks were happier enslaved than free.  Alberto knew better, and had joined a Mexican army in 1913 to fight for the Maderistas who freed Mexican slaves. He had risked his life by resisting the Ku Klux Klan in Austin in the 1920s. Dr. Garcia associated with Marxists, denounced imperialism and fought a dictator.  Borges, in contrast, pleased men like William F. Buckley Jr. by calling for the execution of Marxist intellectual Régis Debray while he was a captive of the Bolivian military dictatorship.

To those who asked, Borges proclaimed: “I dislike Mexico and the Mexicans.”  

It is perhaps just as well that Borges never saw Dr. Garcia, and just as well that history does not record Dr. Garcia ever hearing or meeting Borges during the moments of time when they both lived in Austin.   

Sources

Brad Rockwell, The Life and Times of Alberto G. Garcia (2020).

Alberto Garcia, Space, on file in the Austin History Center; Alberto G. Garcia, M.D., My Moments, on file in the Austin History Center; Yoga Sutra IV 33; Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories, 1933-1969 (1970); Jorge Luis Borges, The New Refutation of Time, Labyrinths (1962); Jorge Luis Borges, The Fearful Sphere of Pascal; Rodolfo Braceli, Borges, in Caras, Caritas y Caretas (1996); Elizabeth Beaudin, Writing Against Time, Jorge Luis Borges (Bloom, ed., 2004); Peter La Salle, Borges and Batts Hall, Texas Observer (Jan. 7, 2005); Charlie Binkow, Texas, the state that stole the heart of literary giant Jorge Luis Borges, Ransom Center Magazine (October 22, 2015); Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonia Express (1979); Jorge Luis Borges interviewed by William F. Buckley Jr. on Firing Line.   

Common Nighthawk, North America’s Bird Nursery, Boreal Songbird Initiative (2015): Oölogists and their confederates point out that the name “nighthawk” is a misnomer.   The bird “is not strictly nocturnal, often flying in sunlight, and it is not a hawk….”  

#JorgeLuisBorges #WilliamFBuckleyJr. #YogaTimelessness #DrAlbertoGGarcia #HermesTrismegistmus

Filed Under: Austin Texas History, Yoga Tagged With: Alberto G. Garcia, Hermes, Jorge Luis Borges, Nighthawk, Willam F. Buckiley Jr.

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About the Author

Brad Rockwell is an attorney who divides his time between Austin, Texas and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Before law school, his advocacy with the Paddlewheel Alliance contributed to the permanent construction shut down of Indiana’s Marble Hill nuclear reactor. Brad also taught public-school in Michigan, worked in many Midwest factories, canvassed door-to-door in Chicago, and worked at Wheatsville Co-op in Austin, Texas. As a volunteer with Austin ACORN he helped design a lifeline electric rate structure for the City of Austin’s electric utility. Read More…

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