The Nine Lives of Elfego Baca

If my memory serves me right, I first saw this show the first weekend we had cable. I know I was in third grade. It would’ve been fall of 1985. The Disney Channel played an episode or two of Zorro and an episode of The Wonderful World of Disney—but one of the ones from my mother’s childhood or thereabouts. I grew up with Walt introducing shows to me, just as my mother had, and I feel certain this was the first one. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think I am. Even if I am, well, memory is how it is.

What Walt introduced me to all those years ago was the story of New Mexico lawman and lawyer Elfego Baca (Robert Loggia). Baca, a historical figure, was born in Socorro, New Mexico, and moved to Topeka, Kansas, as a boy. The family then moved back to Belen, New Mexico; at the age of nineteen, Baca became a deputy sheriff, though whether he was properly deputized or not is a matter of debate. Still, he became sheriff of Socorro County before going to Santa Fe to study the law. At least Disney’s version remained a champion of the poor and oppressed.

Disney tried not to make it about race, but let’s be clear—it was going to be about race. The very first episode is about race. The people in the story of Mexican descent are at odds with the Anglos, who don’t even call them Americans. The historical Baca was the descendant of a family that has its own Wikipedia page, detailing the artists and politicians descended from it. I’m not sure how they’re all related, but it seems quite a few members of the family had large families indeed. Even on the show, Baca has a wealthy cousin of some sort. But the cousin is still seen as inferior to the Anglos, because even though the family had been there since 1600, there are several episodes dealing with trying to take things away from longstanding families.

Not to mention, of course, that while the family whose estate Baca protects in two episodes cannot be said to be poor, most of his other clients are. Which means that, even when it’s not about race, it’s usually about class. There are also two episodes about a group of what the show calls Mustangers, a term I can only find in reference to cars, who in the show are nomadic people making a living capturing and breaking wild mustangs. The head of the group refers to them as Americans of the Protestant persuasion, which we know the Mexican-American people aren’t—the first episode includes a historically accurate statue of Santa Anna—but the town is still trying to drive them out.

The wild part is that the patriarch of that group is played by Arthur Hunnicutt. His daughter is Beverly Garland. She’s engaged to Brian Keith. They’re being threatened by James Coburn. (How have I not written up James Coburn yet?) And in a truly bonkers twist, the second episode of the plot includes a storekeeper who won’t sell to the Mustangers and is played by DeForest Kelley. No other episode has near that level of fame or cult connection associated with it, even though the final episode does fature someone you might remember from a three-hour tour.

So I know what you’re waiting to hear. How are the racial aspects handled? And . . . it’s uneven. A whole lot of brownface. I’m afraid—Annette Funicello’s back again, for one thing. But it is, as with Zorro, on the side of those characters even when they’re played by Anglos. Or Italian or Portuguese people. But even leaving aside Elfego himself, the assorted Hispanic characters are not universally poor or uneducated. The white characters are not universally rich or educated. Elfego deliberately helps the underdogs, and in this story, that’s often the Hispanic characters against the white ones.

There’s only so much I expect these to age well. I watched what of The Swamp Fox was on YouTube at the time, and boy that was problematic stuff. I’ll probably go through some of the other series from those days as I find them, and we’ll see how it goes I guess. Some of them are surprising—Zorro is the example I keep coming back to; my son called this “it’s totally not Zorro,” though there are some pretty substantial differences to them. Starting with the obvious reality of the figure.

In case you’re curious, the historical Elfego Baca died in 1945 at the age of eighty. He wasn’t a perfect man, apparently being a bit too fond of alcohol and wild women. He ran unsuccessfully for office, though he was well known locally for getting out the Hispanic vote. In 1936, he was interviewed for the Federal Writers’ Project, and the notes of that interview are in the Library of Congress. He lived a long, colourful life, and the story of the first episode is more or less factual, though I don’t know about the rest of them. It’s got to be at least as true as the other historical figures presented on the show, right?