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Becoming Whole

Ex-'cholo' found path to recovery by following his Native American side

At 33 years old, Manuel Castro sat in a California prison cell doing a long stretch for drug abuse and robbery, staring down at a photo of himself as a smiling eight-year-old in Guadalupe, Arizona.

“I looked at that picture. I saw how innocent the kid in the photo was. I wondered how I had grown up so bad,” Castro recalls, retelling the incident to participants at the sweat lodge he conducts in Guadalupe.

“I kept asking myself, ‘Who am I?’ ”

In wondering what went wrong in his life, Castro was forced to confront his personal identity crisis when his aunt mailed him the childhood photograph.

Castro was of mixed Chicano and Native American ancestry. His father was Mexican American; his mother was a mix of Yaqui and Mayo Indian bloodlines.

He was born and raised in San Bernadino County, the son of California farm worker parents. When he was eight, his mother died and he was sent to live with his aunt in Guadalupe.

Guadalupe was where Castro’s mother was born. The town of 5,000 people near Tempe and the Interstate 10 freeway was founded around 1900 by Yaquis fleeing persecution in Mexico. Many Yaqui men and women were killed by Mexican soldiers, or forced to work the mines and ranches in their Sonora homeland.

When Castro turned 13, he left the tiny Valley town to return to California. He ended up in a gang.


DOWNWARD SPIRAL

All cultures have light and dark sides. For most of his life Castro had chosen to walk on the dark side of being Chicano. He became a cholo before he was a teenager, and embracing that part of his heritage, lived La Vida Loca.

“Half of me accepted a Chicano way of life,” Castro says. “It didn’t click that I also had a Native American half.”

Castro’s gang banger lifestyle was a restless search for parties, drug and alcohol highs, crime and violence. Minor crimes as a teenager graduated to major crimes as an adult. He bounced in and out of youth detention centers, then jail, and finally landing in prison.

His body became a canvas for tattoos. Iconic Mexican Catholic images like Our Lady of Guadalupe and gang slogans decorate almost every inch of his brown flesh.

Yet his “homies” never suspected his Yaqui blood.

“I knew I looked different, and there were others who had Native American blood like me. But we all said we were Chicanos,” Castro says.

Some Native Americans say they try to “pass” as Latinos because they are ashamed of their Indian ancestry. Others say they have used this identity ruse to survive.

“In the L.A. barrios, if the gangs knew you were Indian, they’d beat you up,” says Marcial Murrieta, a Scottsdale resident of Mayo descent. In the Mexican and Mexican American cultures, “Indio” was a derogatory word, the equivalent of “poor and stupid.”

For Castro, his recovery from gang life came with his release from prison and a return to Guadalupe in 1997.

Back home, Castro learned of the Yaqui community ceremonies such as Cuadesma (Lent) ceremonies in Guadalupe. He learned of the sacred Yaqui Deer Dance, and how all of nature was revered. He heard the elders speak of duty to community, to family, of faith in God and how all people were connected. He learned how to purify one’s body and spirit in a sweat lodge ritual.

Today at 42, Manuel Castro is a certified counselor who has helped youth and adults in Guadalupe and now works for the Salt River-Maricopa Community tribe near Scottsdale.

He is happily married with two infants, his son Manuwe and daughter Sewa Huitzlin, which means “hummingbird” in the Yaqui/Aztec dialect.

Guadalupe residents consider him a spiritual man, and a community leader.

Castro says he united the good from both heritages to become more whole.

“I am of proud of being of Native American and Chicano descent,” he says.