Jock Soto: Beauty Amid the Storm

Renowned ballet dancer Jock Soto, born in Gallup, New Mexico, retired from the New York City Ballet stage in 2005 and is now a master ballet instructor worldwide. Photo courtesy of Luis Fuentes.

COVID-19 is a Category 5 hurricane. We wear masks to shield against the virus much like protecting windows with plywood. Masks might protect our health but don’t do much for our fragile psyches. We strive to feel physically safe in our shelters, but we know there is mayhem out there. Millions and millions of jobs are lost, and no one knows how long it will take to recover. And while uncertain futures are pondered behind precariously protective masks, videos of threatening and deadly acts go viral. COVID’s seething undercurrents take a different shape. . . . a human torrent fills the streets, saying enough is enough. . .

There are and will be countless narratives about the recent happenings in America’s cities. But I am not one to add to the collection. Instead I’m moved to write about resiliency, about perseverance, about strength, indeed, about the gift of beauty in the midst of mayhem. 

I’m moved to write about Jock Soto, world-renowned dancer, born in Gallup, New Mexico to Navajo mother Josephine Towne and Puerto Rican father Jose Soto.

Young Jock Soto with his parents, Jose Soto and Josephine Towne on the rodeo circuit in pre-New York days. Photo courtesy of Jock Soto.

Jock Soto is now 55, retired from the stage but in demand as a teacher of aspiring and professional dancers in New York and around the world. Now, during COVID, he teaches via Zoom from his and his husband Luis Fuentes’s New Mexico sanctuary in Eagle’s Nest, not far from Taos. 

I first saw Jock Soto dance in the late 1980s at the former New York State Theater (now the David H Koch Theater) at Lincoln Center. I saw him not long after he was appointed the youngest principal dancer of the New York City Ballet at the time (and the last male dancer to have been handpicked by the late George Balanchine, the company’s founder and its spiritual leader in perpetuity).

I had been invited to the performance of Balanchine’s Symphony in C featuring Soto by a dear friend visiting from out of town. My friend knew that I loved ballet, and that I had yearned to see Soto. All three of us (Soto, my friend and I) had Southwest legacies, and Soto, so early in his career, was already legendary. The performance showed us why.

During a crisis, our minds tend to journey back to earlier fears and earlier joys. I have been thinking of that gorgeous 1980s performance because New York at that time was experiencing another hurricane . . . AIDS, displacement, a struggle to recover after headwinds of mismanagement and neglect brought the city to its knees. 

Jock as a young ballet student in Phoenix, AZ, where he was spotted by a New York scout.

Jock Soto had arrived in New York in the late seventies, when the city was probably at its most down and out (until now). He was 13 years old. He’d been scouted by the School of American Ballet after being spotted in a class in Phoenix. His family had moved there specifically to give him a chance to fulfill his dream of becoming a ballet dancer, a dream he developed at the age of 5 after seeing the great Edward Villella on television.

His family’s journeys were centered on artistic dreams . . . Jock’s as a dancer, his brother’s as an actor. His parents’ self-appointed role was to keep the doors to dream fulfillment open. Jock tells his story eloquently in his memoir Every Step You Take (told with Leslie Marshall, Harper Collins, 2011).

Soto helping young dancers fulfill their potential, a legacy modeled by his own parents and mentors. (Photo from alchetron.com, the Free Social Encyclopedia)

Though he started out in New York with his family in 1978, life in New York became too much for them, and he was left there at 14 to manage on his own. He became a principal dancer of the company six years later, which tells you how he managed. Many, many ballets were choreographed based on his capacity to do just about anything that a choreographer could conceive of. And unlike some of the other superstars of his era, such as Baryshnikov, Jock had the reputation as one of the best ballet partners in the world. The greatest of ballerinas relied on him to catch them, support them, make possible the otherwise impossible, to let them shine. As a dancer, Jock is a rare combination of greatness without ego. What came through in his performances was not only his unparalleled skill, but generosity beyond measure.

Jock’s Navajo clan is To’aheedliinii, which means Water Flowing Together (there’s a documentary about Jock with this title. It’s nearly impossible to obtain, but a clip is available on YouTube).

The photo to the right (from danceviewtimes.com) shows Soto and ballerina Wendy Whelan flowing together in choreographer Christopher Wheeldon’s “After the Rain.” The year was 2005, Jock’s last year on the New York City Ballet stage.

I read somewhere that members of the Water Flowing Together clan are joyous, sexy, outgoing and dominant . . . all things that Jock conveyed when I saw him dance all those years ago.

Now Jock teaches dancers at all levels. Perhaps most notably, he teaches master classes in partnering . . . a skill that demands perfection lest everything fall apart, a skill that demands that ego be tucked away to showcase another’s ability to spin and fly.

For ten years, Jock taught a 4-week course in ballet to indigenous students in Banff and Toronto, students who never knew a ballet position before his class and at the end knew enough to perform admirably for an audience. Jock told me that it was his mother’s dream that he teach ballet to indigenous peoples. Who better than Jock, who started dancing the hoop dance at the age of 3 and became a principal dancer of NYCB at age 20, to point the way to the beauty and empowerment of movement? 

Jock Soto has much to teach.

Jock’s mother Josephine , a pow wow dancer, was his first dance teacher. She taught him the hoop dance when he was 3 years old, before ballet stole his heart at the age of 5. (Photo courtesy of Jock Soto)

Last year, the LGBT group Dine Pride gave Jock Soto their Dine Pride Champion Award, and he had a message for the audience in Window Rock, the Navajo capital: “What my mother always said was, ‘Pursue your dreams and walk in beauty’.” 

I envision a poster with his picture and his words, with the added directive “Move!”, displayed in every chapter house on the Navajo Nation, where diabetes and heart disease are rampant. 

As the streets of American cities are filled with citizens pleading for change, as the Navajo Nation copes with the worst COVID statistics in the United States, messages like Jock Soto’s can become drowned out by cries of despair and anger. But his are words that all of us need to remember. And Jock can teach all of us something else: flowing together, partnering, is a skill that we all will we need if, at the end of COVID, we are going to fight our way back from disaster and do our damnedest to walk in beauty out of the storm.

A clip from from a 1990s episode of Sesame Street, where Jock and ballerina Lourdes Lopez partner in dance to teach the word “Cooperate.”

Gallup: A Small Town Closes while a New Mayor Takes the Reins

Postcard of Gallup, New Mexico, sometimes known as the Indian Capital of the World.

Almost precisely at the moment when businessman Louie Bonaguidi took up the reins as the newly elected mayor of Gallup, New Mexico, the state’s Governor Grisham granted his request to use the Riot Control Act to lock down the town due to the “uninhibited” spread of COVID-19. For now, traffic along heavily traveled Interstate 40 can’t enter the town of 22,000 people famously featured in the song Get Your Kicks on Route 66 (originating with Nat King Cole and covered by artists as varied as Nancy Sinatra and Glenn Frey). Residents of the town can’t leave. Vehicles within the town can have no more than 2 passengers.

Gallup is the seat of McKinley County, which as of this writing has about 1030 coronavirus cases and 19 deaths. The outbreak started in a detox center and spread to the streets, from the streets to nursing homes and the population at large. Gallup already has many nicknames: The Indian Capital of the World, Drunk Town, and The Most Patriotic Small Town in America. Now a new nickname can be added: The COVID-19 Capital of New Mexico.

Pedestrians on Highway 66, Gallup, NM in 1976, 44 years before anyone heard of social distancing.

I lived outside of Gallup in the mid-1970s, arriving two years after a notorious incident where an angry young activist named Larry Casuse kidnapped the mayor of the town. In 1973, Gallup’s mayor Emmett Garcia had been named to the New Mexico Board of Regents and announced an intention to open an alcohol rehab program. Casuse was enraged not only at the Board of Regents post, but also at Garcia’s hypocrisy in planning a rehab program while being part owner of an infamous bar/liquor store named the Navajo Inn that was situated one mile east of the Navajo Nation border.

Late activist Larry Casuse, who was killed in a police shootout after kidnapping Gallup mayor Emmett Garcia in 1973. Photo from EBwiki.

The kidnapping of the mayor ended with Garcia escaping and being superficially wounded by gunfire from a startled policeman’s pistol. Police then opened fire on the building where Casuse and his accomplice were holed up. Casuse’s accomplice surrendered, but Casuse was dead at the scene. After the incident, Garcia took his place on the Board of Regents and bought out his Navajo Inn partners. Then Garcia lost his reelection bid, and ultimately the Navajo Inn lost its lease and the building was obliterated.

I’ve been reading about Gallup’s new mayor, tipping my hat to him in taking on town leadership at this horrific moment in time. Bonaguidi is the owner of the City Electric Shoe Store. The name of the store stems from the time when the Bonaguidi family settled in Gallup in 1924 and opened a shoe repair enterprise that promised fast quality repair, especially cowboy boot repair, by using state-of-the-art electric equipment (see article on Bonaguidi’s shoe store).

Photo of City Electric Shoe store display. Copied from store’s Facebook page.

Now Mayor Bonaguidi’s shoe store is on the map of must-visit shoe stores in the American West and ranking Number 4 on one publication’s list of best shoe stores in New Mexico (beating out the Santa Fe shop where Jane Fonda buys her boots).

The store makes belts and moccasins on site and is stocked with so much cowboy-meets-pow-wow-dancer merchandise that you couldn’t dream it up in your wildest western fantasy.

To give you an idea of the “not-too-shabby” nature of Bonaguidi’s store, here’s a quote from a review on Yelp: “Hippest men’s boot store in existence with inventory from nothing but the best American-made footwear . . .  Raw hides!  The entire hide!! Whips!!! Chaps to go, animal pelts, custom leather work and more exotic Italian and Spanish shoe leather to reline those Louboutins than you can shake a pinon walking stick at. . . .” The store also has a website selling its in-house made moccasins and belts (https://nativeleather.com/)

Louie Bonaguidi won the office of mayor in an April runoff election against Sammy Chioda (affectionately known in Gallup as Sammy C) by a mere 41 votes. Bonaguidi’s opponent is a former sports broadcaster who owns a namesake establishment called  Sammy C’s Rockin’ Sports Bar, Pub and Grille, which, per Sammy C’s website, is ranked as one of the top 101 best sports bars in the United States by CNN.

Sammy C, who lost his bid to be mayor of Gallup, greets customers at his Sammy C’s Rock N’ Sports Bar, Pub and Grille. Photo copied from Yelp.

Even by 41 votes, the town chose the guy with the business that is helping to put Gallup on the map in a good way. The native and other citizens of Gallup chose boots and moccasins over sports memorabilia and craft beer.

All this to say that Gallup’s taste in mayors has improved a lot in the last 47 years, which, even in the midst of the COVID-19 horror show taking place within its borders right now, indicates there is hope . . .

Gallup is a town whose economy relies on Navajos and Zunis converging on weekends to buy needed supplies, everything from groceries to hay to livestock. It also relies on truckers, tourists, hikers and other assorted travelers stopping for a meal or a warm bed. It depends on Native art lovers cruising its Indian jewelry stores or stores like the mayor’s or attending the Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial held every year to feature the best in Native arts and dance. There are also bloodsucking businesses:  payday lenders who suck the working poor into an eddy of crippling debt, the alcohol establishments that have no problem plying the already inebriated with liquor or sending them off drunk to terrorize the highways, the homeless and itinerants who panhandle or turn tricks or sell their plasma for change to feed their habits.

The Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial is an annual event that draws an international audience who marvel at Native dances and arts and crafts. COVID-19 will likely threaten the ability to hold the event this year. Photo from www.newmexico.org

I wish Mayor Bonaguidi all the luck and hope in the world. I hope that he and Governor Grisham and Navajo President Jonathan Nez can put their heads together to come up with a COVID-19 battle strategy, like emergency medical teams and testing for the population and for visitors that will allow the city to open (with 100 Abbott portable devices processing 5-minute tests, half the population could be tested in a day). And after the battle is over, Mayor Bonaguidi, you can move on to the next more lasting one: fulfilling Gallup’s potential as a city that thrives not on exploitation of its native citizens and patrons, but instead thrives as an example of a city that honors and sustains the natives on which its economy and soul depend.

Joining Hands: Navajo Town Makes Sterile Gloves for New York First Responders

The old trading post at Church Rock, New Mexico, the town where I had my first post-college job.

When you have an interest that you pursue on Google, the Google gods remember, and sometimes they surprise you with related news items that pop up on your Google home page.

The Google gods know that I have an interest in a small town named Church Rock (population per 2010 census: 1,128). Church Rock lies in Navajo territory on the outskirts of Gallup, New Mexico.

Google probably doesn’t know (but maybe does) that my interest in Church Rock stems from my having taught in the town my first year out of college, but no matter. Google knew I would be intrigued by an article that came out in the Navajo Times this week. The article’s subject is a nitrile glove factory in Church Rock that is now manufacturing medical gloves and shipping them to health care facilities in the Navajo Nation and other US locales struggling to cope with COVID-19. The locales include my home state of New York. (See Navajo Times article on Navajo glove facility.)

Navajo workers make sterile gloves for the medical front lines in the fight against COVID-19 in Navajoland, New York State and other impacted regions. Photo by Donovan Quintero saved from Navajo Times.

Phase One of a joint venture between the Navajo Nation and a company called Rhino Health, LLC, is primed to make 60 million pairs of blue nitrile gloves a year. Per the Navajo Times piece by reporter Donovan Quintero, the Church Rock factory is now churning out 8,000 pairs of gloves an hour and running around the clock. They are striving to keep up with demand while dealing with a shortage of raw material. (Materials have to be shipped from South Korea, home of Rhino Health’s parent company.)

If gloves could talk: In the Beatles’ 1968 film Yellow Submarine, a blue glove (once a weapon on the side of evil) learns how to join hands in the fight against destruction.

When Phase Two is completed, adding significantly more manufacturing space, Church Rock will be generating 1.3 billion pairs of blue sterile gloves a year for medical use.

Because of the Navajo Times article, I Googled keywords “nitrile” and “Church Rock” and found that in 2018, about two years before anyone had ever heard of COVID-19, the Navajo Nation invested $19 million for Rhino Health LLC to build its Church Rock facility that will eventually employ 350 Navajo workers (the state of New Mexico kicked in another $3 million).

News about the Navajo-Rhino Health joint venture was reported in the Albuquerque Journal, and later in the Navajo-Hopi Observer, but never leaked beyond regional boundaries. In the event other media don’t report how Navajo workers in Church Rock are helping first responders face the battle against the virus by providing protective gloves, I feel compelled to leak it here.

The “Church Rock” that gives the town its name. When I first saw the rock formation when I arrived as a teacher, I thought it looked more like a hand than a church. And while America paid no attention when the town encountered devastation from a uranium mine accident forty years ago, Church Rock is now really lending a hand in the COVID-19 crisis. Photo from TripAdvisor credited to 44dave56.

You may not know this about the Navajo town of Church Rock, but in July 1979, a few months after the famous Three Mile Island nuclear incident, Church Rock suffered a devastating radioactive contamination event courtesy of the United Nuclear Mine Corporation.

In 1979, the dam holding back tailings at United Nuclear’s Church Rock mine ruptured, sending 1100 tons of solid radioactive waste and 94 million gallons of radioactive solution into the local water sources and beyond (as far away as 50 miles downstream).

The spill resulted in the largest release of radioactive material in US history (see US government reports, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Rock_uranium_mill_spill).

In the world at large, the Church Rock United Nuclear incident is second only to Chernobyl in terms of long-lasting devastation.

Today, if you ask the Google gods “What’s the worst nuclear disaster?” your search result will likely bring up a Business Insider article that describes the incidents in Chernobyl and Fukushima, the latter caused by the 2011 Tohuku earthquake and tsunami. The article says that Three Mile Island was not nearly as devastating as those two calamities (see: https://www.businessinsider.com/chernobyl-fukushima-three-mile-island-nuclear-disasters-2019-6).

Warning signs mark contaminated Church Rock areas. Photo saved from www.vice.com article “Church Rock, America’s Forgotten Nuclear Disaster, Is Still Poisoning Navajo Lands 40 Years Later.” Will Ford also wrote a followup story for The Washington Post in January of this year.

The Business Insider article doesn’t once mention what happened in Church Rock, New Mexico forty years ago. In Church Rock, the effects of the accident (effects that include kidney disease, cancer, fear of having children . . . ) are being felt to this day (see August 2019 VICE article on lasting impact of Church Rock mine disaster).

A central tenet of Navajo belief is the uniting principle of K’e, or kinship. It begins with caring for the immediate family, extends to the clan, and from there extends to the community as a whole. K’e, in essence, is the concept of how we are all related and thus responsible for each other.

In 1979, when it came to nuclear disasters creating a sense of community, a sense of K’e, the whole country fretted about the dangers facing Americans who lived near Three Mile Island. But what happened in Church Rock four months later didn’t penetrate the country’s consciousness at all. The national media barely mentioned the accident back in the day. It seemed that the people of Church Rock, who faced overwhelming devastation–dead livestock, contaminated water, early mortality–were outside the realm of Americans’ concern. Today, forty years later, the media is paying more attention. But while HBO’s Chernobyl won a slew of Emmy Awards, I haven’t read that there’s any series planned on what happened at Church Rock within our own nation’s borders.

A group of my 5th graders at Church Rock Elementary School, 1976, three years before the United Nuclear accident turned Church Rock into America’s Chernobyl.

In 2020, we are united in our knowledge that COVID-19 is affecting all of us, that the virus is shaping our immediate if not distant future. New York State may be the US epicenter of the virus, but we know that no region of the country is immune, especially not the Navajo Nation.

On the Navajo reservation, a territory of 27,425 square miles where about 40% of the population have to drive a great distance to get a supply of water, COVID-19 cases are spiking (see LA Times on Navajo COVID-19 crisis and NPR article on COVID-19 and Navajo Nation). Nonetheless, the people of Church Rock are working hard to ensure that the folks on the front lines as far away as New York State are safe.

I just thought you should know.

COVID-19 Report: Vulnerable? Who Me?

Italy in better days, when Italians were allowed to be Italian.

At 66, I find myself branded with a category I never expected at my age. In the days of COVID-19, I feel like I have a sign pinned on my back that says, “over 60 and vulnerable.” I am healthy. I live in a suburban home in a New York State county that as of today has only 63 confirmed cases of the virus (that’s an old news number; 3/27 update: 160), while New York City, where a lot of my family live, has over 9,000 (that’s an old news number; 3/27 update: about 23,000). And let’s not even mention Italy, where a thousand vulnerable citizens died in a day, in part because Italians couldn’t grasp the meaning of social distancing.

My health club is closed on orders from Albany, but I walk 2-4 miles daily. I practice yoga. I confess that I did have a cold this winter, but I can’t remember the last time I had one before that. In short, I certainly don’t feel vulnerable, despite what Dr. Fauci says. (But don’t get me wrong; I thank God for Dr. Fauci.)

Then there’s my husband. His profile checks all the boxes of COVID-19 vulnerability. He’s over 80, diabetic, with a couple of arteries held open by stents. One of his Sunday jobs is organizing his medications for the week. But there he is, taking his daily walks along the nearby canal, cherishing the site of herons diving for fish, the scampering of small dogs on these bright mornings of early spring. He’s not feeling very vulnerable either. Yesterday he got a call from our supermarket pharmacy, which is about a half mile from our house. They called to ask how he was feeling, did he need any medications delivered to our door? “I’m okay,” he said. “I’m really okay.” My husband is from the former Soviet Union. When the call from the pharmacy ended, he said, “Wow. America.”

New York City was different a few weeks ago . . .

The State of New York is essentially under lockdown now. I talk to family and friends often . . . those who live here, in New York, LA, London, North Carolina . . . They’re all okay.

But I’ve been worried about a Navajo friend of mine who also has all the vulnerability boxes checked. Even before COVID-19 took over the news cycle, where I suppose it will remain for the foreseeable future, my friend was in poor health. She’s over eighty, has diabetes, high blood pressure. She lives alone on the rez, and recently, when she’s called for an ambulance for various non-COVID-19 health crises, she was told an ambulance couldn’t reach her due to road conditions. She lives off US Rte. 64 on a road that I’d experienced a couple of years ago on a good weather day. For fans of bumper cars and pogo sticks, the ride to her house is a rollicking good time. Navajo roads are notoriously awful, preventing kids from getting to school, and, in my friend’s case, the sick from getting to a clinic that could help them get well. You can bet that, regardless of her age and underlying health conditions, my friend is not getting any calls from a pharmacy offering to deliver necessary meds to her door.

A solitary steer in Canyon de Chelly. Social distancing is part of the very fabric of being in the Navajo desert.

I check on my friend by email, text or phone from time to time to see how she’s doing, if she has help, if she might be considering accepting care of relatives off the rez. I checked last week as the COVID-19 collective consciousness swelled, and I didn’t hear from her, and so I fretted. When I read that I am “vulnerable,” I want to shout, “Don’t tell me I’m vulnerable! I know who’s vulnerable!”

Social distancing at Costco, standing 6 ft. behind the person in front of me at the checkout line.

I know Britain toyed with ordering “vulnerable seniors” to stay home until July. Then Governor Gavin Newsom mandated that most Californians stay home. My millennial son is coping with this. Our own Governor Cuomo followed Newsom’s lead. And I’m happy to fall in line and stay home (save trips to buy groceries), maintain social distancing, take my walks and do yoga to free videos on YouTube.

But I think about my Navajo friend. Who’s buying her groceries? I wonder. Who’s making sure she’s safe?

Today, my questions were answered, because my friend replied to my text. She is feeling better and is being careful. She has a mask. She wears gloves when she shops. I had asked her if she was alone. She replied that she had too much company, which she defined as “crows that scold . . . hawks that smirk . . . dogs that beg . . . cats that remind her she forgot milk.” With all the frenzy around social distancing in these days, it’s easy to overlook that living a solitary life is not anathema to many who live in the desert, or in the mountains, or maybe around the corner.

My house is situated near an expressway, where there is usually a rush of traffic that, if I can wax romantic, sounds like ocean waves. But there’s very little traffic now. Now, when I step outside, I can hear the chirping of birds . . . every single chirp. So let’s take stock, breathe the fresh air, pitch our ears to sounds we couldn’t hear before, stay connected while living apart. When we eat through our supply of pasta, we can take heart that we’re not in Italy. We’ll adjust. We’ll give virtual hugs and blow virtual kisses. We’ll get through this.

If this is lockdown, I’m ok with it.