Suppose the very heart of your community disappeared overnight? Obviously, your loss would be great.

However, what about the hidden costs of losing the history of a community when time has long forgotten it? What if the true history of your community, was essentially denied, ignored, or deemed less important than that of others? Could this be your town, or another nearby?

This is the second part of a series, about one such town, it's invisible history, and what time has denied it and its people. The story you are about to read is a continuation of one of my spider webs. It's rooted in historial facts and a true Déjà vu experience that happened to me in a certain border town in Texas, a few years back.

I challenge you to read and discover which paths are real, which ones are dead ends, and which ones you want to follow to a new discovery. See if you want to escape this spider web, or be a willing victim.

By the time Cassie and Joe reached the truck stop, her head was hammering with a sick headache. It wasn't even noon and the temperature outside was well above ninety degrees. This temperature, perhaps acceptable as "cool" to native Texans in June, wasn't so acceptable for people like Cassie and Joe -- who were used to more agreeable Eastern shore temperatures.

Feeling far too hot and somewhat ill, Cassie declined to join Joe at lunch. She took some aspirin, climbed into the bunk, secured the curtains enough to block out the unrelenting sunlight, while simultaneously carefully adjusting them, to allow the all-import air conditioning in the back of the cab before she closed her eyes. Soon, all in a dream she was remembering her Cajun great-grandfather, Emile Navarre, saying:

"Many believe in them, many do not. they are the children of the long forgotten ones. I am one and so are you. Someday you will travel to far away places and you will encounter many of our own kind. They may not be Cajun, however, do not be deceived. They might be old, young, rich or poor; they may be of other races. Never-the-less, you will know them when you see them and they will instantly recognize you, when they look back into your eyes. You have one very important job. It is your purpose and duty to use your gifts to restore to them what has been denied to them by others. Do not fail!"

The first sing of trouble began with a lone howling coyote. Half a dozen coyotes soon joined in a chorus. then, the many dogs of Tiburcio frantically and incessantly barked their alarm for the rest of the night. by dawn of the sad next day, the third day of June, the capilla just simply fell down.

In the daylight, as word spread about the disaster, most of the town's residents showed up to study the situation. None of them were sure how old the mission was, for few remembered that it had once had a date inscribed on the corner stone. Even if anyone had recalled this fact, none would have guessed that the date was not correct. Back in the 1970s, well-meaning community leaders had sealed the deteriorating handmade adobe bricks with stucco.

They thought it would preserve the structure, but instead it had hastened it to its final destruction. Rainwater seeped in behind the stucco, froze during the winter, and then thawed. Over the years, the mud and straw bricks simply melted. Now the church, the spiritual center and heart of Tiburcio's community, stood no more.

It wasn't that the parishioner's hadn't been warned. Years earlier, the Padre had received a letter from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, notifying him that the church, along with many other adobe missions had made the list of most endangered historical sites in the United States.

Not that he needed a letter to tell him what he and the elders of the church community already knew. Because of this official warning, irreplaceable movable saints and holy objects were removed from the church and stored at the priest's residence.

However, Tiburcio, a Hispanic rural community along the Rio Grande, ahd neither the money, nor the knowledge of exactly what to do to correct the situation. Over the years, more important needs of the parishioners always came first. With so many poor, the meager donations the capilla received soon went right back out to those who needed it most.

Now, given the extent of the ruins, what no one could determine on this awful morning, was if the secrets of Tiburcio had survived. As devastating as the disaster was, what to do about their church being destroyed was only secondary to what was being whispered between every adult in every home and on every street corner. Even little children with big ears whispered what little they knew about the subject on the schoolyard. Would the secrets of Tiburcio survive? Moreover, more importantly, where were they? No one had seen any of them since daylight.

Standing in the shadows across from the ruins as a silent observer, not wanting to be noticed, Don Ignacio pondered this very issue. he thought about the appearance of the truck driver and his wife just the day before. Where were they?

He no longer had any doubt that the man's wife was not an ordinary tourist. It was no coincidence that "she" had appeared. No howling coyotes or barking dogs were needed to awaken her to the situation at hand either. By now, Don Ignacio also knew that Cassie did not have to be told what run-of-the-mill tourists, her husband, and the local news media didn't know yet.

Don Ignacio had always known, that for most outsiders, the town was off the beaten path of tourism. It hadn't always been that way. Once the town was the hub of life in the region. It began as a place of miracles, at least in the eyes of those who first settled there.

The story of the town began in Méxicoin 1598, when Don Juan Perez de Oñate, the son of a wealthy conquistador from Zacatecas, México guided hundreds of colonists north. The colonists consisted of soldiers, priests, families, Franciscan monks, Indians and Africans. (Yes, Africans). Along the journey, slaves would be taken from native peoples as needed.

It is recorded that they brought with them eighty-three wagons, two carriages, equipment, art, and seven thousand head of horses, oxen, pigs, sheep, mules, goats, and cattle from southern Chihuahua to colonise Nuevo México. They also carried mining equipment, tools, seed, wheat, farming implements, blacksmithing tools, corn, trade goods, and medicines.

The assemblage was so considerable that it trailed for roughly four miles in length and was nearly as wide in span. This colonization effort had been in the planning and preparation for many years. Indeed, many of its trials and tribulations began, long before the actual journey.

The group could travel no more than twelve miles on a decent day and on a poor day, maybe only four or five miles. Sometimes, the end of the procession got no farther than the prior night's camp for the beginning of the column. Neither Oñate , nor the others had any understanding of what challeneges lay ahead of them -- not in geographic terms or the near impossibilities or hardships. It took them over four months to make this journey.

They had a lot of surprises -- In fact, Don Oñate thought he would run into the South Seas bordering New Mexico. He had written in his agreement with King Phillip of Spain, the permission to moor two ocean-going ships, just for his own commerce, once he claimed the land for the King.

The story of this expedition was a complicated one, with many twists and turns, some downright foolish, some downright evil. The procession had journeyed northwest for eighty-six days across the desert, traveling over eight hundred miles over Northern Mexico, most of it previously unexplored until they reached the banks of the Rio Grande river.

The trip there had been harrowing. They suffered near starvation. There were times when there was no water. Other times the water was so scarce that when water was finally found, they could only conclude that it was a miracle from God.

Near the end of their journey, they had to cross Los Médanos de Samalayuca dunes. The sand dunes are an arid remenant of an ice age lake. They are seven hundred and seventy square miles of the largest drifting sand dunes on the North American continent. They give refuge to no water or useful vegetation of any kind.

Lost for several days without water, their final arrival to a vision of a river seemed virtually unbelievable to the waterless travelers. Both the people and the livestock were so dehydrated navigating the Chihuahua, desert that many of them yielded to the enticement to drink too much too fast.

Some of the horses raced ahead once they caught wind of water and plunged headfirst into the river. It was recorded that two of them gulped so much water, that they exploded their swollen sides and died. Men, women, and children frenzied by their fiery thirst, their tongues distended and their throats gasping -- pitched themselves into the water, and swallowed as though the whole river was not enough to satisfy their thirst.

Safe and grateful for the expedition's deliverance from the extreme hardships of the journey, to commemorate their arrival,Oñate ordered the travelers to construct a temporary church large enough to hold the entire camp. Inside the church, they held a very solemn Mass and gave thanks to God for their deliverance. Following the service, a play was presented.

Then, Don Oñate took ownership of the territory in the name of King Phillip of Spain. At no time, did it ever seem to him or the others, that their declaration was anything but lawful. Had not the Pope himself separated the newly discovered lands into two portions by the Treaty of Trodesillas?

He had given one-half of the land to Portugal, the other to Spain. The fact that the northern Europen Protestant countries would alter dispute this claim, had no influence to change the obstinate, yet sincere belief, that Spain was free to claim all news lands west of the line of Tordesillas.

Of course, the rights of the Indians already living in the region were blatantly disregarded and did not even enter into the conqueror's and the settler's minds. Then, after this ceremony, they had a great feast in celebration of the moment.

Just like Christopher Columbus and a few others, Don Oñate, it's important to remember that there are other viewpoints. He like the others, was more than a conquerors, explorer, and leader of in the settlement of the New World. These men are also responsible for genocide, slavery of native peoples, horrific crimes of Old World identity theft of whole native populations.

Thinking back on all that history, Don Ignacio chuckled to himself. In his eyes, he knew that few outside Tiburcio or Texas would acknowledge or admit that this was the true Thanksgiving celebration in the New World.

This event was twenty-two years before the French founded Acadia, and twenty-three years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. All of these events were facts, that would never appear in Anglo written textbooks, nor pass the lips of the elementary school teachers.

Fearing detection, Don Ignacio started walking down nearby Glorieta and Dindinger roads, as he thought more about this history of his town. He knew the roads were a section of the original El Camino Real. In the center of the town, the El Camino Real reached the cooler clear waters on the southern bank of the Rio Del Norte. Few would remember today, that it was renamed the Rio Grande. From the center of the town the river turned northwest to Socorro, Ysleta, San Lorenzo, El Paso Del Norte, and ultimately to Santa Fe.

In his mind, the years between 1598 and 1879 melted into a vivid panorama. First, there was the Hacienda de los Tiburcios. The hacienda consisted of six thousand acres and more than two hundred residents, before Apache raids forced its abandonment in 1798.

Before that, he remembered in 1779, Spain sought to protect its growing interests in the region. A well-guarded presidio (or fort as Anglos would later call it) was established by the colonial military at the old Hacienda de los Tiburcios. It was built to protect the northbound settlers who were now streaming into the area.

Then, in the early 1830s the unpredictable river created a new channel south of the former one. The town ended up on an island stranded. The resulting island was some twenty miles in length and about three miles in width.

By 1850, Tiburcio contained a bustling village of twelve hundred residents. It had the distinction of having the first school, the first irrigation system, the first courthouse in Texas. The town was a major point on the way west to the gold fields of California. By 1879, the presidio was moved upriver and Tiburcio became the county seat. All facts, that would also not be found, in most school textbooks.

Today, Don Ignacio knew the houses of the locals, poor by American standards in other parts of the country, share the social characteristics of their inhabitants, just as they had in the past. On the outside, their block or stucco thick walls give the uninformed, the impressions of tiny prisons. almost all

Anglo tourists are greeted by the inhabitants with an iron bound polite etiquette rule, which wards off foreign intrusions and holds alien curiosity at bay -- just as effectively as the impenetrable walls and guarded approaches of a Medieval castle would have, in years gone by.

It is taken for granted among the locals that no unworthy tourist, or outsider, would ever overcome the sentinel dragons that watch the portals of the social sanctum, breathing forth jealous mistrust of all things foreign, particularly all things Anglo. Differences of nationality, of language, or inherent habits, mark the residents -- despite the undeniable fact, that they are all proud Americans, living under the same flag.

This area of borderland Texas is a rough country and it has nothing to do with the standard non-Texan perception of what Texas is and what Texas is not. The few who are made to come to the area, usually military personnel stationed at a nearby base, will no doubt often think they've been sent straight to hell, especially when they have to endure the summer temperatures.

Don Ignacio knew that virtually unknown to the world outside, Tiburcio was and always be a place "long of song and story" to those who know where its haunts of romance are to be found. The people of this largely undiscovered community are keenly alive to the picturesque possibilities. They have, as a matter of course, a way of introducing artistic details into their everyday lives, which do away with the sordid tone that dominates in more progressive larger communities, like El Paso Del Norte.

Whether or not their wisdom is folly -- it is not to be determined by the outside world, which cannot be wholly responsive to the vibration at which their lives are pitched. Like antique pottery, the residents of Tiburcio needed a connoisseur to select the strong points of their customs and characteristics from amid the debris of imitative rubbish which in later years, was permitted by some who came to live there. Those few had been permitted to blur their underlying individuality, the best part of what made the residents of Tiburcio, who they were.

Don Ignacio also recognized that only one expert person existed, his sister -- Señora Carlotta Arguellas. Reflecting upon her expertise and what she might have in mind to rectify this terrible disaster, Don Ignacio decided to head home to try to get some rest before the town meeting that would occur later that night.

Later, as the time for the town meeting neared, Tiburcio's children were fed, homework checked, babysitters and elder siblings given their orders about bedtimes and snacks. Every adult in the community prepared for the assembly, with not one able-bodied person deciding not to attend. Everyone knew what was at stake.