Trying to Recapture Russian Emigres’ Life in Mexico

FRANCISCO ZARCO, Baja California -- After he retired from the mattress factory in Vernon, after his children grew up and attained happy American lives, Gabriel Kachirisky moved back to Mexico and turned his life into a museum exhibit.

He began sticking little labels on half the possessions in his house. He went back to the dilapidated church that his parents helped build, restoring it. He even went to the cemetery, pulling weeds from the forgotten headstones, lettered in Cyrillic.

Living among ghosts gives Kachirisky a strange peace.

The only thing that haunts the 70-year-old is a question that does not have an answer: “When I die, who is going to take care of all this?”

A century ago, hundreds of Kachirisky’s forebears -- members of an obscure Russian Christian sect called the Molokans -- fled from the outer reaches of the czar’s empire to the lush Guadalupe Valley 50 miles south of Tijuana. They built a bustling village under the hot Ensenada sun.

Wearing the garb of the old country, they grew alfalfa and grapes, cooked el borscht and los blintzes, and sweated together in saunas behind their houses every Saturday night. On Sundays, they sang psalms and drank tea brewed in samovars brought from Russia.

But years ago, squatters came and took their land. Now, villagers say, fewer than 20 remain who claim “pure Russian blood.”

Kachirisky and a handful of others have taken it upon themselves to keep alive memories of that way of life and a past that has all but slipped away.

The Molokans have gone into the heritage business. They greet the tourist buses that come over the bumpy road from Ensenada. They nurture and scrupulously maintain two museums, right across an unpaved road from each other. And they operate many mom-and-pop enterprises, including one run by Kachirisky.

For Kachirisky and others, it is something. But it’s small solace, given the loss of the idyllic community of their memories. And the museums have not always smoothed the path into the future -- sometimes inflaming local debate over who owns the past, who has a right to claim it and make money off it from tourists.

So Kachirisky pursues his historical restorations in this small town and continues to lecture visitors and tourists, not talking much to his fellow Russian septuagenarians. Even though they are likely the only ones who can really understand.

“The pain of what happened affected us, all of us,” he said. “It makes us so sad.”

*

The Molokans split off from the Russian Orthodox Church in the 18th century. Their Bible-centered religion emphasizes pacifism, and they rejected mandatory service in the czar’s army. In 1840, many Molokans agreed to go to the Kars region of what is now Turkey to avoid military service.

But by 1904, with those agreements set to expire, the Molokans began to emigrate. Many went to Los Angeles, some to Australia, and more than 100 families to the Guadalupe Valley -- settling on 13,000 acres they bought communally, according to Therese Muranaka, a San Diego anthropologist who wrote her dissertation on the community.

In carefully preserved photographs and home movies, the early decades of life at the colony have the appearance of a sun-drenched utopia.

The new settlers consecrated a church. Every Sunday, they came to worship in the simple wood room of plain white boards and softly filtered light.

They stayed for hours, drinking tea and eating borscht. The men wore high-neck shirts and the women covered their heads with scarves, just like their ancestors. And though they learned Spanish, they spoke Russian to each other.

Marriage to Mexicans

Weddings brought Molokans down from Los Angeles for song-filled feasts that would last for three days. At first, marriage to Mexicans was frowned upon, but by the 1940s, it had become common.

Kachirisky’s wife of 47 years, Martha Lidia, is Mexican. She remembers how her mother-in-law taught her to make los blintzes and el borscht, which the Molokans make without beets. Today, the results of those unions are everywhere. More than 300 locals claim some Russian heritage.

The farms prospered as well. Neat rows of alfalfa and grapevines marched up and down the lushly rolling valley.

Many families built saunas behind their houses, where men would gather to purify themselves each Saturday night before Sunday’s visit to church.

The idyll ended in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Hundreds of landless Mexican settlers streamed into town. They stormed up to the farms and announced they were taking over, saying the Molokans weren’t real Mexicans.

“They put on hats like Pancho Villa and carried signs that said, ‘Death to the Russians,’ ” said Augustin Lopez, who is part Russian.

The Molokans pleaded with them. They showed a signed proclamation from Mexican President Porfirio Diaz, granting their rights to the land.

“They didn’t consider you a Mexican citizen,” said George Mohoff, who was born and raised in the Guadalupe Valley, but now lives in Los Angeles County. “They said, ‘Why do you have so much and we have so little?’ ”

But the Molokans were pacifists, unwilling to use guns and fists to hold on to their land. The settlers kept coming, and the Molokans “were left with broken hearts,” Mohoff said.

By the early 1960s, the minister -- and formal Sunday church services -- had disappeared.

Kachirisky was born here in the Guadalupe Valley. But he and his wife became part of the exodus, moving in the early 1960s to Pico Rivera in the Los Angeles suburbs. He stayed there 27 years.

The little English he learned in America still comes out in a gruff voice heavily accented with Russian. But his Spanish has no accent at all, and Kachirisky and his wife transformed themselves into Angelenos, like any other immigrants from Mexico.

He and his wife joined a Pentecostal church, put their kids in school and went to baseball games. They went back to the Guadalupe Valley only for visits.

But by the late 1980s, a change in management had left Kachirisky unhappy at the mattress factory where he worked. He cashed in the equity in his home and returned to the Guadalupe Valley. About the same time, a burgeoning eco-tourist trade brought visitors and museum money to the valley.

For a while, it looked like this would bring the community back together -- although many had stopped practicing the religion.

The Russians collaborated to put together the first museum in 1991. They rummaged in closets and storage spaces, and came up with a vast collection of dresses, photographs and samovars. They helped reconstruct a town map, showing where everyone had lived. Children even began learning Russian.

But in 1998, a dispute over how the museum was being run led its director -- a Mexican married into a Russian family -- to quit and establish a competing museum. It is directly across the road from the first.

Though their exhibits are substantially the same -- photos, maps, bright Russian dresses and samovars -- many townspeople insist there are serious differences between them. But those tend to have more to do with who put the museums together and how they profit.

Michael Wilken, an anthropologist who leads tours through the valley, said he believes the dispute stems from differing perceptions of who has a right to claim the treasured past.

“Whenever I hear the argument, it seems to be that ‘So and so is making all kinds of money off this,’ and ‘They’re not really into it for the right reasons,’ ” said Wilken, who said he has not taken sides in the fight.

Catering to Tourists

“People can have conflicts,” said Julie Bendimez, director of the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Baja California. Her institution helped found the first museum and continues to fund it.

“I don’t want to continue the war between them,” she said, “but that’s how it has evolved.”

Bendimez said she thinks the two museums “complement each other.”

With the museums came busloads of tourists and students -- up to 10,000 a year.

Soon, individual townspeople began catering to the tourist trade. Maria Samaduroff got a tourist certificate and, with her daughter, serves schoolchildren cheese and lectures in her backyard.

And then there is Kachirisky, who has turned himself into the town’s one-man curator. It started with displaying his possessions and serving tourists blintzes.

Then, he turned his attention to the church, built in 1950. The roof had collapsed, and rainwater had poured down the walls and the floors. Somehow, the Bibles were spared the mildew and rot, but almost everything else was damaged.

Kachirisky spent thousands of dollars and hours of labor, painstakingly putting the church back the way it was.

Dozens of teapots and hundreds of teacups sit on a musty shelf, unused since 1960. Alongside, sugar cubes rest patiently in their pink box, as they have for four decades.

“Before, when you went on Sunday, it was so happy,” he said. “So much life ... the boys and girls singing. Now when I come here, I just want to cry.”

In his house, Kachirisky flips on his television and pops in a home movie of a wedding held in 1939. The sound of dozens of voices singing the psalms in Russian fills his little room.

His wife gazes at him fondly as he begins to sway back and forth, singing softly to himself in Russian. He points out faces of those who still live in town, people he doesn’t speak to much these days.

When the movie ends, he reaches over to the VCR and hits play a second time, his stiff 70-year-old body swaying back and forth, his voice lifting again with the voices of the past.