Lika’s Log

The following is an article about Gallup, NM. Gallup is the closes city aka the closes WalMart to me, 30 miles down da road. I live on the Arizona/New Mexico stateline. Its known as the 4 Corners area. Gallup has always had its issues as a border town. It is a border town to the Navajo and Zuni Reservation. One of its main issues is its reputation as a Drunktown. With that said Gallup, NM is also the home of at least 21 millionaires; none of which are Native.

Tension Over Who Prospers in Indian Capital

By CHARLIE LeDUFF

GALLUP, N.M., July 15 - This town is lonesome, neon-lighted, tough. They say there are 20 bars in Gallup, 30 churches, 30 pawnshops and 60 trading posts.

It is a town with 20,000 people, on a stretch of old Route 66 near the Arizona border. On the outskirts live at least 250,000 Indians. Navajo, Hopi, Pueblo, Zuni. This makes Gallup the Indian capital of the United States, and it is the Indians who make Gallup rich and poor.

Tourists come for their jewelry. The mining companies come for their coal. The government checks come at the beginning of the month. Somehow, the Indians remain poor. Unemployment among the Navajo hovers around 50 percent.

Of the 60 resale operations that sell Indian jewelry across town, the majority are owned by whites, and about one-quarter are owned by Arabs, newcomers called Hindians by clever locals who are not clever enough to tell the Middle East from the Indian subcontinent.

Indians make most of the jewelry sold in Gallup. But knockoff merchandise has flooded the market, causing the price for legitimate, handmade goods to drop.

Indian jewelers are trying to organize a boycott against the Arab merchants, who they believe are importing sham products.

It has not been successful. In need of cash, many Indian jewelry makers cannot help themselves when their stomachs come calling. They sell pieces for cheap to the merchants, who mark them up 2, 5, even 10 times the purchase price.

Some sell to the trading post, others to the pawnshop. Either way, it is a non-Indian who profits.

This has created the boil.

“You can blame Indian people for their inability to get things together,” says Tom Arviso, publisher of The Navajo Times. “But there are a lot of sleazy guys on Front Street making it off Indian people. They take advantage of their needs.”

Arabs see it differently.

“Don’t blame the Arab for the way the market works,” said Ehab Maadi, a native Palestinian who owns the Apache Trading Company. “Some squeeze harder than others. But we the newcomers are caught in the old history here that we had nothing to do with. The resentment, I usually hear it when people are drunk.”

For 100 years, it was the whites who profited in trade with the Indians, taking beads and saddles and blankets as collateral for food and clothing until it was time to ship cattle to Chicago or shear sheep for wool. Over the years, the pawn business developed, where the broker takes 10 percent the first month, 4 percent every month thereafter. Today, Indians account for 90 percent of the pawn clientele.

Now it is the Arabs who own a large and growing part of both the jewelry and pawn trades.

“The Arabs are taking over, and we don’t like it,” said Marie Perry, a Navajo jeweler who will no longer sell to the Arab merchants because, she says, the prices are too low and their business style is rude.

“I’d rather sell to the Americans,” she said. “At least I know the white people. They’re fair.”

The first Arabs appeared here about 30 years ago, selling scarves and linen to tourists from their trunks. They discovered first Indian jewelry and second a market for it. They have flourished on the Internet. They are blamed for importing imitations from China and the Philippines.

The problem has gotten so bad, an estimated 40 percent of the stock in Gallup is knockoff, said Ralph A. Richards, former president of the Chamber of Commerce and a white man who is trying to help form a cooperative of Indian artists and vendors. State and federal law prohibit selling goods as Indian made if they are not.

“The forgeries are against the law,” Mr. Richards said. “But it’s almost impossible to launch a boycott. When it gets down to it, people need a dollar.”

The pawn and jewelry business pulls in hundreds of millions of dollars a year, Mr. Richards estimates, from tourists, Internet sales and people down on their luck.

“The pawn goes back a long time, before we even knew we had a country here,” said Bill Richardson, of Richardson’s Trading Company and Cash Pawn, established in 1913. His store is packed with silver and wool and jade and redolent of leather saddles. He is a white man who speaks Navajo.

“It’s the Arabs that got a reputation of exploiters,” he said, not kindly. “Indian people been coming to me four generations. We’ve got a relationship built up. It’s almost family. I don’t sell fakes.”

Mr. Maadi says he does not sell fakes either. But that is how it goes with stereotypes.

“We and the Indians, I tell them we have a similar history and we should not have problems,” he said. “But most don’t even know their own history. It’s an oasis of illiteracy.”

This entry was posted on Friday, June 24th, 2005 at 4:08 am and is filed under Holoholo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.