Dining with Lola and Coyote: A Conversation

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• Dining with Lola and Coyote:A Conversation
• Susan Lowell (bio)

In or about 1963, Lola Casanova and Coyote Iguana joined our family.

Not the actual historic human beings—an electrifying idea—but the two legendary personages who were the subjects of a master's thesis being researched and written in our midst. To advance in her teaching job and for her own satisfaction, my mother, Edith Sykes Lowell, was completing a master's degree in Spanish at the University of Arizona.

Meanwhile we got to know Lola Casanova and Coyote Iguana quite well. Their spirits sat at the dinner table with us and joined us around the fireplace at night, which was where, after a day of teaching, our mother used to sit and study. A large Spanish dictionary usually lay open on the hearth beside her, and now and then a spark would fly out and singe a word or two, so various small sooty holes persisted for the life of the dictionary.

From family camping trips to the Gulf of California, we knew the setting: the Sonoran desert seacoast of northern Mexico, inhabited mostly by fishermen and Seri people. It was not an easy place to live but exciting to visit, although we had to stay home during our parents' research trips to Sonora. And the names "Lola Casanova" and "Coyote Iguana" were utterly delightful. So was their dramatic story (ambush—abduction—then what?) which came to seem as fascinating to young '60s kids as the swashbuckling Man from U.N.C.L.E. or the antics of the Beatles on TV.

And whether they are considered as figures in history, Mexican politics, anthropology, literature, folklore, pop culture, melodrama, sociology, cinema, mythology, or any combination of these, Lola Casanova and Coyote Iguana remain charismatic characters, and their story still casts a spell.

Author's note: The following conversation between me (SL) and my mother (ESL) has been edited and condensed. [End Page 509]

SL:

How did you come up with the topic of Lola Casanova and Coyote Iguana for your thesis?

ESL:

I went to see Dr. Renato Rosaldo, who was the head of the University of Arizona Romance Languages Department where I was a graduate student, and he asked me what I'd like to write about. I told him I didn't know, but I'd like to do something that combined literature with anthropology, which was my undergraduate major, and, if possible, something involving the Gulf of California area.

SL:

There was a lot of family travel to the Gulf, beginning in the 1880s.

ESL:

Yes, my grandfather Godfrey Sykes often built boats and sailed down the Colorado, which wasn't dammed in those days, through the Delta, and into Mexico. It was on one of those trips over 100 years ago that he gave the boojum tree its common name. My father also loved to go on Gulf trips, camping, boating, exploring, and visiting friends. And beginning in the late 1950s we went as a family to Kino Bay, San Carlos, Puerto Lobos, and Puerto Libertad to fish and enjoy the ocean. We all loved to go there.

SL:

How did the Lola project come up?

ESL:

Dr. Rosaldo just popped out with the topic. He didn't take longer than it would to count to five. He said, "Well, the only thing I can think of is Lola Casanova." It was all relatively obscure at the time. The novel had been written and the movie made but neither one was a big success, so I think it was pretty remarkable that he came up with the idea.

SL:

What happened next?

ESL:

I said, "That sounds like what I'm looking for!" So I started looking for information on the story.

SL:

What did you find?

ESL:

I couldn't find anything by anyone who was a principal actor in the event. If there were newspaper accounts, they were obscure. But there were Mexican military records from 1850 that reported an attack by Seris on a party of travelers going from Guaymas to Hermosillo, where fifteen or twenty Mexican civilians were either killed or taken captive, including an eighteen-year-old named Dolores...