I signed up for Grok and asked about Fort Ortiz. Apparently, that's not where the treaty was signed. It was signed at the train station, linking the Yaqui in Mexico, to the Yaqui in Arizona.
I wonder how much a house actually costs down there??? Grok says $20,000.
Cholita might enjoy a vacation home. And she might notice interesting things down there.
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I was just checking online and Real estate on either side of Drogales runs from 90k for a fixer upper to about 200k.
Even Mexico is too expensive!
But Ortiz only has perhaps 1500 inhabitants, and a bunch of abandoned buildings.
Very, very old ones!
I suppose Cholita would hate it. She wants to live in Beverly Hills.
It could be she’d look down on those shifty campesinos!
Danl999, turns out that grok was very close!
520000 mxn = 28,829.82 us$
Sounds like a bargain to me!
The tracks are still used sometimes, and reach all the way to Arizona.
Don Juan would have rode that train to visit his relatives in Yaqui territory there.
There's talk of reviving that train, and the train stop.
I'd say, you can pretty much bet don Juan knew these buildings.
She once gave me a long lecture on the pecking order in Mexico.
Being from Mexico city, she was automatically above anyone to the north.
Chinese were at the bottom, in the "servant" category.
It's ok to abuse them when they serve you at a restaurant.
That's their job!
Blacks were slightly above the Chinese in status.
But from a historical point of view, and who was taking whose jobs, I suppose it makes sense. The Chinese were sailing off to Mexico in search of a better life, a very long time ago.
China was mostly a shit hole back prior to the 1900s. Including roaming famines each season.
So that story about Lujan being a Chinese sailing ship kung fu bodyguard is actually plausible.
Likely he worked for the Dutch East Indies company. Which is somewhat verified by the picture the blue scout drew of his ship, for the "Readers of Infinity" publication.
And East Indies sailing ship!
Same as the one I saw when Fairy pulled me into her world to give me a history lesson on our lineage, to explain why I couldn't let it die.
It's not even impossible to locate Lujan's real name on a ship registry from that period. That trading company kept very good records.
Carlos said Cholita's father was pure blood Olmec, which for some strange strange reason gave her more status in Mexico. I suppose there are levels to the indian populations?
And her father was a bridge designer for the Mexican government, which meant that young Cholita could go along with her dad to all sorts of cities to look at the bridge building situation, staying in expensive hotels for free.
Which explains why I had to put her up in every hotel between Irvine and Los Angeles, for months.
She likes them.
But they didn't like her much.
Once we had the police draw their guns on us, over Cholita's odd behavior.
When Cholita created the phantom copy of our house, using Minx, it slowly evolved into a gigantic hotel complex.
Attached to the inorganic being's world.
To accomodate Minx, perhaps.
Too bad it seems to be gone now. I could go in there fully awake. And didn't lose lucidity no matter how long I stayed.
I only had to open the hallway door, and walk in.
There's no sleeping dreaming condition even a tiny bit like that.
She’s from Mexico City? Ask her if she is a Chilanga, but duck immediately because you might get to smell a rock up close 🤣
Actually she was called a "Fresa".
Her generation.
That's not far from what Cholita looked like at that age.
Earlier posts where we documented previous searches and researching data on this location of (one of!) don Juan's desert "cabin" topic:
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/zaq1gv/where_did_don_juan_live/
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/17zo939/don_juans_enslavement/
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/15h7mqz/hot_on_the_trail/
I didn't see any actual picture of a location for "Fort" Ortiz.
Grok AI insists there's no such thing, and maybe I was thinking of an old church.
But we found it! It's a tourist attraction. And huge.
Unfortunately there's very few street level images on Google, of Ortiz.
Which I suppose protects the villagers.
Notice the street level pictures available are outlined in blue, and only cover a fraction.
But also notice, ISN'T THAT FORT ORTIZ IN THE SAMPLE PICTURE ON GOOGLE MAPS???
But the AI insistes there's no such place.
By the way, after cruising around in that map using google street view, to find the railroad tracks and see if there's a house there I could buy Cholita as a getaway spot, when I reached SK last night and it started streaming continuously, I found myself moving along the streets of Ortiz.
As if floating.
I even passed by people and realized there's more in there than google street maps implies. They seem to have captured only 3 or 5 people in that blue area.
Grok looked at the picture, and admitted that was surely
Fort Ortiz.
But as an excuse, he claims no one ever calls it that. He gave the spanish name: Fuerte Militar XIX.
So this post didn't find a contraction in where we originally thought the surrender took place.
The real question I have is, was Zuleica's house in there?
In the books or lecture notes it only mentions that it's "within a KM" (or two).
But maybe that's a trick to throw us off by increasing the search radius, and somewhere in that very small collection of houses, most outside google street view, is Zuleica's house!
I'll see if I can float along the streets again tonight, but it wasn't something I tried to do.
Might have been Minx's doing.
He's been literally "stinking up the subreddit" in the last week or two.
So, Minx Stinks!
We have 4 to 6 reporting weird strong smells.
Myself included.
And shortly after I started asking Minx to help me find Julian in the IOB realm.
The smells are so strong that when I ask ChatGPT about possible causes, it insists I need to go see a doctor.
Or at least, ChatGPT 5.1 version did. That bombed big time, and is now replaced by the less fussy ChatGPT 5.2
You didn't want to mention sorcery to 5.1.
It "triggered", worrying about all the lawsuits against OpenAI if it implied real magic exists.
Here's why you can't find Fort Ortiz, on google street view. They didn't scan over there. The scanned area is the blue area, and the fort which can be found using that spanish name of Fuerte Militar del s.XIX, is over where the pin is located.
Street view won't go over there.
The train tracks are indeed located to the right of it, as you can see from the satelite view if you look for the rocks around the railroad tracks.
It seems that the narrative that Carlos met don Juan in Arizona, is mistaken.
I was trying to figure out if Ortiz is mostly Yaqui, but it seems that's just where the train station was. And naturally the descendants of the surrendered Yaqui wouldn't necessarily settle right at the train station!
Don Juan met Carlos in Vicam, not too far away.
We have, in the collected notes on page 234:
VEJA -The main thing about your meeting with Don Juan is written in the book "The Teachings of Don Juan" (in the Brazilian version, the Devil's Herb"), but nowhere is there any mention of exactly where they were. site?
CASTANEDA -on the border between the states of California (United States) and Sonora (Mexico) there is a town called Nogales Starting from Nogales, the main highway passing through the city of Hermosillo, capital of Sonora, the city of Guayamas and finally. it crosses Estacion de Vicam. To the west of Vicam Station, towards the Pacific, is the city of Vicam, inhabited mostly by Yaqui Indians. Vicam is the place where I first met Don Juan. the teachings.
VEJA -In order not to take Don Juan's freedom, until today you had not revealed this place. How now do you feel free to describe it accurately?
CASTANEDA - Because now no one would be able to find Don Juan; he is no longer there, and Don Genaro has also disappeared from the mountains of Central Mexico (Sierra Madre Occidental). There is no way to find them. Don Juan showed me and taught me everything he could and so there is no need for him to remain at my disposal. Likewise, you know that if you want to find me, just go to UCLA, leave a message, or look for me in the research library. But if I stop coming to UCLA, you'll have no idea where to find me. Like Don Juan, I try to live as a sorcerer.
Here's "Vicam" from Active Side of Infinity:
The story don Juan wanted me to recollect began in the city of Guaymas, in Sonora, Mexico. In Yuma, Arizona, I had been given the names and addresses of some people who, I was told, might be able to shed light on the mystery of the old man I had met in the bus depot. The people I went to see not only didn't know any retired old shaman, they even doubted that such
The Active Side of Infinity — Table of Contents ✹ 2609
a man had ever existed. They were all filled to the brim, however, with scary stories about Yaqui shamans, and about the belligerent general mood of the Yaqui Indians. They insinuated that perhaps in Vicam, a railroad-station town between the cities of Guaymas and Ciudad Obregon, I might find someone who could perhaps steer me in the proper direction. "Is there anyone in particular I could look up?" I asked.
"Your best bet would be to talk to a field inspector of the official government bank," one of the men suggested. "The bank has a lot of field inspectors. They know all the Indians of the area because the bank is the government institution that buys their crops, and every Yaqui is a farmer, the proprietor of a parcel of land that he can call his own as long as he cultivates it."
"Do you know any field inspectors?" I asked.
They looked at each other and smiled apologetically at me. They didn't know any, but strongly recommended that I should approach one of those men on my own and put my case to him.
In Vicam Station, my attempts at making contact with the field inspectors of the government bank were a total disaster. I met three of them, and when I told them what I wanted, every one of them looked at me with utter distrust. They immediately suspected that I was a spy sent there by the Yankees to cause problems that they could not clearly define, but about which they made wild speculations ranging from political agitation to industrial espionage. It was the unsubstantiated belief of everyone around that there were copper deposits in the lands of the Yaqui Indians and that the Yankees coveted them
***
I'm still looking for a vacation house for Cholita... Her stalking skills are pretty darned good. And she likes "missions". Carlos' friends used to send her on those, looking for specific Art to bring back.