Sierra Blanca



Sierra Blanca is the assumed name of a nomadic refugee people who are currently operating in the southern suburbs of the city of Carlsbad in what used to be New Mexico. The Sierrans hail originally from Sierra Blanca, a small town in West Texas, and after being driven out by forces loyal to neighboring El Paso, began a devastating march north in which two thirds of their membership died. After recovering for a time in the foothills of the Guadeloupe Mountains, they resumed their march, this time going east, in the hopes of finding more hospitable land. They entered Carlsbad in 2075 and immediately became embroiled in a local tribal war waged between a group of New Mexico Cherokee, the Cult, and the local Bulls. Seizing control of the south of the ruins as well as the only remaining groundwater extractor, the Sierrans dubbed their new territory "Nuevo Sierra" and allied themselves with the Bulls tribe.

History: In 2030, after a particularly violent raid by an unknown nearby tribe, the survivors of the plague in Fort Hancock, Texas, elect to relocate to Sierra Blanca, a town that survived with almost its entire population intact due to isolation. Unbeknownst to the Sierrans, who welcomed the refugees, the Fort Hancock survivors carried the plague, and despite their immunities to it, the Sierrans had no such protection.

The plague immediately broke out, killing 2 out of every 7 Sierrans and leaving the town almost deserted. No doubt luckily for the refugees, the Sierrans never made the connection between the outbreak and Fort Hancock (possibly due to the plague's slow-acting nature) but nonetheless took brutal steps to stamp it out that previous communities had been unwilling to take. One popular method was to quarantine sufferers in a pit, and then shove the people who had helped into the pit with the sick. They would then pour oil in and burn them, or alternately bury them alive.

It is unclear if Sierra Blanca's low death rate was due to these preventative measures or simply an abnormally high local immunity. However, in the end, the plague passed Sierra Blanca on, allowing them to concentrate on other matters.

Their most pressing concern was the fact that the now gang-controlled El Paso had been sending scouts to skirmish with Sierran border patrols. The Sierran leadership knew that if the Pasoans decided to take Sierra Blanca, the Sierrans could do nothing to stop them. They adopted a policy of isolationism, hoping to avoid the notice of El Paso. This worked for a time, but as the Pasoans put down various upstart tribes to their west, they turned their attention to the various upstart tribes to their east. When they swept into Sierra Blanca, the Sierrans found themselves so vastly outnumbered that they could do nothing but run.

The President stayed behind with a sacrificial rearguard in an effort to bide the rest time to escape. The rearguard held out for several hours, but was ultimately overwhelmed, and the corpses of the defenders were mutilated. However, it had succeeded in its primary objective, which was to bide time for the rest of Sierra Blanca to escape. The 600-700 remaining Sierrans moved north, losing over half of their population to exposure before reaching the Guadeloupe Mountains and camping there. They found nothing in the way of humans save local family groups of hunter-gatherers, who they coerced into joining them. After two weeks, they set off east in pursuit of rumors of thousands of miles of pure green. The Sierrans halted in Carlsbad to take control of a seemingly abandoned water extractor, and soon found themselves at war with two of the largest groups in the southwest: the New Mexico Cherokee and the Cult.

Dialect:

The Sierrans speak the Sierran dialect of the Pasoan language, a mixture of Spanish and English that formed when the already shaky border between the English-speaking United States and Spanish-speaking Mexico collapsed with the respective governments. (the rest is copied from the wikipedia page on Spanglish, if you couldn't tell) Spanish and English have mixed quite a bit. For example, a fluent bilingual speaker addressing another, like bilingual speaker might engage in code switching with the sentence: I'm sorry I cannot attend next week's meeting porque tengo una obligación de negocios en Boston, pero espero que I'll be back for the meeting the week after. Changing some words to English, for example, "Te veo ahorita, me voy de shopping para el mall": "See you later, I'm going shopping in the mall". Pasoan is mostly spoken this way.

Pasoan phrases often use shorter words from both languages as in: "Me voy a wake up". (Rather than: "Me voy a levantar" or "I am going to wake up.") A common code switch in Sierran Pasoan is using the English word "so" (therefore): "Tengo clase, so me voy" ("I have a class, so I'm leaving"), rather than the Spanish "porque" with different order ("me voy porque tengo clase").

Word borrowings from English to Spanish are more common, using false cognates in their English senses, or calquing idiomatic English expressions. Some examples:

The non-standard word afianza is used in Pasoan in preference to the standard Spanish seguro ("insurance policy"). The word carpeta is "folder" in standard Spanish. In some variants of Pasoan it means "carpet" instead of Spanish 'alfombra'. In Pasoan, yonque denotes "junkyard", not the standard Spanish deshuesadero. In Pasoan, word boiler is both "water heater" and "boiler". The standard Spanish words are calentador de agua (water heater) and hervidor or "caldera" (boiler). The Spanish verb "atender", "to wait upon" or "to give service to", e.g. wait upon a table of diners; however, second-generation Spanish speakers in the Anglo-sphere use the verb as "to attend", instead of "to assist". The Spanish verb asistir, in Pasoan denotes "to assist" rather than true Spanish "to attend". Suceso, "event", is wrongly used to denote "success", leading to expressions such as fue todo un suceso, "it was a complete success" (although this can be ambiguous; interpreted in Spanish this means "it was a big event", which sometimes means about the same anyway). "Push" and empujar are true cognates. In Pasoan, "puchar" is used to the same effect. The expression llamar para atrás is calqued literally from the English "to call back"; cf. standard Spanish devolver la llamada, "to return the call". This example of calquing an English idiomatic phrase to Spanish is common Sierran usage. Van (la van) is Sierran for the American English word Van, instead of the standard Spanish la furgoneta. Parquear is used instead of the correct Spanish estacionar, it derives from the English word '[to] park'. However, Standard and Colloquial Spanish uses the verb aparcar, which is accepted in the diccionary but also appears to derive from English. The verbs hanguear derives from "to hang out". Spanish verbs conversar and charlar mean "to chat". The adjectives serioso | seriosa denote the English serious instead of the proper serio | seria. Actualmente, meaning in Spanish "currently," is frequently misused to replace English actually and in fact. The proper Spanish term for actually is de hecho. Marketa is a frequently used word derived from the English word market (as in Supermarket) instead of the standard Spanish word mercado. Lonche is the Sierran usage for lunch, as in "hora del lonche" (lunchtime). The correct Spanish term is almuerzo. Lonchera is also used to mean lunch box. "Heavy" used unchanged in expressions such as qué heavy, muy heavy, akin to "how awful/terrible".

Religion:

The Sierrans have no official religion, and, indeed, do not profess allegiance to any God. Most subscribe to a sort of radical cynic view of the world, and believe that the only consequences for their actions are those that derive directly from them. For example, a Sierran would have no issues with murdering an innocent if he saw it as beneficial to himself or Sierra Blanca as a whole.

Uniform:

The Sierran tribe can be distinguished by the pair of bandanas that members tend to wear, one covering the head and another covering the face. This odd trend is believed to derive from the days of the Sierran outbreak, when residents would cover themselves as much as possible to avoid airborne exposure to the disease. The twin bandanas are helpful in identifying friendlies in a time when most everyone looks the same.