The Rincon Mystery
Whenever I ride my motorcycle to the mountains or the desert, I go through the town of Valley Center, which sits between where I live and the country I find so beautiful to drive through. The ride through Valley Center isn’t a bad ride either, with enough nice twisty roads and little enough traffic to make it a perfectly pleasant ride even though its not the wide open spaces up on Palomar Mountain or out to the Anza Borrego desert. As I get to the end of Valley Center and see the mountains looming ahead of me that stretch up to 6,000 feet in height, I see a big hotel to my right. It’s the Valley View Casino that operates under the auspices of the San Pasquale Band of the Mission Indians. Then, I suddenly find myself in something called Rincon. Actually, the Valley Center Road goes straight through the Rincon Indian Reservation to Rt. 76 that runs along the base of the Palomar Mountain Range going West to East from Pala and Pauma (other Indian Reservations and Casinos) to Lake Henshaw and near the Lipay Indian Reservation and Casino in Santa Ysabel. Are you getting the picture? There are lots of Indian Reservations and their concomitant Casinos all around this Central Valley area to the East of San Diego County. They all seem prosperous, so I assume they do a good business from the folks in San Diego County.
But I want to focus on the Indian Reservation and Casino that I see and interact with the most and that’s the one in Rincon. I feel like it’s my neighborhood Indian Casino and my very own Indian Reservation since I drive through it so often. Also, it has one of the few gas stations on my hour-long routes, presumably because no surrounding gas stations can compete with the tax structure of the independent Indian Nation versus the Federal and California state tax protocols.
The Rincon Band of Indians are members of the Luiseno Tribe, one of the Mission Indian tribes like the San Pasquale Band over the hill in Escondido. Rincon means “corner” in the indigenous language and its because Rt. 76 was an old salt lick trail (a trail that animals used to travel from salt lick to salt lick) where the intersecting trail that ran through Valley Center met with it. Those intersections always make sense to promote commerce like gas stations and casinos. Add to that its location near the San Luis Rey River, and you have a perfectly logical location.
The tribe has 651 members, but the U.S. census of 2010 only shows 188 self-identified Native Americans, so the other 463 members must have been out of town during the census. Total Rincon population stands at 1,500.
As I drive through Rincon I would characterize it as being a typical rural western ranching area not unlike most Indian Reservations I have seen in the Southwest. There are lots of modest homes clustered near the central road and perhaps a heavier than normal preponderance of pre-fabricated homes (often called mobile homes though they rarely move). In other words, it looks to be a very economically modest area that one might even call somewhat impoverished. I would suggest that it looks fairly well-populated within the bounds of the Reservations in these homes.
However, Rincon has some very notable things besides these scruffy homes and the massive 20-story casino hotel with snazzy tinted glass walls and what looks like High Roller suites on the top floor. To begin with, someone decided that they were very proud of Rincon and that the driving public needed to know where the Reservation starts and stops. Therefore, they brought in massive stones and had the Rincon name carved into these stone signs welcoming visitors to the Reservation from the north and the south. I would argue that the Rincon Reservation signage is twice the size of any National Park sign I have ever seen, so it represents a great deal of local pride.
In addition, for a little town of 1,500 souls, Rincon has a beautiful and huge municipal services building, municipal garage and vehicle garage and one of the biggest and nicest fire stations I have ever seen. That’s all in addition to a Tribal Health Center and a General Tribal Affairs office building. Basically, I’ll bet all of these municipal functions are staffed by every resident of the town and then some. I suspect they have a municipal employee to resident ratio of greater than 1:1. Obviously, some of this can be justified by the presence of a large casino that needs more than an average amount of services like police and fire protection. But I’m guessing that the tribal finances are such that the 651 tribal members or at least the 188 self-identifying Native Americans are more inclined to distribute their tribal wealth through services and jobs rather than in some tribal form of universal income (think Alaska Permanent Fund or Andrew Yang). I’m also wondering about those other non-tribal 849 residents and how they figure into the goodies. It must be a fascinating socioeconomic study (which I’m sure some academic has done or will do) to show how Indian Casino finances trickle their way into the small tribal membership coffers and pockets.
What I know is that it raises all sorts of quandaries to the curious passer-by like me that sees those gleaming fire trucks that never look to be used and are always being polished up by the fit, young firemen, and the nice cars parked at the jazzy municipal building employee lot. I wonder how much of those finances are really benefiting the governed versus the governing or the indigenous versus the local non-tribals versus the carpetbagging. It is sort of a mysterious reality few investigative reports can probably peer into. After all, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA, or as Jay Sekulow might say….Lawya’) is presumably limited to U.S. federal documents and does not pertain to indigenous sovereign issues.
That gives a whole new meaning to the old Las Vegas motto, which LV has now abandoned in favor of “What happens here, only happens here”. We know from the plethora of Indian Casinos within spitting distance of Rincon that what happens there happens all over God’s green acres. But it leaves wide open and more appropriate the old LV motto of “What happens in Rincon, stays in Rincon”, and that seems to me to be the mystery of Rincon that we will likely never solve.