Martinez

Martinez is a motorcycle cop patrolling the streets of postwar Los Angeles, introduced not as a guardian of order but as a manifestation of its most cynical perversion. Momaday places him firmly in the Relocation-era urban landscape that engulfed tens of thousands of Native Americans in the 1950s — a world of cheap rooming houses, liquor stores, and the indifferent machinery of a city that disregards the people it absorbs. His badge serves not as a symbol of protection, but as a license. He knows exactly which men are too marginal, too foreign to the city's systems, too frightened of deportation or arrest to report him. He targets Abel and Ben Benally because they are, by the logic of Los Angeles, invisible — and in Martinez's hands, invisibility transforms into a kind of open season.

Martinez lacks a conventional character arc, and that flatness serves a purpose. He does not undergo change, reflection, or consequences within the narrative. His motivation is twofold: one side reflects the practical exploitation of the powerless, while a colder aspect reveals a pleasure in dominance for its own sake. Momaday emphasizes that Martinez's corruption cannot be attributed merely to poverty or desperation. He exemplifies a system that produces and tolerates men like him, acting with the confidence of someone who has never faced accountability. His absence of interiority is a formal choice; Momaday denies him the depth of a character who might be understood or potentially redeemed.

The alley beating is the novel's most concentrated act of urban violence. Martinez locates Abel and Ben Benally, attacking them with methodical savagery, breaking Abel's hands. The specificity of this injury holds significance. Abel is already disconnected from Walatowa's ceremonial life, unable to find himself in language or ritual — and now the physical means of creating, working, or reaching are destroyed. Ben's narration during this time brims with helplessness; he can recount the events but cannot intervene retrospectively, making the telling itself a form of grief. The broken hands signify Abel's absolute nadir in Los Angeles and serve as the wound that, in some way, propels him back toward Francisco and the dawn runners of Walatowa. Martinez delivers the blow that paradoxically initiates Abel's return.

Abel is Martinez's primary target, and the relationship — if it can be termed as such — is entirely predatory. Martinez does not perceive Abel as an individual; he sees him as a category, a Native man in a city that will not miss him. The beating is impersonal, much like institutional violence, rendering it no less devastating.

Ben Benally witnesses and suffers the attack alongside Abel, and his presence sharpens the scene's meaning. Ben has made greater efforts than Abel to assimilate, to carve out a place in the city's economy, to narrate his own life. Martinez's indifference to that struggle — he beats Ben just as readily — highlights the futility of such accommodations. There is no demonstration of belonging that guarantees safety.

The Albino (Juan Reyes) serves as a structural parallel across the novel's two extremes. While the Albino's menace is ceremonial, embedded in the Pueblo world's darkest spiritual registers, Martinez's is bureaucratic and urban. Together, they encapsulate Abel's experiences, suggesting he is pursued across every aspect of life — ancient and modern, reservation and city.

Tosamah shares the same Los Angeles underworld but addresses its violence through language, irony, and sermon. Martinez embodies the brute reality that Tosamah's rhetoric revolves around without ever fully dismantling. Their thematic opposition elucidates the true cost of survival in the city.