Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation

by Santos, John Phillip

  Coahuila and Texas were a single state of the Mexican republic, and the viceroy who ruled the state sat in Monclova, Coahuila. San Antonio had always been a distant northern settlement, increasingly embattled as more and more Americanos settled there. Eventually, the Anglo Texans broke away from Mexico, and Texas formed their own republic, later becoming a state of the American Union. All the Mexicanos who had lived as Tejanos, as the longtime Mexican residents of Texas were known, became Americans overnight.

  Visiting San Antonio in those days, Uncle Frank said, was like going to a museum. They city had been there almost two hundred years already. The missions, with their fallen walls and collapsed limestone aqueducts, or acequias, were just landmarks that they passed on the road north into the center of the city.

  There, the modest limestone “palace” of the Spanish governor, with its cool, tree-shaded courtyard and fountain, was still standing from colonial times, when San Antonio and parts of southeastern Texas had been settled by los Canarios, eighteenth-century homesteaders from the Canary Islands. There had also been a wave of settlers from Cáceres, in the high plains of Spain. Also, many of the Indian tribes who had allied themselves with Cortés against the Aztecas, like the Totonacas and the Tlaxcaltecas, had long ago been given land in the northern reaches of Nueva España, in places like Monterrey, San Diego, in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, and San Antonio.

  On those early visits, Uncle Frank and Abuelo Jacobo stayed with my great-grandfather’s boyhood friend Tacho Carvajal, who had been a foreman at the Palaú mines and who moved north to supervise one of the quarries that were cutting stone to build the state’s new capitol building in Austin. Tacho and his family had a big house near the quarry, which stood on the northern edge of town.

  Abuelo Jacobo would arrive bearing gifts, piloncillo and rollos de nata, sugar cane candy and goat’s milk caramel delicacies, from the sierra country where Tacho had been born. Tacho complained that nothing like that was available in San Antonio. Uncle Frank said it was also hard to find real barbacoa, made from the head of a cow, fire-roasted for hours, buried underground. And it was harder still to find decent cabrito, the succulent roasted young goat which was a staple of the cocina norteña.

  Abuelo Jacobo joked with his old friend Tacho about how long it would take him to have his fill of this new American way of life and come back to Palaú. Tacho’s mother was getting older, and she had refused to move with her son to San Antonio. His small farm in Palaú lay fallow. His brothers and sisters expected he would return, though as the years passed, several of them eventually moved north themselves, staying with Tacho before finding their own homes in the city. Uncle Frank hadn’t ever imagined that they, too, would soon leave Palaú for San Antonio. He never thought they would be anything but Mexican. Abuelo Jacobo was the administrator of las Minas de Hondo, an old mine in Palaú that seemed to be loaded with unlimited amounts of coal. He also owned a granja, his true passion. This small parcel of land was where he farmed the vegetables and herbs which his family of eleven children, three girls and eight boys, consumed by the bushel.

  According to Uncle Frank, the Garcias were never much taken by “America-struckedness.”

  But they weren’t Mexican nationalists either. Maintaining the unity of the family was their ultimate compromiso, their unspoken obligation. The less the world around them threatened that simple ethic, the better. It was 1911 when the clashes began between the local battalion of Federalistas in Allende and dozens of loosely organized militant bands operating between the towns of Nueva Rosita, Palaú, and Múzquiz. By then, the revolucionarios, strapped with bandoleros bristling bullets, openly stood on street corners, brandishing their homemade Mexican flags and rickety-looking rifles. Over the next years, as day-to-day life in Coahuila during the revolution became unmanageable and then dangerous, the roads led north, and Mexico lost an entire generation to migration and war. Many went to San Antonio, joining the legions of Mexicanos who had already been there for so long.

  The librarian approaches my table with a worried frown on her face.

  “I have three hits for Juan Santos or John Santos,” she says, trailing sheets of perforated computer paper across the reading room. She has done a computer search of the archive at the Institute of Texan Cultures for the original photographs in the San Antonio papers reporting Abuelo Juan José’s death in 1939.

  “One’s a suicide. You knew that? One’s a basketball star. One’s a Rhodes scholar,” she reports. “Now, the collection’s a little spotty in some places. The suicide was thrown out, the Express-News pitched everything pre-1940s. The Rhodes scholar is missing.”

  Then, with some satisfaction, she says, “But I’ve got the basketball star—a glass negative from the San Antonio Light—from 1935.”

  She pulls the plate from behind her back, holding it with fuzzy white cotton mittens. She holds it up to the fluorescent lights of the reading room for me to see. It is my father, all wiry-limbed, crouching in dark silk shorts and tank top, arms cocked back, holding a basketball, his eyes fixed upward on the hoop with the transported stare of a solemn, religious devotee. He was an all-city player at Fox Tech High School in the ’35 season, and the sports section of the paper had done a formal athletic portrait of him before the championship game.

  The headline read simply, SANTOS TO BE FEARED.

  The librarian returns to her computer, thinking the reports of my grandfather’s suicide may still be in the institute’s microfilm collection of San Antonio newspapers. My father hadn’t known that the photograph existed. All three of us—father, son, grandson; two Juan Josés and a John—were a part of the archive, carrying an infinitesimally small part of the history of San Antonio that the library houses, even if my grandfather and I had fallen through the cracks.

  In school, we were never taught about the Mexicans in Texas. We were required to study Texas history, but it was history from the viewpoint of the later Anglo settlers from the United States and Europe, beginning with the battle at the Alamo for Texan independence, and later, statehood. There were no lessons about the Indians, the Payaya and Xaraname, who had been there ages before, or the Spanish and the Mexicans who had first built the city by the river. There were no stories, no pictures, of the great migration that had occurred just fifty years before, during the Mexican revolution, which had brought so many of our families to San Antonio. Because of that, I wasn’t aware that any part of the story was missing for a very long time. If there was a secret history of those lands, I had to cobble it together out of the stories Uncle Frank and the other ancianos had told me, and out of the trips to Mexico and to those small south Texas towns, built around a plaza and a church, that still felt like Mexico.

  The Spanish language was a reservoir of memory. In English, we had become Americans of Mexican descent. But in Spanish, we were still la raza, the chosen people. And the tales of la raza, that ongoing saga of the family with its myriad cast of characters, were by turns tragic, hilarious, bittersweet, poignant. Las Viejitas were always aware of the goings-on in the countless swirling lives of relatives and friends. These were the chronicles of la raza. As if through a sixth sense, they kept track of every episode in these ceaseless, improvised dramas that were as gripping as any telenovela:

  Uncle Beto had cooked a cabrito that was so tough it pulled another uncle’s dentures out. A comadre’s charming son-in-law, a perfect hijito, had gotten seduced by bigtime money, and now he was off to jail. In Monterrey, a distant niece was ordered to remain motionless in bed, dressed in silk nightgowns for the last eight months of her pregnancy, unable to move even her pinky finger. A ne’er-do-well cousin, a sinvergüenza who had already squandered his father’s life savings, had now disappeared with his elderly dad and hadn’t been seen in three weeks.

  The unstoppable carousel of stories was our parallel history of San Antonio, part of another history of Texas, another history of Mexico. We sat in kitchens, living rooms, and backyards across the city, listening to episodes from these al
ways incomplete annals. It seemed every family carried a larger story it was telling to the world over time. Though no one could say exactly what that story was, the Spanish language carried a feeling of it in the way Mexicanos always referred to themselves with the diminutive suffix -ito. We were Mexican-itos in a world of giants and monumental forces.

  We were the meek who would inherit the earth.

  We were the poor who would be welcomed into the Kingdom of God.

  Just as a family possesses within itself these enigmatic, almost un-traceable lines of destiny, so can two families’ destinies become closely intertwined, each changing the direction of the other, as happened with the Santos and the Garcias, the families of my father’s parents. They had lived close to each other in the small town of Palaú, and both families were large. Uela had two sisters and eight brothers, and Abuelo Juan José had two brothers, four sisters, and four half-brothers from his father’s first family by a wife who had died very young.

  According to one old Mexican adage, “Pueblo chico, infierno grande,” or, “Small town, big fire.” It was just before the revolution, and life had been unsettled in the northern Mexican frontera for some time. Out in the state of Sinaloa to the west, there had been sporadic uprisings among the Yaquis and the Mayo since the 1890s. Many of the dissidents who sought to topple the thoroughly corrupt and autocratic regime of the dictator Porfirio Díaz, who was half-Indian, had been driven into exile and were operating from places such as Nogales, El Paso, and San Antonio.

  In Palaú, most of the people worked either on the surrounding farms and livestock ranches or in the deep, rickety coal mines that still honeycomb the region. The summers were very hot, the streets cursedly dusty, and the only relief seemed to come on the Saturday nights when conjuntos and bandas would play in the gazebo at the plaza. It was there that Uela first met Juan José, when they were still in their teens. She was already possessed of a certain regal attitude, in high collar, long dress, and buckled leather boots. His thick black hair well combed off to one side, he was dark-skinned, with large brown eyes, and, it is said, the way he looked at someone, he seemed to never blink.

  When a group of traveling thespians came to the village from Mexico City, they recruited Uela to play a maiden in one of the productions of old Spanish plays that were part of their repertoire. She did so despite the fact that her father, Jacobo, was incensed and scandalized by the idea. According to him, the wandering players were nothing more than vagabonds, charlatanes and misfits, aiming to deflower all the virtuous young ladies of Palaú.

  “Those men wear dresses, and the women smoke pipes! They are out to do the devil’s work, for sure,” he told my grandmother.

  But everyone was quiet when young Margarita acted out her death scene in the play, which was performed under a tent in a harvested corn field just beyond the edge of town. Juan José had come to the play with his brother Uvaldino, who was falling in love with Madrina Tomasa, my grandmother’s sister, so he was distracted through the entire show, trading glances with his paramour.

  Following the play as it took Margarita through soliloquies, romantic liaisons, and poetic plaints, Juan José finally could not bear to watch his beloved pantomime her own death in the arms of someone else, so he left the tent early, disconsolate. When Margarita did finally die at the play’s end, her brother, my Tío Jesús, was grief-stricken, thinking his cherished older sister had truly died.

  Uela was such a success in her acting debut that she was invited to join the company and return with them to Mexico City, to cultivate her talents as an actress. She was torn because of her professed love for Juan José, but those who saw her perform or heard her recite her favorite poetry said her voice had a rare balance of delicate timbre and volume, frailty, and power. And she had the ability of the rarest actors, to become someone else. She could draw you into her imaginary world with the smallest gestures, the tone and resonance of her voice, and the unpredictable way her lips would move and pause around the Spanish words.

  One of my aunts says Uela always saw acting as the true destiny she would never fulfill. Abuelo Jacobo was not about to surrender his daughter to a pack of dilettantes. After all, where would she be left after her beauty and youth faded? How could any of the family see to her needs if she were as far away as Mexico City? Hadn’t she been raised to rear a family and live close to the earth’s cycles of planting, farming, and harvest, just as he had been taught? And what of Juan José, whom my great-grandfather adored as a son and had often said that they would someday start a farm together? Would she abandon him and the family their union promised for the fleeting glory of a life on the stages of traveling tent theaters?

  Daily, there were more and more signals that the revolution was coming to Coahuila. There was banditry on the roads between villages and no authorities to turn to for help. Anyone who tried to make things better in the little towns of the north, without allying themselves with either the Porfiriato government or one of the myriad of opposition political camps, was assassinated. Abuelo Jacobo’s job as a manager of the Palaú mines was imperiled by frequent strikes and work stoppages. It was growing harder to get to the market to keep the family fed. After the letter arrived from Uncle Frank, offering hope and news of jobs, preparations were begun for the family to move to Texas.

  “¡Basta ya con Mexico!”

  “Enough of Mexico!”

  Abuelo Jacobo decided the Garcias would start their new life in El Norte, and Margarita would soon forget these devilish exotic notions.

  And as for Tomasa being courted by Juan José’s brother Uvaldino, this, too, would be brought to a close. Abuelo Jacobo was a frank man who liked to attend to family matters on Sunday afternoons, sitting at the dining table, smoking loose, fat cigarettes he rolled in corn shucks. One Sunday Jacobo pronounced the dashing, courteous, and well-spoken Uvaldino a womanizing gavilán who would come to no good end.

  Aside from the questionable appearance of two brothers romancing two sisters, Uvaldino Santos was very different from Juan José. He was known to frequent the cantinas where he loved to talk tonterías, to sing, and to play the violin. Worse, he was meant to be off soon to study at the university in Monterrey, so what use would he have for a wife? And that was that.

  Feeling their first great disappointments, Margarita and Tomasa both grew anxious to leave Mexico with all its intricate sadness behind. The three sisters shared one bed, and la Tía Pepa remembers both of her sisters crying late into the night that year. To make them feel better, she would ask them each to take a bite of her taco, because, she said, it made it taste better. Then, she would ask them to take a drink of her water, because, she said, it made the water taste sweeter. She remembers that was the summer they learned to pray together, that the three sisters began to study the Via Rosae Crucis.

  From Palaú, the nearest junction to the road leading north to Piedras Negras on the border was a long day’s ride away to the east, in Nueva Rosita. For months, the dusty carriage track from the bigger town of Saltillo to the south had been crowded with horseback riders, covered wagons, and buggies with flatbeds, as Mexicanos set out by the thousands for Texas to flee the mounting tumult of the revolution.

  All of Mexico seemed to be there in the long caravan heading north. There were Lebanese Mexicans from Saltillo, Jewish Mexicans from Querétaro. The day the Garcias and Santos left Palaú they joined up with a group of Mexican Chinese families who had lived for generations in Monclova, to the south, where they had helped build the railroads in the 1890s.

  One of my great-uncles made friends with another young man among them who was a prodigy in feats of illusion and magic, which he performed at fairs in the region. All of the Mexicanos from the mountain towns stared at him in his bright turquoise silk outfit and monk’s cap. After they had talked awhile, the young magician described a trick called “the great Mongolian escape” he someday wanted to perform. My tío remembers making a drawing for him of a box he could have constructed to do the act, and for a long
time, he wondered whether he ever achieved it.

  Under the blistering canopy of Coahuila sunlight, the repetitive grinding sound of the axle had a lulling effect on the young ones riding in the buggy. But Abuelo Jacobo was nervous about traveling with the Chinese. Over their wagon flew a ragged banner that bore an image of Porfirio Díaz on it. The embattled president had been the patrón of the Mexican railroads, undertaking an epic building project that had managed to connect tracks from Mexico City with la frontera. The Chinese might be rightly grateful, Abuelo thought, but the banner would make them an easy target on the open plains ahead—easy valor for a Villista sniper or a Maderista border guard. Old Jacobo, above all else, did not want to get caught in the crossfire. After a few hours’ riding, he pulled the two family wagons off the trail at Villa Unión and let the Chinese move on.

  The Rosicrucian studies the Garcia sisters had done over the years taught them a way to live with proper attention to the signs and visions by which the unknown meaning of things could be discerned. Since all creation was part of the same manifestation of God, everything the world presented was part of the story of something larger taking place, revealing the ultimate meaning of the world. It was each initiate’s obligation to be able to discern the messages underlying whatever they saw.

  A hawk seen in flight in fog was a warning: Your greatest efforts will be useless in the present web of circumstances.