I stopped the car, “What is it, Tío?”
“Un tlacuache,” he whispered. “Possum.”
Older than Spanish, the word’s primordial rasp—Tlacuache—came from the name for possum in Nahuatl of the Aztecs. It hung in the air as we watched the startled mother possum leading two babies crawling behind her across the plush carpet of viridian St. Augustine grass in a neighbor’s front yard. It was not so late, but there was a complete silence over the neighborhood, except for the crickets. Porch-lights glowed through webs of oak tree branches, floating and swaying slowly in the air like amber-colored mandalas. Uncle Frank’s gaze stayed fixed on the small family of possums, leaning forward, mouth agape, as if he were awaiting some message, some dispatch from the time of the Tlacuache.
The conquest, as distant in the Mexican past as it is, runs through most of our Mexican American families like an active fault line. Some think of themselves as Mexican, but never Indio. Others think of themselves as Spanish. Among many Hispanos in the United States, this was often regarded as the preferred family origin. After all, Spaniards are European. My suburban upbringing, where Mexicans were still few, only had the effect of magnifying this divide. One cousin even went by the nickname “Sanka,” instead of Santos, for a while.
To be a child in San Antonio, dark-skinned, with a Latino surname, to be “Spanish,” was to be something other than a “Taco Bender,” a “Wetback,” or a “Greaser,” something other than poor, downtrodden, backward, and desolate, which is how Mexicans had been made to feel over our long history in Texas. Eventually, we took those feelings into the secret holds of our own hearts.
When I rode in my uncle Manuel’s 1954 pearl-colored, wing-finned Chevrolet, rumbling thunderously with its great, roaring mofle through the new, white neighborhood we lived in on the city’s north side, I ducked under the backseat window, fearful some of my new friends might see me in that hulking behemoth jalopy, which was very definitely an old Mexican’s car. I wasn’t ashamed of Uncle Manuel, but I knew the Anglo kids from my new public school did not understand the glories of these vehicles, decked with conjunto music radio, saints’ cards, dashboard religious statuary, and furry dice, and I was too young not to give a damn. For his part, Uncle Manuel was infinitely proud of his car.
At Mount Sacred Heart, the school where I had been before we moved to the new neighborhood, many of the kids were Mexicanos like me. When we took our First Communion, we had looked like campesinos in our pressed white suits and caramel brown skin. It hadn’t seemed odd that we were all Mexican since, although it was hardly ever hostile, segregation between whites and Mexicans was still common in San Antonio then.
Every year, during San Antonio’s annual Fiesta Week, the city celebrated the victory of the Texans over Mexico in the Battle of San Jacinto, known as the Battle of Flowers, the last battle in the war for Texas independence in 1836. We would be visited on the school grounds by the newly crowned King Antonio. He served as the regent for the two weeks of festivities and was elected from an exclusively white, century-old social organization in the city called The Cavaliers. We would all be assembled on both sides of a marching promenade as he was driven onto the campus in a polished powder blue Cadillac convertible.
With each year’s new king, I was always astounded at how white he looked, as if the skin of his face had been powdered with talcum. He was seated atop the backseat of the gleaming car, truly as a king would be, dressed in a military cap with a shiny patent leather visor, a turquoise and magenta military uniform, festooned with massive golden epaulets and braided roping, and a jaunty half cape slung over one shoulder. You could see that he was wearing shiny black equestrian boots that came all the way up to his knees. His driver held a microphone to his mouth, announcing, “Ladies and gentlemen, King Antonio, of the 1963 Battle of Flowers Fiesta!” From the slow-moving car, smiling distractedly, he would wave at us with one hand, tossing us gilded wooden nickels with his picture on them with the other.
One year, my friend Dennis Perez and I hatched a seditious plot to throw “speargrass” at King Antonio, to see if we could stick him as his car went slowly by, but we were caught after just a few attempts by the fearsome Sister Alfred Euthanasius and had to perform penance by staying after school, writing multiplication tables for weeks thereafter. But the struggle against the conquest was still alive.
I can remember feeling, since long ago, that my generation was destined to be the end of our ancient family lines. Maybe not in terms of offspring, but the end, once and for all, of that old life of rivers and ranchería, the life that began to ebb when we first left Mexico. Of knowing which stars were where and what that meant to rustling fields of corn. Of the Garcia knowledge of the strength of esoteric metal alloys by their timbre and weight. Of the smell of wild dove soup, con limón. Of freshly cooked menudo in the winter. Of all the properly starched collars and serious brown faces, dressed like Europeans for a wedding. Of the society of pecans and cabrito. Of river-cooled watermelon, eaten in a large circle of relations. Of the last of Mexico left inside of Texas.
We were born to begin the last chapter of a very old story.
It seemed conceivable when I was a kid that the whole world would end soon, as if the apocalypse we were taught about in catechism classes was going to erupt out of our south Texas dirt. The face of Jesus, with his crown of thorns, was reported to have appeared on a tortilla in Harlingen. At school, one of my friends showed me a picture of a woman in India who had been pregnant for fourteen months, and now the child inside her womb was reciting from the Koran daily and delivering strange prophecies of doom for the world.
My first-grade teacher at Mount Sacred Heart, Sister Alfred, a nun of the order of El Sagrado Corazón, showed our class a slide-show presentation about the visions of Mary at Fatima, Portugal, accompanied by a narration on a phonograph record. The faces of the three children who had seen the Virgin speaking to them out of a cloud looked as familiar as my cousins, their expressions warm but melancholic, with deep-set eyes. The eldest of the visionaries, Lucia, even had the surname dos Santos. But we all took notice when we learned that before their visions of the Mother of Jesus took place, the three were given Communion by an emissary angel, with hosts that dripped blood. The voice on the phonograph told how, during the six visions of Mary, which took place in 1917, she spoke to them of the World Wars of this century and warned humanity of the evil rise of a Great Bear of the East, which, we were told, was most assuredly the Holy Mother’s way of describing the godless communist Soviet Union. On the day of the last of the visions, in a wide valley near Fatima, thousands of onlookers were said to have seen the sun dance in the sky, and then it seemed to fall upon them.
I was frightened when Sister Alfred later spoke to us about the mysterious “third secret” of Fatima, a vision so horrible that Pope John XXIII was said to have collapsed after reading it, and it has remained hidden away in a Vatican vault since.
“They say it’s about the end of the world,” Sister Alfred added in a solemn whisper, as if she were sharing a company secret with us. “And, I will tell you, from my trip to Rome, there are only three more tombs for Popes underneath Saint Peter’s.”
Surely, I thought, the end of the world would come in our time.
Los Santos never wandered much once they settled in San Antonio. They never much needed or sought to know anything of the world that lay to the north of Elgin, east of Houston, west of Uvalde, in Texas, and south of Monclova, in Mexico.
“This is where I’m from, right here,” my father would say, surveying the live oak woods on the family’s small ranch just outside of San Antonio, near Pleasanton, Texas.
“This is the greatest place on the whole earth.”
I certainly couldn’t see any use in learning a language other than Spanish and English, thinking, if I didn’t become an astronaut, I, too, would always dwell in these same lands. Perhaps this was the family’s final migration. There had been stragglers among the Santos, vaguely remembered c
ircles of the family who had stayed behind, scattered throughout towns along the old pilgrimage route out of Mexico during the migrations of 1914. In Mexico, there were a few cousins in Nava, Cloete, Allende, along the main road, Carretera 57, and other relations had settled in towns along Highway 90, on the way to San Antonio. One family Uela used to visit had taken refuge in Villita Unión in Coahuila, just south of the border, eventually building an adobe house alongside a small stream, with financial help from my grandmother and her sister, Madrina Tomasa.
Another part of the tribe had remained in Hondo, in the country on the south Texas plains dotted with towns like Dhanis, Knippa, Sabinal, and Uvalde. Hondo is one of those Texas towns suspended in time—run through the middle by the highway. On one side are the railroad tracks and the bank, with a large painted sign reading BANK, a red-brick dry goods store, an old hotel. On the other side, a strip of gas stations, hardware stores, taco stands and barbecue joints, and the townspeople’s homes.
Those Santos of Hondo were meant to be ornery, even though many were the offspring of the wandering prankster José León, my abuelo’s half-brother, he of the great resounding oversized cowboy boots, who could keep everybody in the old house on Burr Road howling with laughter well into the night. Maybe he didn’t spend enough time with his children, always moving between the houses of his brothers and sisters in Texas and Mexico for long visits—and that ended up making them ornery.
With the passing years, the ones who had been left behind along the peregrinaje road were mainly rumored about, since even Aunt Connie, the “keeper of contact” within the Santos family, had long ago lost touch with them. But we were all from this place, this long narrow homeland of stragglers scattered along an old pilgrimage road that stretched from San Felipe de las Minas in the south, through Palaú and Múzquiz, Piedras Negras, and Eagle Pass, all the way north to San Antonio. If it wasn’t possible to ever fully know my grandfather’s story, there was still this road, connecting our present to our past, north to south, a current running in reverse. If San Antonio contained the fading remnant of Mexico, what was Mexico itself ?
9
Rain of Stones Lluvia de Piedras
You always know there is rain coming up in the mountains by the scent of wild oregano, suddenly suffusing the atmosphere with its pungent spice just before a storm. Lulled nearly to sleep by the long, slow trail climbing to the high ranch of Dr. Mata, the horses were startled by the first dry lightning flash that lit up the twilight sierra landscape around us. From the saddle, for just an instant in that already darkening hour, the large, silent green mountain, corrugated with ravines, was completely visible before us. Thick, stone-colored clouds hung so low they tore inseams along the giant maguey plants decking the peaks with their spear-shaped fronds.
The road into the Mata ranch in north Mexico had been washed out from recent heavy rains. We were going out to do a tally of the nearly four hundred head of cattle, some of which had reportedly been lost in flash floods through distant mountain pastures. We were also carrying supplies for the vaquero, lashed to a burro laden with food and provisions. We had been riding all day. My cousin Chickee from San Antonio was along on the journey. My friend Abrán Mata, son to Dr. Mata, a dear friend of my father’s, was leading the way into his family’s remote Coahuila spread. Don Tiburcio, the vaquero from the Mata ranch, was tending the burro tied to the horn of his saddle.
This was the same wilderness that had surrounded my ancestors before their journey north. By then, I was a university student, studying philosophy and literature, but I came back to the Coahuila ranches on spring breaks and during the summer, to help with roundups, to mend waterworks, to clear pastures for grazing, and to write. The Mata ranch was farther out on the Mexican sierra road to Boquillas del Carmen, and higher into the mountains than the Rancho Los Generales, beyond telephone lines and the long reach of the smog from the coal mines in Nueva Rosita and Palaú. The farther out we went along that trail, the further back in time the horses seemed to be taking us.
Rains that heavy were unusual in Coahuila. The night before, the vaqueros at the ranch we stayed at had spoken about how the rains had come as a result of a spell cast by la Diosa de Maguey, “the Goddess of the Maguey,” a sinewy blue-green Mexican cactus that grows to the size of a truck and mixes into the sierra in Coahuila alongside stands of ponderosa pines and juniper trees. Meticulously picking mites out of the flour we would use to make our tortillas, the vaquero, Tiburcio, insisted that the rains were the work of a goddess, “La Colorada,” as he called her, who had a reputation for appearing as a beautiful woman to vaqueros in the mountains, then seducing them, never to be seen again by their families.
“All the magueys were drying up after this winter, and she brought the water to save them. She didn’t care about the rest of us up here, though. She probably wishes we’d all go away. We just have to take it, I guess.”
Later, after dinner and shots of warm brandy, Tiburcio’s bronco-loud snores, carrying the sound of some doleful animal plaint, had made it impossible for any of the rest of us to sleep, and I sat on the patio, covered in a blanket, counting the shimmering satellites arcing periodically overhead, anxious for the first flares of dawn. In the moonlight, the steam of the horses’ breath passed like luminous clouds into the pasture. Tied up in a small corral nearby, they shifted nervously from hoof to hoof all night long.
The next day, after eight hours on the trail, the clouds that had been gathering along the mountainside since midafternoon began to unleash their sheets of cold, gusting rains. The winds ripped through the pastures, shaking and bending back the trees, as if they were reeds, rumbling the earth with a booming roar of thunder that came from all directions.
“I told you she didn’t want us out here!” Tiburcio shouted back to the rest of us, barely audible over the rising tempest and the din of the raindrops hitting our ponchos. The burro, wide-eyed and braying for mercy, was becoming frantic in the bustle of the flashes, the lashing rain, the flying leaves and branches, nearly pulling off Tiburcio’s saddle in an effort to run in any direction for shelter.
Terrified and bucking wildly, the burro had to be tied to a mesquite tree in a clearing and all the supplies, including meat, flour, and sugar, covered in several layers of oily canvas tarpaulins. Except for fruit and potatoes in our packs, we had no other food, but it was more important to reach the shelter of the ranch, and we could return for the provisions the next morning.
As we climbed the final mountain approach to the ranch, the horses stumbled to find their footing in the rocky terrain of the ravine. I could hear the rattling steps of the horses of Chickee, Abrán, and Tiburcio further on, looking for the trail that would take us down the other side. When the lightning flashed again in one great phosphorescent hoop across the sierra, we were already at the summit of the hill. Far below, in an expansive valley the colors of jade and wet sand, I saw the small ranch house that was our destination. Near the house there were corrals. A small river wound through the landscape, glistening in the fulminating light of the storm.
As we began our climb down, the red mare I had been riding all day began to grouse under my weight, whinnying so loudly in the tumult of the downpour she drew bothered retorts from the other horses. Wrapped in darkness, leaning way back in the saddle to compensate for the hillside’s angle of descent, I felt every step strike the earth like a chime, finding for a moment some quiet refuge from the driving tormenta.
We had been descending for nearly an hour, heavy rain still falling, though by then the lightning had left off, making the ride a blind crawl. Having lost track of my companions, wondering how close we were by then to the valley floor, I tightened the reins to slow us down on a path of loose rocks. I felt the mare take one long step, then, before I could draw her back, another, into open air. As the hind legs left the earth behind us, I leaned forward, gripping the wet, warm fur of her neck, reins flying like streamers. Too breathless to let out a scream, the two of us plunged even deeper into th
e inky Coahuila night.
On my mother’s side, the Lopez and the Velas were from the small town of Cotulla, in south Texas. On Sundays, before Grandfather Leonides’s death, the families would join his brothers José and Blas, and take all the relatives out to a small ranch, a granjita, outside of town where a great lunch of barbecued goat was already being prepared. The closeness of the rancho, the size of the town, at under a thousand families, nestled Cotulla in a time that felt unchanging, and well away from the locomotion and bustle of the American cities.
After my grandfather Leonides’s death there in 1935, Grandmother moved her family to San Antonio for the schools, and to be closer to her sister, Fermina. In San Antonio, by then already a large city, no one knew her. She walked down Houston Street unnoticed by the myriad pedestrians, a widow from one of the oldest Mexican families in Texas, the Velas from Mier—now become invisible. In Cotulla she was widely known and deferred to throughout the town as Doña Leandra, the wife of Don Leonides, the grocer who always wore a suit. She hated being called Señora Lopez.
The Norteños of the family, the Santos and Garcias of north Mexico, always claimed to be ready to move back to the countryside, with a little land to farm, maybe a few head of cattle, but always delaying, always longing perhaps, but never really planning to leave San Antonio, ever. Instead, most weekends we retired to the ranches and the creeks, the rivers and the pastures surrounding San Antonio.
Paradise, for many Norteños, would be a modest ranch, even a dry, scrubby little piece of sandy land like the Pleasanton ranchito, to settle on for eternity. You hear this life sung about and celebrated, sweetly, bitterly, in Tex-Mex corridos, and ranchero music of north Mexico, and in the glossy, new Day-Glo Mexican colors of popular Tejano music. What is left of the ranchero life of south Texas and north Mexico is as old as the New World itself, no matter what its trappings today. Out of its origins in the fierce horsemanship of the Españoles, and the Indians’ knowledge of the terrain, a whole civilization emerged, built with mesquite, leather, rope, corrugated tin, and an infinitude of barbed wire.
Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation Page 16