THERE WAS SUN AND MORE sun and all sun and only sun and slowly the sun began to cook her. Her organs roasted inside her. Intestines. Liver. Kidneys. Heart.
What did she think when she collapsed to the ground, when she rolled on her back in surrender?
Who will take care of my family now?
Will someone find me before the animals do?
Where is this Houston a few miles away?
SACRED HEART BURIAL PARK is on the outskirts of Falfurrias. Take Travis Street west until it becomes Cemetery Road and keep going until a burnt-orange brick gate appears beneath the mesquite. Even from a distance, you can tell that Tejanos are buried here. It is awash in color, with far more flamboyant floral displays than you ever see in gringo graveyards. It also has fresher mounds.
After visiting Elizondo Mortuary, I drive an hour and a half north to this graveyard, then slowly tour through it. Gradually the marble tombstones give way to granite markers, handmade wooden crosses, and then plastic flowers sprouting from the dirt. I park the car and step out. Here, on a parched strip of land, is where unidentified immigrants get buried, beneath tiny markers that seem to have been fashioned out of tin cans. Rather than names, they list numbers: Unknown Female, 436663. Male Unknown, 417654. Male 90709 Sep 7 09 Poco Grande Ranch. They form haphazard rows, just inches from each other, with a fake daisy for adornment tied with a purple ribbon.
Chances are, this is where the woman in the woods got buried, her LG cell phone and twenty-eight dollars sealed in a Ziploc bag beside her. Undocumented when she was found, she has plenty of papers now. A death certificate. An Electronic Death Registration number. All buried in a particleboard coffin, six feet down.
That’s the best-case scenario, anyway. In just a few months, visiting forensic anthropologists from Baylor University and the University of Indianapolis will discover body upon body crammed inside these barely marked graves of Sacred Heart Burial Park—up to five deep. Some corpses won’t even have rated coffins but will have been rolled instead in blankets or stuffed in body bags, burlap bags, kitchen trash bags, or even shopping bags. Many of the remains will not have been identified or their DNA samples obtained, despite state laws requiring otherwise. The anthropologists—headed by Dr. Lori Baker of Baylor University in Waco, Texas—will quickly act to change that.7 Beginning in May 2013, bodies will cease being sent to Elizondo Mortuary for processing and will instead be transported to Webb County Medical Office for DNA analysis before moving on to Baker’s lab to await identification.8
In 2014, a widely publicized investigation by the Texas Rangers of the Texas Department of Public Safety will ensue, and all parties involved—from law enforcement to funeral home directors (including the Elizondos)—will plead a lack of funding, personnel, and resources as their defense. No criminal charges will be filed. In 2015, the Texas Observer will publish an in-depth critique of that investigation citing “rampant violations” of the law by all of the parties cleared by the Rangers. In addition to failures in securing autopsies9 or DNA samples and egregious burial practices, reporter John Carlos Frey will discover that Funeraria del Angel Howard-Williams, the funeral home that recovers the bodies from the ranches, was charging Brooks County $145 per body bag—despite the fact that body bags generally run about $30 apiece and that many of the remains were buried in bags that cost a few dollars if not a few pennies each.
On this brisk afternoon in January 2013, however, there are no Texas Rangers or forensic anthropologists or other reporters in sight. There’s only me, walking among the graves in hopes of finding one with the same death date as the woman in the woods. There are no maps for this cemetery, no records whatsoever of who is buried where. I spend an hour bending over the flimsy markers, reading the many labels, searching for a trace of her. Yet I find only ribbons wrapped around fake flowers, blowing in the wind.
NOTES
1. While awaiting deportation from the United States, many immigrants are held for weeks if not months in a network of more than 250 detention centers that are often owned and operated by private companies like Halliburton in isolated stretches of the country. Even the “better” centers are equipped with not-enough blankets, inedible food, overhead lighting that wards off sleep, and pneumonia-inducing air conditioning. In the worst, immigrants must also fend off physically and sexually abusive guards—and unlike in the criminal justice system, immigration detainees have no guaranteed right to a lawyer. To learn more, watch Maria Hinojosa’s Frontline exposé “Lost in Detention,” which aired on PBS in 2011.
2. Between 2011 and 2014, Durham found seven dead immigrants on the ranch—so many that, with the help of the South Texas Human Rights Center, he started setting up water stations across the property.
3. In their book, Forgotten Dead, historians William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb document 547 cases of mobs lynching Mexicans from 1848 to 1928, not only in the Southwest but also in states like Nebraska and Wyoming. Many became public spectacles with crowds of thousands watching.
4. Named after the Texas town in which it was supposedly conceived, the Plan de San Diego manifesto was written by Mexican rebels and advocated the killing of white males over sixteen and the overthrow of U.S. rule in the Southwest. While 21 whites are believed to have died in the raids it incited, historians estimate that between 300 and 5,000 people of Mexican descent got killed in retaliation. Subsequent racial tension induced a Jim Crow–style segregation that restricted the voting rights and educational opportunities of Tejanos, despite their U.S. citizenship. It also inspired the founding of groups like the League of United Latin American Citizens and, decades later, the Chicano Civil Rights Movement.
5. Professors John Morán González, Trinidad Gonzales, Sonia Hernández, Benjamin Johnson, and Monica Muñoz Martinez commemorated the centennial of this little-known history by launching a multifaceted project called “Refusing to Forget” that included an exhibit at the Bullock Texas State History Museum, just a few blocks from the capitol, in the spring of 2016. The media called it the state’s first official acknowledgment of this troubled past. Learn more at www.refusingtoforget.org.
6. Though I wasn’t aware of it at the time of this reporting, civil rights groups in South Texas were already pressuring Brooks County to send the bodies to the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification instead, as it conducts DNA testing free for law enforcement, plus has a computerized database system (as opposed to Post-it notes). Autopsies and DNA samples for unidentified persons are actually required by state law, but Brooks County hadn’t been obtaining either due to its lack of resources. It is unclear whether the Elizondos were aware of this law when they started processing bodies for the county.
7. Since the fall of 2012, Dr. Lori Baker and her students have recovered 168 bodies from Sacred Heart Burial Park and local funeral homes and transported them back to Baylor University. There, the team submits DNA samples to a national database called Codis, sends biological profiles to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, cleans each set of remains by hand, preserves everything in meticulously labeled boxes, and then stores the boxes on a shelf to wait for identification. “It looks like a mass disaster in here, with body bags everywhere,” Baker says when I reach her by phone at her lab. “I am Catholic, as are most of the people who cross over, so I’ve had Catholic priests come in to bless the lab and the bodies and the students, so that at least we can tell the families something respectful is being done for their loved ones.”
8. As of September 2015, two bodies have been conclusively identified and sent back to their families, and a third one seems imminent, thanks to Baker’s efforts.
9. Of the seventy-two autopsies ordered by Brooks County between 2007 and 2013, the Texas Observer obtained fifty-eight reports under the Texas Public Information Act. Frey describes the reports as “scattershot at best,” often lacking critical data such as bone measurements, specificity about distinguishing teeth features such as cavities, and photographs, all of which are part of s
tandard forensic procedure.
10
The Healing
STORIES HAVE A WEIGHT UNTO THEMSELVES. IMMERSING YOURSELF in the heavier ones can feel like drowning. Some writers I know drink because of this, as a way of relieving vicarious suffering. I tend to harbor too much guilt to allow such indulgence—it didn’t happen to me; I have no right to grieve—but what is the appropriate reaction to witnessing the pain of others? Writing about it only shares the tragedy. Yet it is my instinctive response.
Another is ceremony. One night in Corpus, a friend builds a fire in her backyard and invites everyone over to burn what they must release. We toss old letters into the flames, a stressful bank statement, a medical diagnosis, the shirt of an ex-lover, and—for me—difficult pages from a notebook. A story is told with every toss. Another night, someone suggests gathering at the beach. Huddled on the sand, we each share something that the waves carry away—a song, a poem, a sadness. I have found few forces as redemptive as ritual, and because of that, I try to be open to the practices of others. Who knows where they might lead you?
Like now. It’s another day, another dinner party, another gathering at Santa Barraza’s ranch. As Greg and I enter her kitchen, warm and fragrant with the smell of roasting chicken, I am delighted to see Homero Vera seated at the table. A self-taught historian, he directs the Kenedy Ranch Museum in Sarita and is my favorite source of local lore.
Before Santa has even sliced the chicken, the tales are flying. First up is Homero. His wife, Letty, recently attended a spiritual meeting sponsored by a group called America Needs Fatima. After screening a disturbing film about Nazi Germany (“to make them feel bad,” Homero conjectures), the speaker hauled out a four-foot statue of the Virgin Mary and asked for donations. Finding the experience rather distasteful, Letty left before the hostess even served the cake. When she opened her cell phone to check her messages, she found La Virgen de Guadalupe there, glittering across the screen.
“La Virgen de Guadalupe?” I interrupt.
“Yes, La Virgen,” he says. “So she called me up and said, ‘You’re not going to believe this, but La Virgen de Guadalupe is on my phone.’”
“La Virgen?” I ask again, glancing over at her portrait on Santa’s wall.
“Yes, La Virgen.”
Letty sped home to show him. They decided to return to the gathering in case the America Needs Fatima rep had something to do with it. He casually examined the phone and said, “So, she is with you, too.”
“Just like that!” Homero says. “He didn’t think nothing of it.”
Homero and Letty climbed back in their truck and started driving home. Homero wanted to consult their priest, but Letty said no, it was getting late, they should wait for morning. No sooner did they resolve this than their priest came cruising down the highway. They followed him home and showed him the phone.
“He said, ‘You’re blessed. That’s how she presents herself.’”
“La Virgen de Guadalupe,” I say softly.
“Yes, La Virgen.”
“Is she still there?”
“Yes. Only now, you have to open the phone real quick to see her. Then she fades away. Usually she’s on the right-hand side, but she has also appeared on the left, as a double.”
“She moves around?”
“Yes,” he says, spearing a piece of chicken.
I ask to see her, pero no. Letty is in Mexico City, visiting her ailing mother, and took the cell phone with her.
Sensing my disappointment, Santa says, if you really want to see La Virgencita, go to Robstown. She appeared at St. Anthony’s Catholic Church years ago, when a maintenance crew pulled up the carpet in the pulpit. Mass starts in an hour. If you hurry with that chicken, you’ll make it.
“A LITTLE LATE, WEREN’T YOU?”
An elderly deacon stands by the chapel doors, hands on hips, blocking our exit. It’s true: Greg and I didn’t arrive until the parishioners had already lined up for communion. We barely caught ten minutes of Mass.
“We drove all the way from Kingsville,” I say in our defense.
“It’s not that far,” he snaps, then peers over at Greg. “Remove your cap, son.”
“We heard that La Virgen de Guadalupe … uh … is here?”
“Ah,” he says, then turns on his heels and pushes through the doors, muttering, “Where is she where is she where is she?” He pauses at the altar near the entrance. “Ah, yes. Here she is.”
Beneath the statue of a saint adorned with milagros1 is a large wooden frame the color of honey. Through its glass, I can make out an image on a panel of wood—dark and oblong, with a vaguely feminine shape.
“Here are her shoulders,” says the deacon, pointing toward the top of the image, “and there’s her veil,” he adds, sweeping his hand down and out. “And here are the rays.” Balling his fists near the center of the image, he makes jazz hands and moves them outward, as if mimicking emanating light. “We found her when the carpet got pulled beneath the tabernacle.”
“And then what happened?”
He looks at me sideways. “We put her in the frame.”
“I mean, what happened of significance?”
He shrugs. “I’ve seen this before. Our Blessed Mother appears on grain silos out here.”
I try again: “What do you think La Virgen is trying to tell us?”
“The same as her last words in Scripture: ‘Do everything he tells you.’” With that, the deacon heads back into the vestibule, his white robe rippling behind him.
An elder in a red windbreaker grips a ring of keys, waiting for Greg and me to leave so that he can lock up for the night. I ask if he sees La Virgen inside the frame.
“Not really,” he says. “To some people, she is there, but not to me.”
I glance over at Greg. He’s thinking what I am: We should have stayed at Santa’s.
Then he continues: “The real Virgen was at my house.”
“Excuse me?”
“She was at my house, La Virgen.”
“Oh? When was that?”
“Pues, it was real late at night, maybe one or two. She was kneeling at my altar in the living room, in the corner.”
“Did she say anything?”
“She told me to pray the rosary every day. And I do.”
“Why do you think Robstown is so … blessed by La Virgen?”
“There are a lot of believers here,” he says, his oystery eyes wistful. “One night, I had this dream that I woke up and looked to my ceiling but there was no roof, just the sky, a beautiful blue full of stars, and then I saw the Virgin Mary in the sky, just from the waist up, and then a few seconds later, Jesus appeared, Jesus Christ, and he pushed her down, so that I could see him.”
Smiling to himself, he jingles his keys, signaling it’s time to leave.
SANTA CALLS AS WE DRIVE BACK TO CORPUS. Did you see her? Did you see La Virgencita?
I can’t say that I did—not because she wasn’t there, but because I was so busy asking questions, I forgot to really look. I don’t want to admit this to Santa, though, because La Virgen de Guadalupe is profoundly significant to her. Twenty years ago, while still teaching at Penn State, she once spent a late night at her studio, preparing a painting of La Virgen for an upcoming show. Suddenly, she was overcome by a sadness so consuming, she called her daughter to ensure everything was all right. Unable to regain focus, she went home to try and sleep it off. Santa’s sister called early the next morning to say that their mother had died of a heart attack, right about the time Santa had spontaneously started grieving. Santa stopped at her studio to check on the painting en route to the airport and realized that the face she had given La Virgen was her mother’s. What’s more, she had painted a bleeding heart inside La Virgen’s chest.
I am also reluctant to admit my failure to see La Virgen because it feels like an indictment of my identity. As Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes once said, “One may no longer consider himself a Christian, but you cannot truly be considered a
Mexican unless you believe in the Virgin of Guadalupe.” She has been making public appearances since December 1531, when she surprised a campesino named Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin by springing up beside him on a hilltop near Mexico City. She asked him to convince the local bishop to build her a shrine and—as proof of their encounter—filled his arms with red roses (a miracle, since it was winter). Juan Diego raced down the hill, pounded on the bishop’s door, and opened his cloak to show him the roses. The bishop was far more struck by the image of La Virgen emblazoned on his cloak, her skin as brown as theirs.2
Ever since declaring myself a Chicana in college, I’ve been plastering La Virgen de Guadalupe on my bedroom wall and magnetizing her to my refrigerator. I light candles to her at my desk whenever I begin a new project. I’ve even made a pilgrimage to her famous cloak hanging in La Villa basilica in Mexico City. But is honoring her the same as believing in her? I want it to be as badly as I don’t—and for that sentiment to make any kind of sense, I must defer to our great sage Edward James Olmos, who spoke every Chicanos’ truth in the movie Selena when he griped about the existential dilemma of having to be “more Mexican than the Mexicans and more American than the Americans, both at the same time!”
Interpreting my silence as a no, Santa has a suggestion. “If you really want to learn about La Virgencita,” she says, “you must meet Gilbert and Berta. They make their living filming weddings and quinceañeras, but what they’re really doing is creating a documentary about miracles. Here’s their number.”
IT’S JUST BEFORE NOON when Greg and I pull into Robstown. An elder sells grapefruit out of his truck bed. Two women hawk blankets in a vacant lot. A yard sign says CATHOLICS COMING SOON! We pass Mr. J’s Drivers Ed and Barrera’s Fried Chicken (ONE BITE … AND WE GOT YOU!) before parking between a monster truck and a rusty El Camino. Taqueria Jalisco is bustling with parties of six or more. Patrons wear rump-sculpting jeans and bandannas or cowboy hats. With forks and rolled tortillas, they mow trails through heaps of enchiladas, tacos, tamales, rice, and refried beans smothered in neon cheese. Wherever I turn, I see images of Jesus—upon the walls, tattooed along men’s forearms, dangling inside ladies’ cleavage.
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