Her father would be dead the next year in Sonora, on his way to the U.S. The gangrene began in his foot and slowly crept up his body like endless tendrils of a seed. They told him not to go, but he would not listen. For generations, one thing was clear; the men in my family seemed experts at ignoring the warnings of the women.
*
Amá’s earliest memory of her mother, whom we called Amá Julia, is of them sitting beneath the same tree outside the courtyard walls of that same ranch, La Loma. Her mother wrapped her in a shawl and they sat huddled together on a rock, listening to the birds roosting for the evening in the trees. It was the evening chorus that makes birds feel as if they are as large as their songs carried over the valley, announcing themselves, saying “I’m still here,” as if there were any doubt about it. The stars were innumerable and soon the night would fall with its absolute darkness, because no one had electricity up on the mountain. It was so dark that everything seemed to be on fire when even the slightest light from the sun emerged in the morning, as if by noon it would all be burned to the ground. Amá said that never again were there as many stars in her life.
When the news came that her husband Jesús died, Amá Julia and her seven children all wore black dresses for six months as a rite of mourning. Julia, the new widow, turned every single picture of Jesús hanging on the walls around so that his face looked away—his head pushed against the cool adobe clay. The frames stayed that way until her own death many years later. My mother’s entire time in that house was spent looking at the backs of frames. Neither she nor any of her sisters were ever allowed to turn them over to see what their father looked like. They were obedient; these were traditions of the past, not to be trifled with.
*
In his final years, Jesús drank himself into debt. When he ran out of money, he used the land he inherited as collateral. It was said that he would give an entire plot of land in exchange for a bottle of tequila. All he had left to trade was the ranch of La Loma, but he died before he could sell it. Amá Julia worked the rest of her life sewing dresses, selling her cattle’s offspring, and growing corn to pay off his debt. She never remarried. She said she didn’t want another man living in her house because she had too many beautiful daughters.
Years after Amá Julia’s death, when they were certain her spirit would forgive them, the family finally decided to turn the pictures on the wall over. They mailed the pictures to the U.S., and for the first time since she was four, Amá saw her father’s face. All those years she had dreamed of him and what he might look like. All those years that his face was just a smudge in her memory left her feeling guilty, guilty that she remembered a useless piece of cloth and a meaningless whistle instead of her father’s face. And all those years he was right there, pushed against the wall, looking away.
Although she doesn’t drink, Amá admits that she likes the smell of tequila. Like their father too, her sisters like to smoke now and then as they sit around a table playing cards, taking small sips of mezcal, raising a cup to their father, who now looks straight at them, hanging from the wall above their heads.
2.
On the plane, I wondered if there was an exact point when we were no longer in one country and inside another, or if there was ever a moment when I occupied no country. If ever that was possible, it was possible up in the air. There was no clear correlation between what was happening down below and up above. I had heard that at the official port of entry there were turnstiles, just like the subway, ushering the travelers forward. If such turnstiles existed, you could map the precise moment when half of your body was here and the other half was there. I could measure; all I wanted was that little gold stamp that said I clicked past onto the other side, I entered, I returned, I was measured, counted for, recorded.
Would a sudden coldness come over us when our bodies moved over the actual line of the border? Wasn’t that how loneliness began, with the coldness of our bodies?
[First Movement Before Me as Salt]
Amá Julia poured salt into the shapes of crosses at the edges of her fields to save the crops and protect them from evil—whispering a soft prayer beneath her breath.
I imagine her in a long wool rebozo during the rainy season, walking out across a damp meadow in the morning, with a small bag of salt in one hand and a rosary in the other. One part of her religion was as ancient as olives or bells, not written in any biblical text. It was meant to save her seven children from hunger.
Amá, too young to work, walked through the damp field with no shoes, the soft dirt parting beneath her soles. The only sounds came from a distant wind, the earth muffling her steps as she counted seeds in her hand. It’s not possible to imagine any other sound in that moment. The sisters could go days without talking up on that mountain, without hearing anything louder than a bird’s call. And sometimes, Amá said, the air was so thick and heavy that it smothered even the bird’s songs, so much so that you felt like you were walking underwater—your clothes and your shoes weighed you down to the earth by the stillness. She said you could feel the penetrating silence on your clothes, as if it was something you could wash away, or something you could carry with you far away into another country. And my mother did carry it around like a glove that had no pair because her silence always felt like it was missing something. How I wished I could go even one day without uttering a single sound.
Perhaps the only sound was that of Amá Julia, shaking salt at the edge of the field, salt falling over her like snow, glittering in the air. So much salt that the crops no longer grew in the fallow corner. So much salt that they didn’t even resemble crosses anymore, just small white mounds broken only by her dark wool dress dragging behind her in the morning breeze—her thin lips mumbling a soft prayer through her teeth. Eventually her children would go north and leave her. They would be back with their own stories and their own children, with their own silences, some of whom she would never meet in this life.
3.
When I developed black-and-white photos in my high school art class, I erased all the grayness from their resolution because I believed you didn’t need gradients to understand an image. I believed in black and white and nothing else. I won an award because even though I deformed the images beyond recognition, people could still see through them and understand them. I wanted someone to look at them and know what they were looking at despite everything I had done. Everything was either light or it was a tree.
You were either in one country or you were in another, there was no in between. Black and white. I had no patience for gray.
There was nothing I could do to stop the plane from charging forward. It felt like we were going too fast, I was afraid I would miss the moment we would officially cross over. The border existed both outside me as well as within. I smiled at the flight attendant, who smiled back, I ate my wife’s Biscoff, and I pressed my face to the window.
[First Movement Before Me as Myth and Knife]
During a storm, my Amá Julia lifted her hands high and made the sign of the cross in the air with a knife. Before her time, her mother Josefina, whom they called Pepa, used to make the sign of the cross with a child and recite the Magnificat until the storm subsided. “My soul magnifies the Lord . . . Because he has regarded the lowliness of his handmaid . . .”
The child would die in the process of the prayer, but the crops would be saved. It was the price to be paid to save an entire family, or perhaps even all of the ranches on the mountain. It was the price paid to avoid hunger. Maybe that’s just what they told themselves, that the child died from the curse, not wanting to say that it died because it went hungry.
4.
When I came undocumented to the U.S., I crossed into a threshold of invisibility. Every act of living became an act of trying to remain visible. I was negotiating a simultaneous absence and presence that was begun by the act of my displacement: I am trying to dissect the moment of my erasure. I tried to remain seen for those whom I desired to be seen by, and I wanted to be invi
sible to everyone else. Or maybe I was trying to control who remembered me and who forgot me. But I couldn’t control what someone else saw in me, only persuade them that it was an illusion. There were things that I could not hide, things that would come out of me and expose me in my most vulnerable moments. It was my skin, my dark hair, my cheekbones, that I swore would give me away. I was afraid of the way I walked. It was easy to imagine being hit by a car, because even if they didn’t see me, I would for once be able to feel my body as more than smoke.
[First Movement Before Me as the Blood Moon]
Amá Julia believed that if a woman was expecting a child, she should not go outside during an eclipse and should stay away from the windows—lock herself up. She had to wear red underwear or at least something red on her and safety pins on her body.
When a child died, they never said it died, they said it was stolen. The ocean took her, the moon took her, or a witch who was jealous took her.
To prevent such thefts, the mothers wore red to fool the moon into believing they were dead or that they had miscarried. They stayed indoors and lay still to mimic their own death, since it was common for the newly dead to remain in the house longer than it is today. They needed at least nine days for the novenario.
*
Death was different then. It was something they allowed into their house. It was something they touched. The objects they placed on top of the soul-less bodies during the wake carried tremendous weight, almost as if to say “This will keep you down, this will keep you away.”
The safety pins on the pregnant woman needed to be large, as if they were knives, the instruments of the mother’s death. It was an act, it was theatrical, they needed to be seen. They put on a show for the spirits, for the moon, hoping to convince them that the child wasn’t worth their time, that it was already stolen, that someone had beaten them to it, to move on to another—like the blood smeared over the door of the Israelites to protect their firstborn.
It was all for the sake of the visible, of things of this world, of things that with enough time could be holy to some. It was precisely the belief that ordinary things could be considered holy that bothered Amá. So she left the Catholic Church because her prayers could no longer be to a saint incarnate—to the statue of that saint, its physicality. The divine needed to be more than something standing before her, something she couldn’t see, something she couldn’t have the language for, something she couldn’t even imagine or have a name for. Some people want physical proof of God; they want to see him just like they see their neighbor, in order to believe. But not my mother. She wanted a God who, like her, could hide in plain sight.
Maybe my mother didn’t trust this world and the relics and saints of the world, however holy they may have appeared to be, to carry her message to God. But if it wasn’t for things right in front of us, mediating our contact with God—the saints, the crosses, rosaries, and flowers—could our eyes stand such brightness? “I am that I am,” God said to Moses when Moses asked how would the people believe him without proof, without something visible to show? My mother wanted Yahweh, the only substitute we have as the name too sacred to be spoken for, denoted by the empty space between the cherubs atop the ark of the covenant.
But if it wasn’t for the blood, how would we know we were hurt? How would we know we were dying?
5.
I started to become undone, like a loosely coiled ball of yarn that was bound to come apart eventually. I felt like neither the U.S. nor Mexico wanted me and that I was between two opposing magnets and one was pushing harder than the other—my chest heavy beneath their weight. The U.S. was winning. How appropriate it would have been to die six miles in the sky with Rubi next to me—no footings on earth, a citizen of no country. How happy that would have made me.
I didn’t want to find a home. What I wanted was an origin, which was different than home, to look and see if that origin had a shape, or if I could give it one. If I was not welcome in the country of my birth, I would be okay. I was used to that feeling. What I could not withstand was never finding that from which everything of me came from. Up until that point, I had only heard stories, legends, and myths of my family’s past and what life was like on that mountain. I wanted something else that felt more real because I didn’t trust my imagination enough to fill in the gaps.
If only I could have jumped in the air inside the plane until not even my body was touching the plane and hold still there for hours. I wanted nothing to touch me—to know what it felt like to be untethered.
*
I knew that I was supposed to be grateful to be able to go back because only two other siblings had been able to see him, each a few times in the course of ten years. I knew that there were countless others who would kill for even just a day to be able to come back to see their father. It was a story I knew too well: Be grateful. Rubi held my hand and leaned her head on my shoulder. She had never been to Zacatecas, and even though I was born there, it would be as if we were both seeing everything for the first time. We didn’t talk much for the duration of the flight, we just stared out the window, looking at the landscape below. Being in the air, seemingly motionless, made me believe that I would actually attain it, that I would actually feel the moment we stepped over.
I needed to go to the place of my mother’s birth, the house where she was brought into this world, the ranch of La Loma on that mountain where she played her radio late at night on the roof. Yes, it was selfish to only want to return for my own needs, but I wasn’t done with the past. I could already feel the threads starting to unravel. What would be left of me when they all disappeared?
It was there, in La Loma, that I thought I could feel safe enough to uncoil what I had spent years wrapping tight around me. I had hid so much of myself through behaviors foreign to me, that I started to think those facades were in fact [me]. My whole life was an act, and it started to feel like a joke. I was a walking one-act play. I was tired because I had lost a sense of reality, a sense of who and what I was put on this earth to be. If in that moment at La Loma I became undone, I might be able to replace the center with something, to put something there and begin to wrap and coil myself together again. Maybe then I would be able to start a new life as myself all over again, the self that stayed behind when we migrated twenty years ago. I was returning to look for a five-year-old version of me, to tell him to stop, to hold him and tell him that things would be okay.
In a moment of great despair, I had tried to do this in California, but I soon found that the land, the country that is America, the foreignness of it, even if it was all I had ever known, would end me. Going to La Loma was the only way I could unravel and return to the world of the living. It happened when I was young, I wandered in the woods of the Sierra Nevada in the warmth of the summer, when the small mountain flowers and mule’s ear sprouts were lush. I tried to open, I yelled and yelled and sang and chanted, but even the warm breeze felt like knives to an exposed nerve. And a few years later, I came close to that disentanglement again, but again there was nothing for me to hold on to, nothing of substance to replace the center, so I buckled up and tried to drive my car into the river. I didn’t want to come back. And once this feeling of emptiness at my core started, it wouldn’t go away. It was too late and it felt like I was becoming smaller day by day, unthreading, I could feel how much of myself I left behind everywhere I went. I was almost reveling in it because I felt it as a kind of ecstasy—parts of myself scattered over an entire landscape. A little of me here, a little of me there. My anxiety no longer mattered, my sadness, my invisibility, and my hopelessness felt foreign to me, which is to say, they were inconsequential. I withdrew and let the world move my body without me, I tumbled like dried grass. I didn’t have anything like La Loma, with its thick walls built by my ancestors, to bring me back to reality. No semblance of permanence.
All I wanted was something to hold on to.
If I reached La Loma, I would replace the end of my thread at the center of me w
ith a rock tucked close to my body, something heavy enough to keep me from moving—an anchor—one of those porous volcanic rocks that were found on my mother’s mountain, and in my head I said it as if it actually belonged to her, “My mother’s mountain . . . my mother’s mountain.”
We were always moving; I wanted to stay still for once.
*
I was going to take back what was stolen from me. My childhood was stolen, I had no memory of it whatsoever. It wasn’t my choice to forget; there were things my mind decided were best I didn’t remember. Maybe if I touched the places where I (and those who came before me in my family) were born, then something would come back to me. I couldn’t remember being seven, or nine, or eleven. If I started the journey again, to go to Mexico only to migrate out of Mexico again, maybe it would be like living my life again moment by moment.
It needed to be a rock, it needed to come from the earth, because the idea of place had always evaded me. The places I inhabited were always tied to some kind of origin, but it was always an origin that I was never able to access. In the act of immigrating, I was always looking for what I had lost, perhaps forever. And so part of me, even a microscopic part, was always looking back.
Children of the Land Page 2