still here/week 1
1. we’re still here
nearly a week now roaming southern Colorado and northern New Mexico with my mom, her birthplace, her mother’s birthplace, her grandmother’s birthplace, a line of women stretching back more than a hundred years—at least—as far as we can trace.
nearly a week now I have been a documentation machine.
little poetry or metaphor, these words are not really ready, this is just an outline, a skeleton, before too much dissipates. this is an approximation for the time being, notes before I forget too much in this flood of experience—
—information overload, taking everything in, recording audio, recording video, taking photographs, listening, observing, trying to empty myself to make room—too much to process—faces, languages, texts, signs, emotions, rumors, chismes, innuendos, old family histories, new family dynamics—
in the motel in Durango, I sit on the edge of my bed and dig away bloody bits of flesh around an ingrown toenail that refuses to heal; my mother insists on sitting across from me and directing me how to tend to the wound, even though I tell her to let me be with my gross, bloody toe.
Later, we stand on Ute land while our Ute spiritual/park tour guide, Ricky Hayes, repeats a mantra disguised in tour-guide speak, an incantation, we are the generation, we are the ones who will save it or let it perish for our children and grandchildren. He shapes his words around the space and geography of the Ute Mountain Utes’ reservation side of Mesa Verde park, his narrative circles back on itself, circles back around the parameters of this place, connects to thousand-year-old pictographs, trails behind him in the dust of his big white tour van while we follow, my mom driving. We stop at spots and follow Ricky up small paths where he continues his narrative, circling back again, grandmother spider, solstice markers, prophecies, history, the twins maintaining balance for the world at the north and south poles, the Utes and others drumming up and down the spine of the Americas to let them know that someone still honors them, so that they keep their balance, a continuous thread, “…everybody says, you know, we don’t know where the ancestors went, the Anasazi, after 1300 AD they all just disappeared, but you know, um, I’m here, we’re still here, everywhere, right? we didn’t go nowhere, you know? When the ancestors came they knew they would abandon these spots eventually, you know, they were traveling everywhere, leaving markings, leaving medicine bundles all over this continent from the Arctic north down to the tip of South America, from the east coast to the west coast, they never planned to stay in this one spot, and if you know how to read the markings, you can see all of this, they never disappeared, we’re still all around these parts and other places, too, you see.”
It’s true, all the whites we speak to repeat this other mantra, latch onto this one particular historical point, and then go no further, “It’s real inneresting, you know, but they just disappeared, and nobody knows why, now ain’t that somethin…” Conveniently, two hundred years before the first Europeans arrive, the Anasazi leave, just like the Mayans elsewhere on the continent; it’s a clever semantic move—absolution of the guilt of extermination that followed (the natives were already gone when the white man arrived, after all, never mind all the other natives who were massacred afterward), and, as with the Mayans, erase them from the present with another mythical lie of mysterious disappearance, encase them in museums and a mysterious, unknowable past, encase them in mysticism and anthropological theories, while all around, Utes still practicing their culture, Mayans still practicing their culture, still living and growing, still speaking their languages, still organizing their society and governing themselves, still rebelling, still recounting their own history, still making their own history.
And it’s my mom who recognizes it first, the speech patterns, the rhythms, the way Ricky uses language: My uncles, my grandma, my grandma’s sisters and brothers, we see and recognize something familiar to us. And I point out how much he looks like my uncle Joe and my uncle Andrew, too, same facial structure, same cheeks and jawline.
“We’re still here,” he says, and laughs. “We didn’t go nowhere.”
2. drawing blancos
In the Ute Ouray Memorial Cemetery in Ignacio, Colorado: two simple white crosses, Ramón Blanco, Pacífica Blanco. Ramon Le Blanc, a French fur trapper who settled in Ignacio, who changed his name to the Spanish Blanco. Pacifica Gonzales, the woman who married him.
Years ago, when she was more alert, when her memories were a little more intact and clear, my ninety-three-year-old great-great-aunt Marguerite in Albuquerque once told my mom that this woman, Pacifica—Marguerite’s grandmother—was Ute, that’s why they buried her and her spouse in the Ute cemetery. Now, when my mom asks her about it, she doesn’t remember this, she’s not sure where Pacifica came from, if she was Ute, if she was Mexicana. My mom has warned me that Aunt Marguerite’s memory has been dissipating more and more the past couple of years. Sitting in her daughter’s dining room in Albuquerque, I watch her struggle to piece together history from the memory of a couple of photographs back at her house. She calls them Papa Ramón and Mama Pacífica. She draws out name after name, weaves and tangles several threads of family lines, until all of us are lost and my mom has resolved to visit the Catholic churches in Ignacio and other small, surrounding towns to find some family records and really piece things together.
(how to write about these kinds of things and tie threads, try to dig back and understand, without being corny, without claiming false connections, without making false claims to history, culture, identity? how to reconstruct history from fading memories? from stories and dreams? from a flood of time, events, lives?)
Aunt Marguerite tells the story of a great flood, how their house and everything was flooded when she was a girl, how they had to move. Later, we find out that this great flood actually occurred in 1911, two years before she was born. It was her mother, Virginia Blanco Herrera, who experienced the flood, and then told Marguerite about it. Now, she has claimed the memory as her own, interwoven her own life with her mother’s life. It’s one of those inaccuracies that makes the history more truthful and more real.
3. white white white
at one point, I’m thinking, goddamn, everybody is so white, I mean, I’ve been expecting it once I get to Naropa, but not here, not yet—all my relatives, all my relations here, even the brown ones, the way they speak, the way they relate, their psychology, the big trucks they drive, the big Harley Davidson motorcycles, the big beefy tattooed arms exposed by cutoff t-shirts and leather vests, the big U.S. flags on front lawns, the big U.S. flag magnets on refrigerators, the big consumption-based “patriotic” Coors Light lifestyles in which they encase themselves, their language, their movements in space.
me, on the outside, I blend in, they do not suspect—for the most part.
on the inside, I know the languages, the rhythms, the signs, I do not suspect—for the most part.
but as ingrained as they are in me, they are also foreign to me. it is a living in exile within myself, language and self as sites of exile, occupation, self exiled in self, self articulated in an exiled tongue, self invading and occupying self. it is one of the most difficult things I have attempted to understand and express. the expression negates itself in its very language and articulation. I circle back on myself, on my distance from myself, on the languages that fill in the gap.
I am thinking of DuBois’ souls of black folk.
I am thinking of Fanon’s black skin, white mask.
I am thinking of Jameke Hightower’s primal mind.
I am thinking of Rudy Acuña’s occupied America.
I am thinking of my dad, brown, very little functional English, at my mom’s family gatherings when we were growing up, not fitting in, acutely aware of his awkwardness, both of us, all of us, really—my mom and sisters included—all of us aware of his not fitting in, his awkward gestures and body positionings, his clunky attempts at small-talk and jokes in English, all of us in turn not fitting in, the same awkwardness and clunky occupation of space, and connecting to that awkwardness even now as I fit in while not fitting in, the awkwardness inside, fitting in while not fitting in, exile within myself and outside of myself, a hostile territory of language, identity, skin color, simultaneously navigating and constituting a hostile territory, a hostile exile, a nomad wandering in exile within myself.
I enact an identity that does not disrupt dynamics too much; after all, I am here to observe, to document, to learn, record, survive, create. but inside, I am my brown dad, I am awkward, vigilant, uncomfortable, unsure of how to position my body, fully aware that I do not belong here, that familiar feeling that I have learned to honor as an indication that this is not my community, rather than an indication that something is wrong with me—the alienation is imposed from without, the alienation lies with you, not me, the alienation is something that you project onto me, that your social dynamics project onto my construction of my self and my identity, the alienation is something that I reject, and you take it personally, you take the rejection personally because you identify with the alienation, and you ask the same of me, you want tacit and explicit agreement and validation of it/you.
here and there, I see that they sense this too, it leaks out—through my eyes, through my tongue, through my pores, my crooked limbs. they sense the exile, the enmity, the refusal of alienation. they sense that I do not belong here, and worse, that I have no desire to.
4. of my uncle Andrew who died on March 2 of this year, and was not buried until May 18.
another family circus, arguments, lies, drama. uncles Junior and Joe come down to New Mexico to claim the body and make arrangements, but nobody knows what happened to them, disappeared, went on vacation with their wives back home. aunt Penny coming down after them from Alaska, also fails to claim the body, lying to the coroner (only 3 siblings, not 5—my mom and her brother don’t count, after all, because they’re only “half”-siblings from another dad), fails to make arrangements with the priest, moving the body from Farmington to Albuquerque then back to Farmington to cremate then Durango etc etc. my mom tells me the story and I am laughing laughing dying laughing dying I try to tell her about Faulkner and As I Lay Dying, gothic circus, black humor, we drive by the Mustang gas station in Aztec, New Mexico, where Uncle Andrew last worked, and nearby the small apartment where he lived, where they found his corpse bloated and decomposed after three days in the heat and several weeks of drinking.
one version:
Andrew was a chronic alcoholic, a frustrated, failed artist, a closeted gay man, who fled a DUI warrant in Alaska. He lived in New Mexico for a while, but he wanted to go back home, to Alaska, and aunt Penny told him she also wanted him to come home. But aunt Penny’s husband, Kim, also a chronic alcoholic, threatened to call the police and turn Andrew in if he ever showed up in Alaska. Then, about three months before he died, aunt Penny told him that Kim said it was okay, he could come back to Alaska, everything was cool. So uncle Andrew sold the little trailer he was living in, sold everything he owned (which wasn’t much, but still), bought himself a one-way plane ticket, and then the night before he was supposed to fly to Alaska, aunt Penny called and told him not to come, Kim was drinking again.
So, with no money, no place to live, no furniture or belongings, a useless ticket that couldn’t be refunded, uncle Andrew moved in with some friends for a while until our cousin Ginger found him a job at the gas station and a little apartment within walking distance of the job. for about three months, he was okay, working, trying to get back on his feet. then he started drinking again, missing work, showing up late, and pretty soon he was fired. two weeks later, he went to pick up his final check. He had already been on a deep binge. three days later, they found him dead in his apartment, already pretty badly decomposed from the New Mexico heat.
5. what makes it most difficult
is that when you listen closely enough, without judgment, with compassion, around the ignorant statements, around the fear and hate, you cannot avoid the humanity, the shared experience, even as you recognize the racism, the homophobia, the hate, the fear, even as you continue to maintain protective distance and distrust.
at dinner, NASCAR Mike talks about an episode last week with his rebellious 17-year-old son, Bubba, Bubba drunk and calling over a couple of girl friends in a taxi to hang out at 3 in the morning, then a big yelling match on the front lawn at 3:30 a.m. when the taxi arrives with the girls, Bubba drunk and running down the street in his shorts, barefoot, Bubba on probation, prelude to an episode of Cops, skating on thin ice, and later back at home trying to fight Mike, still drunk, and Mike huge and muscled biker arms, bear-hugging the boy into exhaustion, the boy finally falling out of breath and then crying on his bed, I try so hard to impress you but nothing’s ever good enough, etc., and Mike affirming that Bubba is a good boy, a good son, that he’s proud of him, and the only time he’s not proud is when Bubba lets his “friends” use him for his car;
and then later, Mike telling us about his father, Bill, and his Alzheimer’s and dementia, his paranoia, hallucinations, and how Mike took care of him to the end, the stories funny and sad, familiar, Mike making humor out of tragedy, storytelling, Alzheimer’s like my grandma Pauline, like my mom took care of her to the end, like the people my grandma saw in the trees, like her dolls that were real babies that she took care of, what makes it most difficult, see,
the humanity, underneath the whiteness, the racism, the failure to acknowledge privilege, the fear, the maintenance of white, heterosexual male status quo, underneath, interwoven, entangled—
Ricky Hayes speaks in metaphors and employs a tourguide poetics of resistant geospatial enlightenment, tells us that what the Utes and Hopi and others are doing with their ceremonies in the area, with the information they share, is for all of us, to help all of us, to keep the twins in balance at the poles so that the world does not flip over on itself, so that when the time comes, they will be here ready to help everyone to deal with what is coming to end the fourth world and the easy life to which we have once again succumbed. my mom takes it in, I take it in, I can see that it really seems to sink in with her, hits home, registers. It’s nothing new to me, but for her and her conservative ideology, I sense that it is new information, new language. later, she can’t stop talking about it, and compares Ricky’s presentation with the droll, scientific, sad presentation of the Mesa Verde park ranger, Dean, on the other side of the park a few days before. Dean was nice, but seemed really depressed, and there’s nothing sadder than a depressed park ranger, you know? leading a group of almost all white, unceasingly chattering tourists down the narrow stairway along a cliff, then pointing out the features of cliff dwellings in this bored, resigned, sad voice, and I imagined he had just had a fight with his boy/girlfriend or something, or some bigger existential crisis, maybe, and looking at the lame, noisy tourists taking pictures, shouting at the landscape around them with running commentary on their experience as it occurred, drowning out the silence, I could understand, and at one point, I imagined helping poor Dean push all these jerks over the cliff side and then jumping up and down cheering. then I realized that he would probably push me over, too.
On the Ute side, after Ricky continues on in his van for the full-day tour with a lesbian couple and their young son visiting from the Pacific Northwest, and my mom and I get ready to turn back at the half-day tour endpoint, I sit up on a hill on a big flat rock next to a large pile of small stones and shards of pottery, fragments arranged in little mounds and groupings, all of us little mounds of fragments and shards, and the canyon is silent of human noise, a few birds, some insects, the wind through trees, and over rocks, and nothing else, and off in the distance down the hill, my mom, sitting in the rental car waiting for me, she takes a photograph of me with her digital camera, she works over Ricky’s language in her head.
there are things in me that I do not trust
that you should not trust
there are languages that must be broken down and rearranged
to see how you oppress me and
to see how you are still human
what makes it most difficult
to see how I oppress you and
to see how I am still human
what makes it most difficult
to see how we damage one another
to see how we are so damaged
what makes it most difficult
to see how we must love one another
to see how we refuse
to see how we are still human
to see
6. how to read this
my mom and I ride the old-time train from Durango to Silverton. we are tourists. we ride in a car with a German family and other white tourists. this is the same train, the same route, that our ancestors took. my great-grandfather Benislao Simón García, a WWI veteran, worked the silver mines, and his daughter, my grandmother Pauline, worked as a waitress, as a bartender, and other less respectable jobs in the hotels and saloons of Silverton, when she finally left her first (white) chronic alcoholic husband, and had to care for her four children alone. her brothers and sisters, too, and her uncles and aunts, all of them took this same train along the Animas River, El Río de las Ánimas Perdidas, named during the Dominguez-Escalante expedition in 1776, supposedly for several expedition members who fell in and whose bodies were never recovered. The train moves alongside the river, against the current north to Silverton, my mom and I sit side by side, rocking car, moving back through the tangle of our family’s history—abuse, abandonment, genocide, conquest, moving against the current of a stream of ghosts, a neverending flood of lost souls—drunks, abusers, addicts, chismosos, liars, cheaters, victims of genocide, victimizers, lost souls, walking dead, floating dead, uncle Andrew, uncle Billy, grandma Pauline, lost souls, the dead, and aunt Penny too, and uncle Joe, and uncle Paul, and uncle Paul’s rapidly reproducing white American suburban kids, all of them dead already even though they’re still alive, the walking dead, the open-wounded, the damaged, the fatally injured, the defeated, the addicts, the drunks, the debilitated, the lost, the stream of limping living dead—
¡anímate! my dad would suddenly say to me, to wake me up, scaring me, jolting me in moments of silent contemplation sitting next to him in his truck, fuckin rat bastard making me jump in my seat. come to life, wake up, be alive, animate yourself.
another lost cause, another lost soul, but still, the word is there now, inside me, in my limbs and blood. that must count for something, that must mean something, because it is still there, I can still hear him saying it, planting it there in hostile terrain, exiled words, exiled palabras,
and L calls me “emo-less,” and J says that I am “affectless,” and nobody can read me, empty face, straight face, no emotional expression, intimidating—
—¡anímate! ¡anímate, güey!
“…and the ancestors left markers all over the place, if you know how to read them, they left medicine bundles and markers that if you know how to read them, you know what they were saying, the information they were transmitting, it’s all around us, it’s alive all around us, you just have to know how to read it, the things they buried, the markings on rocks, objects, clan signs, see, these jagged zigzagging lines indicate migration, journey, these things mean something, they say that this is here for all of us, to enjoy, to live, to be happy, they did this for all of us, that’s the main message here, that’s why we do our ceremonies, for all of us, no matter where we come from, for all our children and grandchildren, so that we can leave something behind for them, so that they can enjoy this too, not for you and me, but for them, for our children and our grandchildren, and america is the spine of the world, and so that’s why we drum, so that the vibrations go up and down the spine, so that the twins feel it, that we’re still honoring them, so that they keep the poles balanced, so that they keep the world balanced, for our children and our grandchildren, not for us, but for them, so that we keep it alive, so that we keep ourselves alive”
6. how to write this
a. without succumbing, losing sight, granting license for abuse and destruction, revealing too much, revealing too little, how to read and interpret signs and decipher while re-encoding that information which is dangerous in the wrong hands, how to use one language to untangle another, and then use the other to untangle the first;
b. without erasing the humanity with mysticism, how to balance mysticism with anarchy, balance the spiritual with the mundane, the everyday, the cosmic everydayness of living, how to untangle truth from performance, Ricky performing for us, park ranger Dean performing for us, us performing for them, identity and humanity, wisdom and mundane everyday functioning living emotion—poor, sad ranger Dean, deep, cosmic spiritual tour guide Ricky—all of us performing, all of us seeking to laugh and play and live, have fun, act stupid, act silly, make jokes, make love, animate the world, animate our selves, find cosmic truth in silly puns and metaphors, create the universe out of poems and stories, chisme, wordplay, games, tease each other, play with each other, laugh each other into existence around all the fear and hate and violence
(those who will take your compassion and run with it, abuse it, appropriate it, misapply it
those who will listen, reflect this acknowledgment, seek mutual resolution
those who will do both)
c. mid-afternoon, after sad park ranger Dean: my mom and I begin to drive out of the park on our way to see my great-uncle Alex in Cortéz, Colorado. But after only a few hundred yards from the Cliff Palace stop, we see a sign welcoming us to the Ute reservation and another sign advertising frybread. It’s the frybread that catches our attention most, and we pull off the main road to this little rickety stand on a small dirt road where a Ute woman and her daughter-in-law are selling the bread. It’s been almost fifteen years since I’ve had frybread but I’ve never forgotten how insanely good it is and how much I love it. We order some and then while the daughter-in-law makes it by hand, we kick back and chat. The young woman frying the bread is home for the summer from school at U.C. Riverside. She and her mother-in-law are really cool and friendly. The mother-in-law is the one who tells us about the tour on the Ute side of the park, with Ricky, and she gives us a flyer with all the information. She explains how this area, Mesa Verde National Park, was taken away from the Utes and designated a national park by the U.S. government, but how there’s still a huge area to the south that can only be accessed with a Ute guide, how the official “park” is really only a fraction of the entire area, most of which is within the Ute reservation. Then, when my mom tries to call Uncle Alex to let him know we’re on our way, she has all this drama with her new Bluetooth wireless attachment, which hasn’t seemed to work the whole time we’ve been here, like most of my poor mom’s gadgets (a few days into the trip, she accidentally erases all of the photos she’s taken so far on her digital camera; a few days after that, she records over a previous interview she had filmed of Aunt Marguerite on her camcorder). So the woman and I start talking about Bluetooths and other cell phone technology. Her daughter-in-law pulls out her cell phone and then they tell me about these new sunglasses they saw that have a microphone built into the frame, and a little earpiece that curves around the ear. I get all excited, I’m really into the idea of these new cell phone eyeglasses (I’m thinking, if only all those IWW anarcho-syndicalists who give me so much shit for being a “green primitivist” could see me now). I show the women my older, chunky cell phone and they laugh, the daughter-in-law’s is a slim Razr phone that makes mine look like something from the eighties, and I’m all, Dang, that’s really cool, I want one of those eyeglass frames, that’s worth it enough to make me not be so cheap and finally upgrade to a decent phone. The older woman goes, Yeah, they’re really cool, and they look sharp, too, really nice sunglasses. I ask if you can just get the frames and put your own prescription lenses in, because I’m totally blind without my glasses, and they laugh at me again, we all laugh, and she says she thinks so, and then the fry bread comes and it’s all hot and greasy and melty with honey and powdered sugar and cinnamon, and so we just eat and chat and listen to the country music playing on the woman’s radio, and a gust of wind blows some papers back into the frybread shack, but nobody makes a move to catch them or pick them up.
nearly a week now roaming southern Colorado and northern New Mexico with my mom, her birthplace, her mother’s birthplace, her grandmother’s birthplace, a line of women stretching back more than a hundred years—at least—as far as we can trace.
nearly a week now I have been a documentation machine.
little poetry or metaphor, these words are not really ready, this is just an outline, a skeleton, before too much dissipates. this is an approximation for the time being, notes before I forget too much in this flood of experience—
—information overload, taking everything in, recording audio, recording video, taking photographs, listening, observing, trying to empty myself to make room—too much to process—faces, languages, texts, signs, emotions, rumors, chismes, innuendos, old family histories, new family dynamics—
in the motel in Durango, I sit on the edge of my bed and dig away bloody bits of flesh around an ingrown toenail that refuses to heal; my mother insists on sitting across from me and directing me how to tend to the wound, even though I tell her to let me be with my gross, bloody toe.
Later, we stand on Ute land while our Ute spiritual/park tour guide, Ricky Hayes, repeats a mantra disguised in tour-guide speak, an incantation, we are the generation, we are the ones who will save it or let it perish for our children and grandchildren. He shapes his words around the space and geography of the Ute Mountain Utes’ reservation side of Mesa Verde park, his narrative circles back on itself, circles back around the parameters of this place, connects to thousand-year-old pictographs, trails behind him in the dust of his big white tour van while we follow, my mom driving. We stop at spots and follow Ricky up small paths where he continues his narrative, circling back again, grandmother spider, solstice markers, prophecies, history, the twins maintaining balance for the world at the north and south poles, the Utes and others drumming up and down the spine of the Americas to let them know that someone still honors them, so that they keep their balance, a continuous thread, “…everybody says, you know, we don’t know where the ancestors went, the Anasazi, after 1300 AD they all just disappeared, but you know, um, I’m here, we’re still here, everywhere, right? we didn’t go nowhere, you know? When the ancestors came they knew they would abandon these spots eventually, you know, they were traveling everywhere, leaving markings, leaving medicine bundles all over this continent from the Arctic north down to the tip of South America, from the east coast to the west coast, they never planned to stay in this one spot, and if you know how to read the markings, you can see all of this, they never disappeared, we’re still all around these parts and other places, too, you see.”
It’s true, all the whites we speak to repeat this other mantra, latch onto this one particular historical point, and then go no further, “It’s real inneresting, you know, but they just disappeared, and nobody knows why, now ain’t that somethin…” Conveniently, two hundred years before the first Europeans arrive, the Anasazi leave, just like the Mayans elsewhere on the continent; it’s a clever semantic move—absolution of the guilt of extermination that followed (the natives were already gone when the white man arrived, after all, never mind all the other natives who were massacred afterward), and, as with the Mayans, erase them from the present with another mythical lie of mysterious disappearance, encase them in museums and a mysterious, unknowable past, encase them in mysticism and anthropological theories, while all around, Utes still practicing their culture, Mayans still practicing their culture, still living and growing, still speaking their languages, still organizing their society and governing themselves, still rebelling, still recounting their own history, still making their own history.
And it’s my mom who recognizes it first, the speech patterns, the rhythms, the way Ricky uses language: My uncles, my grandma, my grandma’s sisters and brothers, we see and recognize something familiar to us. And I point out how much he looks like my uncle Joe and my uncle Andrew, too, same facial structure, same cheeks and jawline.
“We’re still here,” he says, and laughs. “We didn’t go nowhere.”
2. drawing blancos
In the Ute Ouray Memorial Cemetery in Ignacio, Colorado: two simple white crosses, Ramón Blanco, Pacífica Blanco. Ramon Le Blanc, a French fur trapper who settled in Ignacio, who changed his name to the Spanish Blanco. Pacifica Gonzales, the woman who married him.
Years ago, when she was more alert, when her memories were a little more intact and clear, my ninety-three-year-old great-great-aunt Marguerite in Albuquerque once told my mom that this woman, Pacifica—Marguerite’s grandmother—was Ute, that’s why they buried her and her spouse in the Ute cemetery. Now, when my mom asks her about it, she doesn’t remember this, she’s not sure where Pacifica came from, if she was Ute, if she was Mexicana. My mom has warned me that Aunt Marguerite’s memory has been dissipating more and more the past couple of years. Sitting in her daughter’s dining room in Albuquerque, I watch her struggle to piece together history from the memory of a couple of photographs back at her house. She calls them Papa Ramón and Mama Pacífica. She draws out name after name, weaves and tangles several threads of family lines, until all of us are lost and my mom has resolved to visit the Catholic churches in Ignacio and other small, surrounding towns to find some family records and really piece things together.
(how to write about these kinds of things and tie threads, try to dig back and understand, without being corny, without claiming false connections, without making false claims to history, culture, identity? how to reconstruct history from fading memories? from stories and dreams? from a flood of time, events, lives?)
Aunt Marguerite tells the story of a great flood, how their house and everything was flooded when she was a girl, how they had to move. Later, we find out that this great flood actually occurred in 1911, two years before she was born. It was her mother, Virginia Blanco Herrera, who experienced the flood, and then told Marguerite about it. Now, she has claimed the memory as her own, interwoven her own life with her mother’s life. It’s one of those inaccuracies that makes the history more truthful and more real.
3. white white white
at one point, I’m thinking, goddamn, everybody is so white, I mean, I’ve been expecting it once I get to Naropa, but not here, not yet—all my relatives, all my relations here, even the brown ones, the way they speak, the way they relate, their psychology, the big trucks they drive, the big Harley Davidson motorcycles, the big beefy tattooed arms exposed by cutoff t-shirts and leather vests, the big U.S. flags on front lawns, the big U.S. flag magnets on refrigerators, the big consumption-based “patriotic” Coors Light lifestyles in which they encase themselves, their language, their movements in space.
me, on the outside, I blend in, they do not suspect—for the most part.
on the inside, I know the languages, the rhythms, the signs, I do not suspect—for the most part.
but as ingrained as they are in me, they are also foreign to me. it is a living in exile within myself, language and self as sites of exile, occupation, self exiled in self, self articulated in an exiled tongue, self invading and occupying self. it is one of the most difficult things I have attempted to understand and express. the expression negates itself in its very language and articulation. I circle back on myself, on my distance from myself, on the languages that fill in the gap.
I am thinking of DuBois’ souls of black folk.
I am thinking of Fanon’s black skin, white mask.
I am thinking of Jameke Hightower’s primal mind.
I am thinking of Rudy Acuña’s occupied America.
I am thinking of my dad, brown, very little functional English, at my mom’s family gatherings when we were growing up, not fitting in, acutely aware of his awkwardness, both of us, all of us, really—my mom and sisters included—all of us aware of his not fitting in, his awkward gestures and body positionings, his clunky attempts at small-talk and jokes in English, all of us in turn not fitting in, the same awkwardness and clunky occupation of space, and connecting to that awkwardness even now as I fit in while not fitting in, the awkwardness inside, fitting in while not fitting in, exile within myself and outside of myself, a hostile territory of language, identity, skin color, simultaneously navigating and constituting a hostile territory, a hostile exile, a nomad wandering in exile within myself.
I enact an identity that does not disrupt dynamics too much; after all, I am here to observe, to document, to learn, record, survive, create. but inside, I am my brown dad, I am awkward, vigilant, uncomfortable, unsure of how to position my body, fully aware that I do not belong here, that familiar feeling that I have learned to honor as an indication that this is not my community, rather than an indication that something is wrong with me—the alienation is imposed from without, the alienation lies with you, not me, the alienation is something that you project onto me, that your social dynamics project onto my construction of my self and my identity, the alienation is something that I reject, and you take it personally, you take the rejection personally because you identify with the alienation, and you ask the same of me, you want tacit and explicit agreement and validation of it/you.
here and there, I see that they sense this too, it leaks out—through my eyes, through my tongue, through my pores, my crooked limbs. they sense the exile, the enmity, the refusal of alienation. they sense that I do not belong here, and worse, that I have no desire to.
4. of my uncle Andrew who died on March 2 of this year, and was not buried until May 18.
another family circus, arguments, lies, drama. uncles Junior and Joe come down to New Mexico to claim the body and make arrangements, but nobody knows what happened to them, disappeared, went on vacation with their wives back home. aunt Penny coming down after them from Alaska, also fails to claim the body, lying to the coroner (only 3 siblings, not 5—my mom and her brother don’t count, after all, because they’re only “half”-siblings from another dad), fails to make arrangements with the priest, moving the body from Farmington to Albuquerque then back to Farmington to cremate then Durango etc etc. my mom tells me the story and I am laughing laughing dying laughing dying I try to tell her about Faulkner and As I Lay Dying, gothic circus, black humor, we drive by the Mustang gas station in Aztec, New Mexico, where Uncle Andrew last worked, and nearby the small apartment where he lived, where they found his corpse bloated and decomposed after three days in the heat and several weeks of drinking.
one version:
Andrew was a chronic alcoholic, a frustrated, failed artist, a closeted gay man, who fled a DUI warrant in Alaska. He lived in New Mexico for a while, but he wanted to go back home, to Alaska, and aunt Penny told him she also wanted him to come home. But aunt Penny’s husband, Kim, also a chronic alcoholic, threatened to call the police and turn Andrew in if he ever showed up in Alaska. Then, about three months before he died, aunt Penny told him that Kim said it was okay, he could come back to Alaska, everything was cool. So uncle Andrew sold the little trailer he was living in, sold everything he owned (which wasn’t much, but still), bought himself a one-way plane ticket, and then the night before he was supposed to fly to Alaska, aunt Penny called and told him not to come, Kim was drinking again.
So, with no money, no place to live, no furniture or belongings, a useless ticket that couldn’t be refunded, uncle Andrew moved in with some friends for a while until our cousin Ginger found him a job at the gas station and a little apartment within walking distance of the job. for about three months, he was okay, working, trying to get back on his feet. then he started drinking again, missing work, showing up late, and pretty soon he was fired. two weeks later, he went to pick up his final check. He had already been on a deep binge. three days later, they found him dead in his apartment, already pretty badly decomposed from the New Mexico heat.
5. what makes it most difficult
is that when you listen closely enough, without judgment, with compassion, around the ignorant statements, around the fear and hate, you cannot avoid the humanity, the shared experience, even as you recognize the racism, the homophobia, the hate, the fear, even as you continue to maintain protective distance and distrust.
at dinner, NASCAR Mike talks about an episode last week with his rebellious 17-year-old son, Bubba, Bubba drunk and calling over a couple of girl friends in a taxi to hang out at 3 in the morning, then a big yelling match on the front lawn at 3:30 a.m. when the taxi arrives with the girls, Bubba drunk and running down the street in his shorts, barefoot, Bubba on probation, prelude to an episode of Cops, skating on thin ice, and later back at home trying to fight Mike, still drunk, and Mike huge and muscled biker arms, bear-hugging the boy into exhaustion, the boy finally falling out of breath and then crying on his bed, I try so hard to impress you but nothing’s ever good enough, etc., and Mike affirming that Bubba is a good boy, a good son, that he’s proud of him, and the only time he’s not proud is when Bubba lets his “friends” use him for his car;
and then later, Mike telling us about his father, Bill, and his Alzheimer’s and dementia, his paranoia, hallucinations, and how Mike took care of him to the end, the stories funny and sad, familiar, Mike making humor out of tragedy, storytelling, Alzheimer’s like my grandma Pauline, like my mom took care of her to the end, like the people my grandma saw in the trees, like her dolls that were real babies that she took care of, what makes it most difficult, see,
the humanity, underneath the whiteness, the racism, the failure to acknowledge privilege, the fear, the maintenance of white, heterosexual male status quo, underneath, interwoven, entangled—
Ricky Hayes speaks in metaphors and employs a tourguide poetics of resistant geospatial enlightenment, tells us that what the Utes and Hopi and others are doing with their ceremonies in the area, with the information they share, is for all of us, to help all of us, to keep the twins in balance at the poles so that the world does not flip over on itself, so that when the time comes, they will be here ready to help everyone to deal with what is coming to end the fourth world and the easy life to which we have once again succumbed. my mom takes it in, I take it in, I can see that it really seems to sink in with her, hits home, registers. It’s nothing new to me, but for her and her conservative ideology, I sense that it is new information, new language. later, she can’t stop talking about it, and compares Ricky’s presentation with the droll, scientific, sad presentation of the Mesa Verde park ranger, Dean, on the other side of the park a few days before. Dean was nice, but seemed really depressed, and there’s nothing sadder than a depressed park ranger, you know? leading a group of almost all white, unceasingly chattering tourists down the narrow stairway along a cliff, then pointing out the features of cliff dwellings in this bored, resigned, sad voice, and I imagined he had just had a fight with his boy/girlfriend or something, or some bigger existential crisis, maybe, and looking at the lame, noisy tourists taking pictures, shouting at the landscape around them with running commentary on their experience as it occurred, drowning out the silence, I could understand, and at one point, I imagined helping poor Dean push all these jerks over the cliff side and then jumping up and down cheering. then I realized that he would probably push me over, too.
On the Ute side, after Ricky continues on in his van for the full-day tour with a lesbian couple and their young son visiting from the Pacific Northwest, and my mom and I get ready to turn back at the half-day tour endpoint, I sit up on a hill on a big flat rock next to a large pile of small stones and shards of pottery, fragments arranged in little mounds and groupings, all of us little mounds of fragments and shards, and the canyon is silent of human noise, a few birds, some insects, the wind through trees, and over rocks, and nothing else, and off in the distance down the hill, my mom, sitting in the rental car waiting for me, she takes a photograph of me with her digital camera, she works over Ricky’s language in her head.
there are things in me that I do not trust
that you should not trust
there are languages that must be broken down and rearranged
to see how you oppress me and
to see how you are still human
what makes it most difficult
to see how I oppress you and
to see how I am still human
what makes it most difficult
to see how we damage one another
to see how we are so damaged
what makes it most difficult
to see how we must love one another
to see how we refuse
to see how we are still human
to see
6. how to read this
my mom and I ride the old-time train from Durango to Silverton. we are tourists. we ride in a car with a German family and other white tourists. this is the same train, the same route, that our ancestors took. my great-grandfather Benislao Simón García, a WWI veteran, worked the silver mines, and his daughter, my grandmother Pauline, worked as a waitress, as a bartender, and other less respectable jobs in the hotels and saloons of Silverton, when she finally left her first (white) chronic alcoholic husband, and had to care for her four children alone. her brothers and sisters, too, and her uncles and aunts, all of them took this same train along the Animas River, El Río de las Ánimas Perdidas, named during the Dominguez-Escalante expedition in 1776, supposedly for several expedition members who fell in and whose bodies were never recovered. The train moves alongside the river, against the current north to Silverton, my mom and I sit side by side, rocking car, moving back through the tangle of our family’s history—abuse, abandonment, genocide, conquest, moving against the current of a stream of ghosts, a neverending flood of lost souls—drunks, abusers, addicts, chismosos, liars, cheaters, victims of genocide, victimizers, lost souls, walking dead, floating dead, uncle Andrew, uncle Billy, grandma Pauline, lost souls, the dead, and aunt Penny too, and uncle Joe, and uncle Paul, and uncle Paul’s rapidly reproducing white American suburban kids, all of them dead already even though they’re still alive, the walking dead, the open-wounded, the damaged, the fatally injured, the defeated, the addicts, the drunks, the debilitated, the lost, the stream of limping living dead—
¡anímate! my dad would suddenly say to me, to wake me up, scaring me, jolting me in moments of silent contemplation sitting next to him in his truck, fuckin rat bastard making me jump in my seat. come to life, wake up, be alive, animate yourself.
another lost cause, another lost soul, but still, the word is there now, inside me, in my limbs and blood. that must count for something, that must mean something, because it is still there, I can still hear him saying it, planting it there in hostile terrain, exiled words, exiled palabras,
and L calls me “emo-less,” and J says that I am “affectless,” and nobody can read me, empty face, straight face, no emotional expression, intimidating—
—¡anímate! ¡anímate, güey!
“…and the ancestors left markers all over the place, if you know how to read them, they left medicine bundles and markers that if you know how to read them, you know what they were saying, the information they were transmitting, it’s all around us, it’s alive all around us, you just have to know how to read it, the things they buried, the markings on rocks, objects, clan signs, see, these jagged zigzagging lines indicate migration, journey, these things mean something, they say that this is here for all of us, to enjoy, to live, to be happy, they did this for all of us, that’s the main message here, that’s why we do our ceremonies, for all of us, no matter where we come from, for all our children and grandchildren, so that we can leave something behind for them, so that they can enjoy this too, not for you and me, but for them, for our children and our grandchildren, and america is the spine of the world, and so that’s why we drum, so that the vibrations go up and down the spine, so that the twins feel it, that we’re still honoring them, so that they keep the poles balanced, so that they keep the world balanced, for our children and our grandchildren, not for us, but for them, so that we keep it alive, so that we keep ourselves alive”
6. how to write this
a. without succumbing, losing sight, granting license for abuse and destruction, revealing too much, revealing too little, how to read and interpret signs and decipher while re-encoding that information which is dangerous in the wrong hands, how to use one language to untangle another, and then use the other to untangle the first;
b. without erasing the humanity with mysticism, how to balance mysticism with anarchy, balance the spiritual with the mundane, the everyday, the cosmic everydayness of living, how to untangle truth from performance, Ricky performing for us, park ranger Dean performing for us, us performing for them, identity and humanity, wisdom and mundane everyday functioning living emotion—poor, sad ranger Dean, deep, cosmic spiritual tour guide Ricky—all of us performing, all of us seeking to laugh and play and live, have fun, act stupid, act silly, make jokes, make love, animate the world, animate our selves, find cosmic truth in silly puns and metaphors, create the universe out of poems and stories, chisme, wordplay, games, tease each other, play with each other, laugh each other into existence around all the fear and hate and violence
(those who will take your compassion and run with it, abuse it, appropriate it, misapply it
those who will listen, reflect this acknowledgment, seek mutual resolution
those who will do both)
c. mid-afternoon, after sad park ranger Dean: my mom and I begin to drive out of the park on our way to see my great-uncle Alex in Cortéz, Colorado. But after only a few hundred yards from the Cliff Palace stop, we see a sign welcoming us to the Ute reservation and another sign advertising frybread. It’s the frybread that catches our attention most, and we pull off the main road to this little rickety stand on a small dirt road where a Ute woman and her daughter-in-law are selling the bread. It’s been almost fifteen years since I’ve had frybread but I’ve never forgotten how insanely good it is and how much I love it. We order some and then while the daughter-in-law makes it by hand, we kick back and chat. The young woman frying the bread is home for the summer from school at U.C. Riverside. She and her mother-in-law are really cool and friendly. The mother-in-law is the one who tells us about the tour on the Ute side of the park, with Ricky, and she gives us a flyer with all the information. She explains how this area, Mesa Verde National Park, was taken away from the Utes and designated a national park by the U.S. government, but how there’s still a huge area to the south that can only be accessed with a Ute guide, how the official “park” is really only a fraction of the entire area, most of which is within the Ute reservation. Then, when my mom tries to call Uncle Alex to let him know we’re on our way, she has all this drama with her new Bluetooth wireless attachment, which hasn’t seemed to work the whole time we’ve been here, like most of my poor mom’s gadgets (a few days into the trip, she accidentally erases all of the photos she’s taken so far on her digital camera; a few days after that, she records over a previous interview she had filmed of Aunt Marguerite on her camcorder). So the woman and I start talking about Bluetooths and other cell phone technology. Her daughter-in-law pulls out her cell phone and then they tell me about these new sunglasses they saw that have a microphone built into the frame, and a little earpiece that curves around the ear. I get all excited, I’m really into the idea of these new cell phone eyeglasses (I’m thinking, if only all those IWW anarcho-syndicalists who give me so much shit for being a “green primitivist” could see me now). I show the women my older, chunky cell phone and they laugh, the daughter-in-law’s is a slim Razr phone that makes mine look like something from the eighties, and I’m all, Dang, that’s really cool, I want one of those eyeglass frames, that’s worth it enough to make me not be so cheap and finally upgrade to a decent phone. The older woman goes, Yeah, they’re really cool, and they look sharp, too, really nice sunglasses. I ask if you can just get the frames and put your own prescription lenses in, because I’m totally blind without my glasses, and they laugh at me again, we all laugh, and she says she thinks so, and then the fry bread comes and it’s all hot and greasy and melty with honey and powdered sugar and cinnamon, and so we just eat and chat and listen to the country music playing on the woman’s radio, and a gust of wind blows some papers back into the frybread shack, but nobody makes a move to catch them or pick them up.
posted by kualyque at 21:18
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