“Yes, you are American, but not in the gringo sense.”
“How do you become Mexican or American?”
This opened the old man’s eyes and the chair froze suddenly in midrock.
“You are Spanish and Yaqui, you are a mestizo from Aztlan, this land, right here where the Nahua people began.” He stamped his foot into the packed earth.
“This is what a Mexican is. But you were born here in America, tambien, and that’s what a Chicano is. You don’t become nothing. It’s only the gringos that become! They are Xipe,” he said, referring to the ancient god of new growth beneath the old, the god the Aztecs distorted into the God of the Flayed Skin. It was Manueal’s word for those people on earth who do not know where they belong.
“They become other religions like choosing a hat and become other names that have no connection to places they live. They become the things they own or the cars they drive. They say that they are one-third this and one-quarter that and their ancestors came from such and such, but they don’t know nothing about them. They have no stories. They have no tribe. Their camp fire is a goddamn television. You” – he pointed at the boy now – “you know where your blood has been for the last ten thousand years, mijo. There are words and songs, palabras y canciones, that tell you and explain to you.
“You do not become American, no, no. Shit, no. American becomes you, mijo.”
He closed his eyes, inhaled deeply through his nose, then pointed over his shoulder.
“Do you smell that, mijo? The tortillas and the frijoles and the chorizo? No matter where you go, to places I know I will never see, when you walk past a doorway or a window and one of those smells hits you, you will come back here to this place and this time. Always. And that is just smell. There are things far deeper than smell.”
“Are you American, Abuelo?”
“No. I am not American. I am not Mexican. In fact, I think I am no longer Yaqui. Shit, I can’t tell you nothin’ for real. I’m nowhere now.”
He leaned back, the anger in his leather face subsiding, and he exhaled slowly, a small hitch near the end of it caused by an old drawn-out affair with Chesterfield nonfilters. Like a ghost, his pain had come into the room. Josephina by the stove felt it and stopped her moving. She stood silently looking for an insect or a snake, on her face a mixture of distress and resignation.
“You see, boy, these people up here around us are so mixed up now that no one belongs, even though this is their country, our country. Do you see?”
“Leave him alone, Manuel,” Josephina said in a hissing voice.
“You can be in the wrong place,” he continued in spite of her warning.
“Your whole life, all of it, you can be in the wrong place and not know it because you’ve lost the power to know where is right. It’s a hard thing to say. I can’t explain.”
He sat back again, composing himself and considering, then nodding to himself. He leaned forward and spoke thoughtfully.
“Someone is in a bus that sways a little on its way up and down the street, and that person is pleased and gets comfort by the swaying.” He moved his dark hand slowly back forth. “It is so comforting that this person takes the bus even when he has nowhere to go. He just rides and rides. Sometimes he stands up and lets the bus roll underneath him.
“Entiendes, hijo? That person, if he had the power, would know that his ancestors were sailors, marineros, and that the sea is calling to him. The sea is trying its best. It’s not just ruts in the road or a bad shock absorber, the sea is calling. The sway of the boat is a small thread of blood, la sangre, that comes up and ties him even when the flesh has fallen away from his dead fathers.
“It’s una brujula en la sangre, a compass in the blood, and it’s a dim command in the blood. And in decades and generations the power to hear it is bargained away in small decisions and small concessions. So he leaves the bus on the street corner and sits at a desk and suffers from something he will never understand. The curanderos will tell him he is depressed or needs a special ceremony or a vacation or something like that, but that’s not it.
“He’ll drink from bottles and sometimes throw things and maybe hit his wife. But at night his spirit throws out a net, and in the morning it’s pulled back torn. And at night the sound of the highway makes him stay awake. It is not the loud rush of the highway.” He pointed the index fingers of both hands at the boy for emphasis. “It’s not the cars or the trucks…it’s the waves, the sound of the sea and the simple people on it. He has forsaken himself by forsaking the sea.”
From: La Maravilla, by Alfredo Vea, Jr.
(I wish I could write like this)
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