| Don Salvador sees the locura en mi.
He knows there’s something
crazy he likes. I’m not sure what I see
in Salvador, but I can’t leave it alone.
We ducked out together tonight.
He wanted to get me on that damn burra.
He wanted to take me into the milpa.
First to his place, locked up tight.
Don Salvador’s got a lock in each room
of his rukita. Chickens run free. Four locks.
He puts me in a chair while he gets ready.
Tonio is his Sancho Panza. I wasn’t too sure
about Tonio, but I catch on. He takes orders
but he also takes care. Don Salvador
comes back into the room, sidles up
to me. We give each other the eye.
I’m thinking of nothing but his poems.
Qué travieso, este cantante haciendo corridos.
He looks at me again. He looks at his side.
He’s got a pistol stuck in his pants.
No, Salvador. De mi lo. Give it to me.
La pistola no va. Ponelo en su cuarto.
He begs me like a child. He was going
to show me the ropes. I won’t go,
Don Salvador, I say. OK, OK.
He shouts something to Tonio.
He takes me through the cercana.
Behind the gate he keeps that saddle
in an old blue Ford LTD that hasn’t
been on the road in a while. No lights,
tires on their axels, but this:
Popeye painted on one side of the trunk,
Navarro painted on the other side.
Popeye Navarro I think. Looking closer,
Popeye’s by himself, the vato Navarro’s
painted in black stocking cap, white pants,
open crotch, three bronzed beauties
surrounding and making promises.
Who do you think is on the hood?
None other. Jesus himself, lifesize
in the cosmos, surrounded by planets.
I’m still disoriented by the pistol.
I’ve never held a loaded .45.
I held one tonight, and taking it
away from him, I felt like the child.
Sube a la burra, don Salvador says.
You get up on the burra, I say.
I’ll walk with you in the corn.
Walking with don Salvador
in the streets of La Cuestita
fills me up. It’s like being
with my mother at baseball games.
Hey, portero, don Salvador cries.
Hey, portero. A la derecha,
Aquí es el rumbo al norte.
Aquí es el Camino Real.
Aquí es el camino de tres preses.
The road to three ponds.
Don Salvador knows I have the camcorder,
and he knows I can’t say no to poems.
He sings. I say, Pare. Stop.
Get the camera ready. OK, Sing.
And he sings. He has gritos.
He’ll talk the poem,
and he’ll swing into memory.
Don Salvador sings. He never repeats himself.
He’s the collected memory of the village.
I am encatado. I know what enchantment
feels like. Salvador knows how to finish
a poem. He dicho, he says, pronouncing
the end of tyranny and the beginning
of justice. He does it all with rhymes
learned in the rural school of Lázaro Cárdenas.
He dicho. I have said it. I have spoken.
Yes you have. Don Salvador takes us
into the milpa. He gets me up on that burra.
Tonio is with us all the time. I am a witness.
Don Salvador sends Tonio into the corn
to get some green ones for eating. This is
the Rumbo a Las Maravillas.
Jim Bodeen
November 17, 2004
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The mantel, or table cloth, bordado por mano.
I arrived 20 minutes ago, after taking Karen
to Guadalajara and home. Second and third visits
to the rancho inside two weeks. Harvest.
Cosechando maíz en el rancho La Cuestita.
El llano de Zamora. The plain stretching out
below the rancho. Me, at this table, to learn
the story of Familia Padilla, family Padilla,
now from Yakima, but from here, La Cuestita,
Michoacán. Celia fixes me a taco. Seven high-backed
wood chairs around this table, under a covered,
renovated portal, in the family quarters.
This is the house of Rafael and Theresa Padilla.
Rafael is the younger brother of Antonio Padilla in Yakima.
Antonio, father of Trinidad, Rosa, Antonio,
Claudia, students in Yakima, Washington, has opened
all of the doors. To all that I can see and hear.
Two nearly identical family quarters
have been created from one, all behind high
cement walls of the cercana. This house,
like all houses here, is protected, and hidden
by walls. It is a corner lot, and doors
open to the main street in the rancho,
as well as to a side street, a residential
wall of concrete, with individual families
living behind, or inside, a family world
of patios and animals, too. The front
corner exterior with a door to the street,
contains a small store with groceries.
The table where I sit under new portals
looking into the patio, is newly renovated,
completed since Rob and I were here in July.
Four bedrooms, recámaras, along with a kitchen,
have been created from what used to be
animal quarters, the stable. It’s all new.
Cement floors, ceilings walls. Painted
light yellow with white ceilings and trim.
All painting was done by the women
who run the family compound,
sweeping, cleaning, cooking, washing,
all by hand. Open fires, out in the open,
behind the cement walls of the cercana, hidden.
A total of five new beds here, all covered space
converted into living quarters. An added washroom
not yet in use, with a ringer washing machine
not yet hooked up. Celia brings me a bowl of chili
and a plate of hot tortillas negra, black tortillas
made from elotes negras, black maíz,
made by hand, and salsa verde, cocinado,
along with té de harnica and frijoles.
The portales of this new living space are also new.
The covered patio around the outside of the inside walls,
connect to the older living quarters, the individual
brown ceiling tiles of the roof descending to eye
level, where nearly everyone ducks in order
to pass into the inner rooms of the house itself.
Celia picks up my plate. She is in her 30’s,
soltera, and this is her territory which she maintains
with doña Jesusita, 80, mother of Rafael,
the patrón of this household.
Celia, Theresa, doña Jesusita,
Miriam, the oldest remaining daughter
of Rafael and Teresa Navarro—
these four women work and maintain
both family compounds. The older part
of the house is in two sections containing
three doors. all bedrooms. There is no inside
sala, or living room. The living room
is patio and portal, all living here before one’s eyes.
Television sets are in bedrooms.
Continuing around the outside of the compound
where I sit, is a small capilla, or chapel.
This capilla, painted light blue,
has two steel doors painted white.
Inside the capilla is one chair,
like a kitchen chair, no room for any more.
Here, on two shelves are the collected images
of the Christ child, El Niño. These are dolls.
Six of them. Six images of El Niño,
each seated in a chair that one recognizes
as a throne. Language and experience
fail me. These images are more
than dolls before me. This is larger than what
I know. These images say, There is always room
here. The child will never be turned away—the dolls
sit on two shelves. One image is in a wood-
trimmed glass box. The Christ Child dressed
in all cases, in formal white dresses, like
baptismal, or first communion clothes.
Doña Jesusita, 80, mother of Rafael,
says this capilla is for Navidad.
Christmas decorations have been set
inside the capilla. In mid-November,
decorations are underway. Between
the capilla, the wall in front of me
separates one living compound from the other.
An steel screen door, with a latch, separates
the two. Rafael, head of the household,
lives in this living area with his wife,
Theresa, and four children, Miriam,
Armando, and the cuates, or twins,
Edgar and Eric. Their other children
have gone to el Norte, to the States,
and live in Concord, California.
Knowledge of Concord is new to me.
Before settling at this family table
where I work on a family tree,
I only knew of Yakima, Washington,
my home, as a destination point for migration
from La Cuestita. There are two:
Yakima, Washington, and Concord, California.
This rectangular wall before me separates
the two living areas and proceeds right to the bathroom,
made of brick with two walls built into the patio area.
All rooms are uninsulated, cement or brick.
Insulation is unnecessary, but nights are cool.
I use the three blankets I am given, and a colcha,
or bedspread. The bathroom is basic, open.
Toilet, shower head, sink, drain.
Shelf for soap and shampoo. A garden chair.
The bathroom is painted blue. To the right
of the bathroom, coming around to the last wall,
is where the fogón or chiminea is located.
Here rests a metate donde se muellan masa,
where ground maíz is mixed with water
and a pinch of wheat flour, to make dough
to be made, by hand, into tortillas,
by a machina para hacer tortillas,
a tortilla maker. The chiminea
is an outdoor oven where tortillas
are made into fires by corn cob and sticks
gathered in the countryside. Once,
Fernando bought two loaves of fresh made bread
from a woman in a truck by the side
of the road, baked in a chiminea,
and the bread had the smoke-filled aroma
of the chiminea. Around the inside
of the walls is a garden of flowers in buckets
and planters, with fruit trees, toronja—grapefruit,
guyaba, limones, and orange, growing natural,
and grafted to each other, in the patio. One
more door behind the cooking area holds
chickens and a burro. Rafael’s horses are elsewhere.
His father-in-law, Salvador Navarro Navarro,
village historian, and keeper of community memory
through corridos and poems learned
in the rural school created by
Revolutionary President Lázaro Cárdenas,
keeps a burrow in his living quarters.
The outside walls, or cercanas,
are painted yellow, with two brown stripes
knee-high and parallel to the ground.
I’m sitting at the table taking all of this in.
Celia brings me boiled camote del cerro,
an indigenous root that grows beneath soil,
a white meat somewhat like a potato,
with a dish of salsa frita, made from
the little green chiles del arbol, muy picante.
Celia is talking with two young women
who look to be still in school, studying
at the secondaria, or prepa, in Chavinda.
La Cuestita has a primary school
named after Lázaro Cárdenas, tata,
so named by the Purepechas. They ask
me what I’m doing here at this table,
in this place. I ask them for their full names.
I say, We’re making the family tree.
I ask for their parents’ names—
the full names, their dates of birth,
and where they were born. They don’t know
some of this. Find out, I say,
and bring me the information.
I need your grandparents’ names too.
Full names, and where they were born,
and when. If they have died,
I want to know where they are buried.
En que panteón. Which cemetery,
so that your children will know
where their grandparents are buried.
If you have brothers or sisters living
in the United States, I want to know where,
and I want to know when they left.
We are making this family tree for them, too.
We want their children to know
their roots in La Cuestita, Michoacán.
One more thing. Una cosa más.
Este trabajo siempre es sagrada.
This work is always sacred.
You will find difficult things.
You might discover a brother who died
as a child that you didn’t know about.
Maybe you have a sister you’ve never
heard of. Cuidado. ¿Me intiendes?
Este es el trabajo del espiritu.
When everyone lived in La Cuestita
we didn’t have to do this. Doña Jesusita
or Doña Esperanza kept track of it all.
Everybody knew everything.
It’s not that way anymore.
Now people come and go.
They’ve been blown all over the place
like seeds in wind. Half of the time
we can’t keep it straight, where
they are or when they left.
It’s not our fault. I’m making you two
the Captains of the Family Tree.
Go find out. Come back and report.
We’ll start this way.
Then we’ll talk to the grandparents.
Before they leave, Celia sits down
at the table. She’s remembering her family.
Theresa comes up and sits down.
And Theresa’s daughter, Miriam.
In the first afternoon we get three pages,
sitting at this table. This is my work,
part of it, part of what I’m here to do.
Jim Bodeen
November 8-24, 2004
La Cuestita, Michoacán-Yakiima, Washington
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