From Mayan Drifter: Chicano Poet in the Lowlands of America
1997
by Juan Felipe Herrera

I crossed the border full of dignity. My satchel flourishes with so many things from the rainy earth.

—Rigoberta Menchú

p. 24. JUAREZ GYPSIES

As always, I am falling forward, my head bent, eyes caugh up in the fast colors, the blur of familiar and strange shapes, as I have done since I was a kid in the early fifties wandering through the San Joaquín Valley and southern mountain villages of California—in motion, spinning, and playing in farmworker camps where my mother, Lucha Quintana, and my father, Felipe Emilio Herrera, aged campesinos, hung onto the edges of small towns like Fowler where I was born by chance, out of wedlock, on the run to Parlier, Delano, and MacFarland.

My father's "legitimate" family lived in southern New Mexico. He would visit them occassionally in the summer, take gifts, bring me T-shirts from Arizona, postcards from the Carlsbad Caverns. He hovered, in his way, between families, the first and the second, between me, his last child, and himself. My mother accepted this arrangement; she knew he loved us and would stay with us. He was an older man, jovial, kind, wise, and branded by a desire to lead us from one town to another. "Everytime you move, your cells change, your whole body changes inside," he would repeat, his hazel eyes moving with a burst of energy. And he had a knack for searching out particular mineral springs and the healing waters of the ocean: "Up there in the mountains, near the Ramona Indian reservation, there are ojos de agua, water springs, that will take care of your pains, Luchita." My mother loved the idea of magical waters for her ailments, and in the end she gave in to my father's quixotic visions.

We moved to Ramona one year and lived behind Mr. Weed's ranchhouse, facing ten acres of the driest part on the planet. You bought bottled spring water or walked to the orchards with an empty bucket to the nearest sundry-store faucet at the entrance to town. Absence, dislocation, abrupt movement, rose-colored fantasies, spiritual calls, and the burning pull to return to sacred vistas were key emotional accelerators and creative triggers in my interior world. Later these early forces and psychic pulleys would power up as poems, theater work, and a foolhardy and feverish penchant for wild escapades and adventures. My travel fate was hidden in the tiny grapevines, the pungent tomato jungle, my father's separations, and vagabond campesino maps; my wondering theme was in the frosted morning onion patch and the forlorn corn milpas abandoned to the mysterious and intelligent spider spinning webs between the sweet dark leaves. I was being true to myself on this road into Mayan territory. My theme was still personal and campesino, still in the realm of family rupture and at the edges of national power and city ambitions.

You'll have to listen to those sounds. You should hear the song of the sky crickets, the passing of the sky, the abandonment of the earth.

—Viejo Chan K'in Nahá, Lacandón jungle, Chiapas, Mexico

As an undergraduate of UCLA in 1969, all I needed to leap the southernmost regions of Indian Mexico was my anthropology professor's comment that there were only a few hundred Lacandón Mayas left in Chiapas. A year later, outfitted with old Army fatigues, miniature machetes, mosquito nets, antiviper first-aid kigs, and Viet Nam tropical combat boots, I jumped out of a junky Cessna into Lacanjá Chan Sayab, one of the two major Lacandón Mayan villages in southeastern Chiapas. My school chum, Tomás Mendoza Harrell, followed me. (Himself a world traveler, he wrote me the last time we communicated from a small island near Sao Paulo, Brazil.) Yet what began as a personal and political quest into Lacandón land, a logical step in the process of cultural inquiry into one of Mexico's smallest Mayan groups pushed out to the edges of survival, became upon my arrival a radical life connection. From that point on, I realized that I would not forget the Lacandón in the lowlands nor the Mayas in the highlands. To read about their "way of life" and spew Chicano "azteca" poetry jive was blasphemy, and to assign the oppressed Maya the honorable position of ancestors was a cultural crime—if I did not take action. So I return to connect again, to speak again, to write again, to reunite with my other family, the bastard daughters and sons unclaimed and ingnored by official Mexico and the uptown, buttoned, mainstream world of Indian lovers and Indian haters.

    TO ROAM, TO WANDER, TO DREAM, to lose myself, to break deeper into soulful worlds—the themes have not changed. Being a child of migrant farmworkers made sudden change a delicacy. I stayed in the labor camps only long enough to know the names of a few farmworker children. [...] I never stayed long enough to see blossoms on the crops my father and mother sowed. We were migrantes, simply. Motion and new travel stories and grape fields fed our hunger for life.

I go to south to San Cristoból bearing vestigial images belonging to another sphere. The hospital bedside of my father reappears. Gangrene from diabetes has mangled his legs, and one is amputated; his kidneys are failing; his campesino days have gone up in smoke to the big city of San Diego, where we finally settled after jaunting through the migrant camps of the San Joaquín Valley until I was eight years old. My father passes away at eighty-two with my mother at his side. Sixteen years old, midnight: I am holding my mother's tiny frame as she trembles and cries into my shoulder and the darkness of our two-room apartment on Eleventh Street, downtown. The relay of family jaunts comes to an end, and a new cycle begins.

Twenty years later, after moving from San Diego to San Francisco's Mission District, where my Aunt Lela and Uncle Beto lived, my mother dies from pneumonia. Since my mother's death in 1986, I have been busy going through my warehouse of locked secrets, unfinished business, and pain. The pain follows me, I write it, and it leaves. I am left alone. The task of unraveling my personal history, the flame that burns in the left side of my chest, begins; an orphan is by nature a seeker of other selves, a night gazer with fire in the blood.

My father, Felipe Emilio, and Lucha come to me now as we swerve past Joigelito, a few miles from San Cristoból. They are with me in some way in this Chiapas Indian void. We would take long evening summer walks in San Diego, after we had left behind jeep rides, Army hauls, makeshift trailer nights. The walking was our urban migration shuffle. Instead of vineyards and orchards, we passed by storefront windows, stopping to inspect Schwinn bicycles and Sears and Roebuck furniture sales, to gawk at Swiss watches and emerald bracelets whose qualities and blemishes we would ably discuss as we passed into the next city block, the next field of asides, the boomcrash of truck traffic heading toward the piers at the end of Broadway. You could see them next to the shadowy profiles of Navy cruisers and destroyers, past the Spreckles downtown theatre and the orange lamplit boulevard studded with Navy lockers and neon tattoo parlors. This was my little drop of Mexican America in the early sixties. Our last walking stop was the Greyhound depot, that amazing, brilliant modern ranchería of poor travelers carrying tricolored jute bags to the south and flat-top white shirt and Levi's seekers to the north.

So there I am in "El Perro" as my father called the Greyhound station, yelling out like the announcer in the speaker box: "Oceanside, Bakersfield, door number five; Needles, Barstow, door number seven. The Los Angeles bus will be loading at door number one in ten minutes. Please have your tickets ready." At the jukebox, drop a dime for Elvis and another for Jackie Wilson, one more for Brenda Lee's "Sweet Nothings"; run over with a dime to the baseball machine with scuffed iron men swinging stiff bats at a large silver ball bearing rolling past second base. [...]

At the Greyhound pews my mother conjures up stories about my uncles again. There was Uncle Beto, the hard worker who in the forties moved from El Paso to San Francisco. A warehouseman and a disk jockey. She says, "Your Uncle Beto created KOFY in a busted garage somewhere in Chinatown in San Francisco, and he did the same in Juaréz after we had come up from Mexico City. But it was your Uncle Geno's idea to travel the North. The idea came to him when we were all living in "El Niño Perdido," a barrio in Mexico City. He wrote to the president of Mexico and requested a leave so that he could join the American Army and pull us out of our misfortune. It sounds crazy, but it worked." My mother nods her head in wonder. "And that's what happened. He was sent to Fort Bliss, in El Paso."

She reminds me of Uncle Beto's early discoveries: "In Juaréz, your Uncle Beto had his own radio show called 'El Barco de la Illusión.' You know, he's the one who introduced Tin-Tan to the public, the famous Mexican comedian and movie star."

"El Barco de la Illusión," I mouth to myself. Sounds like magic, the "Ship of Illusion." While my father was away visiting friends and family or leaving in search of "healing waters," my mother would take out her Brownie Kodak camera and we would take snapshots in the park and city streets. Later we would return to her photo album, where she had collected famly picture dating back to the late nineteenth century. My mother traveled with silver print images and stories.

I still keep my mother's old photo album with its black feltlike paper leaves, spotted and torn at the edges, missing its front and back covers and some of the pages, loose and stuffed in one of her five-and-dime yellow plastic bags that I inherited. Like the Greyhound tales, the album stories captivated me, sparked my inagination, and nurtured my love for language and fast changes. My mother reintroduces her family: "Here's your grandmother Juanita, who you are named after. This is your grandfather, Alejo Quintana, a pulquería worker, who died of exhaustion at the age of forty shortly after I was born in 1907." We pause a while, gazing at his dark features. "Here are my brothers: Geno, the oldest, who joined the U.S. Army like I told you. I don't know what would have happened to us. I would never have met your father Felipe in El Paso." Another pause: "You wouldn't be here." Back to the picture stories: "This is Roberto, who was always at work on a crazy invention, distributing newspapers in a Model T, imagine. Here's your Uncle Vicente, the artist, who made toys out of wood in El Paso, painted murals, carved figures out of soap, clay and plaster, anything, who dreamed of going to Paris, but settled in New York City for a while, where he drew cartoons for the tourists and sold fast bullfighter paintings in the delis." My Aunt Aurelia is the stern sister. She is taller than my mother, and possesses the ability to tell you the ugly truth directly to your face. She is standing behind my mother and my grandmother Juanita, all dressed in black with sharp, sad, angry eyes as they stop for a moment "en la linea" and are ordered to get their picture taken by the Juaréz border officials in the early twenties.

My mother describes herself as a tiny baby. There is no photograph. "I was so small that my father, Alejo, would say to my mother, 'You can carry her in a tompiate." (A tompiate was a handmade basket used for clothes or picnics in those days.) We laugh at the idea of a baby in a tompiate. In an oval brownish photo, grandfather Alejo is a handsome man with a full mustache, dark eyebrows, and large, sad eyes, and Emiliano Zapata face, a young man in deep thought. You could easily mistake him for a Mexico City dandy, a classy gentleman, except his eyes are set on something deeper or ancient or somber. Maybe it is the specter of Mexico a few years before the revolution; maybe it is his own fate and that of his family of eight, about to begin the long, unexpected trek to "El Norte" not long after his death.

I go over these trails: my father's campesino path, my mother's jaunt north from the lowlands of America, my mother's Army family, my father's orphanhood. Once, at the depot, he recounted his fate as an orphan child to Will Kelly, a friend and former neighbor. The two still often met at the fountain in the plazita, the city's old town square, right across from Bradley's Burgers and the Cabrillo Theater. He said to Mr. Kelly, the Irishman dressed up in a blue suit and white shirt, "I jumped a train from Chihuahua to the States at fourteen." Then, he added, "My mother Benita, died while giving birth," and his eyes watered. In the album I turn to a photograph where my father stands, maybe twenty years old with a friend, José Barerra, posing in a dark, worn suit and a short tie, hat to the side, gazing into the studio camera's eye. The margin of the worn picture reads, "Denver, Colorado, 1904."

As I write, I glance up at my mother's photo above my computer. She stands with both hands on her hips while her steel-string guitar rests on the ground, held in check by the tilt of her right hand. "Become an actor, a singer, how about a dancer? Yes, a dancer," my tiny mother would advise me, herself gazing at this very photo. "I always wanted to join the theater, sing and travel, but your uncles didn't want this. They warned my mother, Juanita, 'Don't let Lucha get mixed up with these oddballs doing vaudeville. Who knows how she'll end up?" The guitar was the reservoir of her unfulfilled desires, the punishing repressions. To this day I have two guitars, a nylon string and a Fender electric. My first was my mother's gift when I was sixteen. I sang her corridos, I create my own tunes; more than anything else, my writing is my song. Our melodies resemble each other, and then they go their own way.

—Juan Felipe Herrera