Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation Read online

  Table of Contents

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Testimonio

  Chapter 1 - Tierra de Viejitas

  Chapter 2 - Códices de los Abuelos

  Chapter 3 - Valle de Silencio

  Mexico Viejo

  Chapter 4 - Cuento Mestizo

  Chapter 5 - The Flowered Path

  Chapter 6 - From Huisache to Cedar

  Peregrinaje

  Chapter 7 - Zona de Niebla

  Chapter 8 - Aztec Theater

  Chapter 9 - Rain of Stones Lluvia de Piedras

  Volador

  Chapter 10 - Exilio

  Chapter 11 - La Ruta

  Chapter 12 - Una Canción

  Epilogue

  Tent of Grief

  Acknowledgements

  Praise for Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation

  “This audaciously poetic and muscularly philosophical memoir is, alternately, a magical travelogue, a feverish reconstruction of family history, a perplexing detective novel, and finally, a personal spiritual odyssey back in time to Aztec mythology.”

  —San Jose Mercury News (front page review)

  “Santos is a vaquero poet at heart, but the laughter has turned to introspection and—may we still use this word?—wisdom.”

  —Chicago Tribune (front page review)

  “Santos counts the cost of immigration, assimilation and upward mobility in this graceful memoir, where intimate family chronicle alternates with introspective meditation on the Mexican past . . . he writes splendidly.”

  —The New York Times

  “In his impressive memoir, John Phillip Santos attempts to locate the origin of that lingering loss among the descendants of the conquered Indians, and he does so with grand success. . . . What a wonderful story he has told here, in a memoir that is a brave and beautiful attempt to redeem a people out of a limbo of forgetting.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Significant and unique . . . a beautiful, universal portrait of migration.”

  —The Washington Post

  “There is a remembering here that strikes a deep chord. Mr. Santos tells his stories with clarity and serenity, as one looking back on a long, wide, winding road.”

  —Dallas Morning News

  “[Santos] uses his talents to paint an incredibly rich portrait of his extended family . . . connecting the story to the birth of Mexico, the New World, the larger phenomenon of migration, and his brush with the apocalypse.”

  —The Village Voice

  “Too big to fit in a review, and almost too big to fit in one heart. Places is a book that only a journalist could dream, and only a poet could write.”

  —Austin Chronicle

  “[Santos] masterfully weaves the stories of various unforgettable characters with the landscape and fragrance of their memories.”

  —The Miami Herald

  “An unforgettable chronicle.”

  —Albuquerque Weekly Alibi

  “An unrelentingly gorgeous memoir . . . [Santos] draws from centuries of history and great wells of emotion to construct a remembrance that flies in the face of his very words.”—Texas Monthly

  “A moving, intellectually powerful memoir of Mexican-American life . . . His fine memoir is certain to find a wide readership.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

  “[An] elegantly crafted chronicle of one of the thousands of Mexican families who fled to El Norte during the Mexican Revolution. [Santo’s] book is one of the most insightful investigations into Mexican-American border culture available.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred)

  “Many Americans will find themselves in the narrative of upheaval and migration; they will recognize the difference between labored nostalgia and heartfelt loss.”

  —Booklist (starred)

  “It pains me when the incredible histories of our people are trivialized as magic realism; surviving is no magic act. In a time of global migrations and forgetting, these stories remember beyond the Alamo, beyond 1776, 1492, and 1519. I would recommend that the governors of Texas, California, and Arizona, the presidents of Mexico and the United States, and the director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service read this book. This is the map of one family, and perhaps all families who live on several borders. Here, then, are our documents, our papers. This story is our green card.”

  —Sandra Cisneros, bestselling author of The House on Mango Street

  “This book is a tender treasure, a rare gift, a journey into the rich tapestry of a family’s life and migrations. Exquisitely woven, intrinsically poetic, Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation moves fluidly among relatives and realities, cities and mysteries, unearthing, liking, shining deep light into the memory-caverns of our worlds. The best memoir I’ve ever read.”

  —Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Never in a Hurry

  “John Phillip Santos invokes the muses of homelessness. He draws his silhouette in the twilight and inserts it in an ancient mural whose meaning is beyond him. His ultimate realization is that his is a wandering soul but he is not—has never been—alone. His memoir is a lesson in humility.”

  —Ilan Stavans

  “John Santos’s powerful memoir is not a simple walk down memory lane, but rather a poetic exploration of the ways in which remembering and forgetting inform our fragile modes of surviving and thriving. From Texas to Oxford, from grandparents to Borges, Santos takes us on a poignant pilgrimage that ends deep within our souls.”—Cornel West, bestselling author of Race Matters

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PLACES LEFT UNFINISHED AT THE TIME OF CREATION

  John Phillip Santos, born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, is the first Mexican American Rhodes scholar and the recipient of numerous literary awards. His articles on Latino culture, art, and politics have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, and the San Antonio Express News. He is writer and producer of more than forty television documentaries for CBS and PBS, three of them Emmy nominees. He lives in New York City, where he works in the Media Program of the Ford Foundation.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane,

  London W8 5TZ, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood,

  Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road,

  Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 1999

  Published in Penguin Books 2000

  Copyright © John Phillip Santos, 1999

  All rights reserved

  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  Frontispiece: Front page of La Prensa, January 10, 1939

  Testimonio: The Garcia sisters (top to bottom): Madrina, Uela, Tía Pepa

  Mexico Viejo: The Burning of the Idols, detail from La Descripción de

  Tlaxcala, used by permission of Glasgow University Library

  Peregrinaje: Wedding portrait, Juan José and Margarita Santos, 1915

  Volador: Detail from Códice Fernandez Leal, used by permission of

  The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

  CIP data available

>   eISBN : 978-1-440-67919-3

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Para mis padres,

  who gave me the story

  Family Trees

  Los Garcias

  (Children in order of birth)

  Francisco, UNCLE FRANK

  Margarita, Uela, my grandmother

  José

  Santos

  Juan

  Tomasita (died at birth)

  Tomasa, Madrina

  Josefa, Tía Pepa

  Jesús, UNCLE JESSE

  Gilberto, UNCLE GILBERT

  Manuel

  Valentín (Manuel’s twin, died at birth)

  Carlos, UNCLE CHALE

  Los Santos

  Juan Nepumencio Santos m. Paula Sandoval

  (Children in order of birth)

  Mariano

  Uvaldino

  Juan José, my grandfather

  Andrea

  Francisca, Tía Panchita

  Jesusa, Tía Chita

  Manuela, Tía Nela

  (Children by Juan Nepumencio’s first marriage)

  Pedro

  José León

  Guadalupe

  Jesús María

  Juan José Santos m. Margarita Garcia, Uela

  (Children in order of birth)

  Raul

  Juan José, Jr., my father

  Consuelo, AUNT CONNIE

  Beatriz, AUNT BEA

  Margarita, AUNT MARGIE

  Rogelio, UNCLE ROGER

  Juan José Santos, Jr., DADDY, m. Lucille Lopez, MOTHER

  John Phillip

  George David

  Charles Daniel

  Los Lopez

  Leonides Lopez m. Leandra Vela, GRANDMOTHER

  (Children in order of birth)

  Leo William

  Lauro Luis

  Lydia Viola

  Lily Amanda (died at two)

  Ludovico Blas

  Lucille Cecille, my mother

  I learned to breathe this way when I left that body made of ashes, river water, copal and huisache flowers.

  When my breath was South it was a feather as big as a palm frond. The infinite miles were numbered in stars and the earth was lit from inside.

  My eyes were mirrors, my heart was wind.

  The ground pulled my songs like a magnet.

  The bananas were so ripe they spread like butter when they first brought guns into the garden.

  Our legacy is papaya, is frijol, is sangria by the gallons.

  Helix inside of helix, the color of blood. Dead uncles. Lost friends. Forgotten amantes.

  For five hundred years of impossible weather, this lightning has smelled like night, weaving its net of forgetting across these lands.

  Testimonio

  1

  Tierra de Viejitas

  Land of Little Old Ladies

  “Have all the Santos already died?”

  That’s the question Madrina asks Aunt Connie several times a week, as she awakens from sleeping or daydreaming in front of the television. “¿Ya se murieron todos los Santos?”

  Madrina Tomasa is my grandmother’s sister on my father’s side of the family. She is the eldest living sibling of her brood of Garcias. She lives with my aunt and uncle in a bright, meticulously arranged room in a house in San Antonio, Texas, where she keeps time by TV novelas like Amor Salvaje, variety shows, and televised-live Sunday-morning masses from San Fernando Cathedral.

  Like others of her generation, the present has lost its claim on her. Mostly she wanders, disembodied, through her ninety-five years, as if they were interlocking chambers of an enormous shell of memories. One moment she is a child, bathing in morning light in the mercado of Múzquiz, in the mountains of northern Mexico. Then it is 1921, and she is overturning a Model A Ford on San Antonio’s south side. She laughs now, remembering the tumbling tin milk jugs from the dairy truck she collided with, pouring out across the oily pavement on Nogalitos Street.

  Though she was married to my great-uncle Manuel for almost sixty years, Madrina is still enamored with el tío Uvaldino Santos, my grandfather’s brother, whom she fell in love with as a teen. Aunt Connie says he was the “love of her life,” but they were not permitted to marry because in Mexico it was considered improper for two sisters to marry two brothers. Dead for more than ten years, Uvaldino comes to her in dreams, upright and impeccable in his dark pin-striped suit, with mustache and eyebrows perfectly combed, and presents her with large bunches of grapes. And week to week, she asks my aunt that same question:

  “¿Ya se murieron todos los Santos?”

  My aunt replies, “Sí, Madrina, ya se murieron todos los Santos.”

  “All of the Santos have died.”

  Since Aunt Connie told me that story, I have wondered why she told Madrina all the Santos are dead. Who are we?

  Aren’t we still unfolding the same great tapestry of a tale begun long, long ago? Aren’t my aunts and uncles, cousins, my parents and brothers, all part of the same long dolorous poem that sings of the epoch of ocean-plying caravelas and conquest, of Totonacas and Aztecas, of unimaginable treasures created from jade, silver, and gold? Of gods worshipped and sacrificed to from on top of pyramids—of thousands upon thousands of Indios baptized for Christ in the saliva of Franciscan monks? We may be latter-day Mexicanos, transplanted into another millennium in El Norte, but we are still connected to the old story, aren’t we? The familia walked out of the mountain pueblos of Mexico into the oldest precincts of San Antonio—then, finally, into the suburbs of the onetime colonial city, where the memory of our traditions has flickered like a votive flame, taken from the first fire.

  It’s a common name my family carries out of our Mexican past. It is a name that invokes the saints and embroiders daily prayers of Latinos in North and South America. The old ones in the family say the name was once de Los Santos. “From the saints.” But no one remembers when or why it was shortened. There were Santos already in San Antonio two hundred years ago. In the records for the year 1793 at the Mission San Antonio de Valero, which later became the Alamo, you find the names of Manuel and Jorge de Los Santos, referred to as “Indios,” but it’s not clear whether they are our ancestors.

  It sometimes seems as if Mexicans are to forgetting what the Jews are to remembering. We have made selective forgetting a sacramental obligation. Leave it all in the past, all that you were, and all that you could not be. There is pain enough in the present to go around. Some memories cannot be abandoned. Let the past reclaim all the rest, forever, and let stories come to their fitting end.

  I never understood people’s fascination with immortality. The idea of life without end gave me chills. Even as a kid, I wanted to be among my family and my ancestors, walking through our short time together, fully knowing it will end. I wanted to bind Texas and Mexico together like a raft strong enough to float out onto the ocean of time, with our past trailing in the wake behind us like a comet tail of memories.

  But the past can be difficult to conjure again when so little has been left behind. A few photographs, a golden medal, a pair of eyeglasses as delicate as eggshells, an old Bible, a letter or two. Some families in Mexico have troves of their ancestors’ belongings, from pottery of the ancients and exquisite paintings of Mexico City in the eighteenth century to helmets and shields of the Spaniards, and even hundred-year-old parrots and maguey plants that have been handed down, from the great-grandparents who first tended them.

  By comparison, the Santos are traveling light through time. In my family, virtually nothing has been handed down, not because there was nothing to give, but after leaving Mexico to come to Texas—so many loved ones left behind, cherished places and things abandoned—the antepasados ceased to regard anything as a keepsake. Everything was given away. Or they may have secretly clung so closely to their treasured objects that they were never passed on.

  Then they were lost.

  My mother’s mother, Leandra Lopez, whom we called simply “Grandmother,” sat in her clu
ttered dark house on West Russell Street like an aged Tejana sphinx during the last ten years of her life. Through the year, she filed away embossed death notices and patron saint prayer cards of departed family and friends in the black leather address book I consulted to write out her Christmas cards every year. In early December, I would sit down with her and first cross out the entries for all those who had “passed onward,” as she used to say. By each name in the book, she had already scratched a cross with thick black pencil lines.

  Memo Montalvo from Hebbronville, Texas. According to Grandmother, a good man. He had married a not-very-pretty cousin from Laredo.

  Efraín Vela from Mier, Tamaulipas. Son of a cousin on her father’s side whom she never spoke to. Supposedly, he was the keeper of the family coat of arms, awarded to the family by the Viceroy of Nueva España himself. What would happen to it now?