The Fog of Memory

It is not difficult to find evidence for the claim that Mexican Americans often suffer from a sense of alienation, a confusion of identity. That sense of abandonment lies at the heart of mariachi ballads that bemoan something lost, not recognized. In popular telenovelas of today, the main characters are virtually always Anglicized. The only ones who look Mexican--that is, Indian--are servants, especially criadas, poor women retainers who, to the point of martyrdom, are loyal to their rich and arrogant patronas. This pervasive Anglicization extends beyond Mexico into all brown-skinned cultures. Puerto Rican Ricky Martin, his hair growing lighter, sings a few words in Spanish, but he has been converted into every teenage girl’s and boy’s dream of a cute American kid. His last name, the clearly Hispanic Morales, has been dropped in favor of his middle name, which blurs the distinction; in Spanish it would be pronounced Mar-teen. There is confusion about what to call oneself--Mexican American? Hispanic? Latino? The most prevalent designation, Chicano, was, for decades, a term of disrespect among Mexicans.

Not too long ago in Texas, children, if they were fair, were warned by well-meaning friends not to call themselves Mexican but Spanish. Down-sloping “Indian eyelashes� must be curled into a tilt. Those attitudes of European superiority have a strong historical parallel. In Mexico, the war against France produced a dictator, Porfirio Diaz, a mestizo who nevertheless became renowned for his European pretensions.

In his impressive memoir, John Phillip Santos (the name means “saints�) attempts to locate the origin of that lingering loss among the descendants of the conquered Indians, and he does so with grand success: imagining lives, roaming through myths, history and borrowed dreams.

He embarks on several journeys of discovery: to find the truth of his grandfather’s drowning in the San Antonio River; to trace Hernan Cortes’ symbolic conquest of Mexico; and to retrieve the banished stories of his own family.

A sense of awe permeates his haunting book and lifts it above its easy categorization as the memoir of a Tejano, an appropriately elegant word for a Mexican American born or raised in Texas. (Santos does not use the word “Chicano.�)

Was the drowning of his grandfather at age 49 the result of a heart attack? Murder? Santos’ search leads him to an old retired fireman who may have pulled the body from the river. The addled man responds to questions with a rendition of “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You.� That and the reticence of his family to recall the event lead Santos to search for a deeper meaning, within the heavy fog that persisted that fatal day, the niebla, which means “fog� in Spanish but also suggests psychological and psychic confusion.

Santos moodily describes an ominousfog that infiltrates the mythology of the Nahuac and Aztec cultures, a fog that occurs “as if all the heavens have been stilled.� In San Antonio, “the body and its senses begin to retreat from the outside world.� Was his grandfather’s death a suicide in response to the ancient melancholia of conquered ancestors, a melancholia “handed down, wordlessly, through numberless generations, inscribed onto the helical cortex of the DNA�?

As Cortes--�the grandfather no Mexican wants to admit to�--swept into Mexico, he devastated ancient temples and traditions, quashing a complex culture knowledgeable in mathematics, medicine, architecture. He also carved deep wounds into the psyche of the Indians, spawning children often born of rape, mestizos, “the mixed ones,� outsiders from the two worlds that produced them. That conquest still “runs through most Mexican American families like an active fault line.� It creates an epic of defensive forgetting among a people who, like Santos, easily weep.

“We have made selective forgetting a sacramental obligation. Leave it all in the past, all that you were, and all that you could be. There is pain enough in the present.� He wonders: “Could you tell a story about centuries of forgetting?� In answer, he restores the lives and memories of his family in San Antonio. With loving humor, he presents a gallery of snapshots within portraits.

He brings to life las viejitas--�don~as who held court in shady painted backyard arbors and parlors across the neighborhoods. . . . To the uninitiated, [they] might look fragile, with their bundled bluish hair, false teeth, and halting arthritic steps . . . grandmothers, great-aunts, sisters-in-law. . . . But under the all-knowing gazes . . . we never felt oppressed or downtrodden. . . . They had raised their tribes--las familias--in El Norte, virtually alone. Most of their men fell early in the century, at an epic age’s end when the memories and dreams of old Mexico were receding quickly to the south like a tide falling back into an ancient inland sea. . . .� In Hispanic culture, these ubiquitous women are symbols of indomitable spirit and endurance.

Among the ancianos, Uncle Lico suffers a terrible ignominy. He is buried not with the grandiose melodrama of Catholic tradition but with the stingy recitations of “born-agains� who claim his last days and his defenseless dead body.

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Santos is respectful of the lore some might label superstitions, and his accounts are aptly tinted with magical realism. A double rainbow augurs smooth passage past purgatory. A dream of “luminous pears, glowing bright green against the midnight sky,� will end turbulent sleep. The Inframundo of the Aztecs is a limbo “where all that has been forgotten still lives.�

Susto, a sudden fright with religious overtones, can traumatize forever, as when the corpse of an Anglo woman is being carried by two sisters for preparation and a stumble causes it to fly from their grasp. A veil falls, revealing the face of death to Aunt Madrina, who sees the woman’s soul “spiral upward like smoke.� That susto causes her epilepsy.

Santos’ sense of awe allows him to leave mysteries unresolved, to yield, instead, to strong metaphoric meanings, mysterious epiphanies. As a child, he is fascinated with los voladores, men in Indian garb who perform a kind of dance, spiraling downward in widening circles while roped to a tall pole atop which another man stands singing. The adult Santos believes that the dance--men seeming to fly away, liberated from punishing gravity--holds a secret intended only for him. When he asks the stationary performer what he thinks of as he surveys the field others will fly through, the man answers, “I think about nothing.�

In Texas, an aunt stares in horror at a captive wolf in a cage. In its desperation to escape, the wolf has shredded its own flesh. In her country, wolves roamed free, “a part of God’s wild creation that always seemed beyond human control.� Their howls were “like a conversation in an old language . . . everyone but the wolves had forgotten.� When she recovers from having fainted at the terrifying spectacle of the martyred wolf, she knows: “We have been taken to purgatory. Soon the chastisements would begin.�

The chastisements had already begun. Bigotry provides a subtle but strong strain throughout. There are intimations of “refugee camps,� of immigration agents sweeping through neighborhoods in search of wetbacks, “greasers.� Bicycle tires are slashed, the word “Meskin� scratched on a desk. Santos is made ashamed of the gaudy old Cadillac his uncle drives. There are warnings of Texas ranchers shooting Mexicans.

In school, he is taught a history populated only by Anglo settlers, not the Indians nor the Spanish who built San Antonio and exist within a “secret history.� He deduces: “The struggle against the conquest was still alive.�

The book’s flaws attest to its power. A trip to visit the chapel of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the blessed brown lady revered perhaps even more than Jesus, is propped beautifully, arousing expectations. But there is, finally, no sense of unique revelation before that presence, staggering beyond religious belief: That great apparition assumed Indian coloring--though not Indian features--to become the Mother of Mexico.

In a disturbing passage and with unflinching honesty, Santos documents his shooting of a doe for meat. He fires three times. The doe will not fall. He refuses to feel guilt. Yet the reader anticipates a revelation beyond the event as the stricken doe continues to move accusingly toward its killer--not unlike the people Santos describes, wounded by a conqueror but still enduring.

Nor is Santos beyond a stumble in his graceful delivery. “It felt like� recurs awkwardly. A misplaced phrase may jar his refined imagery. “Like others of her generation, the present. . . .�

Those are minor lapses in writing that seamlessly combines a formal literary tone with that of a cuento, a folk tale. Some sentences seem sculpted. Here is Grandmother speaking: “[H]er sentences moved in one steady arc, like a bow across a violin, and her words were delicately pronounced, so that you could hear every tinkle of an old chandelier, every gust of a Coahuila wind falling to a hush, and the grain of a rustling squash blossom.�

Later, when he journeys as a documentary producer, Santos is able to link the world of his ancestors with that of other people’s history of ancient grief, other worlds God forgot. In a famine camp in Sudan, starving bodies beg a television crew for food. He realizes that all he can offer to do is to tell their story.

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.