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Authors: John Phillip Santos
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my hand.
Then together, we remember.
It had been raining all morning in San Antonio on the day of Uncle Raul’s funeral, but the sun was breaking through as the afternoon Mass began. When my cousins and I first picked up the coffin as pallbearers, it seemed almost weightless, and it possessed its own orienting force, like a gyroscope. As we carried him down the aisle and outside across the plaza of Little Flower Church, a triple rainbow arched over Culebra Street, marking the way to San Fernando Cemetery. “That’s a sign!” Aunt Connie said. No purgatory for el querido tío. He would dwell forevermore with el Padre Jesucristo, el Espíritu Santo, la Virgencita, and all the saints.
Maybe now, I thought to myself, my uncle has returned to earth as an angel.
When I open my eyes, he seems to be praying, and periodically crossing himself.
“Mariposa. Canela. Atole. Huisache. Tortilla. Deseos. Enamorados. Alameda. Azulejos. Enemigo. Nubes. Terreno. Vaqueros. Granja. Arroyo. Acequia. Concepción. Tranquilidad. Bendiciones y bendiciones. Siempre. Siempre. Siempre.”
The Spanish words hang in the air: Butterfly. Cinnamon. Porridge. Huisache. Tortilla. Desires. Lovers. Boulevard. Tiles. Enemy. Clouds. Land. Cowboys. Farm. Creek. Aqueduct. Conception. Tranquility. Blessings and blessings. Always. Always. Always.
“This is a prayer against our forgetting,” Uncle Raul says, with uncharacteristic seriousness. “But the prayer is as long as time, so you can never be done with it. It just goes on and on, forever.”
Raul, my father’s elder brother, had died of cancer, and he was among the many Santos I never had a chance to ask about the family’s past. Along with Uvaldino, Chita, Andrea, Nela, Paulita, and all the others that had gone before. I wanted to ask him now—about the stories he had heard of Mexico, about the family’s early life in San Antonio, and about his father, Abuelo Juan José.
“There were memories in the familia before there was anyone around to remember them,” he said, before I had a chance to ask. “So where do we begin?”
Uncle Raul looks at me now with tears in his eyes, “There were the stars and the planets in the sky, the earth, the fire, and the wind. Why not ask them, John Phillip? Why not ask them?”
The Tarahumara Indian priests of northwestern Mexico say we are meant by the Creator to walk twenty-four miles a day, and that this is why our feet are shaped like a bridge. We are meant to walk through the lands that surround us. If we stand still, we become spiritually sick, and eventually, whether in the space of one life, or over the span of several generations, this sickness will overwhelm us.
The Aztecs and their descendants have always been sorcerers of the earth. They know the land is alive, a place of magic and awe that connects us to the panoramas of the unseen worlds, to geographies within geographies. This invisible topography of the dead is called el Inframundo. It includes Tlalocan, the place of the underworld, and the paradisal Tamoanchan. El Inframundo is not like Hell and Heaven, set apart from the world. It is more like a portal out of history and into eternity, encompassing all of the gradations of darkness and light, where all of the dead dwell, simultaneously beyond, and among, us. In the Inframundo, you communicate with the spirits of the dead, with the spirits of animals and all created things, and sometimes with the gods themselves.
You enter the Inframundo by several paths. There are places spread across the land that are like gateways into this dimension: caves and hills, streams and charcos, gorges and cañones, buttes and valleys.
The old brujos, or sorcerers, the fierce geomancers of the Inframundo, could enter directly, through a trance, looking without blinking at old maps or paintings of revered sacred places. Gradually the masses of color and lines would begin to undulate and swirl, spinning like a maelstrom, accelerating past north, south,
Then together, we remember.
It had been raining all morning in San Antonio on the day of Uncle Raul’s funeral, but the sun was breaking through as the afternoon Mass began. When my cousins and I first picked up the coffin as pallbearers, it seemed almost weightless, and it possessed its own orienting force, like a gyroscope. As we carried him down the aisle and outside across the plaza of Little Flower Church, a triple rainbow arched over Culebra Street, marking the way to San Fernando Cemetery. “That’s a sign!” Aunt Connie said. No purgatory for el querido tío. He would dwell forevermore with el Padre Jesucristo, el Espíritu Santo, la Virgencita, and all the saints.
Maybe now, I thought to myself, my uncle has returned to earth as an angel.
When I open my eyes, he seems to be praying, and periodically crossing himself.
“Mariposa. Canela. Atole. Huisache. Tortilla. Deseos. Enamorados. Alameda. Azulejos. Enemigo. Nubes. Terreno. Vaqueros. Granja. Arroyo. Acequia. Concepción. Tranquilidad. Bendiciones y bendiciones. Siempre. Siempre. Siempre.”
The Spanish words hang in the air: Butterfly. Cinnamon. Porridge. Huisache. Tortilla. Desires. Lovers. Boulevard. Tiles. Enemy. Clouds. Land. Cowboys. Farm. Creek. Aqueduct. Conception. Tranquility. Blessings and blessings. Always. Always. Always.
“This is a prayer against our forgetting,” Uncle Raul says, with uncharacteristic seriousness. “But the prayer is as long as time, so you can never be done with it. It just goes on and on, forever.”
Raul, my father’s elder brother, had died of cancer, and he was among the many Santos I never had a chance to ask about the family’s past. Along with Uvaldino, Chita, Andrea, Nela, Paulita, and all the others that had gone before. I wanted to ask him now—about the stories he had heard of Mexico, about the family’s early life in San Antonio, and about his father, Abuelo Juan José.
“There were memories in the familia before there was anyone around to remember them,” he said, before I had a chance to ask. “So where do we begin?”
Uncle Raul looks at me now with tears in his eyes, “There were the stars and the planets in the sky, the earth, the fire, and the wind. Why not ask them, John Phillip? Why not ask them?”
The Tarahumara Indian priests of northwestern Mexico say we are meant by the Creator to walk twenty-four miles a day, and that this is why our feet are shaped like a bridge. We are meant to walk through the lands that surround us. If we stand still, we become spiritually sick, and eventually, whether in the space of one life, or over the span of several generations, this sickness will overwhelm us.
The Aztecs and their descendants have always been sorcerers of the earth. They know the land is alive, a place of magic and awe that connects us to the panoramas of the unseen worlds, to geographies within geographies. This invisible topography of the dead is called el Inframundo. It includes Tlalocan, the place of the underworld, and the paradisal Tamoanchan. El Inframundo is not like Hell and Heaven, set apart from the world. It is more like a portal out of history and into eternity, encompassing all of the gradations of darkness and light, where all of the dead dwell, simultaneously beyond, and among, us. In the Inframundo, you communicate with the spirits of the dead, with the spirits of animals and all created things, and sometimes with the gods themselves.
You enter the Inframundo by several paths. There are places spread across the land that are like gateways into this dimension: caves and hills, streams and charcos, gorges and cañones, buttes and valleys.
The old brujos, or sorcerers, the fierce geomancers of the Inframundo, could enter directly, through a trance, looking without blinking at old maps or paintings of revered sacred places. Gradually the masses of color and lines would begin to undulate and swirl, spinning like a maelstrom, accelerating past north, south,
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