Read Online Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation by John Phillip Santos - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: John Phillip Santos
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east, and west, until whole continents were pinwheeling in the movement, fiery at their extremities, consuming everything—stone, cactus, wind, and sunlight—in a perfect equilibrium of chaotic energies. By these means, you could reach the place that lies at the end of the seen world, the lands that await beyond the walk of one thousand years. The whole landscape becomes a bridge into the empire of the spirits and the time of the ancestors.
This is the story I was told about the first journey.
El Tío Francisco, Uncle Frank, the eldest of the Garcias, made the trip, taking a train to the frontera and walking across the Rio Grande on a high, creaky swinging wooden bridge at the border with Texas which connected the towns of Eagle Pass on the American side and Piedras Negras on the Mexican. The only people there to greet him were some Kikapu Indians selling balls of white asadero string cheese and deerskin shoes and purses.
It was a cold February that year, and he remembered making the “four-day walk” to Uvalde, where he’d heard you could catch a freight train heading north to San Antonio. On those chilly nights he slept warily in the open country, having heard stories of Texas ranchers shooting Mexicanos they found on their property. To him, it all looked like high Coahuila desert land. There weren’t many fences then, so you could walk long flat stretches of the parched land with only bird shadows for shade in the daytime. It looked like home, only, he pointed out, there were more stones on the Texas side.
When Uncle Frank sent news back to Mexico of a big dam project on the Medina River near San Antonio, the rest of the Garcias followed the pilgrimage north. He had written to his brothers, all of them naturally gifted workers of metal and steel,
Queridos Hermanos, there are pipes to fit in Medina, pipes to fit in Medina!
Abuelo Juan José and his brother Uvaldino came north with the Garcias, though my abuelo was reluctant. The revolution was making everyday life in Coahuila a struggle. The roads between towns were often blocked either by Villistas or Maderistas or Federalistas. And they sometimes conscripted the men of the region, young and old, to join their ranks on threat of death. Young women were in constant danger of assault and rape by the same roving bands, who didn’t seem to be under the control of any officers, and the troops, often without any provisions, looted supplies, food, and livestock, from the citizenry at gunpoint.
The Garcias didn’t particularly care for any of the warring factions. In fact, politics seemed to them little more than chicanery in fancy trappings. The brothers—Francisco, Santos, Juan, Jesse, Gilbert, Manuel, and Carlos, whom we called Chale—gravitated toward rectitude, simplicity, and things that worked, as evidenced by all of the machines and tools they would build throughout their lives. Abuelo Jacobo wasn’t going to wait until he saw his adored sons fighting each other across barricades for the benefit of good-for-nothing pelados and charlatanes in Monterrey and Mexico City.
They had heard that in El Norte, Mexicanos were needed for the demanding work of building the new Texas. Frank and the other Garcia brothers knew their talents as inventors, machinists, and engineers would be needed. Abuelo Juan José, like his future father-in-law, Jacobo, wanted more than anything else to work with the land, and he had heard there was rich sharecropper’s farmland in the Texas territory between the Colorado and Guadalupe Rivers, beginning north of San Antonio, stretching south into the San Fernando Valley. The time had come to leave Mexico and its revolución de locuras behind.
Madrina remembers how the train the family rode with all their belongings was attacked by Pancho Villa’s army as they approached the border town of Piedras Negras. The blistering volleys of bullets ricocheted off the sides of the cars, leaving all the passengers, goats and chickens
This is the story I was told about the first journey.
El Tío Francisco, Uncle Frank, the eldest of the Garcias, made the trip, taking a train to the frontera and walking across the Rio Grande on a high, creaky swinging wooden bridge at the border with Texas which connected the towns of Eagle Pass on the American side and Piedras Negras on the Mexican. The only people there to greet him were some Kikapu Indians selling balls of white asadero string cheese and deerskin shoes and purses.
It was a cold February that year, and he remembered making the “four-day walk” to Uvalde, where he’d heard you could catch a freight train heading north to San Antonio. On those chilly nights he slept warily in the open country, having heard stories of Texas ranchers shooting Mexicanos they found on their property. To him, it all looked like high Coahuila desert land. There weren’t many fences then, so you could walk long flat stretches of the parched land with only bird shadows for shade in the daytime. It looked like home, only, he pointed out, there were more stones on the Texas side.
When Uncle Frank sent news back to Mexico of a big dam project on the Medina River near San Antonio, the rest of the Garcias followed the pilgrimage north. He had written to his brothers, all of them naturally gifted workers of metal and steel,
Queridos Hermanos, there are pipes to fit in Medina, pipes to fit in Medina!
Abuelo Juan José and his brother Uvaldino came north with the Garcias, though my abuelo was reluctant. The revolution was making everyday life in Coahuila a struggle. The roads between towns were often blocked either by Villistas or Maderistas or Federalistas. And they sometimes conscripted the men of the region, young and old, to join their ranks on threat of death. Young women were in constant danger of assault and rape by the same roving bands, who didn’t seem to be under the control of any officers, and the troops, often without any provisions, looted supplies, food, and livestock, from the citizenry at gunpoint.
The Garcias didn’t particularly care for any of the warring factions. In fact, politics seemed to them little more than chicanery in fancy trappings. The brothers—Francisco, Santos, Juan, Jesse, Gilbert, Manuel, and Carlos, whom we called Chale—gravitated toward rectitude, simplicity, and things that worked, as evidenced by all of the machines and tools they would build throughout their lives. Abuelo Jacobo wasn’t going to wait until he saw his adored sons fighting each other across barricades for the benefit of good-for-nothing pelados and charlatanes in Monterrey and Mexico City.
They had heard that in El Norte, Mexicanos were needed for the demanding work of building the new Texas. Frank and the other Garcia brothers knew their talents as inventors, machinists, and engineers would be needed. Abuelo Juan José, like his future father-in-law, Jacobo, wanted more than anything else to work with the land, and he had heard there was rich sharecropper’s farmland in the Texas territory between the Colorado and Guadalupe Rivers, beginning north of San Antonio, stretching south into the San Fernando Valley. The time had come to leave Mexico and its revolución de locuras behind.
Madrina remembers how the train the family rode with all their belongings was attacked by Pancho Villa’s army as they approached the border town of Piedras Negras. The blistering volleys of bullets ricocheted off the sides of the cars, leaving all the passengers, goats and chickens
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