Imperial (29 page)

BORDER GIRLS

And so I think I understand why the choreographer Rebeca Hernández once said to me: I’m not Mexican-American. I’m a border girl. A Mexican-American is someone who speaks English and Spanish at the same time. I can be a Mexican in Mexico, perfectly Mexican. I can be, not perfect American in America, but I can pass. I just connect better with Mexicans than with Mexican-Americans. The Virgin of Guadalupe is not European; she’s syncretic. My face is syncretic. I’m Indian, African and European. But I’m not one or the other. Even my clothes. Let’s see, today I’m wearing this bandage on my wrist, and that’s from Mexicali, but the clasp is American. My sandals are Mexican; my shorts are American. My underwear is Mexican, so the size is
chica
instead of petite. My shirt, let’s see, where the fuck did I buy this shirt? . . .

Is it true that the Virgin of Guadalupe is “not one or the other”? In 1904, the year of Mexicali’s founding, Pope Pius conferred on her shrine the designation of basilica. She’d already been the official protector of New Spain since 1754. But back in 1531, when she first revealed herself to the Aztec (or Mexican as he would have called himself in the pre-Conquest sense of the word) Juan Diego Cuahtaloatzin, some Indians conflated her with their goddess Tonantzin. To them she was darkskinned; for her they performed the outlawed pagan dances. A book called
The Wonder of Guadalupe,
which naturally never makes any such association, offers the following Northside view of Tonantzin:
A statue of this grim goddess . . . truly conveys the chilling nature of the Aztec mentality. Her head is a combination of loathsome snakes’ heads and her garment a mass of writhing serpents . . .
Our Lady of Guadalupe, “She Who Tramples the Serpents,” looks in no way serpentine. (And what about her supposed antithesis? One researcher reminds us that
another name for the Virgin Tonantzin is Coatlalopeuh, “she who crushes the serpent’s head.”
)

When she first appeared to him, Juan Diego thought that she might have been fourteen. Now her image shines forever upon his mantle of ayate fiber. Her eyes are almost closed; her gaze is far-off and sleepy; a gold-bordered, gold-starred mantle of celestial blue enwraps her dark hair and spills down to her ankles; she clasps her hands in prayer and wears the same black cross as the conquistadores. Good Father Florencia of the Society of Jesus advises all women, rich or poor, to be guided by her in their own deportment,
how they must correct their dress, and what they must forego so that they may give no scandal.
As for Tonantzin, whose name not coincidentally means “Our Mother” and upon whose ruined temple the Virgin first appeared, some Northsiders seem quite sure that she
projects a visage of fathomless grief from her sightless eyes, as if in perpetual mourning over the self-slaughter of her children.

Nine million Mexicans turned away from her—or, if you like, adored her new incarnation—and converted to Catholicism. So I read in
The Wonder of Guadalupe.
A migrant worker’s child informs us that
Guadalupe predates Christianity. She was Tonantzin to the Aztecs. She is the compassionate mother of all Mexicans, but especially of the orphans and the disenfranchised.
A Northsider student of religion who visited her shrine more bluntly asserts:
The Virgin of Guadalupe is a figure through which the indigenous people fought back against their colonizers and the religion of their colonizers and continue to do so today, whether they are conscious of it or not. I would consider this technique to be “Cultural Guerrilla Warfare,”
and he goes on to quote Mao Zedong.

In 1545, the Virgin of Guadalupe halted a typhus epidemic. In 1737, upon being named Patroness of Mexico, she stopped another plague. In 1775 the de Anza Expedition sang a Mass to her and adopted her among their patron saints before setting out to traverse the sands of Imperial. In 1810 a priest raised up her likeness as an icon of independence from Spain. Over the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, by whose provisions Mexico lost half her territory to the United States, the Virgin of Guadalupe presided, gazing dreamily down into space. In 1921 she withstood a time bomb. In 1966, in his “Plan de Delano” speech, César Chávez announced that at the head of their penitential cavalcade from Delano to Sacramento, a good two hundred and fifty miles,
We carry LA VIRGEN DE LA GUADALUPE, because she is ours.
As I write, Mexicans on both sides of the border still rely on her to help them conceive children or cure a fright. A historian of stereotypes gives the following Northside interpretation of the Virgin Mary:
As a special pleader for sinners, the Virgin offered confidence in them that they could “beat the rap.”

In 2005 a dancer at the Thirteen Negro assured me that her youngest daughter had been truly and absolutely dying, so she named her María Guadalupe and promised to make an annual pilgrimage to the little hill above her hometown of Obregon, a sacred little hill because it was there that the Virgin of Guadalupe was once seen. Every year Emily fulfilled her vow; upon her dressing room mirror in Mexicali, the Virgin’s image gazed down at her.

In 2004 the
Imperial Valley White Sheet
contained this advertisement:
GRACIAS VIRGEN de Guadalupe por escuchar oraciones M.P.
Thank you, Virgin of Guadalupe, for having heard our prayers—probably poor people’s prayers. And why not? Juan Diego Cuahtaloatzin described himself to the Virgin as
a poor ordinary man. I carry burdens with the tumpline and carrying frame.

In 2003 an old woman in Tecate who possessed three images of this syncretic goddess told me in a tone of quiet rapture: This is the religion I’ve been raised in. This is the Virgin I have the most feeling for. The Virgin of Guadalupe is for everyone, for the whole world . . . We’re all under her blanket. When I was younger, especially around the time I had my first communion, I used to dream about her . . .

In 2002 a street-lounger and would-be
pollo
in Mexicali uncomfortably told me: Most of the people in this country, they do believe in that. Do I believe or not? I’m not sure about that. I believe in God and Jesus but I think I have to read more about that. But something’s not right about that, because I hear a lot of old people, they don’t believe in that.—Slowly his faith in her grew evident. I suspect that he wanted to be, or be considered, an ultra-orthodox Catholic; nonetheless he loved her; he was hers and she was his. He and his Virgin were syncretic.

In 2000, Vicente Fox ended seven decades of single party rule in Mexico. Just before he took the presidential oath, he went to pay his respects to the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Look! In the double line of waiting cars and trucks at Mexicali’s western border crossing, darkskinned people in sports jackets are selling gigantic crucifixes; that’s standard; that’s Catholic; but over here an Indian girl is offering a white bas-relief of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Syncretism goes back farther than that, at least to 1519, when Cortés came to Mexico and (after temporarily bestowing her on
a very grand gentleman
named Hernando Alonso Puertocarrero) took as his mistress the highborn woman, the “mistress of vassals” from Jalisco whom he christened Doña Marina, used as an interpreter and confidante throughout the Mexican Conquest, begat on her a son named Don Martín Cortés, and married her off to a certain Juan Jaramillo. Since then the denizens of what we might as well call Northside have looked across the ditch with race-mixing in their hearts. Why not? Doña Marina, who might have loved him, for she exerted herself to save him from being assassinated by the Cholulan Indians (then again, that might have simply been the wisest course for her career as she saw it; moreover, it has been asserted that there was no assassination plot), opined for the record that
God had been very gracious to her in freeing her from the worship of idols and making her a Christian, and giving her a son by her lord and master Cortes, also in marrying her to such a gentleman as her husband Juan Jaramillo.
What could be more syncretic than that? (She sold out at a fancy price.) She is better known now as Malinche, and Mexican politicians like to attack one another as
malinchistas,
meaning
that one is not truly Mexican. That one is susceptible to foreign influences. A traitor. Like Malinche.

In the
Annals of Tlatelolco,
composed by the vanquished, Marina speaks to them like a haughty queen:
Do come here . . . Is Quauhtemoc still such a child?
One of Malinche’s few biographers responds:
Mexico’s problem with Malinche is, fundamentally, a question of how to honor a rape.
The Florentine Codex says:
. . . the Spaniards took things from people by force. They were looking for gold; they cared nothing for green-stone . . . They looked everywhere with the women, on their abdomens, under their skirts . . . And [they] took, picked out the beautiful women, with yellow bodies.
And in the same breath, the Codex describes the seizing and branding of men for slaves.

Perhaps she submitted willingly, relishing her important position. In the Florentine Codex
they placed a canopy of varicolored cloth over the Marqués,
which is to say Cortés;
then he sat down, and Marina sat beside him.
In the
Annals of Tlatelolco
the defeated ones bring to Cortés all the gold they can find,
but when the Captain and Marina saw it they became angry and said, “Is that what is being looked for?”
because they expected more; the writer seems to see them as equals. In a later Nahuatl folk tale, there is syncretic mention of
the White Woman, the great lady. She is known as the interpreter of Cortés.

Perhaps she was a traitor to some phantasm of united indigenous Mexican-ness that did not yet exist; she was Mayan, and Cortés conquered the Aztecs. Who are we to say what she was? In the 1850s, some Los Angeles Rangers sent to arrest Mexicans at a fandango were instead
immediately taken into custody by an overwhelming array of black-eyed Señoritas.
And here’s a Southside man in 2002, with eight brothers and four sisters, some of whom were born white, because his father had many girlfriends, some of whom have his dark skin and kinky hair. He gazes hungrily across the ditch and says: I’m gonna tell you the truth. I got a problem, ’cause all the girls to me are beautiful. But my speciality, I like one girl, maybe tomorrow I like another, maybe
morena
like that (you know
morena
? it means dark
⁴¹
), maybe tomorrow white, but to be married, I like a white girl. I don’t know why.
⁴²

THE AZTECS ARE BACK

Here’s another telling of Malinche’s marriage-tale: If they won’t swallow our Virgin, then mix her up with their goddess Tonantzin; that ought to make her stick! She’s already preparing to engrave her image, supernaturally, of course, on that Indian blanket; call it one of the first Spanish flags to fly over Mexico. May they all believe in the Virgin of Guadalupe! But will we Northsiders ever believe in Tonantzin? What do you think? Her power springs from the other side of the ditch. In the last few years of writing
Imperial,
I began to notice that some Southsiders, particularly those who dwelled in Tijuana, referred to themselves as Aztecs. They did so with pride. Meanwhile, I read the following editorial in a national Northside newspaper: The Iraqi insurgents who carve off the heads of American hostages are not actually Muslims at all (thus opines Mr. Ralph Peters), but mere exemplars of
the elementary problem of our times: Frightened human beings and the longing for easy answers that lead to the most repugnant forms of faith. The Aztecs are back.

And now it’s midnight in Mexicali, with only the bars still open, whores flying or waddling brilliantly up the dark street, the churches glowing in their sleep; and at the border itself, under many yellow lights, with the sound of the turnstiles echoing in the cooling air, a mother sits on a bench, desperately kissing her child, a tramp sleeps on the next bench, a cockroach runs across the yellow-lit sidewalk, the Chinese
licuado
man laughingly plays snap-the-towel with his girlfriend, and up the railroad track the cars glow, waiting to clear the U.S. checkpoint on the other side of the ditch. A few steps away, it’s darker than dark beside the Escuela Cuauhtémoc, Cuauhtémoc being the last Aztec prince, who surrendered to Cortés and whom Cortés,
who could not prevent their actions,
first allowed his lieutenants to torture by fire, in hopes of getting more gold, and later, this time on his own authority, hanged for conspiracy. That way, the Aztecs wouldn’t be back. And now it’s so dark, so quiet!—We didn’t have those waves of people coming across, remarks the old pioneer from Heber.

And then slowly, like a juice vendor ladling his wares, keeping ice and liquid in their respective places, a
pollo
comes creeping toward the fence, with a friend who’ll raise him up on his shoulders; he’s getting ready to be syncretic; he’s going to commit another totally needless and senseless act. He’s a wiry little man in a soccer jersey and a baseball cap which spells out his wish:
CALIFORNIA
. He wears a cross around his neck. I nod to him, and he nods to me. Sucking in his cheeks, clenching an unlit cigarette between two fingers, he approaches the wall. His comrade murmurs in his ear, probably something along the lines of:
Go with God!
because he replies softly:
Gracias.
The Border Patrol won’t drive to the detention center just for him; they’ll wait until the whole van is full.

Chapter 8

SIGN OF SLOW GROWTH SENDS STOCKS LOWER (2002)

Specialization
is passing from the consideration of a given set of objects
to that of a smaller set, or of just one object, contained in the smaller set.
Specialization is often useful in the solution of problems.