MY 19th CENTURY

…manufactured in a certain style. Any style contains a history.

-Wayne Koestenbaum

Upon defending my MFA thesis, my advisor, Cuban poet Pablo Medina, walked me to his office. As we sat, he reached under his desk and handed me a book: Henry Kamen’s The Disinherited: Exile and the Making of Spanish Culture 1492–1975. I thanked him, saying I’d do my best to read it and get it back to him before I returned to Arizona. He waved away my remark with gentle dismissiveness. “Keep it. It’s yours,” he said. “Besides…” he leaned over his desk, playfully lowering his voice as if under surveillance, “I want you to see what bastards they were to us.”

So began my 19th century.

*

In 1789, the Spanish Crown commissioned a research expedition of the overseas empire. It had been decades since the Crown had conducted such work. The goal, to yield clarity regarding the conditions of colonial populations, possessions, and businesses abroad.

Tasked with sailing to the Spanish colonies in the Americas and the South Pacific, the Italian-born, Spanish naval officer Alejandro Malaspina departed in 1789 and returned in 1794. His findings: the colonies were riddled with unrest and creeping toward revolt. He recommended they be granted “moderate freedoms” and that the Crown reform its colonial policies in favor of more democratic representation.

Because of his findings, Malaspina was jailed and exiled. He died in 1810—the same year Mexico formally began its armed campaign for independence. Malaspina never returned to the kingdom of Spain.

*

At eighteen, almost two centuries after Malaspina died in exile, I embarked on my own voyage. Told I was smart and capable by my teachers, I went away to a private college in New England, the kind founded in the 19th century to uphold an elite, intellectual class in the newly independent United States of America.

While away from home for the first time, I wrote. I wrote not knowing what I was searching for or whether I’d ever return to share what I found.

*

My paternal grandparents were Rarámuris, born and raised in the Copper Canyon of northwest Mexico. This is the land our people have called home since time immemorial.

My dad was also born on our ancestral land but did not stay there long. In 1961, less than a year after his birth, the Ferrocarril Chihuahua al Pacífico (Chihuahua Railroad to the Pacific), largely funded by a Kansas-based enterprise, was completed. The route triggered mass Mexican and U.S. settlement of the mountains and the displacement of Rarámuris. Consequently, my dad was primarily raised in coastal Sinaloa, spending much of his childhood in cramped quarters without running water or formal education.

*

Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes in Decolonizing Methodologies: “The word itself, ‘research,’ is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary.” Given the histories of Western institutions—their violence and extraction of Indigenous knowledge and resources—it should come as no surprise that when research is evoked “in many indigenous contexts, it stirs up silence, it conjures up bad memories, it raises a smile that is knowing and distrustful.”

If what I’m doing can be called “research,” then I’m accountable for anything taken and not returned, anyone wronged and not righted, every resource burned, consumed, or killed without acknowledgement nor recompense. Please, don’t let me get away with it.

*

I ask my dad what he can tell me of his homeland.

“No recuerdo mucho,” he says.

I ask how often he returned.

He tells me he went back once or twice as a young man, and then again to recover his baptism certificate so he could marry my mother in the Church.

As he speaks, I try to imagine the twenty-five-year-old Rarámuri man with his bride-to-be at his side, travelling by any means available, searching to prove his origins to an institution that cared little about anything but its own eternal glory.

*

Founded in 1813 by Baptist missionaries on dispossessed Abenaki territory, Colby College sits atop Mayflower Hill overlooking the town of Waterville, Maine.

I enrolled as a student in 2008. During my first semester, Barack Obama was elected President of the United States. I called my mother after watching his victory speech. She could barely speak through her tears of joy and uncertainty. A few days later, my younger sister shared with our mom that white kids at her high school had staged a “funeral for America” on campus. They dressed in all black and threw flowers onto a coffin containing the stars and stripes.

Over eight years, the Obama administration went on to deport more people than any previous presidential administration in U.S. history. The majority of those deported came from Central America and Mexico, many belonging to Indigenous communities who had endured destabilization and destruction of their homelands at the hands of corporations and Western-backed, anti-democratic regimes. As Chicana scholar Alicia Schmidt Camacho observed in her book Migrant Imaginaries, by the early 21st century, “…the Mixteca/o population of southwestern Mexico surpassed the Navajo (Dineh [sic]) to become the largest indigenous group within the United States.”

While intensifying deportations, the Obama administration further militarized the U.S.-Mexico Border. Increases in surveillance and armed personnel accompanied rising violence against migrants as well as members of the Tohono O’odham Nation, whose territory spans the present-day Arizona-Sonora borderlands.

*

Does looking back help explain what I see when I look forward? That’s not what this is about. Neither relief nor solutions reside in my past; only reminders like evicted houses, bodies without life within.

*

I am thirty-five years old as I write this. Within the same number of years, starting in 1820, the Indigenous peoples of present-day Arizona lived under Spanish, Mexican, and US rule. In another four years, my lifespan will see the O’odham peoples of central Arizona forcibly relocated to the Gila River Indian Reservation, the first reservation in the territory under U.S. control.

I was born and raised on O’odham land, in the Washington-Escobedo neighborhood, which was cobbled together to segregate impoverished Black and Mexican residents. Even in diaspora (or especially in diaspora) we inherit these histories, wear them around our necks, drag them with each step we take beneath a punishing sun.

*

In 1825, five years after liberation from Spanish imperial rule, the newly formed Mexican government passed the Law of Colonization. This edict incentivized non-Indigenous Mexicans to settle the northern territories, granting land to anyone willing to fight and kill for it. Among these territories were homelands of the O’odham, Piipaash, Yoeme, and Rarámuri.

According to anthropologist Edward Spicer, “the net effect of the Law of Colonization was to encourage Mexicans to move deeper into Tarahumara [Rarámuri] country, to push the Indians farther west and south into the mountains…” Consequently, “the process of voluntary isolation from Mexicans on the part of the great majority of Tarahumara [Rarámuri] was intensified.”

In territories north of Chihuahua, the Law of Colonization also encouraged Anglo-Americans from the U.S. to settle territories in present-day Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. In exchange for their settlement and willingness to war against Indigenous peoples, these settlers were given land grants and free rein in their combat tactics. Anglo-American enclaves in Mexico’s sparsely-populated northern territories thus grew in numbers. Mexican officials hoped these Anglo-American settlers would eventually assimilate into the milieu of settler-colonial Mexican life.

You can read the language in which I write to know how that turned out.

*

After my undergraduate studies, I struggled to find and hold a job. Like many of my generation, I was unprepared to confront an economic reality in which the qualifications I’d worked hard to obtain barely mattered. We had to pay for the misdeeds of prior generations, especially the excesses of the political and financial elite.

Unemployed and mired in inadequacy, I began to write fiction and poetry. In college, I fantasized about being a writer, writing and publishing things of consequence. However, because of my insecurity, I did not seek out publication. Instead, I kept journals where I wrote personal reflections, notes for school assignments, and scraps of verse and narrative.

As I reread some of what I wrote, I find I repeatedly begin entries with either encouragement for journaling consistently or admonishment for failing to do so. Even if I never intended to write anything for public engagement, I was determined to write often. For most of my time away from home, I turned to writing to try to make sense of what I witnessed and experienced. Only once I felt as though I had no other way through my struggles did I decide to go public with my writing.

I gathered what resources I had and wrote what fiction I could as a sample of my capabilities. My sights set, again, on a school across the country in New England, I applied to a single creative writing graduate program.

*

Founded in 1880, Emerson College began as an institution specializing in communication studies. I did not know this when I began my graduate studies there. In fact, I knew little about Emerson College or its Creative Writing MFA, save for the fact that they had on their faculty Pablo Medina—a writer I greatly admired.

*

Exiled from his homeland at the age of twelve, Pablo tried to (re)collect his family’s histories in his Exiled Memories: A Cuban Childhood. Near the book’s close, he writes: “All of us struggled a great deal when we lost the land of our birth. But so did those who came before us.” To be sure, throughout the memoir, Pablo details the warmth, strife, and strangeness he felt with his family in pre-revolutionary Cuba.

Among the many compelling family members he writes about is his grandfather, Pablo Medina I. Born in 1896—two years before Cuba liberated itself from Spanish colonial rule—Medina I was, according to his wife, a man with “a prodigious memory and infectious wit. He was also charming and vibrant…[and] he never cared about his children or about [his grandson Pablo]. He cared only about himself.”

Amid so much social and political upheaval, Pablo’s patriarch and namesake behaved selfishly, with little regard for consequences. Perhaps reflecting habits inherited from a chaotic childhood, Medina I gambled away money in lieu of providing for his family, abandoned his household for long stretches at a time, and regularly cheated on his wife.

Yet Pablo—the grandson memoirist—concludes about his grandfather: “I have chosen to like him…[for] to damn him, to question or judge his life when others closer to him have not fallen into that trap, would be to condemn the only thing he passed on to me—his name.”

This kind of literary forgiveness, not forgetting, led me to trust Pablo with my writing.

*

On a sunny afternoon in winter, while I worked at a desk near our department offices, Pablo came over and handed me a copy of Blue Mesa Review.

“You should read this,” he said. “And maybe consider submitting something to them.”

Before I could thank him, Pablo had turned and walked back toward his office.

Months later, I published my poem “Every Father Says I Love” with the journal.

Inspired by the one time in college when my dad told me he loved me—something I desperately needed to hear in the wake of an ugly breakup—the poem detailed elements of my dad’s life that had previously barred him from saying the words “I love you,” from linguistic barriers to childhood poverty and my own obstinacy. The poem concludes with me longing to rest “my cheek against dad’s cheek” to listen.

*

My most publicized fiction piece is titled “Tourista.” The story recounts an afternoon in the life of an Indigenous-Mexican, first-year college student in New England. It begins when the unnamed narrator is jolted out of a hangover nap by a phone call from his college admissions office. Even though he does not work as a campus tour guide, the admissions office calls him to ask if he can serve as a guide and ambassador for a prospective student and his father, both of whom are from Mexico. Suddenly realizing he represents the entire Mexican student body on campus, the narrator uneasily accepts.

Eventually, the narrator finds comfort with the two Mexican strangers. The three sit down and speak casually about their backgrounds. Though a clear class distinction separates them—the father and son representing elite Mexican nationals with enough wealth to consider private universities in the U.S., and the narrator a U.S.-born son of once-undocumented economic refugees—it isn’t until the narrator reveals that his father is Indigenous that the differences become irreconcilable. Hyper-aware of his guests’ bigotry, the narrator excuses himself in search of more alcohol to assuage the shame from the encounter.

*

Three years before I returned home from my MFA, I quit drinking. As I write this, I still don’t miss alcohol, how it made me feel.

*

Linda Tuhiwai Smith tells us, “While the West might be experiencing fragmentation, the process of fragmentation known under its older guise as colonization is well known to indigenous peoples… Fragmentation is not an indigenous project; it is something we are recovering from.”

To help us restore ourselves and our connections to land, histories, and our ways, Smith advocates for holistic methods, such as storytelling, remembering, and reframing. All these methods require mental clarity and a willingness to be honest about how much has been surrendered or lost in the name of survival and adaptation.

*

I’ve written and talked elsewhere about the particulars of my family’s migration. Taken as individualized narratives of impossible situations and decisions, each member’s story can feel like it makes sense—a person will do what’s necessary to survive and persist, after all. Attempting to reframe them as origins for my life—or for the lives of my cousins or my siblings or their children—however, feels like trying to reassemble a place one pebble, one blade of grass, one droplet of water at a time.

Catching up with family or talking about a relative’s latest health status or scare, a different detail emerges—an additional, complicating particular—to a portrait never composed in full.

*

In all the Latino communities in which I’ve lived, I’ve never encountered someone with my surname, unless they were kin or also hailed from our ancestral home. I concluded my surname must be a Hispanicized modification of a Rarámuri word or phrase.

I searched for its meaning in David Brambila’s Diccionario Rarámuri-Castellano (Rarámuri-Spanish Dictionary) and found the word “ma’chiná” with the following definitions:

(1) Imperative, 2nd person of ma’chínama: “Get out.” Ex. “Sapú ma’chiná!” (Get out quickly!)

(2) Adverb, modifier: “obviously,” “visibly,” “clearly.” Ex. “M’achiná akibasa ka ba.” (If it obviously were to occur.)
(3) Adverb, positional: “away,” “outside.” Ex. “We ma’chiná mochiwi.” (They are outside, over there.)

*

In my 19th century, I was a subject of New Spain; a remnant of Mexican independence and unrealized community therefrom; an unforeseen consequence of U.S. military invasion, conquest, and capitalism; a displaced Rarámuri walking along a precipice. To one side of me, an empire teetered but never quite collapsed; to the other, the quiet of ashes. I wandered away from home in search of beginnings, origins, conclusions, and bridges between all.

While our stories are far from over—far from started—I returned home with two truths sharing a border within me.

First, people break hearts. Whether through our circumstances or actions, sooner or later, we remind each other of how much we can hurt.

Second, the more I experienced what this nation terms “success,” the further I was pulled from my origins, my family, and my home. From my childhood on, well-meaning adults—deliberately or inadvertently—pushed me away from where I belonged. I’m beyond grateful I found my way back.