father was born here)?probably around 1902. An astute businesswoman, she later
owned property in several California counties: produce fields and houses for
field workers. She carried her money wrapped up in her shawl. My father clearly
remembered the early days, when they all had to pick lettuce and strawberries
and walnuts in order to survive. They went as far as San Francisco, working in
the fields.
Carlotta had been raped by Mexican soldiers. I wrote about it in the poem
"Angelina," which appears in Part Two of this book. A bad thing
happened to Carlotta, but by all accounts she was a good and kind person. She
was not the bad thing. She was stronger than that.
Carlotta’s father, Pedro Ramos, had been a merchant in Sonora. He had a
caravan of burros loaded with supplies that he traded and sold along the coast
near Guaymas, Sonora. It is possible that he was also a smuggler, perhaps a
gunrunner for the Yaquis in the mountains.
Pedro was murdered, "shot by Mexicans dressed as Indians,"
according to family legend. This phrase always made me wonder until I learned
more about Yaqui history. I think that the mountain Yaquis had a disdain for the
pueblo Yaquis and would have characterized them as "Mexicans dressed as
Indians." In other words, the pueblo Yaquis may have dressed like other
Yaquis but were really Mexican at heart, living and accepting Mexican rule. Or
perhaps he was simply shot by Mexican bandits.
In any case, his wife, my great-grandmother Estefana Garica, marched to the
local law authority. With a gun on each tiny hip, she demanded that he find the
killers or die himself.
Another story is told about her. She had a tooth pulled?and it was the
wrong one. She swore she’d kill the "dentist." For more about her,
read "Estefana’s Necklace of Bullets."
My Yaqui grandmothers were strong women, educated, clever, and fearless.
Carlotta was also graceful, exceedingly beautiful, and kind. She fed hoboes,
loved music (she played the twelve-string guitar), and sang. She was only four
feet, eleven inches tall, with masses of dark hair piled up on top of her head.
Her eyes were deep black. I have her photo on my office wall, next to one of her
husband, Meetah. He’s posed stiffly in a suit, with a shock of unruly hair
escaping out from under a dark hat. He didn’t like Mexicans. He lived his life
like an Indian, he’d say to anyone. He could easily lift four hundred pounds,
according to my father. Meetah was five-ten and stocky. As a young man, he
trained horses all over California and Arizona. He died from a hit-and-run
accident in the middle of the night in Long Beach, California, on September 19,
1937. He’d probably been drinking. I wrote about it in "Grandfather Sun
Falls in Love with a Moon-Faced Woman." The story is actually a retelling
of an old Yaqui story about the sun falling in love with the moon, but I wove it
into our family history.
Meetah owned a junkyard that now is just part of the neighborhood across the
street from the Long Beach Community Hospital, where I was born. His was a long
journey; from his experience as a boy witnessing his father, Valentino, being
murdered by soldiers to the experiences of a man living not far from Hollywood,
town of illusions and fantasy.
Valentino also dealt with his father’s death. Valentino and his
brother and father had been up in the mountains in Sonora, hunting for honey,
when something happened. I don’t know what, maybe a heart attack or a fall down
the mountain trail. The boys had to bury their father there among the red rocks
and crumbling earth.
Diaz is not a Yaqui name but one given to our family. It is a Mexican name,
specifically that of the Mexican president Porfirio Diaz, who was in power from
1876 to 1910. Sometime during that period, we acquired that last name. I was
born Anita Diaz. Other family surnames were Flores, Garica, and Ramos?all
Mexican names, not Yaqui. Many Yaquis had both a Yaqui name and a Mexican name,
along with nicknames by which they were more commonly known. My childhood
nickname was "Stormy." My Indian name, given to me shortly after my
birth, is Desert Rose.
Life was hard for my ancestors. They didn’t live long. But I know about them
through the stories we still tell. There are not enough stories; I always want
to hear more. I want to understand them and learn more about them and myself.
I want my children, Aaron and Maja, to know them also. That’s why I write and
paint, to pass it on.
The history of words is the history of people. People define and are defined
by their language. If you study languages, you learn about war, religion,
adventure, and spirit. I think it is interesting that scholars studying Indian
languages today are coming to realize that the great diversity of languages in
this hemisphere supports the idea that we have been here a lot longer than the
accepted, academic starting point of 11,500 years ago (the Clovis timetable).
Indeed, recent research has agreed that native people have been here for about
45,000 years. The voice of a people truly is their history.
My father never spoke Yaqui. When he was young, he was ashamed of being
Indian. He didn’t want to listen to the old stories. And yet he liked to tell us
about what life was like "in the old days." My younger half-sister,
Rondi (who was born in Farmington, New Mexico, on March 15, 1959), told me how
our father would go skinny-dipping in the ocean and the police would take his
clothes. He traveled with his family in a buckboard wagon into Los Angeles. He
was, she says, great at storytelling, funny, and generous. Rondi says, "I
see him with both the eyes of an adult and the memory of a child. When I was
little, he was wonderful. He’d sing for me and let me blow up the muscles on his
arm by blowing hard on his thumbs." But he also ran around with other women
and was a "happy drunk." For sometime he was separated from her
mother, and he lived for a while in New Mexico. We have a picture of him giving
a corn grinding demonstration at Chaco Canyon.
Rondi says, "He claimed to be a Catholic. Other times, he’ d talk of the
Happy Hunting Grounds. If truth be known, he didn’t believe in anything.
Whatever served his purpose at the moment." Yet she also relates how he
became a Christian later in his life and was a changed person: "He became
kind, considerate, and humble." She enjoyed being with him then. "So
his last days were his happiest. They were my happiest, also, because I found my
dad before he died," she told me.
Our father, Alex, was married three times (my mother was the second) and had
six legitimate children plus several illegitimate ones. My older half-sister,
Mary Francis, has only good memories of him. She still misses him, twenty years
after his death. My full sister, Barbara, remembers him not at all. My other two
half-siblings, Raymond and Tim, have mixed feelings about our father.
My parents’ marriage was very troubled. We lived for a while in Merlin,
Oregon, near Grant’s Pass. My parents logged their land. I remember napping in a
tent covered with crawling caterpillars. I breathed the close, green-tinted,
pine-scented air. I heard the milky sighs of my sleeping baby sister, Barbara.
It was a place of violence, I’ve since learned. I wrote a poem about it,
which appears in this book. It’s called "My Little Sister’s Heart in My
Hands."
I remember my father’s violence. He scared me. We finally left, my mother
secretly stealing away with us girls. We moved around a lot after that. From
birth to age eighteen, I lived in thirteen different houses. I went to a
different school every year from sixth to twelfth grade. In the poem
"Housing Dreams" (in the recently published The Humming of Stars
and Bees and Waves) I say, "There’s no rhythm / to moving / except the
moving." And "we moved / because we were nowhere / better / than
tomorrow." For many Indian writers, place is vital. For me, it’s been
thought and feeling, an emotional landscape. A landscape of dreams and stories.
It’s been four generations on either side of the family since someone has died
where they were born. We have been rootless for more than one hundred years. And
yet that restlessness, or desperation for something better, has given us a
vitality, a sense of adventure. While I have a Danish husband and my children
can find their roots in many countries of the world, we are Americans in the
special way in which only those who have Indian blood can connect to this land.
Excerpted from the Introduction to Throwing Fire and the Sun, Water at
the Moon (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2000). Copyright ? 2000 by
Anita Endrezee.
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