About Anita Endrezze Essay, Research Paper
Anita Endrezze
Hi, my name is Anita Endrezze. My father was Yaqui and my mother is a combination of
Italian, Slovenian, and German-Romanian. Although I’m Yaqui I don’t speak for all
Yaquis. I speak for me and my experiences as a woman, a half-Yaqui, and a wife and mother.
I have two children, a teenage son and a daughter in 1st grade. We are all
complicated humans, with many influences in our lives. My tribe comes from northwestern
Mexico. Look at a map. South of Arizona is the state of Sonora. You will find the Gulf
of California. Look for the Rio Yaqui. It is a river named after my tribe and where most
Yaquis live. In Mexico they speak Spanish. Some Yaquis speak Yaqui, which is a language
that has been spoken for thousands of years. I don’t speak it. My grandparents left Mexico
about 1900 and moved to California. Some Yaquis also live in Arizona. I live in Washington
state. Leslie Ullman
Endrezze’s collection, her first, is
luxuriant with fragments of myth, the voices of different personae, striking visual images
and always, as a backdrop, metaphors interweaving the natural world with the landscape of
human emotion. Her heritage is half-European and half-Yaqui Indian; in these poems, native
American sensibility manifests itself in the earthbound nature of her images and in her
deep sensitivity to the rhythms of nature rather than in the subject matter. Endrezze is
also a professional storyteller and a painter (one of her vivid, dreamlike paintings is
the book’s cover.) These abilities, which also arise from a warm, primal sensibility,
surface in her beautifully visualized images and in the strong narrative movement of many
poems.
Endrezze’s is a voice, or vision, that constantly
redefines familiar things, sure of itself at every turn but respectful of an abiding
mystery. Throughout these poems Endrezze strikes arresting balances, via metaphors,
between the human world and the natural world, as in these opening lines from
"Calendars":
the days are circles of bread, paper-words, the
light in the egg
the nights are grass-moons, volcanic glass
the dark wine of the body
The calendar of water is lightning-flint, the dew that scars
the iris, the bitter salt of blood
my wrist is time’s turning on bone, the sinew of
grace
Often she seems to be translating passionate
feeling directly into landscape, which allows her to speak from the very personal realm of
desire and loss in such a way as to link personal dynamics to the less personal, more
encompassing workings of nature. In "Searching for the One in My Dreams," she
conjures the searched-for lover through a metaphor, making him more a natural force rather
than a specific person: "Your name is a red branch. Your eyes have been the western
twilight …. Though you be the only rain on a high plateau, I will find you."
And in "There Are Roses You’ve Never Given Me," she uses images of roses
to honor, with particular grace, the sensual, expansive, powerful feminity of the speaker:
"I carry …. Roses made of teeth / and threads of rain."
Passion in Endrezze’s work is enduring, yet full
of ebb and flow, linked as it is with natural laws. In the example above, it has a lyrical
quality, something gentle and plantlike. Elsewhere, however, passion has the heat and
rankness of animal life. In a poem called "Fox-Woman Goes Man-Hunting,"
Endrezze’s Yaqui background and her skills as a storyteller come into full play, as a fox
"take[s] on the illusion of womanskin" in order to find the man who killed her
"Kits" and to become impregnated by him so that she can have more. She hitches a
ride into town and enters a bar where she sees:
…. the evasive eyes of gray-suited men who
think they are wolves. There are hands that snap-trap the flesh in dark comers. There are
the growly words that smell like old meat on the teeth of urging men. But I got savvy. I
know some tricks of my own! I take the smoky light into my nails and scratch my sign on
their groins. Now there’s some action!
from a review in the Kenyon Review ? 1993 by Leslie Ullman.
Anita Endrezee
from "A Journey to the Heart"
The faces of my ancestors are both luminous and shadowy. I’m standing in a
long line, holding the memory of their hands. My own hands are bone and muscle,
sinew and threadlike veins of blood. We’re dreaming about each other or maybe
playing a game of "telephone," hundreds of years old. You know, where
one person whispers a message or story to another, who then whispers it to the
next person in line. Pass it on. The message is changed, perhaps only
slightly but continually, until it has created a new language, a different shape
of itself. Or maybe the words become the dimple in your mother’s cheek or the
stubborn cowlick in your sister’s hair. Still, there is a connection of breath,
heart, mind, and spirit.
Not one of my immediate ancestors was a professional storyteller, yet all
told stories about our families, and collectively the stories of their lives
have influenced me.
I’m half Indian and half white. Most people assume it’s my mother who is
Indian. Not so. My mother’s grandparents came from Vinica (Slovenia), Fai Della
Paganella (alpine Italy), and Curciu (Romania). For sociopolitical reasons, they
all probably spoke German in addition to their national languages. They were two
men and two women, traveling individually from their small villages to the end
of the earth: Butte, Montana. They came in the late 1890s: Johanna Ostronic,
Joseph Kambic, Elizabeth Yaeger, Eugenio Endrizzi.
Like many young men, Eugenio Endrizzi intended to work for a few years in
America, make his fortune, and return to Italy. In Butte, he met Elizabeth
Yaeger, and they married and had children (my grandfather, William Eugene
"Papa Billy," was one of them). Eugenio had already sent his family
back to Italy when he was killed in a mining accident on October 11, 1905. He
was thirty-eight.
I have a copy of the newspaper article about his death. The headline reads: Dead
Miners Careless. Below that it says "Endrizzi and O’Neill failed to
follow instructions of the shift boss."
Further headlines add: Crushed Beneath Tons of Rock in Speculator Mine.
The detailed article goes on to say that "suddenly and without warning,
an immense quantity of rock came down from the hanging wall and caught O’Neill
and Endrizzi. One of them spoke a few words after falling, but the other appeared
to be dead."
I’d like to think it was my great-grandfather passing on that message,
speaking his last few words. What did he say? I’m still listening. Maybe my son
was learning as he arranged his rock collection. The beauty of each rock was
formed under certain immense pressures in the heart of the earth. Each rock
exists, singular in its own beauty, and ageless. Like people.
Eugenio’s widow and children returned to that raw city of bricks and trees
burnt leafless by the sulfuric acid in the air. Butte was a city of great
wealth, vitality, and death. A town that heaved itself up and out of the earth,
home to immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Scotland, and Scandinavia. My mother was
born there.
Her name is Jean and she is Papa Billy’s daughter. She’s fair-skinned with
amber-colored eyes and blondish brown hair. I have photos of her when she was a
little girl, wearing her blond hair in a Dutch-boy haircut. She’s told me how
she played on the mine tailings.
Shortly before World War II, she moved to Long Beach, California, and worked
in the naval shipyards, drafting. She was very good at it. The blue lines were
clean, neat, and precise.
My maternal grandmother, Ann, or Nana, was also a quiet woman. Deeply
religious, she tried to get me to go to mass. My mother wouldn’t let her. Even
so, I grew up with ideas and experiences in both Catholic and Protestant
churches. Nana was ninety-two when she died in 1994, and she taught me a lot
about patience. She was a nurse in a time when nurses were instructed how to
formulate their own disinfectants and told how to prepare a kitchen for a
woman’s birth labor. She was born in Butte, Montana.
She was a good shot; they called her "Annie Oakley." But she was
also fearful, didn’t like taking risks, avoided changes. I have tried to follow
my mother’s example of saying yes to life’s possibilities. Still, I can
understand my grandmother. In her lifetime, the world went through changes
tremendous and frightening to the timid soul.
Her husband, my Papa Billy, was a steamfitter by trade and an inventor by
inclination. He invented an ore classifier used in the Montana mines.
He had a rock collection: stunning purple crystals and clusters of yellow
crystals that caught and refracted the light. We set them all on our mantel.
Blue-green rocks?copper?that we were warned not to lick. Solid "fool’s
gold," or pyrite, which made our childish eyes glitter. Heavy chunks of
lead. I learned the names of rocks before I learned my multiplication tables.
Although Papa Billy’s father had been killed in that mining accident, he was
fascinated with the deep earth?and the deep sea. Papa Billy invented a
nuclear-powered submarine with a conical-shaped hull. I still have all his
patent drawings. I can see his drafting table, set square in the golden light of
a lace-curtained window. Pens. Straightedge. Crumbly erasers. A small penknife
to sharpen thin-leaded pencils. The implements of his creativity were just as
exciting to me as his creations.
Someday I’d like to write a book about my mother’s side of the family.
My father, Alexander Raymond Diaz, was Yaqui. A full-blood with a dark moon face
and hair so black it shone blue at times. When he met my mother, he was a
divorced motorcycle mechanic for the Long Beach Police Department. After they
were married, they tried to buy a house, but because he was Indian, no one would
sell one to him. And because my mother was a woman, she wasn’t allowed to buy
one either.
I wrote about this in "La Morena as the Sad-Eyed Jaguar Priest." La
Morena means "the dark woman." and she is one aspect of the female
presence in many of the poems and prose poems I have included in this book. I am
also related to the Moreno family. My godfather was Alex Moreno (see the poem
"Anonymous Is Coyote Girl"). Additionally, the Virgin of Guadalupe is
known as "La Morenita," which is an affectionate way of saying
"the little dark one," since she is of indio blood.
"Someday, your daughter’s going to write about this," La Morena
promises in "La Morena as the Sad-Eyed Jaguar Priest." "Doesn’t
matter if she gets it the way it really happened. Nothing happens the way we
remember it."
While collecting stories for this book, I asked relatives for their memories
and discovered that people remember things differently. One story might be told
three different ways, filtered by individual perceptions and by time. I was
intrigued by something Stravinsky said: that we live by memory, not by truth. In
gathering material for this book, I learned that the truth is not often found in
fact. The reporting of history is always subjective, no matter who is telling
it. This discovery freed me: I was able to figure out how I wanted to approach
my family history?as fact or fiction? Long troubled by the question, I decided
to do it in both ways. This book, therefore. is history, myth, family anecdotes,
poetry, and short stories, and they are all the same thing.
Yaquis have had centuries of contact with Europeans. The first Spaniard went
through in about 1533 on a slave-raiding expedition. Another explorer, Francisco
de Ulloa, saw "naked people " and smoke signals on the beach as he
sailed up the Gulf of California sometime between 1539 and 1541. There have been
periods of relative peace, but consider this: at one time, there were thirty
thousand Yaquis living in eighty rancherias. Three hundred years later,
there were only ten thousand left. For better and for worse, Spanish culture,
language, and religion have influenced Yaqui culture.
Other tribes in the region have fared worse. Of the ten original Cahita-speaking
tribes, only the Mayos and Yaquis survived.
The Yaquis have lived near the Rio Yaqui in northwestern Sonora for thousands
of years. In fact, one name given to us is Ria Hiaqui, which means "People
Who Shout across the River." Another name used by native speakers is Yoemem.
It means "the People."
My father’s parents, Carlotta Ramos and Emiterio (Meetah) Diaz, were Yaquis
from Mexico. It was a terrible time. Just before my grandparents were born, more
than one hundred Yaquis were burned to death in a church in Bacum, one of the
eight Yaqui pueblos. This is what happened: six hundred men, women, and children
surrendered to a Mexican colonel, who ordered four hundred fifty of them into
the church. The others were let go. He kept ten leaders as hostages and promised
that if there were any attempts to escape, all hostages would be shot. He
trained his artillery on the church door. I tell about this in the poem
"Red at Bacum."
There were constant battles against the Mexican government and the soldiers,
the federales, who enforced the tax collections and took away Yaqui
rights and land. Reprisals against the Yaquis included deportation to Yucatan,
enslavement, rape, murder, and starvation. My grandfather, Meetah, was just a
boy when he saw his father murdered by Mexicans. Meetah escaped by hiding under
the porch and later walked north. In "Bones Resembling My
Grandfather," I relate how he "scooped up handfuls of mud and made a
turban of wet earth" as he crossed the Salton Sea. This is how he avoided
sunstroke. Since the Salton Sea wasn’t formed until after 1905-1906, when the
area was flooded by the releasing of a dike damming the Colorado River, he must
have been there after that date.
In 1886, when Carlotta was a child. the Yaquis suffered a defeat at the hands
of the Mexican general Carbo, military commander of Sonora. Two hundred Yaquis
died and two thousand became prisoners of war. Diseases claimed the lives of
many civilian Yaquis. Many Yaquis were settled in the eight pueblos, under the
control of the government, but the majority left the Yaqui Valley, seeking work
and freedom. Some fled to the rugged Bacatete Mountains. They raided the
Mexicans and the pueblo Yaquis.
In 1900, General Torres battled the mountain Yaquis and killed four hundred
men. Many others committed suicide by jumping off cliffs. More than a thousand
women and children were forced to march down the trail. Most died along the way.
This is called the Massacre of Mazocoba. Only eighteen federales were killed and
sixty wounded. Thirty-five guns were taken from the Yaquis during the
"battle."
By 1907, Yaquis were a cash commodity, selling for sixty pesos a head to the
owners of henequen plantations in Yucatan and sugar fields in Oaxaca.
Many Yaquis left Mexico at this time, some fleeing to Arizona, refugees from
their homeland, always hoping they would be able to return. My grandparents
(separately, since they were not married at this time) went to California.
Although Yaqui history continued hand in hand with Mexican history (in 1910
the Mexican Revolution changed the country), my grandparents had removed
themselves from those dangers?and begun to merge with American history and
culture.
The Arizona Yaquis maintained a more unified identity as a tribal people than
did those who lived in California, who blended into a Mexican American identity.
My grandparents struggled with making a living and raising children. Although my
father grew up knowing he was Yaqui and heard the family stories, he was not
political. Even after my parents divorced and he moved to Green Valley. Arizona,
he didn’t participate in the Yaqui effort to establish a reservation outside of
Tucson. Instead, he was busy with his nursery business and raising my two
younger half- siblings. In ill health for a number of years, he died in 1979.
the same year the Pascua reservation was approved by the federal government.
My grandmother Carlotta Ramos came to the United States before 1916 (when my