By Patrisia Gonzales & Roberto Rodriguez
[Rodriguez and Gonzales can be reached at:
(915) 593-2387
P.O. Box 370394
El Paso, TX 79937 or
"You're late. The rooster crowed all morning. I knew you were coming."
Trini, a curandera, or healer, opens the screen door to her old farm. She
lives not far from Hillsboro, Texas, where around 1919, a black man was
burned at the stake by a mob.
We met Trini a few years ago, while driving down a country road that's no
more than a scratch in the earth. A handwritten sign that read "TAMALES"
caught our eye. And that's how we ended up talking about the message of the
rooster's crow, finding miracles in candles and, of course, her famous
tamales.
Trini's tamales have been known to attract people from as far away as Dallas
to these black lands where sweet corn grows tall. "Tierra caliente,"
Mexicans call it--or "hot earth."
Ever since she was a child she's also had the gift for divining. She once
found Spanish gold buried under a stick. These days, white farmers sometimes
ask her to show them where gold is buried on their land. They say they've
seen lights dancing on the earth at night--a sign of buried treasure. But
Trini refuses--for reasons rooted deep in American history--"because of what
the white man did to the black man, and for taking the land from Mexico."
Trini's people have been here since before there were six flags flying over
Texas. Her grandparents were Cherokee and Mexican Indians who liked to eat
on the floor and asked to be buried in a mountain when they died--the Indian
way.
Trini's skin is as brown and red as the earth. She looks like she's always
been here. And at age 72, she can't remember a time when her relatives
weren't here. Though she was born in these parts, she doesn't speak English
well, and cannot read nor write.
In other words, Trini would be a prime suspect for la migra--border patrol
agents who constantly search for "illegal aliens"--even hundreds of miles
from any border. If Congress has its way and adopts a national ID card for
everyone, it is people like Trini who will be constantly asked to produce it.
In a great irony of U.S. history, the true natives of this land have become
the immigrants. People who can trace their ancestry back the farthest are
stopped and questioned because "they look Hispanic"--meaning they look
Indian.
Canadian or European immigrants, though, are not hunted down by la migra in
this way. To us, then, our nation's immigration policy is simply a
continuation of the Indian removal policy of the 1800s, when Indians were
removed from their lands and forced into Indian Territory.
During that era, Native Americans were forced to walk the Trail of
Tears--some 600 miles without food or shelter--to Oklahoma, which became a
deportation center, according to Antonio Bustamante, an historian at the
University of Arizona. Many fell along the way. As Bustamante says, "There
were many trails of tears for each group that was removed."
Today another trail of tears exists. People indigenous to the Americas are
being removed again--through deportation.
Mexicans and Central Americans going north to the United States die in
boxcars, car trunks, crawl across mountains, and trust the rivers and deserts
with their lives. They must risk this hazardous journey because U.S. laws
have made it a crime for them to work here, and have branded them as
criminals not worthy of human rights--in a land that was formerly theirs.
And a man can still go free for shooting a Mexican in the back--as U.S.
Border Patrol Officer Michael Elmer did in 1994, after killing an immigrant
and then burying his body in the desert.
In indigenous culture, migration is part of a people's evolution and
spiritual journey. Certain places are deemed sacred because a people once
passed through there. In ancient picture books that show the founding of
Mexico, migration was depicted symbolically as footprints leaving seven
caves, an area which many believe to be the present-day Southwest.
Some Mexican Americans feel they are hated by "gringos" because their Indian
faces are reminders that they once owned the land--that they were
dispossessed and made illegitimate by an unjust war. Like Trini, Mexicans
and Central Americans are not immigrants. They have the land written on
their face, the age of the land etched in the deep color of their skin. And
the Hopi of the Southwest say, they are just following their right to return
home.
And they still leave footprints in the desert.
Source: MCLR List, 22429bsc@msu.edu (belinda cook)