About Me

I am a storyteller who was born and raised in the Arizona-Sonoran desertlands. I grew up in a richly layered Mexican Catholic lifeworld. It was a world where the ancestors were alive, along with the saints, the Lady, her child, and a father presence that my grandmother called Tatita Dios. It was also a world fraught with colonizing tensions--the assimilating pressures of the overculture, the repressive bindings of the church. I left home looking for answers to questions I didn't even know how to ask.

The writings I share here reflect the currents that bring me home with stories to tell. In many ways, the voices I share in these stories may be perplexing and disorienting to my family and the people from my hometown. I do not claim to represent them. However, these stories are written from a place of love meant to honor the ancestors, family, lands, cultures, and friends who have nourished the seeds of remembering in me.

Finally, at their root, these stories come from a well of deep longing. In 2011, I made a vow to answer this longing. Here is the story:

THE VOW
On March 21, 2011, I took this small decoupaged wooden block and wrote with permanent marker on the back. I wrote a vow to this woman. I signed and dated my statement. My whole life I had struggled to know who she is. I knew her image so well. At times she felt close, yet some part of me seemed incapable of reaching her. She was the blurry memory in the near reaches of my mind—just enough out of focus that I would sometimes forget.

I thought I had met her inside the walls of the church. She had a story with straight lines that were polished and repeated over and over until the words turned into well-worn history. How could there be any other way? I met her in the same way I met lions and tigers, gorillas and chimpanzees: inside a cage that had a reasonable story. There were just enough plants and concrete ponds to make it all a good-enough illusion. Just enough natural flavoring to keep the hoax alive. Tamed. Enclosed.

When I left religion for good, she surprised me.

“I’m still here,” she said. “I am bigger than any cathedral or basilica. I cannot be contained by walls, picture frames, or statues.”

She was beyond those stories about her that I knew so well. The threads pulled away, unraveling everything I thought I knew. Holes revealed themselves, and she was everything underneath and beyond. I could frighten myself if I tried too hard to understand.

On that day, those many years ago, I knew enough to vow my life to her. I was not sure how to explain who she was, but I knew that every cell in my being longed to be at her feet, under her feet. I realized that the vow was more to myself than it was to her. Do not forget. The pain of forgetting her—the struggle to remember who she is—that is a pain I have known for lifetimes. It was a knowing that went underground for safe-keeping because civilization was a dangerous place for those who remembered.

Civilization itself is fraying now. She is the ground beneath, holding us as our threads unravel. Now it’s time for us to step out of our own cages. Can we remember we are as wild as she is?