Notes from Zacatecas: The Past
Weaving this wanderlust trail through Mexico’s mountains and roads, I try my best to remember something that I often forget: this is a part of my past. If not this street or this city, this land is the land of my ancestors. This land is a part of me.
My connection to Mexico is both very real, and a bit obscure. What is certain is that my family crossed from Coahuila during the Mexican Revolution, early in the last century. Several years ago my mother spent a few months tracing the genealogy. Even after the Mormon Church FedEx’ed records on microfilm, the trail dead-ended with a small settlement at the base of one hill in Coahuila. Our own personal Mexico, where perhaps another hundred years of the past even now sit rotting in a cabinet.
On my trip to la frontera last summer I met John Neck, a resident of the borderlands and something of a Mexican history buff. Over a dinner of carne asada in Ciudad Acuña, he speculated that the records — birth and death certificates, wedding notices and the like — may have ended up in Spain. Long before Mexico, it was common for Spanish colonial governors to take such things with them. And as for Aztec roots, who can say? Some stories of the past are lost wholly to time.
My father’s mother is the only immediate family member that I think feels a connection to Mexico. Her father — my Great Grandfather, who I knew only briefly — felt connected to Mexico too. My grandmother speaks of riding horses on ranches in Texas, yet when it comes to Mexico, even she experienced it as a visitor, blazing years ago her trail through Monterrey, Mexico City, Zacatecas, Aguascalientes, Guadalajara, much of it on tour buses. She was born in Texas in the 1920s. Mexico was already a memory.
Memory can be a powerful thing, yet so many things seem forgotten. Long before my ancestors crossed from México to Tejas, another generation saw Tejas break away from México; another generation saw México break from Spain; another saw Spain colonize these ancient Aztec lands. So it goes, back to when an ancient people called the Mexica left their homeland of Aztlán, moved south and built a great city — Tenochtitlán — in the heart of what is now Mexico.
The Spaniards destroyed Tenochtitlan, and built Mexico City on the ruins. Further north, where once Texas and Mexico were one, the Rio Grande now marks an increasingly militarized zone between Los Estados Unidos and Los Estados Unidos Mexicanos. The ancient tongues and the ancient lands are gone and forgotten. Yet the blood of the ancients still flows through me.
Weaving this trail, mile by mountainous mile, I try my best to see this land as a part of me. I sit here and wonder: Long before this city, long before these churches, these buses, these centuries of change, did my ancestors cross these hills, weaving their tenuous southward trail?
I don’t know the answer to that question. But even with so much of the past forgotten and gone, I cannot help but look out of smudged omnibus windows with a sense of wonder.