I haven’t written, I know. The summer has again returned to the torrid land where I reside, the northern sertões of southern Texas, a time of heat, humidity and desperation. I can almost think of José de Alencar’s Iracema beginning the same way I’m beginning this entry, full of sun, the sea breeze and the humid coast begging to be spoken to in the vocative case…
Texas Tech and all of my problems there are once again a vague and distant memory, left in the dust and the desolation of the West Texas plains. This will probably be the last time I will write favorably of such a region, as all it represents to me now is just another place I didn’t fit into. As much as I want to belong to the people and the things there, I just don’t. I came to these sad and desolate places five years before, and left, wondering if I’d ever see it again, and I wonder now, again, if it will be the same. I know, after all the things that have happened there, with graduation now come and gone without any clear prospect of success on the horizon, that things from here on out will never be the same. I don’t know what to expect, maybe I should just pack and leave. I have a couple of job offers: Santa Fe, San Francisco, Mexico, Brazil, Oxford. All of these places beckon to me like distant lovers (because I’ve fallen in love with all of these places). At home, my mother sits and laughs. “You’re crazy, son,” she’ll say, in that wonderfully mocking way, “There’s no way I’m allowing you to go to Brazil with my blessing.” But she knows I’ll go anyway, because essentially I’ll go for what I want when I know that it’ll work for me. After all, everything else has –– education first, then working out (making progress), then a job. My priorities are all mixed up. A boy like me is made of all will but no substance. I’m like a well-built ship on the waters of the sea, but without a sail. But even sail-less ships can arrive at peaceful and tropical ports, on islands far away.
As I write this my computer is slowly dying, the result of a nasty spill it took when I dropped it on a wooden floor in a haste to put on my morning clothes. My own experiences with this beloved little MacBook Air have taught me enough about being grateful for what you have. This computer has been my steady and faithful companion, through the storms of life, ethnolinguisitcs papers, and a thesis. As I write this now I see little brown legs and faces mixing about me. Brown, happy faces, Inland South accents, talk of Tex-Mex for lunch. My people. And even if I really don’t look like them or even share some of the same ideals, I feel bound to them, as if my fortunes are mixed in their livelihoods, and theirs in mine. I have an obligation –– not based on compadrismo (not to be achingly chauvinistic for once), but rather based on a desperate desire to succeed. I keep on being reminded from a passage in John, 1, 42-46, in which a bewildered Nathanael asks the disciple Philip about Jesus. I feel a little like Jesus: not wanted anywhere, and suspected of being just another country bumpkin with an agenda. If my own cynicism about Texas will permit me, I can only say that in those places where I have been rejected –– in the vast expanses of the Desolate Plain, or here, in the Paradise at the Edge of Sanity –– I am motivated by a desire to do as much I as I can to defy everyone’s expectations. I don’t want to be what they expect me to be, because I am nothing of what anyone expects. I am myself. He is, without a doubt, my own worst enemy, and a stranger. I am called to the mirror-lake of self-concept. I do not recognize the face in the reflection. He doesn’t appear to be the successful person I know he is. And when I run my hand against the waters, the image changes. I don’t know who I am anymore.
My thesis’ official title reads: La Madera de Antes, La Madera de Hoy: folk-saints, aging, and the culture of time-keeping and calendar customs in the regional Mexican-American folk religion of the Lower Border. The cover is white, tall Helvetica letters in red and black, with a fat black accent over the a of my last name. There are three little squares featuring pictures I took of a ritual ceremony in Los Fresnos two summers ago (right after the hurricane), and of course, my own little book of Spanish prayers I picked up in a botánica six years ago, when I was a young, hot gay.
When the thesis was done it was, cover-to-cover, 135 pages with citations, notes and a thorough, if not overdone, bibliography. Within weeks of its publication by the University I got at least 40 e-mails from people who were anxious to question its results. One of them, a professor from Missouri State, a frankly obnoxious old fart with two degrees in Linguistics and a abiding interest in Afro-Cuban folk religion, wrote me this:
Just how are you to explain, for example, the prevalence of Afr0-Cuban deities existing without clear evidence of a population of devotées? This would be like saying that there are Indians in Cowboy Country holding pow-wows and that the Indians aren’t being preached to, aren’t having their lands taken away, or being proselytized. Clearly I find a small discrepancy in your way of treating your consultants and questioning the way their religious beliefs are motivated by local forces, especially the drug trade. In Chiapas I have not found any sort of evidence for the veneration of “folk saints” that are clearly not of Mexican origin…
I need not explain, however, that because of the influx of the drug-trade in northern Mexico and the border, the constant confluence of Afro-Cuban, Haitian, and Afro-Brazilian folk religious traditions abide. Where the money and the drugs go, there go the beliefs of the people as well. And Chiapas, I might add, is full of Kich’è Maya people who have their own gods. Of course, the Indians still have pow-wows in White Man’s country, they still sell goods on the side of the roads that the White Man has built. These things have survived and will survived, inasmuch as the Church outlaws its practices and suppresses cults it has objections to. The Senhor do Bonfim will still be prayed to and His church in Bahia will be washed down with rose and jasmine water the local women, clad in garments reminiscent of slave liveries with much devotion prepare.
But for the most part the responses to my thesis were long, deliberate, and sometimes, very hurtful. My two advisors tore the entire thing apart, mercilessly exposing its flaws, especially in regards to one of my professors, of whom I thought I could confide in her friendship and general amiability. She said that my work was “poorly thought out” and that I needed to “return to the drawing board” when it came to talking about things that I’ve known about all my life. I tried to write this great work with as much objectivity and passion as possible. I removed personal thoughts and whims. I tried to stay as reasoned and as open as possible. But, it seems, like all the other things I’ve tried to do well, it made people more upset then I intended it to be.
CJ and Paul, my little brother and his wife, are not even speaking to one another anymore: she left in a torrent of tears and curses, and then, one night, ran her brand new Camaro into a telephone pole. The weekend before last (a very bad, hot weekend), she disappeared into the South Texas night after her grandfather and grandmother (horrible people, apparently) found her doing things she oughtn’t (namely, doing lines of coke in their garage). She ran off with the guy she’s been sleeping with (also named Paul) into some godforsaken orange grove off of Highway 281, with the intention of evading responsibilities for one blessed weekend. Alarmed, and apparently with the idea in his head that she was in danger, my little brother spent his gas money on one weekend driving back and forth between city, looking high and low for this crazy woman. And when he did indeed find her, in hot Venusian embraces of the other man, she got mad at him! It turned out the entire thing was a ruse to get Paul to have her move into our house again. We were all furious. Paul, predictably, was hurt, and I don’t think he’ll be talking to her for some time now. You know, it still hurts. He hurts every time he thinks of her. I hope I never get to that point in a relationship with someone I love.
I’m thinking of doing a little bit of traveling: first to Santa Fe for an interview, then maybe to visit Scott-Scott in the fall, finally. I bought a couple of nice things for him down here and am hoping he will love them. I think the time is now I need to make my life, as it looks like neither South Texas nor West Texas may be the best idea for my sustenance.
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