La Diosa Coatlicue "smiles" down upon me today.
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She's filled my shoes with feet & my cup with café con leche, & so out into the calles with Californios I go.
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Algunos dicen she's mean and cruel - we give her infants & she produces the elderly. Otros dicen she's kind and tolerant - we give her our sweat & she gives us the sun. She's everywhere and nowhere.
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Los Californios. Christians & Muslims. Jews & Buddhists. Athiests & Agnostics. Shadows of Marxist revolutionaries clinging to the curbs as capitalist caravans of Mack trucks roll down the road. Some trucks filled with warm bodies coming to work the fields of the great central valley. They drive down streets inhabited by descendants of slaves. Somewhere nearby, below the streets or over the sun, lurk spirits & memories of other dieties. Other goddesses. Other dreams.
For freedom's sake, or enslaved in chains, in search of substenance or shining gold, brought in to build railroads or toil in migrant fields, the world came to California. They left other lands and came, one way or the other, to this now sinking ark.
From the hill can just seen the rusty tips of the Golden Gate, once the gateway to the gold fields that lay beyond.
An El Dorado of the Far West.
That was once an El Dorado of the Far East.
Long before the young man went West, the young girl went East.
Things change, yet stay the same, & never appear as they used to...except when the sun is at its brightest.
Too many dreams, demasiado stories, too many nightmares, ever to be encompassed in one narrative. Things we never knew, yet long ago forgot. Things that never were, & yet still are celebrated. The peripheral vision of California is blinding.
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The pot of gold is melting under the sun's rays. And somewhere Coatlicue is pensive. Her children are mixing, Black to Brown to White to Yellow, forming scar tissue that is much more durable than the wounds of 500 years.
The scar tissue is stronger than the anemic body that carries it. The body politic is dying. Something else is being born.
California is changing fast. One long dance is winding down. A new one is appearing. |
From someplace can be heard the cracking of
Pio Pico's stern countenance into a different expression. The last
gobernador de Alta California. He of African, Native American, Spanish, & Italian descent.
Perhaps he's starting to grin.