Native Country of the Heart

by Cherríe Moraga

  Buried in the corners of closets was more of the same: a stuffed animal from my son’s toddler days, a clean wrinkled pair of my dad’s boxers, a drugstore bag of unopened cosmetics. There had been so many missing items and occasionally, yes, that “stolen” identification card, set of house keys, checkbook, and new scarf would emerge, but even after my many days alone in the house and later after my sister’s arrival with her adult children, our excavation produced few great revelations as to the mysteries of those years of loss. Maybe the jardineros really had come in and taken her watch. We’d never know. So much of my mother’s life had fallen into a great Diablo Triangle of unsolved missing parts, as if the physical objects of my mother’s history had simply vanished with her own vanishing memory.

  At the same time, whole drawers of perfectly starched manteles remained expertly folded, alongside pastel table napkins and hand-embroidered doilies that hadn’t been touched in decades. To open this world of order, where telas were starched and guardadas for that special visita, one felt drawn into a forgotten era; where after daylong mornings of labor en la casa o en el campo, señoritas were confined to embroidery hoops to pass those endless hot afternoons, under the watchful eye de la tía o de la hermana mayor.

  My mother had tried in vain to instruct my sister and me in the tradition. “It’s for your hope chest,” she encouraged. To my bookish sister, who fantasized a romantic rescue from the humdrum of her Catholic school girlhood, a hope chest conjured the figure of a brooding dark and handsome figure on the horizon, one akin to those from the nineteenth-century novels of which she was a voracious fan. I, on the other hand, did not really believe in hope, if hope meant bridal gowns and a life without sports. So, after several summers of watching her daughters fidget at their post in the living room, our sun-toasted thighs sticking to the aqua-colored vinyl upholstery, my mother succumbed to the gringo reality that no suitor would be appearing outside our bedroom windows, serenading his longing with a mariachi backup, as young men did for my mother in her teen years in Tijuana.

  I ruthlessly scavenged cupboards for traces of that mother—the one I had known in my childhood—and found only muted remnants in objects she had abandoned for decades. Had I had the heart, the red-and-black can of Calumet baking powder with the drawing of the Plains Indian chief on the label could have elicited the sound of her rolling pin slamming against the flour-dusted wooden slab, the picture of her brown arthritic knuckles diving into the white metallic black-rimmed bowl, whipping la manteca into perfect bolitas de harina. Had I the heart, I would have remembered tortillas the texture of fine paper, the hot mineral smell of the comal, fire against cast iron, the palpable moistening in the kitchen air as I entered it from winter outdoors play.

  Possibly, as the objects that made up my mother’s history no longer mattered to her, they meant less and less to me. For as I pried open the cookie-tin sewing canisters and small cloth-covered overnight suitcase that served as file cabinet at the base of a closet; as I fingered the fine golden hair de mi niñez stuffed inside a card-sized envelope, its seal broken; as I pilfered through endless piles of skirts and sweaters and pants that descended in size with the ascending age of my mother, it seemed since forever she had been so ill, since forever we had been losing what we understood as her “ser.” I no longer knew any other mother than the broken one. In a different lifetime, she smelled of gardenias. That day, outside in her garden, the gardenias had already curled brown, gathering in a moldering blanket at the plant’s base.

  Maybe the house really didn’t matter. Maybe neither three days nor three months would’ve returned me to that location of heart I knew as my mother’s home. Still, on that late-autumn day, beneath the purple shadow of those languorous San Gabriel Mountains, I lit a sprig of cedar on an abalone shell. I raised an eagle feather to the rising smoke, passed it through the rooms of my mother’s house, and prayed:

  Let this wing of memory greet my mother’s spirits

  and send them flying home.

  Ya. Do not linger here.

  She will not be returning, I lie.

  SIBANGNA

  In 1977, as I stuffed my Volkswagen bug to its metal gills and headed north on 101, following in the highway wake of thousands of young people in pursuit of “liberation,” I had no way of knowing that twenty-five years later, I would return to San Gabriel to uncover what was left there. Ostensibly in search of my mother’s history, it was my own buried remains I sought. But how do you dig up amnesia?

  Diggers. Digger Indians is the name the anthropologists first gave to the Indigenous peoples of California. A no-name people in their estimation, the Gabrieleños-Tongva of the Los Angeles basin were similarly denigrated, reduced to the image of broken nails scratching at an equally broken earth in search of supper. And yet this was exactly how I had felt scouring my mother’s past for a sign of palpable memory, a sign that we were a people that predated suburban sprawl, mini-marts, and my family’s en masse denial that we walked in cultural mourning.

  The neighboring Mission grounds were the only testament to a history that predated Gold Rush California and all the gringo gold-digs to follow. I knew, even as a child, that it was the site of holy terror, where the memory of the Indian dead persisted if in nothing other than the mestizo bodies of my schoolmates, draped in plaid woolen Catholic school skirts and charcoal-gray trousers. We were immigrant “Mexican” and Native Californian—Tongva, Acjachemen, Chumash, Mohave, Yaqui, Shoshone, Cahuilla, Quechan, O’odham, and more—the descendants of those mission and desert Indians extending from as far away as San Xavier del Bac in southern Arizona to the coastal and inland regions throughout Southern California. Somehow, without saying so, the Indians buried beneath the tiled floor of that Old Mission Church were not strangers to me.

  * * *

  Four decades later, my sister and I enter the Mission Gardens. We stand beneath the same midday sun of our childhood past. I allow myself a moment’s reprieve, to imagine an exchange between races as equitable as the coexistence of plant life in this jardín.

  The garden displays what I love most about Mestizo California—that meeting of the Mediterranean and Native American landscapes: bougainvillea climbing over adobe walls; the muscled thrust of elder grapevines throwing arches of shade over broken cobblestone pathways; the petals of succulents brotando como flores; the desert memory of maguey and nopales with trunks as thick as torsos amid mounds of goldenrod and poppies; the scent of anise and yerba buena wafting lightly through a steady heat. Here the beauty of the native seems enlivened by the contact with the immigrant. I am as romantic as the tourist in this regard, longing to imagine a less brutal past. But spirit won’t have it.

  * * *

  A grave marker states: “Antonio, First Indian Buried in This Cemetery, Oct. 20, 1778,” shadowed by a life-size crucifix. Who was Antonio and what was his real name? What were the names of six thousand “neophytes” interned and interred within the quarter square mile of the San Gabriel Mission?

  Inside the Old Mission Church, JoAnn is physically unable to enter the baptistery, in which resides the “same sterling silver baptismal shell” where “the first Indian child received the waters of everlasting life.”

  “I can’t go in there,” she says. And she can’t.

  I remember my sister-in-arms, the writer-activist Barbara Smith, telling me the same when, wandering down the streets of New Orleans toward the outskirts of town, she happened upon the former site of a slave auction block.

  Spirit won’t have it.

  A decade from now, the first “Pope of the Americas” will come to Washington, D.C., and hold a canonization Mass for the California missions’ founder, Junípero Serra. Pope Francis will not travel to California to bestow the honor, although Serra’s body lies there entombed in the Carmel Mission. The pope’s itinerary will not permit a parallel journey along El Camino Real, following in the dusty and sanguinary footsteps of the “saint’s” sandals. The pope, a holy man, will not kneel down on those Indi
an burial grounds, kiss the earth, and ask forgiveness in the Roman Church’s name.

  For to walk that real road of history, he would encounter its original peoples, many of whom remember the mission system as bitterly as African Americans remember the plantation: as the site of slavery, subjugation, and ethnocide. And yet to this day, those sites paradoxically still matter to Native Californians as physical markers of the unrecorded Indigenous histories known in their bones and in scarcely remembered songs. The lands still resonate with their bisabuelos’ receding original tongues and with stories told by the old aunties.

  Just down the road from la Misión de San Gabriel a tiled mural acknowledging the contributions of the Tongva Nation overlooks the same neighborhood park we used to frequent as children. In the kiddie playground where Elvira once bounced her grandchildren on the spring coils of pastel seals, a replica of a Tongva village now stands. Surrounded by native plants used for medicine, baskets, and clothing, the site recognizes a scarcely documented history that predates mission days and acknowledges Sibangna as the original name for the area. There a community of some one hundred and fifty people had once made home.

  Two hundred years later, my family did the same.

  * * *

  I have no papers to prove that my family moved to San Gabriel in 1961 as an act of cultural reconciliation; but in recent years I have wondered over curious geographical coincidences. Lieutenant José Joaquín Moraga served as second-in-command to Juan Bautista de Anza, in his second expedition to Alta California by way of the De Anza Trail.

  The route parallels my own family’s journey of migration and, in particular, my own: from the birth site of the Moragas in Altar, Sonora, México, in the early 1800s, to the meeting and marriage of my maternal grandparents in Tucson at the turn of the nineteenth century, followed by a leap in time and circumstance to eventually land Elvira Moraga y su familia two blocks from la Misión de San Gabriel. A near generation later, I would move to the San Francisco Bay Area and, soon after, assume my mother’s Mexican patronymic surname.

  Decades ago, serving as tour guide on my parents’ visit to the Bay Area, I pointed out the gravestone of Lieutenant José Joaquín Moraga, embedded in the tiled floor of Mission Dolores in San Francisco. Touting her sudden claim to fame, by virtue of her shared surname with the lieutenant, my mother pronounces to my father, “And you thought you married just any ole Mexican.”

  My dad and I smile.

  If there is reason to believe that the Moragas from which we descended are remote relations of Lieutenant José Joaquín, it would probably be through the lineage of his brother, José Ignacio, and of the Moragas who remained in or returned to Sonora after the De Anza expeditions in the late eighteenth century. My great-great-grandfather José Moraga was born in Sonora in 1832. That’s as far back as we know for (almost) sure. It also, of course, says nothing of the history of matrilineal lines threaded through the tapestry of my ancestors.

  Many Sonoran Moragas were military men and warriors—from as early as the missionization period through the Mexican-American War. They were distant relations who killed Apaches or relations who were Apaches themselves. There was a Chiricahua chief who carried the Moraga name, as well as Akimel O’odham (Pima) and Quechan (Yuma) and mestizo Moragas—men and women in Arizona who are recorded in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historical annals and whose descendants walk the same deserts today.

  Whatever the actual historical scenario, my mother’s patrilineal ancestors—European, Native, Mestizo—at some point intermarried or had sexual unions (by force or agreement), resulting in the mixed-blood band of Arizona and California MexicanAmericans we are today. Whatever the scenario, after World War II, in gratitude for the safe return of her sons, my maternal grandmother traveled with the Tohono O’odham in peregrinación from San Xavier del Bac Mission to Santa Maria Magdalena Mission in the heart of the Sonoran Desert. Did Dolores share the O’odham bloodline? I don’t know. Did their cultural roads cross, intersect, and blend? Yes. The mixing would continue into my own generation and well beyond it.

  What la familia Moraga shares historically with multiple generations of Mexicans and MexicanAmericans is the denial of our Native origins. As mestizos, we swallowed the bitter Kool-Aid of colonization—first through the Spanish and then the gringo—that distanced us from the recognition of a living Indigenous presence in our histories, our families, and ourselves.

  At times, I felt my mother’s prejudice in this regard, a bias directed even at herself, which always translated into a hyperawareness of skin shade. Fingering through half-century-old family photos, my mother would point herself out—“la india flaquita”—she always the skinniest and the darkest one, pressed against sibling shoulders. A fact, I suspect, first noted by her Spanish-skinned mother.

  “Mira, la indita.”

  * * *

  It is Christmas Eve, 1992, a family gathering at Tío Manuel’s home in Montebello. He and I encounter each other in the narrow hallway. I am waiting to use the bathroom. He is a big man and there is little room for us both, but in that small space he finds the space to speak to me with a certain confidence.

  “We were the Indians that built the Mission,” he says. “It was all our land, the entire San Gabriel Valley.” It is a short conversation, the time it takes for the bathroom door to open again and allow me entrance. But I have never forgotten it. Somehow this information was passed down to my tío over a period of two hundred years. Some other “Mexicans” taught him to remember in spite of all the internalized and familial anti-“indio” prejudice to the contrary.

  My tío Manuel was an uncle by marriage to my mother’s sister Eva. But to us he was family for more than half a century, as are his children. They, my first cousins, carry (perhaps unbeknownst to them) that same Gabrieleño (Tongva) bloodline.

  I’ve learned some stories told by the Tongva/Kizh about their forced displacement when México secularized the missions in the 1830s. I’ve learned that Native familias banished from the mission fled into hiding in the same San Gabriel Mountains to which I contemplated escape as a child. The adults were hunted down and executed en masse. Soon after, their children, undetected by the military, returned “home” and homeless to nearby villages. There they found protection among the Mexican familias who took them into their homes where they learned to hide their Indian identity in order to survive.

  But who were these “Mexicans” who offered them hogar, if not Native and mestizos themselves: people who had mixed biologically and/or culturally with the Spanish and/or who were “indios” from neighboring tribes. How else might the Tongva children have blended if not for the fact that their protectors also looked (were) Native?

  How far back do we need to go for the reclamation of ourselves?

  * * *

  In 1821, after about fifty years of direct Spanish colonial occupation in California, the citizens of the newly formed independent México may have become mestizo in culture, but with the exception of the Hispanic Californios, remained predominantly Native in ethnicity. A mere thirty years later, in 1850, California will win AngloAmerican statehood and the identifiable Native population will have been decimated by 90 percent.

  It is always a political act when we are named and when we name ourselves. “Chicano/Xicano” emerged in the late 1960s as a movimiento of Indigenous and mestizo self-reclamation. Today many of those same activists and their familias have recovered themselves as Kumeyaay, Tongva/Kizh, Chumash, Esselen, Salinan, and Ohlone. I am a displaced mixed-blood Chicana, whose Native relations on my mother’s side may land me somewhere in the deserts of Sonora and perhaps, and quite distantly, in the once paradisal lands of the Tongva. There is something to be found in those sites where memory calls us, in spite of the institutional amnesia force-fed to us for centuries. We return as refugees to that forgotten landscape which we somehow recognize as home.

  * * *

  It wasn’t until the last years of her life that my mother admitted aloud what I alrea
dy knew from the character of her mexicanismo, that as a mestiza she was also “Indian.” I don’t remember exactly how the subject of her ethnicity arose; I only remember how the words fell so easily from her lips, this time without shame.

  Bueno, también soy india.

  Without tribal name or entitlement, and just as Alzheimer’s was beginning to traverse the map of my mother’s brain, the geography of that remembrance returned to her. It was not a grand statement, but it was grand to me. After a near century of denial, in the same way she had responded to her fifty-five-year marriage, my mother was simply done with the pretense.

  REUNION

  Maybe in this land of forgetfulness, my mother found a befitting place to forget.

  On el Día de la Virgen de Guadalupe (December 12) in 2003, my mother is released from Della Martin Center after a stay of nearly six weeks. She is immediately placed in Expressions, the memory-impaired wing of Prestige, inhabited by those same shoe-shuffling elders in bunny suits from whom I had tried to shield her just a few months earlier. Now they would become her neighbors. A five-minute drive from my sister’s home in Yorba Linda, the residence also held a Prestige single apartment waiting for my father, once he recovered from his hip replacement surgery.

  Like most of Orange County, Yorba Linda is a city cemented in amnesia where sprawling malls, one-stop shopping centers, and “fifty-five and better” condominium developments encroach upon the few remaining citrus groves and Japanese-owned strawberry fields along the surrounding hillsides. My tío Eddie remembered the twenty-four-hour gym on Yorba Linda Boulevard as the packinghouse where his older sister Victoria worked, stuffing oranges into wooden crates in the 1930s.