How much of this recollection is fact, collective memory, or energy I could not affirm. I don’t know if I first overheard it as a child... eating dirt out of Mama Lupe’s mammoth clay macetas; shoved the story deep in my dress pocket like a secret. Or did my Mama Lupe whisper it into the flour for tortillas de harina? The narrative consuming me from the inside; singing and heavy like a hand-patted mound straight from the comal. What I can affirm is that the ghost of my great great grandmother weeps. I see it in the eyes of the wxmen in my family. I saw it in the mirror of my darkest days.
It’s been implied that she was about 13 or 14 years old. La edad de Malintzin; mother of our people. She collected water from the river, un cantaro de barro on her shoulder. Cantaro water is the sweetest and I know the strength of her shoulders; I feel them when I want to give up writing. The cantaro had blue flowers painted on it, I was told in meditation. Those petals matter to me, because I want to get lost in their beauty and not in the thorns of her fate. He saw her and stopped dead in his tracks. Was it the fire in her obsidian eyes, her copper purepecha skin, the black velour of her hair? Was it her energy that lit straight through him, did he want to keep her light forever? What colonizer mentality compels a man to believe that he can steal whatever he wants? This foreign sickness prevails. When my Mama Lupe tells the story she says that he “deposited” her at someone’s house. She was a transaction.
Others like to romanticize our origin story, “She must have been so beautiful as to enrapture the attention of such a substantial French man.” She must have been so terrified, is what my heart beats. I can’t imagine their first sexual encounter as consensual… and from that devastation we came to be. Residual trauma, Tello says. Stuck in our bodies. In our cell memory. Attached to our spirits. I dream of other people’s truths. I am nostalgic for places I’ve never seen. I weep all of our great grandmother’s tears, it’s in my DNA.
I interview my Mom.
“And I do remember my grandma at the end of her life, she got dementia, but she used to cry a lot. She would sit there in a chair and cry and cry and cry. So I know - that they say once you get older and you get dementia, you go back to your younger years. I think that by her crying it was her going back to when she didn’t want to get married. But then, we’re all here, unfortunately, or fortunately we’re all here.”
* * *
My healing work is heavy. It connects me to all circumstance, dark & light. Past and future. I don’t partake in ritual exclusively for the sake of my own spirit. The saying ignorance is bliss has upheld generations for a reason. It would have been easier to be a transaction, a deposit, upheld my engagement… but I was born of tears, and for that I vow to die in laughter. Have you heard my laugh? It’s my destiny.
Sometimes, when a substantial stranger is walking towards me, their spirit speaks to mine. They communicate that they feel her obsidian & fire in my eyes, and they want to keep my light forever as well… but I am mine. And in my autonomy I am freeing her. I am freeing all of us.