el crispito

All our things are packed and in storage. Because we're in a place where people will be staying after us, there is still furniture, cooking equipment and a few books, but all the things that have made this building our home for the past 12 years are hibernating until they see the light of day again in Mexico.

So barren is the house that last night I had a hard time getting to sleep, even after being up for 40 hours straight packing and moving our things. Where there used to be the soft gurgle of a fishtank and the warm glow of my Virgen de Guadalupe night light there is now only absolute silence and darkness. In that void, it feels like I've died and come back as a ghost to haunt whoever will next inhabit this place. Driving around town, I feel like a visitor who has returned to his home town to see that everything has changed, as if all the new development of new buildings and the demise of my favorite haunts were sudden rather than happening over the past decade.

It's true. You can't go home again. Sometimes it seems like a myth that you were ever there in the first place.

Miss Liberty tells me Aztlan's gone. As if I didn't know that, as if I didn't know my own back yard.

Now I start to notice that my perception of myself must change. Since coming to live in the southwestern United States, I have felt deeply a unity with this place, less this arctic fringe than the parched desert, but all the same, I have not only been an "American," but very specifically one of those in the frontier. In Los Angeles, you feel as if you might as well be in Mexico, but even so, it's still the frontier of Mexico. For many years I've lived in a Mexican territory, because this area has been shaped by the influence of its once being a part of Mexico, and before that, the land of the people that didn't have to deal with that scar of a river cutting us into two countries.

I've realized that I'm not only crossing the border, but I'm leaving that border region behind to go deep into the interior. I'll no longer be a self-declared Chicano but merely a gringo. I can no longer feel like I'm in the set of a people who have gotten with the times and speak English and Spanish because those are our languages that we speak here. I'm an expatriat that manages to eek out a few phrases in order to survive. My perspective on this place will be so different now. I'll see the border not as the southwest but as the north. I'll be on el otro lado.

And I'm trying to get back to a place I've never been. I'm trying to cross over.

No longer will the Mexico I live in be the mesquite smoke and adobe of Santa Fe, the saquaros of Tucson, the missions of California. In leaving the southwest, I am also leaving behind a certain cultural Mexico that is completely foreign to Guadalajara. I'll be leaving behind the cradle that not only holds El Paso, Nogales and San Diego, but also Chihuahua, Hermosillo and Tijuana.

I'd never thought of that before, until now. I'm already leaving what is to me a part of Mexico for another, and for the first time, I realize how much I'll miss her.

Eleven generations, she's lived there. It's the just land and name that's changed its borders.

Lyrics: El Vez, Aztlan, from the album "Graciasland"