By John Phillip Santos
A family's epic origins within the hinterlands of Mexico that grew to become Texas-and prior, in Iberia In his acclaimed 1999 memoir areas Left Unfinished on the Time of production, John Phillip Santos advised the tale of 1 Mexican kinfolk- his father's-set in the better tale of Mexico itself. during this fantastically written new ebook, he tells of the way one other family-this time, his mother's-erased and forgot through the years their historic origins in Spain. each relatives has a forgotten story of the place it got here from. who's pushed to inform it and why? Weaving jointly a hugely unique mixture of autobiography, conquest historical past, elegy, commute, kinfolk remembrance, and time vacationing narration, Santos deals an unforgettable testimony to this calling and describes a lifelong quest to discover the lacking chronicle of his mother's relatives, person who takes him to numerous destinations in South Texas and Mexico, to manhattan urban, to Spain, and finally to the center East. mixing genres brilliantly, Santos increases profound questions on no matter if we will be able to ever locate our actual place of origin and what we will research from our valuable, shared cultural legacies.
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Additional resources for The Farthest Home Is in an Empire of Fire: A Tejano Elegy
Example text
Then silence, his jaw tensing again. Was it a joke? The waiter brought espressos. “I was thinking the same thing about you,” I deadpanned. And then we laughed. And then Pamela returned. Ironically, that moment may’ve secured the strange concordat under which, for the next five years, I made dozens of documentaries at CBS: honor between gangsters. I would make the programs around the world about faith-based uprisings of the poor, revolutions in the Americas, resurging Islam in the Sudan; and the network would dutifully broadcast them, on Sunday mornings, when only insomniacs or junkies were awake.
There, where runners pass, mothers push their babies’ prams, and dogs perambulate with their owners, were the two great goggle eyes of Tlaloc, the god who had ruled over the ancient city of Teotihuacán, now keeping watch over the falling waters of a Central Park stream. I suspect that, eventually, along with the gods of the European world, all of the old gods from Mexico, Latin America, Asia, and Africa will come to find their home in America. We can hide under the city’s girded graphite skies, crisscrossed with bright comet tails and the gauzy flame tracks of jets, but eventually all of the ancestors will come seeking us, sending their gods into the subways, walking like mendicants into the plazas and avenues of the city.
There were typed corrections and penciled-in notes throughout. In some places she had just typed over earlier sentences, or in any space left between the lines of battered letters. Allowing a brief gracious nod for my attempt to fathom her work, she insisted I couldn’t possibly have understood it. Homage? Of course. Her oeuvre was, in her own unabashed estimation, the highest achievement possible in the way of poetry. But not even that pinnacle was sufficient: Was I not aware of the fact that she had renounced Poetry itself, hers included, in 1938, nearly forty years before?