Across the Llano

1918—

Domingo knew the language well. Still, there were times like these, when he couldn’t, for the life of him, get his point across, couldn’t find the right words, couldn’t express himself, no matter how hard he tried, without devolving into some frustrated, adolescent state, a helpless, undignified silence that pressed up against the very limits of language itself.

What Domingo knew was that, for almost a week, he’d not heard from his son Umberto. Calls and visits to the sheriff’s department, local emergency rooms, even the district attorney’s office (and home) turned up nothing more than silence, a sinister absence that said something the old man couldn’t quite decipher. What was there to do anyway? What could he, a migrant worker and Mexican national living in Texas, really expect to get out of them? “The Good Ole Boys,” as he’d heard them referred to, always with a wink. He knew what that meant.

Within hours, Domingo called family, gathered neighbors, and commenced a search of the surrounding area.

Across the llano, dry air carries the laughs of the wicked…

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[This is where I’ll die?], he thought. [Like this? A prisoner? And for what? My father warned, begged, plead, did everything short of—]

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…but the earth proves it won’t hide their secrets for long.

An old man walking his dog. At the foot of a grove of honey mesquite, a tuft of hair clings to bleached bone like a black wave from white seas.

———

By her husband’s gravestone, Isla comforts her father-in-law, Domingo. They are all her son Galeno has left. Their lives were never going to be easy; it will be an altogether different thing from now on, supporting little Galito while carrying the burden of injustice.

Stories like hers were all too common, and yet, all too commonly untold, left to the empty spaces of history, faded instances unearthed as disparate coordinates, points of data, bits and pieces here and there. A birth certificate, a death certificate, any trace of being.

Lynching of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans by assorted vigilantes, militias, and law enforcement agencies were common in the tapestry of life as long as Isleta had been alive (note: “…between 1848 and 1928 in Texas alone, 232 ethnic Mexicans were lynched by violent groups of three or more people.” Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You, 2018). “Juan Crow” they called it. Always cute with language, especially when discussing their specialty—death. Kicking the bucket, buying the farm, hearing the fat lady sing, anything to get in one last laugh.

The year prior, Umberto participated in the Bath Riots, joining other residents of their sleepy border town in justified fury. Mexicans were driven to action by outrage over forced de-lousing, kerosene baths forced upon them at the Mexico-Texas crossing. Stripped naked, men and women, children and the elderly, were subjected to chemical spray by authorities, dull men with ugly laughs, on the order of the U.S. Public Health Services.

Despite mass protests, the baths would continue for another 40 years, incorporating, over the years, additional chemicals such as D.D.T., a pesticide and carcinogen.

Isla would only have to wait another 30 years to see Zyklon B, the chemical used in the “gas chambers,” as the facilities in El Paso were described, be used in the gas chambers of Nazi death camps. The war would be won by the same men who dowsed her and her people’s belongings in insecticide.

No matter. For Isleta, that war, the one that had traveled across the Atlantic and taken so many lives, the one that would persist well beyond 1945, in dark corners of well-known places, had already taken her husband, Umberto.

———

[This is where I’ll die], he thought.

———

“In Mesoamerica, there is commonly a mixture of fear and derision toward the gods of death. Although widely thought to be ruthless and cunning, they are frequently outwitted and defeated in mythological accounts.” - Miller & Taube, An Illustrated Dictionary of the Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya

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