About Anita Endrezze Essay Research Paper Anita — страница 5

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it was the wrong one. She swore she’d kill the "dentist." For more about her, read "Estefana’s Necklace of Bullets." My Yaqui grandmothers were strong women, educated, clever, and fearless. Carlotta was also graceful, exceedingly beautiful, and kind. She fed hoboes, loved music (she played the twelve-string guitar), and sang. She was only four feet, eleven inches tall, with masses of dark hair piled up on top of her head. Her eyes were deep black. I have her photo on my office wall, next to one of her husband, Meetah. He’s posed stiffly in a suit, with a shock of unruly hair escaping out from under a dark hat. He didn’t like Mexicans. He lived his life like an Indian, he’d say to anyone. He could easily lift four hundred pounds, according to my

father. Meetah was five-ten and stocky. As a young man, he trained horses all over California and Arizona. He died from a hit-and-run accident in the middle of the night in Long Beach, California, on September 19, 1937. He’d probably been drinking. I wrote about it in "Grandfather Sun Falls in Love with a Moon-Faced Woman." The story is actually a retelling of an old Yaqui story about the sun falling in love with the moon, but I wove it into our family history. Meetah owned a junkyard that now is just part of the neighborhood across the street from the Long Beach Community Hospital, where I was born. His was a long journey; from his experience as a boy witnessing his father, Valentino, being murdered by soldiers to the experiences of a man living not far from

Hollywood, town of illusions and fantasy. Valentino also dealt with his father’s death. Valentino and his brother and father had been up in the mountains in Sonora, hunting for honey, when something happened. I don’t know what, maybe a heart attack or a fall down the mountain trail. The boys had to bury their father there among the red rocks and crumbling earth. Diaz is not a Yaqui name but one given to our family. It is a Mexican name, specifically that of the Mexican president Porfirio Diaz, who was in power from 1876 to 1910. Sometime during that period, we acquired that last name. I was born Anita Diaz. Other family surnames were Flores, Garica, and Ramos?all Mexican names, not Yaqui. Many Yaquis had both a Yaqui name and a Mexican name, along with nicknames by which they

were more commonly known. My childhood nickname was "Stormy." My Indian name, given to me shortly after my birth, is Desert Rose. Life was hard for my ancestors. They didn’t live long. But I know about them through the stories we still tell. There are not enough stories; I always want to hear more. I want to understand them and learn more about them and myself. I want my children, Aaron and Maja, to know them also. That’s why I write and paint, to pass it on. The history of words is the history of people. People define and are defined by their language. If you study languages, you learn about war, religion, adventure, and spirit. I think it is interesting that scholars studying Indian languages today are coming to realize that the great diversity of languages in

this hemisphere supports the idea that we have been here a lot longer than the accepted, academic starting point of 11,500 years ago (the Clovis timetable). Indeed, recent research has agreed that native people have been here for about 45,000 years. The voice of a people truly is their history. My father never spoke Yaqui. When he was young, he was ashamed of being Indian. He didn’t want to listen to the old stories. And yet he liked to tell us about what life was like "in the old days." My younger half-sister, Rondi (who was born in Farmington, New Mexico, on March 15, 1959), told me how our father would go skinny-dipping in the ocean and the police would take his clothes. He traveled with his family in a buckboard wagon into Los Angeles. He was, she says, great at

storytelling, funny, and generous. Rondi says, "I see him with both the eyes of an adult and the memory of a child. When I was little, he was wonderful. He’d sing for me and let me blow up the muscles on his arm by blowing hard on his thumbs." But he also ran around with other women and was a "happy drunk." For sometime he was separated from her mother, and he lived for a while in New Mexico. We have a picture of him giving a corn grinding demonstration at Chaco Canyon. Rondi says, "He claimed to be a Catholic. Other times, he’ d talk of the Happy Hunting Grounds. If truth be known, he didn’t believe in anything. Whatever served his purpose at the moment." Yet she also relates how he became a Christian later in his life and was a changed