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ineffable, try as the conquistadors might to build a “New Spain” on Mexican earth. For better or worse, all the progeny of the conquest, Indios, Españoles, and mixed-blood Mestizos alike, shared the destiny of being irreversibly separated from their origins. That was the beginning of the Mexican Diaspora. To be Mexican American, Chicano, is to be further removed from those origins.
    As a raza, a “nation,” we are a Diaspora within a Diaspora.
    Yet, something miraculous happened that marked the destiny of every Mexican to be born out of the crucible of the conquest. Ten years after the fall of the Aztec empire, on a hill outside of Tenochtitlán where the Indians had worshipped their goddess Tonantzín, a brown-skinned woman dressed simply as an Indian appeared to an Aztec man, Juan Diego, and told him in Nahuatl that she had come to be Mother to all the peoples of this land. By legend, she appeared in a shimmering cloud and made a field of roses bloom in the middle of winter.
    Later, her winsome, cloaked image mysteriously appeared in a painting on Juan Diego’s cloak. She would come to be known as la Morenita, the Virgin of Guadalupe, part Indian, part Spanish, a living emblem of the union of opposing worlds in the new Mexico, and the supreme Mother whose spirit forged the watchful presence of all of the generations of Viejitas who were to come.
    Las Viejitas were born in the Virgin’s magic.
    They grew up in a twilight time and geography, poised between those ancient Indio origins from the south, Spain’s grand utopian designs, and our Mestizo future in the north. The world they remember from their youth is not the modern Mexico ruled over by a rough-trade priestly elite of Ivy league, pedigreed technocrats, orchestrating Mexico’s extreme slow-motion collapse. Their legacy is from the time that the Spanish language, theology, and science were first thrown across the Mexican geography like an enormous net, from a vision of the land enmeshed within the cosmos. That vision, with all of its mystical powers, has been almost lost.
    When Madrina asks now if all of the Santos have died, she’s really wondering whether a whole time has passed, her time, her age —and a generation with it—a generation with a living memory of the deep family bonds into Mexico’s past.
    All of the Santos have died.
    I am one of their survivors.

2
    Códices de los Abuelos
    Grandfather Codices

    Just past dawn at the hilltop church in San Juan Tzompántepec, the morning in Puebla is already bright. Garlands of silvery fog left behind after a heavy storm the night before are still visible in the valley below, running sluggishly along the creeks, tattered in the treetops, swaddling other hills in the distance. I am here looking for faint traces of the grandfather no Mexican wants to admit to: Hernán Cortés.
    On its march to the Aztec capital, his army had fought a bloody battle with fearsome Tlaxcaltecan Indian warriors here. The Spaniards were nearly defeated. Legends tell how Cortés himself only survived a likely fatal chase by hiding in a hollow Tzompantle tree on this site. I came here to find a painting of the conquistador and his Indian consort, Malintzín, that is thought to be the only one painted by an Indian artist in Cortés’s lifetime. But it is inside the church and the church door is locked.
    On my father’s side, Madrina and Tía Pepa had always said the Garcias had Spanish blood, though no one remembered exactly how, or from where. The Santos knew still less of their heritage, Spanish or Indian. In my mother’s family, in the Lopez and Vela lines, Uncle Lico had found the deeds of Spanish land grants that had given our ancestors title to lands in Mier, Texas, near the Rio Grande, in the eighteenth century.
    Most Mexican families are Mestizo, mixtures of Spanish and Indian heritage. But, after the Revolution of 1910, after three centuries of Spanish disregard for the indigenous world, the Mexican soul became Indian.