Chicana Dreamer

From my dream journals

12-14-10 – Dream
I’m staying at a house like a dormitory and there is a playful atmosphere, though we are taking care of serious matters in our lives. I find myself at the top of a ladder unable to get myself down. I’m frightened, I’m high off the ground. I see a friend, a white man, who reaches up to me to kiss me, and I tell him to help me down. “Will you wait until I make it down?” I ask him. He nods happily, slowly and carefully letting the ladder tip forward and holds on to me until I reach bottom.

Notes:
I’ve been looking for information on the Anasazi and looking at pictures of their kivas. There was one picture that shows the roof of a kiva with two holes and two ladders for getting down into it.

12-16-10 – Notes:
I’m stunned at the realization that the Anasazi are amongst us. I remember hearing about them in the 60’s in an anthropology class I took at City College. It was a ho-hum class for me then. Cliff Dwellers- as though they had clawed their way into the mountainside and were a primitive people.

Through the internet, I’m finding that they thrived for a millennium, built complex cities with running water, cultural centers for worship, building complexes of 200-700 rooms, farming communities, and a highway network that connected over 1000 cities throughout the Southwest. These cities were planned and then built over several centuries. How they managed to do the planning and then carry it out over the generations is an interesting question to pause on. But I imagine it was like everything else in oral culture, passed to the next generation precisely as it was received. Of course, then there was no “Southwest,” but there have been some connections found in the linguistic patterns of the Nahua (Aztecs) amongst the Navaho, Pueblo and other descendants of the Bird People as the Anasazi were called.

In an early dream I had where I am learning to fly, my father pushes me off the top of a ladder and I sail into the air, freeze into the pose of a dead horse, and am rescued by a gentle Native American man who flies up from ground level. Then, there are these visits with the Elders in kivas.

It is because of my connection to the Elders in my dreams that I have my first book. It was they who rattled my memory and helped me put the story together. Now, they are telling me to write about the Aztec migration from somewhere “en el norte” to the Valley of Anahuac, and it’s interesting how that story is unfolding.

The reason the Anasazi are important and finding the connection between the linguistic patterns of the Aztec and the cultures of the North American Southwest, is that identity plays into this. Our identity tells us who we are, where we come from, who our people are. For people who have been colonized and then brainwashed against the very blood that flows through them, it’s important to question and challenge the assumptions of what’s been passed on. More on identity later.

Chew on identity and what it tells you about who you are.
Sweet dreams,
Ellie

It’s early in the morning, and I’ve awakened with a quiet feeling of peace–aleluya, hermana/o–. I attribute this peace to the fact that I’ve returned to my first love, the piano. I’m not working with a teacher yet, but I’m just practicing to pick up speed and let me fingers unthaw after the long silence. It took time, but something in the following entry put together over the summer into my journal opened my eyes to an unsatisfied longing in my heart. It begins with a poem:

“‘Dime La Verdad, Mamá.
Tell Me the Truth

‘Dime la verdad, Mamá. Tell me that you have always loved me. Tell me that your dreams for me extended beyond the river, the mountains, the horizon, the Sun and the stars; that you dreamed for me guidance by flames of alter candles, prayers, and gentle words; that open arms awaited you from your first breath and were then your legacy to me.

‘Tell me that before you were born, your great grandmother had a place set for her at the dinner table, that she was surrounded by lovely flowers and was given the spiritual truths from her grandmothers, and the heartstrings continued forever forward.

‘Tell me that as far back to the beginning of time, you and your grandmothers lives were filled with music, incantations for joy, and love; that the sweet sound of melodic voices singing in celebration awoke you at their births; and that you danced in bright colored costumes with silver and gold chimes, where your dresses flowed gracefully in rhythm to horns, guitars, gourds, rattles, and drums.

‘My dreams tell me I am a stranger at dinner tables where I am hungry, invisible; where I take small morsels, and say little; a shadow that slips through doors unseen; where only at night I dare to speak my thoughts and dance alone under the dark moon.

‘Tell me I was never shipped to places unknown, beyond the warmth of my family, where voices cracked through stunned silence as muffled noises that awakened espiritus malos bad spirits.

‘Tell me I was never scorned; never seen as the wretched forgotten child of a family, la rechazada, who hid behind tattered curtains, denying lies she heard about a bewildered little stranger, her soul longing for comfort, and respite.

Tell me this is someone else’s nightmare; that my life began filled with music, incantations for joy and love; that the sweet sound of melodic voices singing in celebration awoke me at my birth; and that I danced in bright colored costumes with silver and gold chimes that flowed gracefully in rhythm to horns, guitars, gourds, rattles, and drums.’

“As I write this poem, my sadness stems from not having personal experience with cultural traditions that were available generations past, before Mamá as a governess set sail with an American family for the United States, via South America. To my mind, something in her heart shut down then, in 1920, which altered family ties beyond her time. When I think of my mother’s life, I imagine her as a sixteen year packing her suitcase, and not looking back for many years until she could begin to fathom all she’d lost in leaving her pueblo of Rayon, in Southeastern Mexico. With letters from home in hand, I’d observe her sitting quietly at the top of our back door steps looking into an empty lot overgrown with dry weeds. Sighing pensively, she’d return to her chores with an air of resignation.

“In some way, I carry her unspoken sadness, and long to recreate at least a small fragment of the spiritual truths she left behind. I often feel that I am living out a part of her appointment with destiny.

“Papá was born in Cananea, Sonora, in 1900, fifty years after El Norte was lopped off from Mexico. From his accounts, it seems to me that in the hearts of the people at that time El Rio Bravo still roared its usual song and remained a channel that carried the old ways. In 1918, he arrived in Los Angeles with his guitar and mandolin; they were his love, and his passion. It’s as though he carried his destiny firmly in hand, and whatever twists fate had in store for him, he was prepared to face them.

“I now often wonder if it was my destiny to have this bittersweet, indefinable ache that relentlessly pushes me to scrap together what was “lost,” in my parents’ move North. Before poverty turned our family upside down, and I was sent away to other families while Mamá’s worked in a bracero camp, her dream for me was that people could say “Que bonito Noni toca el piano.” How beautifully Noni plays the piano. As I came into my teens, it was enough for me to know this was what she wanted, to make me fly in the opposite direction. And that was how I missed out on the best of my childhood years; because I felt rejected, I then rejected everything I loved. I do wonder if life would have been sweeter and more accommodating had I bowed to the call of the piano that I loved so much. (my emphasis).”

It is “bowing” to this call that brings me so much joy. I wonder if there is a secret place in your heart that needs to be honored? Today’s the Virgen de Guadalupe’s birthday, another reason to honor what’s in your heart. It does bring peace

Blessings,
Ellie