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From Mythic Rocks to Rockless Journeys: Stories of a Transpanted Mexicana Pilar Melero University of Wisconsin-Whitewater (United States) I grew up in Atotonilco, Durango, listening to
grandmother tell stories as she sat on a rock in the middle of an open
field, lighting dusk with a Faro cigarrete as she pointed west to “El
Cerro de los Chilicotes.” El Cerro de los Chilicotes, in her stories,
was an enchanted mountain where pagans paid for their sins, their life
suspended under the weight of the mountain and guarded by the watchful eye
of an enormous serpent that would lead you into the mountain if you dared
go near it. One day, after a few hours in a plane, I went from the
mountain life in rural Durango to the heartland of the United States,
Waukesha, Wisconsin. Once in the flatlands of the Midwest, I found out
that what I missed the most were my “rocks.” As I write in a brief
testimonial about the experience, “From Person to Minority, a Rockless
Journey,” Coming from the mountains in Durango, I was used to
rocky river beds, streets paved with rocks, smooth rocks used to remove
dead skin when you bathed. Rocks to calculate how deep was the part of the
river you were about to jump into. Big rocks, boulders, to climb and sit
on while waiting for your mother to catch up with you on your daily walk
to the hot springs; or for grandma to sit on and tell stories...But in the
paved streets of Waukesha, I could not find a rock.
I could not find a rock in the meticulously manicured lawns outside
the apartment complex on Estberg Avenue, where we lived. I was lost
without my rocks. Worst yet, I could not trust the ground: it was all
covered with green …and when not covered with green, it was covered with
white, with snow. How could you trust a ground that did not allow you see
it, to touch it; a ground that invitingly called your feet to step on its
green, luscious carpet, only to trick you into giving a false step? But
there was something more dangerously deceiving then the covered ground:
the land of opportunity itself was nothing but beautifully disguised
ground with no rocks. This illusory land of dreams, I would figure out
years later, had the potential to rob you of your personhood, turning you
into a minority… In this presentation, “From Mythic Rocks to Rockless Journeys: Stories of a Transplanted Mexicana” I read two stories, “El cerro de los Chilicotes y la ciudad encantada” and “From Person to Minority: A Rockless Journey,” tracing the journey as a young immigrant from my childhood in a world of rocks and enchanted mountains in rural Mexico, to the perfectly manicured lawns of the Midwest. The idea is to reflect on the importance of myth and a sense of place, like the one formed through grandmother’s stories in my world of rocks, in the development of a personal identity that survives even when all markers of identity (landscape, food, history, and language) has been removed or seriously damaged through experiences such as immigration. About Pilar Melero Pilar Melero was born in Atotonilgo, Durango, Mexico in 1965. She moved to Wisconsin in 1981, at the age of 15, and has since then lived in El Paso, Texas, and in Wisconsin. She teaches Spanish and Chicano Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, and is an ABD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She worked as a journalist for newspapers in Wisconsin and Texas for more then 10 years, and has also published short stories and poems in Zona de carga, a literaty journal in Madison, Wisconsin; and in Puentes: El cuento en la fronera. Revista mexico-chicana de literatura, cultura y arte. She has also presented her research on Mexican women and discourse in the early 1900s in conferences in the United States, Cuba and Peru. |