PLACES LEFT UNFINISHED AT THE TIME OF CREATION
By John Phillip Santos
Viking, 284 pages, $24.95
Like the forebears of so many other Mexican-American families, journalist and TV producer John Phillip Santos’ grandparents fled to the U.S. shortly after the beginning of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Santos has chronicled his family’s experience in the U.S. in his idiosyncratic memoir, “Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation.” An exquisitely crafted work, it is a poetic and inventive text that blends genres, explores the relevance of ancient belief systems to contemporary life, and throws in some ghosts and a possible suicide mystery as extras.
Making all that work coherently is a feat in itself. Santos pulls it off with grace and considerable insight.
Life north of the Rio Grande was not significantly different from the agrarian life of Mexico–at first. But time moves more quickly in the north, and it demands accommodation in order to survive. “Mexico was always an empire of forgetting,” Santos writes, stressing that it is the destiny of every Mexican to either embrace or lose entirely the “hidden light left behind in the past.” Through journeys of exploration (both interior and exterior), interviews with ghosts and examinations of family stories and heirlooms, Santos enters the Inframundo, the timeless underworld of the ancient peoples of Mexico, in an effort to find the hidden light of memory, and thus, himself.
Santos reclaims his family’s history by recording it in a richly woven tapestry inhabited by a host of eclectic characters–a clairvoyant albino aunt, a great-grandfather stolen by the Kickapoo Indians who was recognized years later by his mother from a lullaby he was singing, an aunt who learned English from the young Lyndon Baines Johnson in exchange for cabbages and potatoes. Then there was Santos’ grandfather, Juan Jose, whose mysterious 1939 drowning haunts the book. Some memories are best left undisturbed, Santos’ father implies about this possible suicide. Yet it was this family mystery that inspired Santos at age 17 to begin shaking the family tree.
Looking for a connection with the past, he found that a kind of cultural-historical disconnection had the most negative impact on the family. Living in el norte meant losing traditions, losing accepted behaviors, losing faith, losing one’s way: Perhaps this is a cultural cliche, but brought down to the level of one family, it becomes a moving indictment of the immigrant experience in the U.S. Santos’ grandfather, keenly aware of what was being lost, was “carried off in a current of worries, suspicion, and melancholy impossible to resist.”
Santos himself exemplifies this cultural grief. A writer with some hefty mainstream literary awards under his belt, including an Academy of American Poets prize and the Oxford Fiction Prize, Santos attended Oxford as the first Mexican-American Rhodes scholar in 1979. In 1984, he began writing and producing TV documentaries for CBS. Forty documentaries and 16 countries later, with two Emmy nominations to his credit, Santos turned his attention to how he came to be a scion of an ancient but now-childless family. “For all my obsession with telling the family story,” Santos writes near the end of the book, “my brothers and I, still childless, might yet be the end of our family line, the end of the story the ancestors have been telling to time for millennia.”
Santos divides that story into four sections, wherein he merges traditional memoir, ancient Mexican history and beliefs, personal sacramental journeys and ghostly interviews to create one of the most insightful investigations into Mexican-American border culture available.
Worth noting is the poetic quality of Santos’ prose, which is sustained by “(a) wind of story, a wind of forgetting, a perpetual wind. . . .” Some of his best passages occur when he is on horseback in Mexico, as when we find him galloping across the desert mountains of Coahuila through a flood of migrating monarch butterflies, “wafting dreamily south to Michoacan. . . . The light was familiar. The everlasting wind. The slow, far-off clanging of a few cow bells. Numberless shoals of pink clouds were tracing the edge of the western horizon. The entire scene felt like a memory of a time that was older than me, as if it were the memory of the land itself. My father taught me how to see places like this. He taught me awe. . . .”
As his story progresses, it becomes clear that we are observing an agrarian soul too long loose in an urban environment. He is a brilliant negotiator of that environment, yet he lives with a constant, palpable yearning for a different existence.
One of the recurring images in the book is of the Aztec “guardians of time,” the flying Volador dancers, whom Santos first encountered at the 1968 HemisFair in San Antonio. At the end of the book, in a Castaneda-like dream-vision, guided by the spirit of his Uncle Raul, Santos hovers in the air watching the Volador dancers leap off the roof of an Upper East Side New York building, only to soar through the strange canyons of “Babylon-on-the-Hudson.” Even here, far from the original frontera, “Mexico’s invisible enchantment is already under way.”
Santos’ book fills a huge void. It explores a familial experience that is extremely common among Mexican-Americans–flight to the north from the 1910 revolution and the consequent loss of family memory beyond one or two generations–but it is an intensely personal book as well. Santos recalls visits to the ranch of some family friends near Sabinas, Coahuila. He spent those young days riding and reading–everything from Elizabethan poets to Kerouac and Borges. At the time, he described himself in a journal as ” `a laughing vaquero poet at the end of twentieth century.’ ” He is still a vaquero poet at heart, but the laughter has turned to introspection and–may we still use this word?–wisdom.
