over the mountains of the moon, down the valley of shadow

Dear Rosa,

We don't celebrate Thanksgiving. We eat the turkey, and we do the stuffing, and we sit at the tables and spend time with each other. But we don't do it for the White people. We do it because we've worked all year and this is a day off, and even if some of us don't get paid, we appreciate the chance to just sit at home and rest. We talk about what's been happening, how the deaths in the family this year have affected us, how Tia Estela is still a fresh wound that pulses everytime we look to the right and see her daughters sitting at her spot on our table.

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When I try to remember you now, the first thing that I can think of is that day in my kitchen. The stove was on, and my mother, in her black and white dress pajamas and her oversized shirt, was cooking caldo de rez. You called it beef stew, even though it was clearly not. You weren't there that day, but I was on the phone with you, sitting on a burgandy foldout chair, my cellphone in my ear, mom's food on the stove, and the rain hitting the window.
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Our culture is one of remembrance.

Ocotlán, where my mother was born, remembers its past in its bones. Midway up the northern side of the pueblo sit hundreds of shallow, bone-white, square wells, called cajetes. These are made of cement, and worn to smoothness by the salt water that evaporates every January and February. This process of evaporation leaves behind the salt that is Ocotlán's main product. The people of el pueblo have a list that says who gets to fill their cajetes when, and in what order. Everyone on that list is ordered and reordered to ensure fairness. No one goes a second time before everyone has gone a first, because Ocotlán doesn't have hacendados.

To the south of the cajetes sits the Church, painted in bright yellows, oranges, and blues. It's archways are painted gold, and inside, Jesus sits in all his forms, from infant to adult, crucified and not. At the center of the altar, Jesus is flanked by the Virgin Mary and St. Sebastian, the designated protector of Ocotlán. Beneath Jesus's feet is a large stone carved in the shape of a bowl, large enough for a person to lay their upper body across it. The symbols on its sides could be snakes, or the heads of jaguars, and the red stains down the sides might have, at one time, been blood.

Fr. Jose, the Spanish friar who gave Ocotlán St. Sebastian, turned the stone into a baptism fountain in the early 1900s. It was, until the Earthquake of September 19, 2017, still used to baptize children. Its sides still shine a faded deep red, today.

Behind the church, to the left, it's possible to see the path that runs past el Gachupin. Its branches have migrated high up along its trunk, and it no longer produces fruit, though the thickness of its trunk indicates it is still a young growth. The Gachupin was named after the Spanish hacendado who died on its branches. A just punishment, the pueblo thought, because el Gachupin had murdered one of theirs. So the pueblo responded by taking everything from him, and making him walk on bare feet to the site of his hanging.

Opposite el Gachupin, at the top of the pueblo are the primary and secondary schools. They are the farthest from all the surrounding farmland, but they also provide the best view of the growing crops. As though the Spanish wanted to encourage assimilation, at the same time that they reminded the children of their duty. Go to school, but only after the farm work is done, seems to be the overall message.

The pueblo, unfortunately, has not completely forgotten this lesson.

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Ocotlán means home of the pine trees.

This is the first thing el pueblo forgot, because language is always one of the first things to go.

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Our culture is one of preserverance.

For every paved path up to the schools, there are two dirt roads to the sides marked with the footprints of farmers and housewives. For every forgotten language, there are its cousins littered throughout the Spanish of el pueblo. For every person that leaves el pueblo to work, there are two siblings who go to school. For every brick room, there is one made of adobe.

Ocotlán has its history in its bones, the rituals of our ancestors preserved in the homes of my grandmother's neighbors, safe behind the guise of Christianity. For every Christmas, there is a celebration of dances in costumes made of bright cloths to honor one God now, instead of many. There are altars to the past, decorated with flowers and candles, prayers intermixed with the imagery of death, to remember the people we've lost.

There are wedding rituals, where the bride walks back and forth between houses before she goes home with her husband. Her life is acted out in a flurry of colors by men in flowing dresses. There are dances to drive away evil, people in horrible masks dancing to the beat of the shells that hang from their clothes. There is the dance of flowers, the dance for food, for drink, for gifts, and somewhere between all that is the priest and a church.

Somewhere, out there, is Ocotlán.

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Our culture is one of endurance.

It is a mountain made up of traditions and people, weathered and chipped to perfection. They're not what they were, but they'll do.