I wish I could find the photographs of the fishermen and their long glorious nets near sundown at Lake Pátzcuaro

“This is a little piece of your heritage” my uncle said to me. “You must know the people and the history.“ he drove me through artisan towns and stopped at the side of roads so that I could talk to the ceramicists, wood workers, and weavers. All of them had inherited the craft from their mothers and fathers.

My uncle’s study was full of books, it was a little paradise I took for granted instead of frequenting it I spent my hours with my cousins playing in the orchard and running through my aunt’s flower garden. We stayed half the summer hidden behind an 8 foot fence. Only coming out to travel or  walk two blocks down the road to my grandmother’s house that was falling apart.

At the time it’s was as if her house was me, my walls crumbling, my doors creaking, the spirits of the old loud and  in the mirror brown eyes peered back with more questions than answers.

How do I bridge these worlds? How can the conquered and conquerer find peace?

One day the wooden beams of my grandmother’s house pressed too heavily into the adobe walls and the left side of the house collapsed.  They moved her into my uncle’s brand new empty house, the one he’d constructed expecting to grow tired of living in the States, which was located on the same large plot of land.  

Just like that it fell and one day they tore the rest of it down and built it again.

One day, too
I just decided to tear down all notions, combine all the parts, honor every ancestor, and be everything I was. I didn’t have to belong to one place; I was by nature many things.
A girl who stood at the shore of Janitzio taking photographs of rising nets and the smell of Tzintzuntzan was still very much a large part of me. I wanted those photographs to remember.