Anita Endrezze

By nature Indians are very lazy and sworn enemies of work. They prefer to suffer hunger than to fatigue themselves with agriculture. Therefore, they must be forced to do this by their superiors. With six industrious Europeans one can do more in one day than fifty Indians —Joseph Och , Missionary in Sonora: Travel Reports of Joseph Och, S.J., 1755-1767 Mining: The Indian is naked, swinging quarter to half hundredweight steel-edged crowbars. He climbs beams with notches set step by step, carrying ore in plaited baskets on his shoulders. They are given one half-bushel of maize per week. This is their payment unless they have a family– then they are given two half-bushels. Two men using a wheelbarrow could haul out more than can thirty lazy Indians working an entire day.

There are two memories of tides: one for the deep blackness that split away from the mother sea and one for sea that found itself in the daybreaks of rivers. Yet it was all one sea tracked by comets and the Elegant Tern, seals in speckled pod-shaped skins, and whales, opening their small eyes when the hands of people drew fish out of the salt. Geologists tell us that the sea split millions of years ago before the Yoemem, Yoremem, Kunkaak, O-Otam curled their tongues around the names of themselves and raised the conch shell to their lips, so that the sound of nature became human, too: kalifornia vaawe Then the sea was measured and divided into leagues. The Spanish ships called it dangerous because the sea tore in two ways, tide and rivers, so they contained it in maps written on dead animal skins with ink made from dried octopus blood Mar de la Kalifornia Golfo de California

From a newspaper photo and article about my godfather, James Moreno, East Los Angeles, 1950. (Three police officers took a brutal beating in a wild free-for-all with a family, including three young girls. From left, James, 19, and Alex, 22, in jail after the fracas on the porch of their home at 3307 Hunter.) Jimmy is staring off the page, hands in his pockets. A four-button dark shirt. No bruises, but he looks dazed. Alex wears a leather coat and a polka-dot shirt, which is in itself a crime. Nowhere is there a photo of a young girl with a face carved like a racetrack saint, eyes with all bets called off, grinning like a coyote. (Officer Parks had his glasses broken with his own sap and was thrown through a window.) Jimmy and Alex are my dad’s cousins, lived on Boyle Heights and tortillas. Mama says the cops always harassed them, those niños from East L.A., driving their low-riders, chrome shinier than a cop’s badge. And why wasn’t Coyote Girl mentioned, that round-armed girl with a punch like a bag of bees, a girl with old eyes, her lips cracking open as she saw the cop sailing through glass, boiling out of Boyle Heights, skidding on the sidewalk, flat as a tortilla? (The officers received severe cuts and bruises, were treated at a hospital and released in time to jail the youths, who were charged with assault with a deadly weapon.) Two years later, I was born and Jimmy entered the church, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched, watching the christening. Four drops of water, like popped-off wafer-thin buttons, fell on my head. No. He never showed up that day or any other. My spiritual guardian must’ve been there in spirit only. He didn’t know nada about Got and no one knows where he is today, but I think you could find him at the end of a knife. Or in the slash of the z in ¡La Raza! the dark blood reds of graffiti. Or tomatoes grown in old coffee cans by a white-haired man sitting in the sun in a dark shirt, next to an old woman growing younger every day as I tell her story, my story, our story with all the grace and power of a deadly weapon.