Pride of Place: A Contemporary Anthology of Texas Nature Writing

10. Ray Gonzales, “Tortas Locas” from The Underground Heart

131 Chapter 10 Ray Gonzales Tortas Locas Ray Gonzalez is the author of nine books of poetry. Turtle Pictures (Arizona, 2000), a mixed-genre text, received the 2001 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry. His poetry has appeared in the 1999, 2000, and 2003 editions of The Best American Poetry (Scribners) and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses 2000 (Pushcart Press). “Tortas Locas” is taken from his collection of essays, The Underground Heart: A Return to a Hidden Landscape (Arizona, 2002), which received the 2003 Carr P. Collins/ Texas Institute of Letters Award for Best Book of Non-fiction, was named one of ten Best Southwest Books of the Year by the Arizona Humanities Commission, named one of the Best Non-fiction Books of theYear by the Rocky Mountain News, named a Minnesota Book Award Finalist in Memoir, and selected as a Book of the Month by the El Paso Public Library. His other non-fiction book is Memory Fever (University of Arizona Press, 1999), a memoir about growing up in the Southwest.He has written two collections of short stories, The Ghost of John Wayne (Arizona, 2001, winner of a 2002 Western Heritage Award for Best Short Story and a 2002 Latino Heritage Award in Literature) and Circling the Tortilla Dragon (Creative Arts, 2002). He is the editor of 12 anthologies, most recently No Boundaries: Prose Poems by 24 American Poets (Tupelo Press,2002). He has served as Poetry Editor of The Bloomsbury Review for 22 years and founded LUNA, a poetry journal, in 1998. He is Full Professor in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. In his essay “The Place, the Region, and the Commons,” poet Gary Snyder tells us,“The childhood landscape is learned on foot, and a map is inscribed in the mind—trails and pathways… going out farther and 132 wider.” He writes about the perception of young children and how we carry a picture of the terrain within us, things we learn between the ages of six and nine. Snyder concludes,“Revisualizing that place with its smells and textures, walking through it again in your imagination, has a grounding and settling effect.” I may have internalized the terrain of the desert at a very young age, but it was the unlocking of my creativity at age 11 that got the tides turning. Trying to find traces of these maps, I visit the recently opened El Paso History Museum, a small building on the east side of town that used to be a steakhouse. Old habits are hard to break; I think, “Only in El Paso would a restaurant building become a history museum and still look like a restaurant from the outside.” An exhibit of photographs reveals what the town looked like before my family came to El Paso. I stare at panoramic images stretched across the museum walls, and a line from one of my poems emerges—“The heart is a self-portrait.” It is also a downtown street in a yellow photograph from 1916, buildings I never saw before they were turned over to the ghosts. I squint as I study the tiny carriages and Model T’s an old camera managed to capture. That tower over in the corner. Four children trapped there by a woman who lit a torch in 1914. The heart is not a historian, simply an oxygen machine in the old hospital where I was born, the building rising tall in the other photograph.The first movement of my legs was the same as the other babies born that September day in 1952. The hospital is now gone, 32 drawers of unexplained cadavers bulldozed, without a report filed. The heart is a petrified tree hiding under the bricks of the growing town, branches that held sparrows and pigeons under an evening sun, where the man dressed in black first appeared,1904.Blink closer.Right there in the huge,yellow photograph,he leans against the last cottonwood before it was removed, the public hangings banned from the streets, executions Ray Gonzales 133 of Mexicans and Tewa Indians moved to the basement of the building cropped out of the photo. The heart is the survivor of rewritten history.It is the yellowing image of return, another photograph showing a man wading in the shallow fountain in San Jacinto Plaza, wrestling or feeding the alligators kept there in the...