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Introduction “A Land Right Merry with the Sun” In 1903 W. E. B. DuBois wrote The Souls of Black Folk, in which he describes a “land right merry with the sun,” where “children sing and rolling hills” are full of plenty. The highway of the King passes through this place of bounty, yet on the side of the beautiful road there “sits a figure veiled and bowed.” The darkness of the character is uncomfortable for passersby. Their pace quickens as they walk past the bowed figure that seems so strangely out of place in this land of plenty. This book is about an old Mexican cemetery caught inside a whitewashed suburban community. It is in a place that is “right merry with the sun,” where “children sing.” It is a bountiful area, home to the powerful and wealthy. Yet the cemetery is like the “figure veiled and bowed;” its dark history evokes an uncomfortable feeling in all who pass by. Cemeteries of Ambivalent Desire is about a cemetery in Southeast Texas named San Isidro. Although known as a burial ground for ethnic Mexicans,1 it was also a cemetery for prisoners and slaves. It is located in Sugar Land, a former company town in Fort Bend County, presently considered one of the wealthiest areas in the state and even the nation. Fort Bend was named after a garrison built in 1822 at the bend of the Brazos River. The area was called the Brazos Bottoms. In 2005 it was identified as Houston’s wealthiest suburb; a place where the dividing lines between people and power create intense narratives . It is home to former congressman Tom DeLay and Clifford Baxter, the Enron executive who committed suicide in 2002. Fort Bend is also the home of Texas history, where the first white people settled before Texas became an independent nation. Its nineteenth-century agrarian economic success—built on slave and convict labor—has transformed into a significant market for the twenty-first-century consumer. The county’s economic development organization boasts that Fort Bend has more 2 introduction master-planned communities than any other county of Texas, is the most diverse , and has a population plentiful with college graduates and homeowners .2 The claims of diversity are valid, yet the people of color living in the eastern part of the county (where the wealth is) are generally neither ethnic Mexican nor black. Rather, they are Asian or South Asian. In writing this book, I found a “land right merry with the sun,” whose striking and troubled history has left an unnamed ghost hiding behind a veil that is yet to be removed. Beginnings The project began with my interest in an old Mexican cemetery located in Sugar Land, on the eastern side of the county. San Isidro Cemetery was (and is) the burial place for Latino employees of Imperial Sugar.3 It is a place I often visited as a child. From 1996 through 2004 I slowly learned the story of the cemetery, the sugar company, and the county itself. The story of the county seemed to come last. In this long overdue book I find myself going further and further back past the stories of San Isidro Cemetery. As I reintegrate my own history with these narratives, I realize that the veil DuBois describes also covered my vision and experience of growing up in the county. This book is about history and memory. As I write, the words of Houston Baker Jr. come to mind: “[M]y present work . . . revolves around revision and re-visitation . . . and it begins for me with the inescapable fact of the tightly spaced southernness I have long sought to erase from my speech, my bearing, and my memory. But it has never really been possible. For . . . I quickly discover I have not left the South, nor has the South left me.”4 In this story of Fort Bend County the subjectivity of a memory is inexplicably tied to the perceived identity of a person. History is everything. Thus the imagination of a preschool child who, because of her particular life circumstances, was privy to the many stories that comprise “what it was like” sometime in the past, enabled her to become a witness to what she saw. Decades later the child is now the ethnographer/writer. The imaginary enters what she remembers. The relevance of her nuanced perspective is not clear, yet she is aware that she is not the only one who...

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