Los Del Olvido

Take a good look at what becomes of the Mexican who goes north. He ends up a man without religion, without a country or home… a coward, an afeminado who is incapable of feeling shame for having abandoned his responsibilities to his family. Despite this, the roads are packed with Mexicans headed toward the United States in search of bitter bread. Everywhere you hear the rallying cry—"¡Vámonos al norte!"

—St. Toribio Romo, ¡Vámonos al Norte!

Every Mexican, to paraphrase the chilango performance artist Guillermo-Gómez Peña, is a potential Pocho. Take my tío Toribio Romo for instance. My father's second cousin was a priest and a writer from Jalisco, Mexico, who didn't like Mexicans-turned-Pochos too much during his lifetime but became, after his death, a transcultural hybrid of sorts. Santo Toribio, who was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2000, is known as the patron saint of migrants. Some call him the "Holy Smuggler." But I like to think of my tío as the first officially certified Pocho Saint. The funny thing is that while he was still alive, Uncle Toribio had some pretty harsh words for Mexicans who crossed over to the US. He called them "traitors to the motherland" and all sorts of other unflattering names. But as divine providence would have it, decades after Toribio was assassinated by Mexican federal soldiers during the Cristero War in 1928 for practicing the priesthood illegally, he seems to have ended up crossing to this side of the border himself—today people in California and Arizona say they sometimes see him walking around or driving a red pickup truck through the deserts rescuing stranded immigrants.

Recently, I traveled to Guadalajara where I uncovered a huge batch of St. Romo's writings in the Catholic Church's historical archives. That's where I met the Promoter of the Faith, popularly known as the Devil's Advocate—the archivist appointed by the Vatican to gather documents and dig up dirt on candidates for sainthood. The Devil's Advocate allowed me to take digital photographs of hundreds of pages written by Toribio Romo, none of which have ever been published. Most of them were plays, sermons, homilies, letters to his family, and journal entries he wrote hurriedly on scraps of paper inside caves and abandoned adobe shacks while on the run from government troops. The most fascinating literary piece I came across was a one-act comedy Toribio Romo wrote titled ¡Vámonos al Norte! Believing humor could be an effective weapon in the Catholic Church's "holy crusade" against emigration to the US, Romo staged this slapstick morality play in the Los Altos de Jalisco region in the early 1920s to convince his parishioners to stay home.

¡Vámonos al Norte! depicts a cultural clash between Rogiciano, an Americanized Mexican migrant who returns to his village in central Mexico with foolish airs of superiority, and Sancho, a rough but sharp-witted campesino who never left. In the opening scenes, Rogiciano impresses the locals by flaunting his newly acquired English and proclaiming himself a lover of "progress and civilization." But towards the latter part of the play, Sancho literally beats the acculturated Mexican into submission by slapping him over the head with a cane and forcing him to stand before the audience like a mannequin—Brechtian style—to expose the evils of emigration. Rogiciano is the ultimate Spanglish-speaking cultural half-breed. With his slicked-back hair, sweet-smelling cologne, silk shirt, and high-water pants, he is the very embodiment of the corrosive influences that returning emigrants bring back from the other side—irresponsibility, the loss of family values, materialism, and sexual ambiguity. If you betray your country and go north, Toribio Romo's play warns, you might come back as a "rooster hen that neither crows nor lays eggs" or, even worse, a Protestant. At the end of the theatre piece, Rogiciano is forced to strip down to his underwear, like the mythical Pachuco character of Luis Valdez's Zoot Suit (1978). In the past few years, I've come across quite a...