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Chapter one Cementerios What is encased in the tomb, grave, or monument stretches from the individual who has died to the descendants of those who buried her. Stories of their relationship parallel the larger story of the land that holds the cemetery itself. The dead do not exist in isolation. They remain not only in their graves but also in the imaginary of all those connected with that piece of land—from long ago to well into the future. This imaginary forms memories and expectations that guide those associated with the cemetery. Cemeteries contain the desire and imaginary of the past. Under six feet of earth, each buried body is made invisible to the living. Some bodies are secretly preserved in modern-day chemicals. Others have been reduced to the pieces of soil that firm up their graves. Those walking above them cannot see. Bodies inside their caskets appear merely to be sleeping. Things stay the same in the metal caskets, with expensive, airtight vaults creating an arti ficial boundary between the deceased and the continuously transforming outside world. The artificial boundary surrounding the unchanging body of the deceased holds tenaciously to the technologically constructed reality that projects permanence and strength. The semantics of power continue to affect those who are alive; they do not change the dead. Those uncorrupted bodies remain as sleeping people who, if they came above ground, would appear pale and still, with enough semblance of life that they could confuse whoever saw them. Such is the power of death and burial. What is buried reaches back over and over to relay the rules of before. The dead have stayed artificially bounded to the space, deceiving the living into thinking that what they said as living people is still valid and proper. We fool ourselves about those whose bodies and tombstones have disappeared . Crediting only what exists in the material world, proves us scientifically correct. In our twenty-first-century minds, power lies in what can be cementerios 15 proven, touched, seen.1 Even then, the proof can come only from those authorized to validate such information. Genealogy has been the criterion for authority in the case of the cemetery and its surroundings.2 The stories that lack authorization are not written with the ease of those enclosed in legacy. They become like a secret lover, simultaneously cherished and despised, intensely desired yet not worthy of a public presence. Their silence indicates a false disappearance that belies an intensity that only magnifies over time. This book is about those invisible narratives and their relation to an old Mexican cemetery. It is a textual exploration into the life of a place and its relationship to an event of national importance. The invisible stories inflect and flavor the continuously evolving history. The cemetery I write about is located on land once owned by Stephen F. Austin. In 1823 it was part of the first “official ” colony of Anglo settlers in what was then the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas.Two centuries later this same piece of land lies within one of the wealthiest and most conservative areas of Texas and the United States. Former CongressmanTom DeLay, once known as “the Hammer” on Capitol Hill, heartily represented the area for twenty-two years. It is the home of corporate power. Houston executives favor the area for its whitened environment and gang-free suburban schools. The chief financial officer of Enron Corporation committed suicide in his Mercedes on his tree-lined street not far from the cemetery.3 This is a text about the relationship between the particular and the collective ; geography links the two. There is a seemingly improbable relation between a child’s narrative about a forty-year-old memory and newspaper reports on the highest-profile suicide of 2002. Yet, the fabric of the intertwining narratives connects one story to another. The physical distance between the cemetery and the Enron executive’s home is not more than two miles. This work is about the space and time in between these two points. What remains between is not constant. The chronological and socioeconomic distances contract and expand sporadically, disallowing the standard categorization of space and time. The past and the future are affected by an imaginary history that conjured a “place of origin” that persistently seeks to cleanse and strengthen the fabric of its constitution. Re-Membering: The Poetry of the Past The project began with the...

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