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Chapter One

ON THE COOL OCTOBER MORNING when Cayetana Ch谩vez brought
her baby to light, it was the start of that season in Sinaloa when the humid
torments of summer finally gave way to breezes and falling leaves, and small red
birds skittered through the corrals, and the dogs grew new coats.

On the big Santana rancho, the People had never seen paved streets,
streetlamps, a trolley, or a ship. Steps were an innovation that seemed an
occult work, stairways were the wicked cousins of ladders, and greatly to be
avoided. Even the streets of Ocoroni, trod on certain Sundays when the People
formed a long parade and left the safety of the hacienda to attend Mass, were
dirt, or cobbled, not paved. The People thought all great cities had pigs in the
streets and great muddy rivers of mule piss attracting hysterical swarms of
wasps, and that all places were built of dirt and straw. They called little
Cayetana the Hummingbird, using the mother tongue to say it: Semal煤.

On that October day, the fifteenth, the People had already begun readying for
the Day of the Dead, only two weeks away. They were starting to prepare plates
of the dead’s favorite snacks: deceased uncles, already half-forgotten, still
got their favorite green tamales, which, due to the heat and the flies, would
soon turn even greener. Small glasses held the dead’s preferred brands of
tequila, or rum, or rompope: T铆o Pancho liked beer, so a clay flagon of watery
Guaymas brew fizzled itself flat before his graven image on a family altar. The
ranch workers set aside candied sweet potatoes, cactus and guayaba sweets, mango
jam, goat jerky, dribbly white cheeses, all food they themselves would like to
eat, but they knew the restless spirits were famished, and no family could
afford to assuage its own hunger and insult the dead. Jes煤s! Everybody knew that
being dead could put you in a terrible mood.

The People were already setting out the dead’s favorite corn-husk cigarettes,
and if they could not afford tobacco, they filled the cigarros with machuche,
which would burn just as well and only make the smokers cough a little.
Grandmother’s thimble, Grandfather’s old bullets, pictures of Father and Mother,
a baby’s umbilical cord in a crocheted pouch. They saved up their centavos to
buy loaves of ghost bread and sugar skulls with blue icing on their foreheads
spelling out the names of the dead they wished to honor, though they could not
read the skulls, and the confectioners often couldn’t read them either, an
alphabet falling downstairs. Tom谩s Urrea, the master of the rancho, along with
his hired cowboys, thought it was funny to note the grammatical atrocities
committed by the candy skulls: Mart铆a, Jorse, Octablio. The vaqueros laughed
wickedly, though most of them couldn’t read, either. Still, they were not about
to lead Don Tom谩s to think they were brutos, or worse-pendejos.

“A poem!” Tom谩s announced.

“Oh no,” said his best friend, Don Lauro Aguirre, the great Engineer, on one
of his regular visits.

“There was a young man from Guam煤chil,” Tom谩s recited, “whose name was Pinche
滨苍煤迟颈濒!”

“And?” said Don Lauro.

“I haven’t worked it out yet.”

Tom谩s rode his wicked black stallion through the frosting of starlight that
turned his ranch blue and pale gray, as if powdered sugar had blown off the sky
and sifted over the mangos and mesquites. Most of the citizens of Sinaloa had
never wandered more than 100 miles; he had traveled more than anyone else, 107
miles, an epic journey undertaken five days before, when he and his foreman,
Segundo, had led a squad of armed outriders to Los Mochis, then to the Sea of
Cort茅s beyond. All to collect Don Lauro Aguirre, arriving by ship from far
Mazatl谩n, and with him, a shipment of goods for the ranch, which they contracted
for safe delivery in a Conducta wagon train accompanied by cavalry.

In Los Mochis, Tom谩s had seen the legendary object called “the sea.”

“More green than blue,” he’d noted to his companions, already an expert on
first sight. “The poets are wrong.”

“Pinches poets,” said Segundo, hating all versifiers and psalmists.

They had gone on to greet the Engineer at the docks. He fairly danced off the
boat, so charged with delight was he to be once again in the rustic arms of his
bon ami tr猫s enchant茅! Under his arm, carefully wrapped in oilcloth,
Aguirre clutched a leather-bound copy of Maxwell’s Treatise on Electricity
and Magnetism. In Aguirre’s opinion, the Scotsman had written a classic! Don
Lauro had a nagging suspicion that electricity, this occult force, and
magnetism, certainly a force of spirit, could be used to locate, and even
affect, the human soul. In his pocket, a greater wonder was hidden: a package of
Adams’s Black Jack chewing gum-the indescribable flavor of licorice! Wait until
Tom谩s tasted that!

The ship looked to Segundo like a fat bird with gray wings floating on the
water after eating some fish. He was delighted with himself and pointed to the
boat and told one of the buckaroos, “Fat bird. Ate some fish. Floating around.”
He lit a little cigar and grinned, his gums and teeth clotted with shreds of
tobacco.

Segundo had the face of an Aztec carving. He had Chinese eyes, and a sloping
Mayan forehead. His nose was a great curving blade that hung down over his
drooping bandido mustache. He thought he was handsome. But then, Aguirre also
thought himself handsome, though he seemed to have inherited the penchant for
fat cheeks that was supposed to be the curse of the Urrea clan. He tried to
remember to suck in his cheeks, especially when he was being compared to his
friend Tom谩s Urrea. Where had Tom谩s’s cheeks gone? In bright light, you could
see his cheekbones casting shadows as if he were some Indian warrior. And those
eyes! Urrea had a ferocious gleam in his eyes-a glare. Men found it unnerving,
but women were apparently mesmerized. They were the only green eyes Aguirre had
ever beheld.

“You have much work to do, you lazy bastard,” said Tom谩s.

The Urrea clan paid Aguirre handsomely to exercise his education for them in
elaborate hydrological and construction plans. He had designed a network of
vents to carry odors from the house’s revolutionary indoor toilet. He had even
astounded them all by designing a system of pipes that carried water uphill.

With liquid on the mind, it was not long before they found the notorious El
Farolito cantina. There, they ate raw shellfish still gasping under tides of
lime juice and hot sauce and great crystals of salt that cracked between the
teeth of the men. Naked women writhed to a tuba-and-drum combo. The men regarded
this display with joy, though Aguirre made the effort to feel guilty about it.
Lieutenant Emilio Enr铆quez, in charge of the Conducta wagon train, joined them
at the table.

“Teniente!” Tom谩s shouted. “What do you hear?”

“Gentlemen,” said Enr铆quez, arranging his sword so he could sit. “Unrest in
Mexico City.”

Aguirre had to admit to himself that this soldier, though an enforcer of the
oppressors, was a dashing figure in his medallions and the bright brass fittings
on his tunic.

“What troubles are these, sir?” he said, always ready to hear the government
was being overthrown.

Enr铆quez twirled the ends of his upswept bigote and nodded to the barkeep,
who landed a foaming beer before him.

“Protesters,” he sighed, “have dug up Santa Anna’s leg again.”

Everybody burst out laughing.

The old dictator’s leg had once been blown off by a cannonball and buried
with full military honors in the capital.

“Every year, somebody digs it up and kicks it around,” Enr铆quez said.

Tom谩s raised his glass of beer.

“To Mexico,” he said.

“To Santa Anna’s leg!” Lieutenant Enr铆quez announced.

They all raised their glasses.

“The Canadians,” Enr铆quez said, as he poured himself a fresh glass of beer,
“have launched a mounted police force. They control their Indians.”

“And bandits?” Tom谩s interjected.

Tom谩s Urrea’s own father had been waylaid by bandits on the road to Palo
Cagado. The bandits, a scruffy lot said to have dropped out of the Durango
hills, had been after silver. Tom谩s’s father, Don Juan Francisco, was well known
for carrying casks of coin to cover the wages of the three hundred workers on
his brother’s great million-acre hacienda south of Culiac谩n. When the outlaws
discovered no silver, they stood Don Juan Francisco against an alamo tree and
executed him with a volley of ninety-seven bullets. Tom谩s had been nine at the
time. Yet his subsequent hatred of bandidos, as he grew up on the vast ranch,
was so intense it transformed into a lifelong fascination. Some even said Tom谩s
now wished he were a bandido.

“It goes without saying, caballeros. Bandits!” said Enr铆quez. “Besides, we
have already started the rural police program here in Mexico to accost our own
outlaws.”

“Gringos! They have copied us again,” Tom谩s announced.

“Los Rurales,” Enr铆quez continued. “The rural mounted police force.”

“To the Rurales,” Tom谩s said.

They raised their glasses.

“To the bandits,” said Segundo.

“And the Apaches,” Enr铆quez said, “who keep me employed.”

They drank the hot brew and pissed out the back door and tossed coins to the
women to keep them dancing. Tom谩s suddenly grabbed a guitar and launched into a
ballad about a boy who loved his schoolteacher but was too shy to tell her.
Instead, he wrote her a love note every day and tucked it in a tree. One day,
while he was placing his latest testimonial in the tree, it was hit by
lightning, and not only did this poor boy die, but the tree with its enclosed
epistles of love burned to the ground. The teacher ran to the tree in time to
behold this disaster. The ballad ended with the melancholy schoolteacher, lonely
and unloved, brushing the ashes of the boy’s unread notes from her hair before
turning out her lamp and sleeping alone for yet another night. The naked dancers
covered themselves and wept.

Early the next morning, the men left the thunderously hungover barkeep and
dancers behind and began their long ride inland, to where the hills started to
rise and the iguanas were longer than the rattlesnakes. They began to forget the
color of the sea.

HummingbirdsDa_ornament.jpg

Cayetana greeted that dawn with a concoction made with coffee beans and
burned corn kernels. As the light poured out of the eastern sea and splashed
into windows from coast to coast, Mexicans rose and went to their million
kitchens and cooking fires to pour their first rations of coffee. A tidal wave
of coffee rushed west across the land, rising and falling from kitchen to fire
ring to cave to ramada. Some drank coffee from thick glasses. Some sipped it
from colorful gourds, rough clay pots that dissolved as they drank, cones of
banana leaf. Caf茅 negro. Caf茅 with canela. Caf茅 with goat’s milk. Caf茅 with a
golden-brown cone of piloncillo melting in it like a pyramid engulfed by a black
flood. Tropical caf茅 with a dollop of sugarcane rum coiling in it like a hot
snake. Bitter mountaintop caf茅 that thickened the blood. In Sinaloa, caf茅 with
boiled milk, its burned milk skin floating on top in a pale membrane that looked
like the flesh of a peeled blister. The heavy-eyed stared into the round mirrors
of their cups and regarded their own dark reflections. And Cayetana Ch谩vez, too,
lifted a cup, her coffee reboiled from yesterday’s grounds and grits, sweet with
spoons of sugarcane syrup, and lightened by thin blue milk stolen with a few
quick squeezes from one of the patr贸n’s cows.

On that long westward morning, all Mexicans still dreamed the same dream.
They dreamed of being Mexican. There was no greater mystery.

Only rich men, soldiers, and a few Indians had wandered far enough from home
to learn the terrible truth: Mexico was too big. It had too many colors. It was
noisier than anyone could have imagined, and the voice of the Atlantic was
different from the voice of the Pacific. One was shrill, worried, and demanding.
The other was boisterous, easy to rile into a frenzy. The rich men, soldiers,
and Indians were the few who knew that the east was a swoon of green, a
thick-aired smell of ripe fruit and flowers and dead pigs and salt and sweat and
mud, while the west was a riot of purple. Pyramids rose between llanos of dust
and among turgid jungles. Snakes as long as country roads swam tame beside
canoes. Volcanoes wore hats of snow. Cactus forests grew taller than trees.
Shamans ate mushrooms and flew. In the south, some tribes still went nearly
naked, their women wearing red flowers in their hair and blue skirts, and their
breasts hanging free. Men outside the great Mexico City ate tacos made of live
winged ants that flew away if the men did not chew quickly enough.

So what were they? Every Mexican was a diluted Indian, invaded by milk like
the coffee in Cayetana’s cup. Afraid, after the Conquest and the Inquisition, of
their own brown wrappers, they colored their faces with powder, covered their
skins in perfumes and European silks and American habits. Yet for all their
beaver hats and their lace veils, the fine citizens of the great cities knew
they had nothing that would ever match the ancient feathers of the quetzal. No
cacique stood atop any temple clad in jaguar skins. Crinolines, waistcoats.
Operas, High Mass, caf茅 au lait in demitasse cups in sidewalk patisseries. They
attempted to choke the gods with New York pantaloons, Parisian petticoats. But
still the banished spirits whispered from corners and basements. In Mexico City,
the great and fallen Tenochtitl谩n, among streets and buildings constructed with
the stones of the Pyramid of the Sun, gentlemen walked with their heads slightly
tilted, cocked as if listening to this puzzling murmur of wraiths.

They still spoke a thousand languages-Spanish, too, to be sure, but also a
thicket of songs and grammars. Mexico-the sound of wind in the ruins. Mexico-the
waves rushing the shore. Mexico-the sand dunes, the snowfields, the steam of
sleeping Popocat茅petl. Mexico-across marijuana fields, tomato plants, avocado
trees, the agave in the village of Tequila.

Mexico….

All around them, in the small woods, in the caves, in the precipitous canyons
of copper country, in the swamps and at the crossroads, the harsh Old Ones
gathered. Tlaloc, the rain god, lips parched because the Mexicans no longer
tortured children to feed him sweet drafts of their tears. The Flayed One, Xipe
Totec, shivering cold because priests no longer skinned sacrifices alive and
danced in their flesh to bring forth the harvest. Ton谩ntzin, goddess of Tepeyac,
chased from her summit by the very Mother of God, the Virgen de Guadalupe. The
awesome and ferocious warrior god, Hummingbird on the Left, Huitzilopochtli.
Even the Mexicans’ friend, Chac Mool, was lonely.

Continues…

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Excerpted from The Hummingbird’s Daughter by Luis
Alberto Urrea Copyright 漏 2005 by Luis Alberto Urrea. Excerpted by
permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced
or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are
provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this
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Little, Brown