When we left our travels, we were in Northern Mexico, skirting the border to the US. We travel now to New Mexico, where the people live north of the border, but share a culture with their family to the south.

We’ve been here before with Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima. Like Teresa Urrea in The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Ultima is a curandera. She knows plants, and she knows the spirits around her. She knows healing.

Life is hard, but for some it is unbearable. There is pain and sadness in every family, but most of us hold it together by sharing the burden with those we love. One peripheral character I remember from Bless Me, Ultima was cousin Lupe, who went to the war and came back with “war disease.” After the gruesome bloodshed of war, he would never be the same again. I have a picture of him in my mind, running wild through the arroya, the men in his family chasing behind to keep him from hurting himself.

I see this kind of war disease in some of my beloved friends and family members. For most it is not a literal war, but some gruesome life experiences they can’t seem to recover from. May they all find peace and balance in their lives.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 at 1:52 pm and is filed under Latin America, US and Canada, magical realism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.