Excerpt: “Pedro’s Theory: Reimagining the Promised Land”
I first met Marcos Gonsalez in a creative writing class during our doctoral study where I was lucky to witness the very beginning of this book. Even then I knew Marcos Gonsalez had a unique writing voice—a millennial Octavio Paz with the poetic convictions of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. Both writers I think would be happy to consider Marcos a peer. The following is an excerpt from Part 3 of “Pedro of the Americas,” where he tackles the issues of both physical and ideological “tourism” in a Latinx identity.
-Yollotl Lopez
There’s no way if you are a tourist in Mexico you are not stopping at the house of Frida Kahlo. E— and I walk through Frida’s house in awe of everything. The little bed on which she slept. The collection of books she read for inspiration. The striking blue of the house. The tiled countertops in the kitchen. The many self-portraits of her.
[…]
Frida is a portal to Mexico, one portal into the history of Mexico, to its people and its rhythms, and Frida is a portal to myself. I am a different person than I was during my high school or college years. I let everyone know in my graduate program who and what I am. I am out and proud on social media. I put up pictures of my father and of my Mexican family. I no longer pass as anything other than the person I want to be, authentically and truthfully. A year before this trip E— and I go to an exhibit at the Botanical Gardens in the Bronx displaying the plants Frida used to cultivate and was inspired by, and some of her paintings. There’s the Flower of Life, a poinsettia-looking plant, what looks to be the sex organs of a male and female, the duality of life and its origins. There’s the Still Life with Parrot and Fruit, a watermelon and orange bitten into, other fruits ripe and full of life, a green parrot perched on top of them. There’s the Portrait of Luther Burbank, the American botanist who created many hybrids of plants, a man transformed into a tree whose roots sap the energy from a lifeless corpse, life and death. A day after we visit the exhibition my Puerto Rican grandmother, a woman who was a mother to me, dies. All I can think of is the little exhibition in the Bronx, the plants wilting and blooming, the paintings vibrant, so alive, and to what Frida gave to me: where there is sorrow, there is joy; where there is death, there will always be life.
—
My mother asks me when I will go to Puerto Rico. Soon, I say, saying soon every time she asks, not knowing why this trip never seems to happen. Soon becomes not quite soon because Hurricane Maria strikes the island, leveling so much of it and leaving the island in a precarious position. I’m upset at myself for not going because now the town my grandmother was born and raised in, Salinas, will not be the Salinas my grandmother knew. There will not be the roadways that she walked, the buildings that she went into, the house she inhabited. I’m afraid I will return to the land I have never been to with no history, no point of reference, no way in which to access this part of my story, this part of the returning.
—
That thing called the tourist. The surveyors of lands and their pleasures. The tourist demands a landscape that will accommodate their every whim and fancy. The tourist wants a landscape fit to be consumed with little or no resistance from the environment, the people. The tourist requests a certain kind of experience of a place. The tourist is so needy for a particular kind of experience. I try to deny this impulse while in Mexico. This impulse to demand, to use the money I am spending as a weapon against the people and their land I am visiting. I let myself wander, observing the activity around me, the footfalls of tourists and the pandering of vendors, men and their looks and women and their hurried steps, the life and the masses of life moving. I see people on the streets I want to photograph working or interacting or what have you but I resist. I instead turn to my notebook to jot down these characters in my drama, characterizing them and emplotting them and giving them purpose in ways funneled through my outsider lens, my Mexican self in the diaspora. I try to make sure I do not interfere or intrude upon events that are in no way shape or form meant for my inclusion, opting instead to be a bystander, to be a presence when I can, when I have to be, when I ought to be.
Marcos Gonsalez. Photo courtesy of author.
I am a tourist in Mexico. But I want to think I am a different kind. One rooted, one whose roots can reattach to the land, one who makes sure not to put roots where his roots do not belong. I am a stranger in Mexico, a land where nobody knows my name, and where nobody might know how to say my name. This boy who is too Mexican and Puerto Rican in some places, with some kinds of people, and in other places and with other people not Mexican and Puerto Rican enough. How can I be a tourist in a land some deem mine, a land I should know, a land I should find familiar? Mexico is nothing familiar to me. It is a terrain I want to continue knowing, continuing exploring, continue experiencing. I want to do all this further exploration not in the way most tourists do, most tourists whose quest to experience and know mimics far too closely the conquerors of yesterday, replicating too easily the power dynamics which gave shape to this unequal, this suffering, Americas. I want to be in the world, with others, those I know and those who are strangers, gently, with attention to their lives and differences. I want to belong not to a land or a national identity, not the belonging that is wanting to possess, to have, to lay claim to. I want the belonging that is the shared desire for caring better for the lives of those we don’t know. The belonging to the shared goal of wanting the well-being and thriving of the neighbor I do not know, the familiar face of the stranger seen every day in town or the subway ride to work, or the masses of people in far-flung places we will never know. The belonging to the commitment to unlearn what we have come to understand as normal ways of being and living together on this planet. The normality of possessive individualism, monetary accumulation at all costs, and lawful exploitation of others which colonialism and capitalism has wrought across this Americas, and this planet. This is the Americas I want to be a part of. This is the Americas I imagine in my head as I undertake the role of the tourist. Another kind, another way. (Gonzalez 257-261)
Marcos Gonsalez is an essayist and assistant professor of English living in New York City. Marcos’ memoir featuring literary criticism and cultural analysis, Pedro’s Theory, is out now with Melville House. Marcos’ essays have appeared in Literary Hub, Public Books, Inside Higher Education, Ploughshares, Catapult, ASAP/Journal, The New Inquiry, and elsewhere. Pedro’s Theory is available for order at Bookshop, directly at the publisher, or wherever else books are sold.