BIGGEST
SELECTION
West of the Pecos
Open 10am to 9pm
Mon - Sat
Taste and See
Bakery
Thursdays 4 - 6pm
• Organic spelt, hard white wheat berries.
• Rye and kamut freshly milled in my
stone burr mill and baked into
delicious breads, pizza crusts, cookies
and other goodies.
• Stone ground flour milled to order for
home bakers.
We use no white flour or
white sugar in our products
432.837.7476
605 E Holland Ave • Alpine
www.twinpeaksliquors.com
26
Cenizo
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802 E. Brown St. and Cockrell
Alpine
432-386-3772
[email protected]
those who’ve gone
before us, and in
the Old and New World traditions that manifest
themselves not only in commemorating the
dead, but in poking
fun at death itself
with costumes and
painted faces.
The night is also
about love.
“Just because some-
one passes, doesn’t
mean they’re gone,”
says de Narvaez.
Burying a loved one
shouldn’t preclude
our saying, “‘Let’s go
down and have din-
ner with Grandma
and spend time with
her, and eat and
dance and cry, even
though she’s not on
this plane anymore.’
Just because she has
passed doesn't mean
that she’s not still our
Grandma.”
“Love,” she says,
“is timeless.”
I believe in love,
in its immutable
strength. But I’m about to find out if I believe
something about myself — that I can balance
within me the legacy of indigenous customs and
Christian traditions that I’ve inherited.
This adventure began with a friend’s sugges-
tion that I photograph the Día de los Muertos
celebration in Brewster County’s Terlingua
Ghost Town — a community that, according to
The Texas Almanac, had only an estimated 61
residents last year. At the invitation, I remem-
bered hearing that for years, Day of the Dead
has been a celebration in this blip of a town in
West Texas.
Terlingua and its environs have a rich histo-
ry, but not one I’d have tied to this pre-
Columbian tradition. Quicksilver, or mercury,
actually put Terlingua on the map. According
to the Texas State Historical Association, the
element was discovered in the area in the mid-
1880s and its mining peaked during World War
I. By the end of World War II, the Chisos
Mining Company had gone bankrupt and its
successor had stopped operations, leaving
Terlingua a ghost town. Tourism and a chili
cook-off helped revive it in the 1960s, and today
chili heads trek in from all over the country —
and beyond — to try their luck in the two con-
tests that take place in the fall.
Steve Wick, a paleontology technician at Big
Bend National Park, once shared with me
another bit of history about this part of Texas.
Terlingua sits on a swath of desert that 75 mil-
Fourth Quarter 2014
continued from page 4
lion years ago was the bed of the Western
Interior Seaway. This Cretaceous Period ocean
split North America down the middle and today
the desert still offers up reminders of its past: fos-
silized shark teeth and
fossilized bones of
hadrosaurs, mosasaurs,
and sauropods. In the
hills, metates have
been ground into the
rock, evidence of the
human population that
came much later.
Back to the Day of
the Dead.
Though I was born
in the United States,
my parents are from
Mexico, a country
where Día de los
Muertos dates back to
the Aztecs. Before the
arrival of the Spanish,
once a year, the Aztecs
celebrated not only
their dead, but also the
deity Mictecacihuatl.
Known as Lady of the
Dead or Queen of
the Underworld, she
watched over the bones
of the dead. After the
Spanish conquest Catholic beliefs became inter-
twined with these ancient ones giving rise to Día
de los Muertos, which is celebrated Nov. 1 and
2, the Catholic observance of All Saints Day and
All Souls Day.
When my friend invited me to Terlingua, I
was just beginning to explore this piece of my
heritage. In Mexico and other parts of Latin
America, The Day of the Dead is celebrated big
with painted faces, sugar skull candies,
marigolds, and La Catrina, the skeleton woman
in the big hat who reminds us that not even the
wealthy can avoid death. Some of my friends
commemorate the day with home altars offer-
ing their deceased loved ones favorite foods and
mementos.
My family, on the other hand, has always
been rooted in the more solemn observance of
the holiday. We would attend Mass and recall
our loved ones with flowers on their graves. We
prayed novenas for the repose of their souls. Not
for us the rituals that hearkened back to our
Aztec forebears. Somewhere along the way, we
must have submitted ourselves wholly to the
rigid dogma of our conquerors. Or, did we?
Perhaps I still carry some vestige of my ances-
tors’ past when I decide to come to Terlingua.
Perhaps I intuit that this holiday will soon have
deeper significance for me. Though I don’t
know it yet, my mother, who has suffered from
Alzheimer’s for years, is preparing to make her
exit. I can’t know that five months later, on a