John Phillip Santos’ secret genealogy of Mexico: la inframundo of research, fantasy and spells of diabetic madness.

There is something so masculine about John Phillip Santos’ Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation. I don’t believe in the gender binary (kinda, sorta) but there is something so masculine and dark wood, heavy and deliberate in the way he chooses to enter into story. With little dialogue or action, Places is just pure, rich story thick like condensed milk boiled into manjar- and studded with stars, pumas and wild roses. Like the taste of manjar (boiled down condensed milk) it is beautiful, strongly evokes the Mexican essences that Santos is trying to capture, and sometimes hard to digest.

There is a very deliberate set of choices about which stories are told and in what order. Their order- abuela, abuelo, uncle, uncle, father, father’s dead father – brings to the mind of the reader a strong and delicate family tree that’s literally a tree: I can see the brances of dark wood. He chooses to tell their stories starting with the ones who were born and grew in the Mexico that he’s trying to remember and goes ahead chronologically. This is a deliberate choice. Doing this felt like it brought the feeling that there is a specific, ritual pathway of telling, based in chronology, that must be followed for the story to come.

Elmaz, you asked us to examine all the ways Santos chooses to enter into and tell history. The first way I would say is question. Chapter one is studded with questions. The young boy asks, what will happen to Mexico? The grandmother asks (and the book open with) the question, Have all the Santos died? The author asks, Who Are We? Who is Mexico? Who Are Mexicans?The ancestors, on page 9, are imagined as asking, Where did our forebears come from and what have we amounted to in the world? Where have we come from in the span of all time and where are we headed? What messages and markers of the ancient past do we carry in these handed-down bodies we live in today?

I loved that Santos chose to open his book with these questions, these huge questions of any diasporic people facing silence, forgetting and loss of history and trying to figure out what to do about them. Doing this in the middle of such a portent-filled first chapter of incantations both set the intention/tone for the book, and made the writer open and vulnerable. His intentions, his presence as author/ mediator through which the book is transmitted are set out transparently. He’s not pretending not to be there, not to be invested or with agency. He is clear and up front about his presence.

The book is the intramundo, or Santos’ prayer that it will become so, that everything is remembered. In explaining the concept of the inframundo- and how humans on the planet in our bodies can’t hope to come close to it in our memories, as with his description of Uncle Lico’s ’secret geneology of Mexico’ that is a mix of ‘research fantasy and spells of diabetic madness’ ( a mix of document, what is wildly hoped for, what is just a fancy) – Santos is setting out there a standard for the book to try and come to, and admitting that it’s impossible.

Other ways Santos enters into story are his documentation in language, telling dates, times, the specific smells and tastes and hopes. Precise documentation of what is not known. Precise documentation of what is not literally real, but is definitely spiritually real.

Santos wants to preserve, get it right, set it down, and heal all the wounds of loss of the past in doing so. He wants one answer, one story that’s the right one. I am with him in all my immigrant heart, but sometimes his sober desire to get one correct story holds me back. Because the stories can be myth and true and that’s alright; because another way he enters into story is through the land, the original Book of the family, never meant to be given away, still present even if it has been given away. I want him to loosen up and fly even more in his dance with the distance between human memory and the intramundo.