Re-Membering Personal History and Land in John Phillip Santos’ Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation

Abstract

Re-Membering Personal History and Land in John Phillip Santos’ Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation William Arce Rarely does a family memoir speak poignantly about a contemporary national debate, but this is the case with John Phillips Santos’ autobiography Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (1999)1 and recent discussions about immigration. In the wake of Arizona’s SB 1070, and President Barack Obama’s second term initiative for comprehensive immigration reform, the U.S. once again prepares for a national debate on immigration, national identity, and border enforcement.2 In stark opposition to the tense national discourse regarding immigration, Santos’ memoir provides a sobering poetic commentary on migration patterns, family history and a people’s connection to land. Santos revisits the legacy of his antepasados (ancestors) and reclaims the history of the lands from which they migrated without dwelling on borders, cultures, and politics. Undoing what he claims is a Mexican cultural characteristic of forgetting, “Mexicans are to forgetting what the Jews are to remembering” (5), his autobiography uses poetic writing as a vessel for rescuing personal and national history from the immense waters of a forgotten past and the turbulence of debates on immigration. Santos’ memoir opens new territory in the genre of Mexican American autobiographies by moving beyond the traditional geo-political confines of nation state. It is a transnational-American-autobiography, that is, an autobiography where borders are arbitrary, and hegemonic pressures to culturally assimilate are significant only when they cloak the true history of a people’s migrations. The U.S. and Mexico are important as topographical markers in the memoir since they locate Santos’ family within a specific time and place, but they are not competing cultural structures that force family members into old patterns of assimilation and/or strategic forms of acculturation. The memoir appears to have a much larger objective, one that Santos makes clear early in the text where he frames his purpose in the form of a question: “Where did our forebears come from and what have we amounted to in this world?” (9). In his autobiography, one of Santos’ major claims is that true national belonging in the U.S. necessitates a genealogical restoration that transcends national geo-political [End Page 2] boundaries. He argues for a cultural citizenship that is anchored in the fulfillment of what he calls a “compromiso,” a promise to keep the stories of one’s ancestors alive. Unlike “other” immigrant groups in the U.S., for Chicanos/as, the American Southwest is a homeland that precedes the arrival of Europeans and, therefore, Santos’ autobiography interrogates larger national discussions of what constitutes Americanness. He questions current constructions of nation along the lines of land, birthplace, race, language, religion, and ethnicity since they fail to properly represent the varied historical strands used to weave the tapestry of American history. Instead, he reimagines nation as a more inclusive concept, a construct in which one can choose to participate. In this essay I explore Santos’ concept of “el compromiso” (the social promise) in order to illustrate how personal genealogy can generate a more inclusive form of national belonging. In the field of Chicano literature, Santos is not alone in writing about family history. In his now-classic study of Chicano autobiographies, Genaro M. Padilla visits a treasure trove of nineteenth-century texts written by Mexican and Mexican Americans who, as he argues, wrote autobiographies as a “personal and communitarian response to the threat of erasure” (x). In early autobiographies, such as John N. Seguin’s Personal Memoir of John N. Seguín (1858), Mariano G. Vallejo’s Recuerdos Históricos y Personales Tocante a la Alta California (1875), and Cleofas Jaramillo’s Shadows of the Past (1941), Mexicans and their Mexican-American progeny wrote to preserve their history in a land that once belonged to them. Cleofas Jaramillo, for example, writes in the introduction to Shadows of the Past, “My humble effort in writing this book is with the sole desire of preserving in writing our rapidly vanishing New Mexico Spanish folklore” (10). Mexican American autobiography emerged as a discursive necessity, testifying to the deep roots of the Mexican community and history in...