Ombligo

My father was laid off this past year after the guy who ran the company which paid him (the plantation owner) embezzled $40 million dollars! This is the first time in my father’s entire life that he has been without work. The work that he does is not enviable: it is dirty, muddy, sweaty, wet, all-day, deadly, back-breaking work which pays just enough to sustain him so that he can keep his heart pumping long enough to die just before he’s supposed to collect his pension. He’s a farm-worker, like many immigrants, past and present. But, it’s work. And now he’s without it. He walks up and down the house all day infuriating my mother—he’s like a caged animal. So, this past summer, he decided to go back to Michoacan for the first time since 1984.

Of course, nothing is like he left it. His parents are dead. His siblings are dead. The house in which he grew up is in ruins, swallowed up by vegetation like an ancient temple. He spent a month just walking the old trails he and his father used to walk when he was a child—through mountains rich with history but not much else. He tells me with uncharacteristic enthusiasm about the day he rode a horse to the place beneath an elm where his belly-button is buried. My grandfather dug a hole and stuck it in deep, then rolled a giant stone on top of it. He told him: aquí estas enterrado, mijo. That was over 50 years ago. With his belly-button buried in a hole in the hills of Michoacan, it’s easy to understand why this man, my father, never found a real home elsewhere—the umbilical cord which ties him to his land, to his past and his destiny, to his burial, is much stronger than the seduction of the “American dream.”