The Flower in the Skull

By Kathleen Alcalá

A riveting novel from acclaimed author Kathleen Alcalá, this second edition of The Flower in the Skull, from Raven Chronicles Press, begins in the Sonoran Desert in the late 19th century, where an Ópata village is attacked by Mexican soldiers. Her family scattered, Concha makes her way to Tucson, where the storie

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Raven Chronicles
• Release date: May 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781735478050

Kathleen Alcalá

Kathleen Alcalá contributed to a novel for the Seattle7Writers project for literacy.

Book preview

PRAISE for books by Kathleen Alcalá

The Desert Remembers My Name: On Family and Writing

Alcalá’s life work has been an ongoing act of translation—not only between languages, but also between cultures. She has been building prismatic bridges not just between the Mexican and American cultures, but also across divides of gender, generation, religion, and ethnicity.

—The Seattle Times

Treasures in Heaven

Kathleen Alcalá is exceptional among Latina writers. Her voice is a compass to navigate the corridors of history so as to approach our common past anew.

—Ilan Stavans

Mrs. Vargas and the Dead Naturalist

. . . The kingdoms of Borges and Garcia Márquez lie just over the horizon, but this landscape of desert towns and dreaming hearts, of lost sisters and ghost scientists, canary singers and road readers, is Alcalá-land. It lies across the border between the living and the dead, across all the borders—a true new world.

—Ursula K. LeGuin

Spirits of the Ordinary

. . . it is testimony to Ms. Alcalá’s vivid talents as a storyteller, and to the mystical allure of the threads of magic realism that run through her narrative, that we come to care about many of her characters, and to wonder what destinies await them in her next book.

—Laurel Graeber, New York Times

Alcalá’s lyrical language soars, sweeping the reader into achingly beautiful landscapes, the rapture of spiritual experience, and the madness lurking at the edge of solitude.

—Claudia Castro Luna, Washington State Poet Laureate

Kathleen Alcalá is a writer with beautiful gifts. Her prose is continually arresting—there’s a spirit in it which is not ordinary. She has given us a strong and finely rendered book in which passions both ordinary and extraordinary are made vivid and convincing.

—Larry McMurtry

RAVEN CHRONICLES PRESS

Copyright © 1998 Kathleen Alcalá

Raven Chronicles supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. Otherwise, all rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

Raven Chronicles Press Edition

Copyright © 2023 Kathleen Alcalá

ISBN 978-1-7354780-3-6

ISBN 978-1-7354780-5-0 (e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022951944

The Flower in the Skull is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Alcalá, Kathleen. 1954-

Flower in the Skull : a novel / by Kathleen Alcalá.

1. Mexican American women—California—Los Angeles —Fiction.

2. Indian women—North America—Fiction.

3. Ópata Indians—Fiction.

Cover painting: Alfredo Arreguín, Tucson, 1998, oil on canvas, 60x 48.

Book Design: Phoebe Bosché, using Mirosa (display), and

Adobe Jenson Pro (text).

Cover Design: Scott Martin.

Author’s Photo: Wayne Roth (back cover).

Raven Chronicles Press

15528 12th Avenue NE

Shoreline, Washington 98155-6226

[e-mail]

https://www.ravenchronicles.org

This novel is dedicated to

the people of the Sonoran Desert.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Anne Woosley and Allan McIntyre of the Amerind Foundation, and the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona for making their time and resources available to me. I would also like to acknowledge Artist Trust and the Washington State Arts Commission for financial support, and Hedgebrook Farm for time and a place to write.

Many people have worked to preserve and pass on the cultures of the Sonoran Desert, among them Thomas B. Hinton, Patricia Preciado Martin, Edward and Rosamond Spicer, Thomas Sheridan, Gary Paul Nabhan, James S. Griffith, and Bernardo Fontana. The work of Ofelia Zepeda and Leslie Marmon Silko have also been an inspiration to me. I hope the interested reader will seek out their work as well.

Publishing is hard work that involves many people, from the early ideas to sales and distribution. I would like to thank my editor, Phoebe Bosché, for her patience and professional attitude, and copy editor Dana Gaskin Wenig for finding yet more corrections to help make this a better story. Thank you.

A portion of this novel was published in an early form under the title Walking Home in The Americas Review, Volume 23, Number 3-4, Fall-Winter 1995.

I

NTRODUCTION

When I wrote The Flower in the Skull , I was afraid it would be more of a memorial to my ancestors than the revealing / revelation of a living people. I grew up knowing we were part Indian on my mother’s side, but nothing more. Well, I thought as I concluded work on the book, at least I tried to document who we are, why the history of a people can be so wonderful and terrible at the same time. Then I moved on to my next book.

My father was darker-skinned, so people assumed he had more indigenous blood than my fair-skinned, grey-eyed mother. But the mitochondrial DNA passed down from mother to daughter for generations confirms the family stories. This sort of testing was not available when I wrote the book, but it doesn’t really matter. One’s indigenous identity cannot be captured in a test tube, or a list of names or places. If anything, it is a set of stories that tie a person to the land in some way that supersedes all the rules and regulations and proofs that people demand of each other. It is choosing to wear these stories like a familiar shirt, or a beaded vest. It is owning these stories whether or not it is to one’s advantage to do so. And it is seeking out and honoring the carriers of these stories so that they can be passed on to future generations.

At first, not much happened with The Flower in the Skull. It received a major award, the Western States Book Award. The reviews were mixed, but my paperback editor at Harvest/ Harcourt Brace called to say how much he loved it, no faint praise from a publishing heavyweight. Months passed, a year, and my next book, Treasures in Heaven, came out and attention shifted to its feminist themes.

The internet was rapidly evolving at this time, and Qui Qui Felix, a woman who maintained a Geocities website devoted to the Ópata, contacted me. I was thrilled! With just a few resources at her disposal, she had painstakingly accumulated images, photos, videos, and art spanning hundreds of years about the Ópata on this free website that was popular in the 90s. She arranged to visit me so that she could read and scan the small library I had put together over the years.

Then Ricardo Tánori, a retired psychologist living in Baja, California, wrote to say that he hosted a Yahoo!MX chat group dedicated to the Ópata, and invited me to join. There were not too many people in the Spanish language group at first, maybe twenty-five or so posting sporadically. But still, it felt like a miracle, people who knew the old stories and even some of the old languages.

More and more people joined, and often our stories were similar—one or two great-grandparents were Ópata, the family had migrated from Sonora to Arizona or California as farmworkers or railroad workers. Often, they intermarried with the Yaqui (Yoeme) at this time. There was no formal Ópata tribe, since the US Government had dropped recognition of the Ópata in the 1950s, along with several other tribes across the country. I’m not sure why. Colorful tourist maps illustrated with men in war bonnets, or cute ponies on placemats in diners, stopped showing the Ópata living near the Pima Bajo on the Arizona/ Sonora border.

But that doesn’t mean we went away. A few people still had extended family in Sonora, a few others knew a few individual words or stories, but none of us was fluent in what turns out to be three dialects from the region. The online community grew and migrated to Facebook. We had our differences, mostly having nothing to do with our collective identity. We met twice in Tucson, Arizona, and I met Teresa Leal (1945-2016) in Nogales—a labor leader, rabble-rouser, and staunch advocate for the Ópata people. We planned to meet again, but she died suddenly at seventy years of age. Earlier, we had lost Peace and Justice Warrior Gustavo Villanueva Gutierrez (1932—2012) at the age of eighty when he fell from his horse during a social justice march. He was probably the most widely recognized Ópata of the last one hundred years.

The Flower in the Skull is a work of historical fiction based on the life of my great-grandmother, Pastora Curiel. The second volume in a trilogy, it dovetails with the other two novels to present her story from a point of view the characters in Spirits of the Ordinary and Treasures in Heaven would struggle to understand. Pieced together over many years, tracing the names that were not named, the paternity never discussed, The Flower in the Skull traces my lines of descent back to the village where my great-grandmother was born, and from which she traveled a long, long way.

Today, there are over 300 people who identify as Ópata and participate in online discussions. There is a smaller group working on legal recognition from both the United States and Mexico, and, of course, many more who live and work on both sides of the border. You are welcome to look at our website at https://opatanation.org.

In 2022 I visited the Rio Sonora valley and the Banámichi River of northeastern Mexico, where villages located along the river valleys continue to tell and retell stories that illuminate the past. I also met up with Cristina Murrieta, who traveled from the next valley over where she is the official story keeper for the town of Nácori Chico. Like me an Ópata descendant, she is working hard to document the past, preserving it through accounts of song, dance, weaving, pottery, and food. She has published at least two books of myths and stories from the area. Soldiers have been replaced by drug dealers, and ranchers by distillers of mescal, but the beauty of our desert culture continues to shine through our people.

This book is a simple recreation of one of those journeys. If you read this and see reflections of your own family, then this book has served its purpose.

—Kathleen Alcalá

Bainbridge Island, Washington

October 13, 2022

THE FLOWER IN THE SKULL

Y en medio de esos cambios interiores

tu cráneo lleno de una nueva vida,

en vez de pensamientos dará flores.

Manuel Acuña, de Ante un cadaver

Amid those internal changes

Your skull fills with a new life,

and instead of thoughts, has flowers.

Manuel Acuña, from Before a Corpse

Contents

I: Concha

Something Precious

Hu’uki

The Boy with the Calendar in His Head

The Captains of War

Javier Oposura

La Plancha

Train

Barrio Libre

The Weeping Pearls

Walking Home

II: Rosa

How I Came To Be Different From My Mother

Susto

Nogales

Beto

The Lamp Shop of Alma Prieta

Gabriel

III: Shelly

The Girl in the Closet

Tucson

Next Year in Magdalena

A Photograph

Waiting Room

Los Angeles

Hermana Araña

I

C

ONCHA

Something Precious

In the desert, deep inside the spiny center of the cactus, nests a bird no bigger than my finger. While the sharp thorns fend off animals that would eat the eggs, the parent birds come and go at will. And this was my mother’s name, living at the heart of the spiny cactus, Sému, what others would call Hummingbird. The last time I saw her was on the way to Casas Grandes.

In Sonora is a river called Moctezuma, and a village there was our home, just before it meets the Yaqui River. My mother and her sister owned rancherías, and their husbands and sons raised corn and wheat and cotton and many good things to eat. The soil was good and the water from the river was sweet, the sweetest I ever tasted.

My name at that time was Shark’s Tooth from the Sea, which means something precious. The Ópata used to trade good baskets to the Seri for shark’s teeth to decorate their clothes and baskets, and when I was born, my mother’s family named me after this rare and beautiful object. It meant that I was strong and fierce and wild and beautiful, all things that the Ópata wanted in their baby girls. My name also held the promise of water, which made it even more precious.

The women wove baskets and ground corn and carried babies and sang songs. And the chiefs of peace would gather the people in the center place each evening and tell the stories of the place where we lived, of sacred mountains and rivers, of the miracles of Saint Francis, and the lives of good men. The story of the life of a good man, they used to say, is worth as much as a good rainstorm.

This is what we left. We left all of this behind when the fighting got too bad, when the crops were burned, when the villages were burned and the cattle stolen, when the young girls were kidnapped and the men were captured or shot. All of this we left behind when the fighting between the Mexican Army and the Yaqui got too bad, and the Mexicans couldn’t tell the Ópata from the Yaqui, and treated us just as bad as they treated the Yaqui, who had a vision of their own country, an Indian country separate from the rest of Mexico, where the Yaqui and the Ópata and the Mayo and Pima and all the others could own their own land and live in peace.

This is what my people left when they picked up their feet and put on their bundles and their babies and walked north to Tucson and Nogales and the northern Opatería.

I did not know if I could do this. I did not know if I could pick up my feet, put on my sandals, and walk the long, long way, the singing way, north to the river people of the Santa Cruz. My mother and brother and sisters stood, bundles on their backs and their heads, and looked at me. If I stayed, here where the desert sang for me, where the trees grew and the birds lived and every rock and lizard was a companion to me, if I stayed, they told me, I would die. They will come for us again, and this time, they said, they might do more to me than before. The Spanish/ Mexicans would kill me for being a Yaqui, or the Apache would kill me for not being one of them.

We had no choice. We had to pick up our feet and put on our sandals and walk. Away from our homes, our fields, away from our mountains and valleys, away from our rivers and sacred places, away, even, from our sky. We walked to where the Pima and Papago lived, where the Apache had fought and lost. We walked to where the Americans lived, and hoped to live in peace. We were not fighters, we were not horse people, although we loved our horses. We were river people, and just needed a little land and water for our milpas.

There was room here now, and Mexican and American ranchers who needed help, because the Apache had been killed or sent far away. Much of this land had once belonged to the Ópata, had been where they grew corn and cotton and squash and beans, but because of the Apache and their appetite for blood, white and Indian alike, the Northern Ópata had abandoned their rancherías and fled south to join their brothers in the mountains.

Now the Ópata returned—no longer owners of their own rancherías, since they had no papers to prove such things, but as hired hands on the same land. All we had were our strong backs. And this was because the Mexican Army had become worse than the Apache, or at least not much better.

This is the story of my journey to Tucson, where I would find both happiness and sorrow. This is the story of my people, the Ópata, who once numbered as many as the saguaro of the desert, and who once farmed many rancherías and had many villages, but are now just a few, and scattered far and wide from their home and the constellations that knew them.

Hu’uki

In the