Palm Latitudes by Kate Braverman

Author:Kate Braverman [Braverman, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-60980-283-7
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2011-01-04T00:00:00+00:00

Marta Ortega was not superstitious. She was pragmatic and eclectic. After all, by nationality she was an American, by texture and choice a Chicana. She had been born on the edge of the central village which would eventually become the infestation of spires and steel citadels called Los Angeles. Her home was just beyond the original pueblo of Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles, in a green pocket which would later be eradicated by tractors and bulldozers to form a home for the American baseball team the failed city lured from New York.

The barrio of her youth was a composition of greens, tamed fields, sloping hills constant with wildflowers and family plots of maize, tomatoes and melons. In the long afternoons, women fed chickens, leaned across whitewashed or stucco courtyard walls and gossiped between their scrubbing and their cooking. They watered terra-cotta pots of whatever stalks or leaves they had brought with them from Mexico. The ground accepted these seeds and cuttings with familiarity and recognition. Then the women dispensed advice, traded and embellished herb remedies, treated the afflictions of illness, mourning and childbirth with the juices of healing plants, with the vestiges of the antique magic and science that had somehow survived the conquistadores.

Their pueblo seemed too insignificant to attract the attention of any conqueror or collection of warriors who were presently referring to themselves as governments. Time moved as slowly as a thing betrayed, shell-shocked and paralyzed. This was collectively perceived as a phenomenon for which one should be deeply grateful.

Occasionally current events were discussed with an excitement Marta Ortega dismissed as desperate and contrived. These conversations were the exclusive province of men. And when she heard the men speak of revolutions, she assumed they meant the spinning of the planet, the arc it had been instructed to inscribe in the sky. When the men pronounced out loud the names of legendary capitals and nodded their heads as if the words Moscow or Paris actually affected them, Marta Ortega felt it was the preening of peacocks only.

Of course new lines would be drawn across maps, she thought, ignoring the pomposities of the men as she did the clacking of chickens. It was the nature of territory to change with regularity. Always there were documents to etch, emblems to design and seals to affix on various scrolls or parchments, depending upon which tribe, empire or warlord had won the most recent of their redundant, relentless battles for pueblos and land. Marta Ortega recognized that these conflicts were waged from habit and a vast irredeemable boredom, intrinsic to the cycles, the process.

Every two years, American government officials visited the village. They made no attempt to shield their disgust at the lack of interest the women and the men displayed in currently approved methods of hygiene, styles of education, roads and telephone poles. Still, government representatives appeared just before elections. The opposing delegates offered increasingly extravagant rhetoric and promises of American inventions which they described as marvels, as if they were objects created specifically for them by God.

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