Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation by John Phillip Santos

Author:John Phillip Santos
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2000-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

At the founding of many American cities lurk unsavory tales of invasion and mayhem, usually whitewashed or forgotten. Whether it’s the hoary presence of old buildings or a nebula of run-down shacks and other ruins, the evidence of the past—raw, weathered, and scarred—raises accusatory questions. How did this all come about? What price was paid, by whom, and for whose sake? Who was here before the whole story began? Troubled by the wraiths of American history, our cities have been bled by the suburbs and washed in the waters of urban renewal. They have emerged cleansed of the taint of the sin, discord, and, in some cases, the ethnicity of the past.

Yet, the past is recorded, even if imperfectly. On a visit to San Antonio in 1854, Frederick Law Olmsted, architect of New York City’s Central Park, felt like an outsider there, writing in his journal of “the dirty, grim, old stuccoed stone cathedral, whose cracked bell is now clunking for vespers, in a tone that bids us no welcome, as more of the intruding race who have caused all this progress, on which its traditions, like its imperturbable dome, frown down.”

In the same year, the historian Timothy Matovina tells of a San Antonian who stormed the sanctuary of Mission San Juan and began to demolish the statues and images of Jesus and the saints with a hammer. As he smashed a figurine of St. Martin de Porres, he was stopped by other Tejanos. At the time of the conquest, for many of the Indios and Mestizos alike, the saints of the Catholic sacred pantheon became the focus of the devotions that had once been offered to the Pre-Columbian gods. These Mexican gods were no gods at all, the vandal told those who restrained him. If Mexicans worshipped the true God, he would never have let the Gringos take Texas.

We lived in the ruins of that time, when the faint echoes of the conquest had become mirages and spectacles. On Saturdays, all day long, with brothers, cousins, and friends, we watched Kung-Fu triple features at the Aztec Theater, a cinema palace in downtown San Antonio. The walls of the theater were decorated with colorful panels of Mayan and Aztecan glyphs, interspersed with the faces of various gods, all presided over by the Feathered Serpent God Quetzalcoatl, whose image surrounded the screen as Bruce Lee threw slow-motion aerial drop kicks. Coyolxauqhui, the moon-faced Mexica night goddess, her face pierced and gilded, stared down at us in the red light of the exit signs.

The theater was inaugurated in 1926, after a San Antonio architect sent assistants all over Mexico to collect images and ideas from the ruins of Maya, Zapoteca, Mixteca, Tolteca, and Azteca Indian cities. The curtain painting depicted the first meeting between Cortés and Motecuhzoma, the Aztec emperor. Thousands of people were turned away from that opening, according to one of my great-uncles who remembers being there, having sneaked in early in the afternoon. After the movie, he said, there

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