Notes From My Knapsack 6-18-06
Jeff Gill

Crossing the Border

Ken Salazar speaks fluent Spanish. He lives and works in Colorado, but his family is from the south. Not Mexico, though. . .
New Mexico, actually, where his ancestors were among the founders of Santa Fe four centuries ago. His lineage does go back to south of the Rio Grande, but before there was a Mexico, so he jokes before audiences about whether or not he can really claim the label "Mexican-American" many put on him. Salazar goes on to point out that his family never crossed the border, but the border crossed them.
As a United States Senator, he has this conversation often. The first Hispanic elected outside New Mexico to such office, the Democrat is asked to help Anglo audiences in Colorado and around the US understand some of the challenges and intricacies of the immigration issue.
No one, from Salazar on down, doubts that ten million plus illegal immigrants over the last decade from Mexico represents a unique problem that has to be addressed. What can be lost in the political furor over the southern border is that tens of millions of Spanish speaking Americans are already here, are US citizens from before the Gadsden Purchase, and that the Hispanic/Latino element of this country’s ethnic mix is vital and longstanding.
We may not get Ken Salazar to speak in Licking County anytime soon, but a new novel can help you get some perspective on how Latino is not new piece in the national fabric, but one of our oldest stripes of color in the flag.
"The Night Journal," by Elizabeth Crook, is a fictional story about made up people, but set in actual places you can visit, like Pecos Pueblo southeast of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Las Vegas. Nope, not that one, but a quieter and much, much older one on the eastern edge of the Rockies, where the Sangre de Cristo range starts to rise to the north.
Crook has clearly done her research on New Mexican, Mexican, Mormon, and general American history, weaving them together with a tale of settlers and railroads and a briefly glimpsed appearance by Paul Harvey. Nope, not that one, but the fellow who a century and more ago, opened up the southwest to the first tourism boom. If you’ve traveled in the Grand Canyon area, you may have run into the name still used for hotel and restaurant management.
This book is a richly detailed story about people set nearly today (in the 1980’s) and also a hundred years back, with windows through those characters another generation before and more. If you have read A. S. Byatt’s "Possession," this is constructed similarly, with letters and diary entries believably created to tell earlier stories, with ghostly scenes written by a narrative perspective quietly omniscient but selectively revealing.
Generally, I keep my book reviewing to stuff that’s out in paperback for ease of access, but with the immigration debate flaring around us, and our local libraries mostly carrying Crook’s newest book, this was a recommendation I didn’t want to delay in making. Find a copy however you wish, or remember it until the cheaper version comes out, but I can heartily endorse putting "The Night Journal" on the top of your reading pile.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about your immigrant ancestors through disciple@voyager.net.