Salt, Soil, and Story

  You may have noticed my posts have slowed.  This is intentional.  I am sitting with the state of our country right now, and while there are positive distractions all around us, plenty of beauty, plenty of light, for me it does not feel appropriate to post in a "business as usual" manner, as if nothing is happening.  I have been deeply affected by what is happening to immigrant communities in the United States and am cautiously watching how it unfolds here in the Rio Grande Valley. This place is not an abstraction. It is neighborhoods, schools, markets, churches, bus stops, border checkpoints, and kitchen tables where people are trying to decide what to do next. As a researcher, as a forever student of anthropology, and as a relatively new member of this region, I am in a liminal state. Not quite insider, not quite outsider. Watching history write itself in real time. Watching policy turn into lived experience. Watching rumor, fear, hope, and resistance move through...

You may be wondering why on earth I am doing field notes from the flea market. What does this have to do with storytelling and folklore in the RGV?  The answer is simple:  Everything. Folklore isn’t just bedtime stories. It isn’t just handmade pottery or dances in Market Square, although it is all those things, too. But folklore is also the way a place smells at 10 a.m. on a warm Saturday, the way a vendor arranges statues on a folding table, the way a stranger casually tells you why you should buy this bracelet for protection and not that one. As Sims and Stephens in Living Folklore: An Introduction to the Study of People and their Traditions  remind us,  “folklore is not just about time-honored traditions or quaint customs; it is a philosophical approach to understanding people and expressive culture” (xv). Folklore is the texture of daily life. It is how people knit meaning into ordinary gestures. It is what we do without thinking, what we pass down without cal...

Pictured with Enrique Palacios Alvarez, @entique_el_tlacuatl The Mitte Cultural District in Brownsville, TX on a First Friday smells like elote and asphalt cooling after rain. The kind of night where music leaks out of every alley, and even the stray dogs seem to walk to a rhythm. I came to see art and listen to music, nothing serious, just another night under the gilttering lights of Market Square.  La Lexxion took the stage and started mixing George Strait with cumbias. Country twang tangled with güiro and bass, and it worked brilliantly -  a mashup that felt like the border itself: stitched together, beautiful… and a little defiant . That’s when I met Enrique Palacios Alvarez ,  standing behind a small table of block prints that didn’t whisper buy me, they demanded listen. The crowd blurred. The smell of roasted corn and nacho cheese swirled through the air, laughter bounced off the brick walls, but I was locked in. Enrique spoke my love language: folklore.  ...

Dr. Cano shown displaying his Llorona dolls. Photo captured by Jose Guadalupe Rodriguez Jr.  Fieldwork often begins in books, but mine began with three dolls.  Under soft yellow lights at Buho , a local gem of a bookstore tucked into downtown Brownsville, the wailing woman spoke again. Through stitched cloth and glass, she became hunter, mother, and witness, reminding us that stories aren’t only written, they’re lived and mourned into being. A couple of weeks ago, if someone had asked what material culture I planned to engage with in my ethnographic project, I would’ve said books. Books felt like the right answer for a study that is, quite literally, about stories: bound, printed, archived. I imagined myself tucked between folklore collections from the borderlands and thumbing through anthologies of cautionary tales. But a small community event last week changed that, quietly, like a tiny draft of air.  I attended Exploring Borderlands Folklore: La Llorona , a lecture ...

Field Notes, as part of my ongoing research on folklore and storytelling across the South Texas Border.  I attended my first Día de los Muertos celebration, “Fiesta de Vida” this past weekend in Brownsville, Texas, and I am still haunted, in the most beautiful way possible. Hosted by the Mitte Cultural District and ROCA (Revival of Cultural Arts Brownsville), the event took place in the city’s old cemetery, where Brownsville’s founders and early families are buried beneath weather-tilted stones. The evening began with an opening ceremony and the lighting of copal, that resinous incense burned by Indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica to purify and call in spirits. The smoke curled upward, blue and sweet, carrying whispers of pre-Columbian memory. Smoke, Song, and the Shape of Memory As the copal thickened in the air, the first strains of La Llorona rose from the makeshift stage, a stone walkway in the center of the cemetery. Sung slow, it carried with it a weight that felt ancestral. ...