I let fifteen years lapse before returning to Michoacán, my ancestral homeland. The last time I had seen my mother’s parents, I was thirty, my father was still alive and still asking me for money. I was still saying no. The rumors about kidnappings in Mexico by inept thugs were rampant. Anyone known to have relatives living in the US became vulnerable.
“They’ll kidnap your grandma for thirty dollars,” people said. “They’ll return her without her thumbs, if they return her at all.”
I didn’t want to endanger Abuela Herminia’s thumbs or any other part of her. But the detail of the torture got to me. Abuela was a master knitter, and she’d sit in front of the house all afternoon with the needles in her hands making doilies and table runners. To take that from her was a crueler fate than even the kidnappers imagined. So I stayed away, believing that by doing so I was keeping her safe.
As time passed, it became easier to choose other destinations for my summer travels. I flew to different states in Mexico, like Oaxaca and Cuernavaca. I flew to Europe, to South America, and countless times I walked the historic streets of Old San Juan, where I became such a seasonal presence that the islanders thought I surely had relatives in the area.
The stories of the crimes committed in the small towns of Michoacán have not subsided, as the drug cartels compete for control of land and resources. Decades ago, my family lost access to their cornfield up in the mountains. The corn industry was failing because it was cheaper for Mexico to buy the crop from Iowa, so enterprising criminals began to cultivate marijuana instead. They needed everyone’s fertile soil. And they took it.
What finally made me transcend this fear of going home were the devastating news articles about the monarch butterfly. A deadly combination of climate change and illegal logging was decreasing their numbers exponentially. What was once a spectacular sight to behold, as the monarchs descended into the forests of their ancestors, was now a natural phenomenon whose days were numbered. Or so the headlines foretold.
The monarch is the perfect metaphor for my family’s migration from Mexico to the US and then back again. We relocated from one country to the next, every other generation. My great-grandfather and father were Mexican citizens. My grandfather and I were US-born. I had adopted the monarch as a symbol of my sexuality as well, since mariposa, the Spanish word for butterfly, was slang for homosexual. Its demise forecasted, I knew I had to see the migration once again before it was too late.
•
I had experienced it only once before, when I was child growing up in Michoacán. Since my family were people of the mountain, scaling up on the weekends to check up on the cornfield, to hunt, dig for medicinal roots, and socialize with other families, we were not afraid of the arduous trek up to Angangueo, where the monarch butterfly biosphere is located, just a three-hour drive east of our town of Zacapu.
As a mischievous child, I learned the hard way about respect for nature. After one such family trek, when we finally reached the site, the butterflies were fluttering all around us, and it seemed like such an easy thing to pick up a branch and start swatting. I set into the insects with naïve glee, until Abuelo Melecio took the switch from my hand and let me have it. The only time he ever punished me. I was more stunned by the fact that it had been him and not Abuela, who was usually the short-tempered one. I knew then I had committed some grave infraction and I knew never to do it again. Not because I would meet the same fate, but because I had offended Abuelo. Abuelo was a good man. Even as a child I recognized this. He was a good man who liked good things, like horses, firewood, prayer, and butterflies.
•
Fifteen years after my last visit, I was now a middle-aged man, in recovery after an extended illness that kept me walking with a cane for seven years. I no longer used the cane, but physical exercise was still a chore. None of this mattered. My mind was made up. I was going down to Michoacán to greet the monarchs.
November was the most important month. The monarchs always arrived during the Days of the Dead, which only underscored the myth that these were the souls of our departed returning home. I had lost my father by then, and his parents, and a few cousins. Would they be among the kaleidoscope? It was already one week past the festivities, but the cemeteries were still ablaze with dry marigolds, including the one in Zacapu, where my mother was buried. In my family, it is tradition to pay our respects to the dead first. The taxi dropped me off in front of the entrance, and I zigzagged my way through the graves to place my hand on the blue tile of my mother’s tomb. I uttered the words, “I’m here.”
After a quick visit, I walked up the road to my grandparents’ house, and was pleasantly surprised to find them sitting outside. Abuela fidgeted with her rebozo. No knitting needles.
“Good afternoon,” I called out.
“Good afternoon,” they answered. And I realized then that they didn’t recognize me. It had been fifteen years since my last visit, but I hadn’t changed dramatically. I was older, a little heavier, but I was still me, their first grandson.
“Do you know who I am?” I asked.
My grandmother narrowed her eyes. “No, I don’t. Who are you?”
“I’m your grandson,” I said. “I’m Avelina’s son.”
“And who is she?” Abuela said.
My heart sank. If I was fifteen years older, so were they. But that meant Abuela was now in her eighties, and Abuelo in his nineties, the stage of life when memory fades. Their hair was completely white, and their faces had softened. Abuelo used crutches to move about. My mother’s youngest brother, Tío Chuy, and his wife had become their caretakers. They welcomed me and explained the hard truth: both my grandparents suffered from dementia.
When they asked me why I had not come any sooner, I confessed to them that I was afraid of one of my loved ones getting kidnapped. “Oh that doesn’t happen very often,” Tío Chuy reassured me. “And the bodies they find around here, they are not anyone we know. They are people dumped here from somewhere else.”
At lunch, Abuelo started telling me about the time he fell off his horse. It was a story he would repeat two more times before I said goodbye again. Abuela would suddenly remember me, but minutes later she would forget. The sad cycle of light and dark was too much for me to bear, so I kept my visit brief, promising to return soon. As I walked away I heard Abuela ask Abuelo, “Who was that?” and Abuelo answer, “I’m not sure.”
I took photographs and video footage of them speaking now that I had a phone with such capabilities. Fifteen years ago this was unthinkable. But the technology had come too late, or rather, I had returned too late with the technology. What was I taking back with me but images that captured a fraction of their long and beautiful lives?
I left Zacapu, which had not grown much over the years, and checked into a hotel in Morelia, the state capital. The city was more my pace, with its crowded streets and tourist traps. In my youth, my family refused to come to Morelia, except for special occasions like weddings, funerals, and graduations. They said the city was full of dangers and sin. The city was also full of people who, like my father, were descendants of the Purépecha. I kept being startled each time I bumped into a man who shared my father’s Indigenous features.
My clothing singled me out as a tourist, which made me resentful because I had roots so deep in the city’s history. In nearby San Agustín, a former convent which was once a commercial center, my family kept a food stand for generations, selling corundas, a regional specialty, since the end of the Mexican Revolution one century ago.
But I was determined not to be distracted. I went up to a kiosk next to the cathedral, where tours to the Rosario butterfly sanctuary were booked. And I was met with another devastating blow: the butterflies had not arrived.
“Not arrived?” I exclaimed. “How can that be? It’s the middle of the month!”
The young woman shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know what else to tell you, mister. We’re as shocked as anybody. But we hope that any day now, they will surprise us.”
I spent the next few days beating myself up over my own late arrival. I had come too late to find my grandparents still lucid and I had come too late to find the butterfly migration still vibrant and healthy. Despite all this, I made the best of my visit, traveling to nearby towns I had not seen since my childhood. In Quiroga I ate all my favorites like carnitas and atole de grano. In Tzintzuntzan I visited the cemetery because I had relatives there, though I didn’t know how to locate their graves. I also traveled to Pátzcuaro, to find that special needlework it was famous for, the kind Abuela Herminia also knew but rarely practiced because of her failing eyesight. She preferred to knit, not stitch.
The day before I was set to depart Michoacán, I had all but given up on the prospect of visiting the sanctuary. I decided to take advantage of the warmth and go out for an early morning stroll. The cathedral, which was built with a pinkish stone, would look dazzling beneath the morning light. But just as I passed the kiosk, the same young lady who had delivered the bad news a few days earlier called out: “The butterflies have arrived! The butterflies have arrived!”
I couldn’t even speak but she knew what my intentions were when I pulled out my wallet. I was lucky enough to get the last seat on the tour bus, which was departing in minutes.
The drive to Angangueo was approximately five hours in that slow vehicle. But the views of the countryside were glorious. These were the farmlands that were too exposed to be used for covert marijuana plantations. Here, the lands were for the livestock to graze, and every herd of cattle, goats, and sheep reminded me of a Michoacán that existed before the drug cartels invaded.
Once we reached the foot of the canyon, the guide informed us that we would have to climb part of the way by horse because the heavy rains had made the paths too slippery, and then the rest of the way — another hour’s climb — on foot. Since the oyamel trees on this part of the mountain were hard for humans to reach, they were also less likely to be destroyed or damaged. After some initial grumbling by the other tourists, we forged ahead. The butterflies fluttering above us helped motivate our hike.
When I approached the horse, I was startled by its size. Suddenly the story Abuelo had told about falling off one of these animals became much more impressive. I grabbed the horn of the saddle with one hand, the grip of the cantle with the other, and with my feet badly adjusted to the stirrups, I started the steep climb. The horse trotted dangerously close to the edge of the trail, and I held my breath. The last thing I wanted was to go hurtling down the side of the mountain. But I made it to solid ground, which was lush green and blossoming with monarchs. It was Edenic.
Now came the more physically demanding part of the journey. I took heart when I saw a few older ladies walking ahead of me, but eventually they collapsed from exhaustion and had to be taken down on a stretcher, their purses dangling beneath them like extracted body organs. I then noticed many young men on the sides of the trail, waiting with stretchers beside them, and realized the climb was expected to defeat visitors like myself. I resolved not to be one of them, but already I could feel the effects of the altitude. If I made it to the top, my stay would be cut short by the need to come down as quickly as possible. I had suffered from altitude sickness once before, while hiking the Sierra Nevadas in California. The chill and dehydration felt familiar.
Somehow I made it, with dozens of others, and now we were clustered together on a narrow part of the path. A rope prohibited people from going farther into the forest. The sky was overcast for the moment, which meant the butterflies would remain pressed to the trees for warmth. A guide told us that as soon as the sky cleared, the butterflies would cascade into the open. But we had to be very quiet. They were sensitive to noise.
More people arrived, and word was passed down for silence. We became a community of quiet, like a congregation in a church during prayer. The clouds began to disperse. Everyone kept still, even the children who had become impatient waiting for something to happen.
And then suddenly, something did happen. A waterfall of butterflies rained down from the tops of the trees, dispersing into the skies before they struck the ground. I couldn’t help myself and I joined the communal gasp. That moment was the perfect blessing for a man like me who, like the butterflies, had also stayed away for far too long. But we finally made it. We had returned to find Michoacán changed, more hostile and melancholy than we had left it, but still home for me and the monarchs.
•••
Rigoberto González is the author of seventeen books of poetry and prose, including the memoir What Drowns the Flowers in Your Mouth, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle. He is a columnist for NBC Latino and critic at large at the Los Angeles Times. Recipient of Guggenheim, NEA, NYFA, and USA Rolón fellowships, he is director of the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark.