A Half-Panicked Epiphany

Stockpiling literature in case of a digital apocalypse.

I have two stories to tell you about one thing.

The first story is about something I read last week, about how it saw into and right through me.

The second story is about how the thing I read is an endangered species. One day, you might not be able to read it.

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1.

When we lived in Mexico, my wife went to a language school so one of us would have more than the smallest of phrasebook small-talk. At the school, when US students called themselves “American”, her Mexican teacher would insist, defiant and irritated, that he too was American. We wondered about this because, a few months earlier, a man had won the US presidency in spite of (or because of) talking about Mexicans like a drunk uncle.

Maybe this was an attempt to show that linguistic walls are as absurd as the actual wall Trump had recently proposed. Maybe it was meant to reveal the inherent subjectivity in constructs such as American and Mexican, or us and them. Maybe it was a rejection of yanking the term “American” from people who’d occupied the continent long before the United States was born.

I asked some friends in Guanajuato, and they said that’s how geography was taught in their schools: teachers described the Americas as “the Americas” without (as they do where I grew up) delineating between north and south. Sure, but their sharpness when they corrected you on it? That seemed like something deeper than cartography.

I thought about that again last week when I read “Back to Bachimba”, by Enrique Hank Lopez. The essay’s written with the clear vision of a sharpshooter, and it impressed me so much I kept thinking the word “bravura”, a word I’ve never used in real life so I had to double check its meaning — yes, this was indeed a piece of bravura writing.

Lopez writes about how being born in Mexico and raised in the US bifurcated his sense of self. To describe that duality, he borrows the term pocho. “A pocho,” he tells us, “is a Mexican slob who has pretensions of being a gringo sonofabitch.” However:

“To me that word has come to mean ‘uprooted Mexican’, and that’s what I have been all my life. Though my entire upbringing and education took place in the United States, I have never felt completely American; and when I am in Mexico, I sometimes feel like a displaced gringo with a curiously Mexican name...”

This spoke to something so deep and part of my everyday that I never thought to give it a word. A word like pocho, though, would be a nicely concise reply to the question I get all the time, because of my accent: Where are you from?

Sometimes I say I’m from Canada, but that makes me feel duplicitous. Being “from” someplace implies singularity, a checkbox on a form to specify one nationality or another, and that’s not me.

Sometimes I explain I was born in England, moved to Canada at three months old, set the concrete of my foundation there, then my family moved back across the ocean to England, just as I entered the manic episode of my pubescent years.

Sometimes they don’t ask where I’m from, they ask where my accent is from, like it’s a scarf wrapped around my neck, a trinket picked up from travels long ago.

Sometimes I call it a “bigener accent”. Bigener means a hybrid made from crossing two species of flower. Take some of the Canadian accent — the parts of its DNA that code for the rhotic “r” and the weird way “bag” rhymes with “egg” — and cross-pollinate it with the genetic information of a West Midlands English dialect, and you’ll get my accent, which in botanical terms is a weed. I’d pluck it out and plant something prettier if I could. Maybe I should do what Lopez did:

“I finally got rid of my accent by constantly reciting ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers’ with little round pebbles in my mouth.”

When your accent comes from a few places, it’s easy to feel like it’s from nowhere. I don’t sound English to the English, and I don’t sound Canadian to Canadians.

I met an older Canadian once who asked me and my wife where we were from. She said, “England,” and he nodded, eyes closed, fine with this answer. He looked at me, eyebrows raised, and I said, “Canada.” His eyebrows dropped, a frown, an accusation, and he said, “That’s not a Canadian accent.” I told him, well, I’m also from England, and he said I sound nothing like my English wife. I gave him an accentless shrug.

Sometimes, when US tourists heard our friends in Guanajuato call themselves “American”, the visitors made it clear that these Mexicans didn’t sound, or look, like their idea of an American. These tourists had let their idea become an ideal, and they couldn’t expand it to contain multitudes; they closed up tighter to avoid uncomfortable contradictions.

There’s a point in the essay where Lopez talks about his idea of Bachimba:

“Though I had been born there, I had always regarded ‘Bachimba’ as a fictitious, made-up, Lewis Carroll kind of word. So eight years ago, when I first returned to Mexico, I was literally stunned when I came to a crossroad south of Chihuahua and saw an old road marker: ‘Bachimba 18 km.’ Then it really exists — I shouted inwardly — Bachimba is a real town!”

Here, at last, he’d discover the reality of the Wonderland he’d imagined since his youth:

“It turned out to be a quiet, dusty village with a bleak worn-down plaza that was surrounded by nondescript buildings of uncertain vintage.”

The miracle of this essay, for me, was the collection of details about his own experience that Lopez strung together like decorative bunting, the whole as remarkable as each of its parts. Reading it, I noticed more of myself in this stranger, then I noticed how much I was a stranger to myself. There was stuff about me I hadn’t understood and stuff I didn’t even know I hadn’t understood. It took a “hyphenated American” to make it make sense.

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2.

All of this started with William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, in a chapter about memoir. Zinsser used an excerpt from the “Bachimba” essay that so floored me I became determined to read the whole thing. I didn’t realise how determined I’d have to be, but stubborn is my middle name. (It’s not, but if I decided to change my middle name to “Stubborn”, no bureaucratic migraine would stop me.)

I checked the index in the Zinsser book and got the title and publication date of the Lopez essay. These turned up nothing online except references to Zinsser’s book. Then I quoted a few sentences from “Back to Bachimba” into Google, which gave me a scattering of blogs where others had written about Lopez. From there, I learned which edition of which magazine had first published “Back to Bachimba”, and after missing my shot with that on various search engines, I remembered a site called Internet Archive. So I searched there for the magazine by date. I found it, but most of the scanned pages were available only if you had an account, so I made one, and there it was — the essay as originally printed in Horizon, Winter 1967. (You can find it here.)

I tell you all this only so you, hopefully, have the same half-panicked epiphany I did: that this unique piece of writing, so meaningful that it still mattered to a reader almost sixty years past print date, is on the precipice of eradication. If the Internet Archive goes down, the full essay is just...

gone.

So I highlighted the scanned magazine to copy-paste it into a Word document as an act of preservation. It wouldn’t copy, for some reason only the tech gods understand, so I took a screenshot of each page, highlighted the text from within those images, and pasted that into Word. That gave me a single five-page paragraph missing a bunch of sentences. The rest of my evening was spent manually fixing the formatting, typos, and missing lines. This document doesn’t help the wider world, but the Lopez essay is safe for this guy at least.

I don’t have a call-to-action, because I’m not sure what it would be, short of everyone becoming hoarders and filling our homes with filing cabinets stuffed with magazines, newspapers, and printouts as a grassroots stockpile of literature against a digital apocalypse.

The best I can do is to write about things as a way of pointing madly and shouting, Hey! This thing here! It’s really worth your time! Maybe that’s enough. Maybe it’s not about immortality. Maybe it’s just about making the most of these things while we have them.

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