Allá En El Rancho Grande

by Rudolfo Carrillo

Told breathlessly by the folks who reach this destination through wires and star-crossed radio wave networks that I ought to write more about weird or off-key things I have seen or heard or felt while drifting through Nuevo Mexico, apparition-like but still bound to la tierra by enchiladas and old farm implements, I have revised this post to reflect the aforementioned outlandish directions observation sometimes takes in consideration of home.

Mostly, it is la gente que no viven aqui, or maybe them just arrived, who want to hear about an elaborately eccentric and baroque version of New Mexico, but I think that if you are from here or stay long enough, you will probably dream of the state's astral relations and configurations anyway, a situation which makes for infinite possibilities, considering the one million five hundred thousand or so souls traipsing or crawling or flying around the province at this very moment.

So, in a vision conjured during my mystical association with a relational database code-named la neta, este estado still practices a form of political feudalism while lavishly entertaining powerful wizards from abroad. Subsets of that version invariably include alien visitation and miraculous images on tortillas. All of this is okay with the citizens of the alternate universe because they are happily ensconced at home, decoding lottery tickets, cleaning weapons imbued with religious significance, and interminably replaying depictions of violence, fictive and otherwise, on a million view screens in a million homes.

Humans from as far away as Chicago, New Bedford, or somewhere in the frozen tundra and perpetual frontier twilight which I am told exists up north, display trance-like behavior and quirky, involuntary hand movements when, in the course of telecommunications made using mildly radioactive materials, they describe esta ubicación geofísica to the folks back home.

The story of this place sure ain't square and therefore invites random gesticulation.

Such representations are, more likely than not, the imaginings of dreamers and inward looking butterfly correspondents who came out here for the weather or else in search of the freedom found under every extant cactus needle, in the gut of a spider traversing the lonely desert, in the mud you mixed up with straw to make your walls.

Those seeking solace in the dry communion with myth, available here on most days, found such readily available on the poorly paved back roads, ruined mining towns, electrified quonset huts, and rattlesnake dens scattered blamelessly, perfectly, among the sage and pointy little rocks that fill up the empty spaces between towns.

They often accessed that particular form of structural magic in the murky hours before the sun rose in obliterating glory, baking every damn thing to a sunny, leathery representation of the thing itself. This process grows roots. Más tarde, los comienzos de hojas aparecen.

Consequently, y en defencia to the continued presentation and preservation of this imaginary state, texts generated by observers are often infused with the subtle tension, mystery, and allure that results from being produced in a location whose modern basis was mainly a response to the existential needs of the service workers, soldiers, and scientists that came out, built, and continue to utilize an atomic powered outpost here in the middle of  a desert that presents lightning bolts and scorpions when asked.