The Medicine of Memory: A Mexica Clan in California

by Alejandro Murguía

"People who live in California deny the past," asserts Alejandro Murguía. In a state where "what matters is keeping up with the current trends, fads, or latest computer gizmo," no one has "the time, energy, or desire to reflect on what happened last week, much less what happened ten years ago, or a hundred." From this oblivion of memory, he continues, comes a false sense of history, a deluded belief that the way things are now is the way they have always been. In this work of creative nonfiction, Murguía draws on memories—his own and his family's reaching back to the eighteenth century—to (re)construct the forgotten Chicano-indigenous history of California. He tells the story through significant moments in California history, including the birth of the mestizo in Mexico, destruction of Indian lifeways under the mission system, violence toward Mexicanos during the Gold Rush, Chicano farm life in the early twentieth century, the Chicano Movement of the 1960s, Chicano-Latino activism in San Francisco in the 1970s, and the current rebirth of Chicano-Indio culture. Rejecting the notion that history is always written by the victors, and refusing to be one of the vanquished, he declares, "This is my California history, my memories, richly subjective and atavistic."

Genres: Historical, Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2002

About the author

Alejandro Murguía was born in California, but raised in Mexico City. His experiences as an international volunteer in the Nicaraguan Insurrection of 1979 are recounted in his second collection of short stories Southern Front (American Book Award, 1991). He lives in San Francisco, where he teaches Latin American literature at San Francisco State University.

Reviews

[Scott Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Murguía was a San Francisco poet laureate and I love his work, especially his poem “16th and Valencia” on the hotel where Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo was written. The Medicine of Memory exhibits the importance of Chicano memory, our history, and family stories, which often don’t get told. Murguía, Californio, Chicano, and Indio, works through the contradictions of the Californio and Indigenous inheritance, an important issue particularly now with many statues of colonizers coming down. (Check out the chapter “The “Good Old” Mission Days Never existed”). Murguía, travels, unravels, and dissects these inherited histories, including those he lived. He offers a memoir of growing up near the ruins of missions and research about his family history and the horrors of mission life there. He confronts other contradictions, such as between the Chicano experience and Mexican and promotes decolonial Indigenous outlooks. The chapters mix about high school, the Chicano Movement, and tracking down Josefa, the first Mexican American recorded as lynched by Americans in Gold Country. He even tracks down the oldest continually inhabited area in North America.

There is research, imagined times, and none of this nods: there are fights, FBI interviews, proving he is a poet to cops and he didn’t steal his own books, you name it. For me, Murguía does the work to offer us history, our connections and conflicts via his own family stories and memories, a missing component of education. This is an elder filling us in on ourselves and our history and inheritance which I as a Chicano, Indio, and Californio appreciate.

[Michele · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this book. It covers so much of the history of California from a variety of different view points. Mexican-Cornish miners, archaeology of Southern California, zootsuits, Los Angeles, San Francisco...

[meli · Rating 5 out of 5]

i loved this book. california, tijuana, mexico city, san francisco. the first time i have felt rooted/related to a book. learned a few things and planted the seed to learn more and more about los angeles. a must read for us native californians, and transplants alike.