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On Roots and Research
Accessing who you are and where you come from
“What are you?” ’is a question I’ve been asked by strangers since I was a child. As a little girl, I didn’t know how to answer this question with a simple one-word, one-identity response. And I still don’t. I knew then just as I know now that we were many things. We were American, we were Mexican, we were Filipino and Spanish and Jewish. And on my maternal line, here in Denver I am only a few hundred miles north from where my Picuris Pueblo ancestors lived since the beginning of time. I grew up one of seven children in both the suburbs and an older section of Denver called the Northside, an area that developers renamed to Highlands, a term used by those who flocked to the city during the waves of gentrification starting in the 1990s and charging through today. As a child, I traveled throughout the city with my parents, visiting an auntie on the West Side, a grandmother in Five Points, and another on the East Side. These places were associated with the people who lived there — Brown, Black, and Jewish sections, the unofficial segregation of Denver.
I was in a cemetery when I first realized that my people were seemingly placed in designated areas. It came to me in my early teens, one Memorial Day, a time when my family visits our graves, cleans the stones, and plants new flowers. We circle our dead, burn copal and sage, place small rocks over headstones and send prayers for our ancestors into the sky with smoke. I remember noticing no Anglo names buried in the section along the train tracks near my Uncle Jaimie Fajardo, an immigrant from the Philippines who died of tuberculous while attending law school and working as a chauffeur for a wealthy Denver family in the 1940s. I noticed this at each grave that day, at the flat headstone of my cousin Napoleon Lucero who had died of AIDs in the late 1980s, his little brother Michael who had been killed as a child by drag racers, and on and on. And later, visiting other cemeteries across Denver, I felt envious of the marble mausoleums where wealthy Anglo families buried their dead — Evans, Byers, Chivington, the latter who ordered the horrific Sand Creek Massacre of the Cheyenne and Arapahoe people in 1864. At our headstones, one had to bend over and squint to see our names while at these looming tombs, lineage was displayed as if inside lay the…
