 I grew up with these two blankets in my house. My mom used to say that I grew up crawling on them. I don't know, maybe these things have meaning, and I absorbed the power of these blankets. But I also listened to the stories, which is what led me to want to pull back the layers of telling the story of slavery in this region. Those two blankets, according to the family tradition, were made by Manuelita Cisneros. She was a matriarch of my branch of the Rael family that lived in Abacue. She was taken when she was about five years old, and she learned to weave in the master's tradition, as many individuals did. They learned the trades in the master's house. She was baptized as Cisneros, that wasn't her name. We will never know her name, and that's part of the story of slavery anywhere, and certainly true here, that we lose their origins, we lose their name, we lose the story. She was captured, brought into Abacue, enslaved with a Cisneros family, and she eventually married another mestizo, someone who himself was mixed, Antonio José Rael, whose grandfather is listed as a mestizo, and whose grandmother was listed as a coyota, and so she marries him, and that family moves from Abacue into the village where I was raised in Cuesta. And so for me, that was my great, great, great grandmother. And so as I learned the story of these blankets, I just wanted to recover more and more of those individual stories. For many years hung above my desk when I was a state historian. Now it hangs above my dining room table, and it reminds me, every time I break bread, of the create, it reminds me, that blanket reminds me of the genetic weave that I come from. In this case, it's a literal weave that she made with her hands, but it's also, I'm the result of a genetic weave that she was part of. So that's the story of those two blankets that I have.