 This poem is called The Storykeeper, Instructions from a Historian. In the harros, she says, look in the harros, the ones forgotten, or shoved aside with a broken clay lip and color dulled by years of hard use and unmeditated abuse. Search between the foals of rags, the places no one else would look. Often they are there, hiding. Look in the garage, in the dark corners, sometimes they are undiscovered, silent in the tecorucho sheds, out back, or dumped in the alley, wiped away from our lives for the trash to take. Others, hoarded like treasures, the holder fears to reveal, wrapped in a homemade colcha, in a wooden box under the bed. In the viejitos' eyes, in the twilight of death, you read their secret. The eyes point you to the spot, stamp remember on the almost forgotten box and plead with you to be the keeper of the story. To open the box, unwrap the colcha carefully, save the scrawled story, protect it as best you can. Look in the places where ink does not show, in the breaking voice between the lines of a song. Our history is written in that song, written on the voice, sometimes written on the heart. Look at the hands, the way the woman crosses herself when she passes a certain feel. Everyone knows the story of what happened there, late that night, 90 years ago. Everyone knows, but it is not written. The paragraphs of dangling bodies were too long, too ugly to be written. The sentences like unfinished lives too short to make sense. The letters of the word spelled out distorted incomprehensible like mutilation of body parts that started out in beyesa and truth. Look at the way she holds the masa with both hands, protecting, feeling it's warmth, memorizing the moment for just a second before it's split apart into many tortillas, each to go their own way. Some consumed rapidly, some wasted, some disappeared, never to be seen again in her gestures, her hesitations, her sigh of mourning lie our history. Ask the whispers, she whispers, breathed out in unguarded moments when the soul is too tired to think the body too worn down to hurt more in the numbness of the night, when the father wrestles with the unwritten history, bleeding to save it, speak it, bury it, staring at the pluma across the room, avoiding the paper, singing the Indian chant of a story that he will not tell his children yet. They are too young, only 10 or 16 or 36. Wait, wait, he prays, I fear for them to know what those hate-filled others did to my grandfather. They are too young, perhaps I too, at only 60 and too young to know, too old to forget. Ask the whispers, she chants, learn the chant, sing it slow and privately like he, a sacred song to be sung at only sacred moments. Look in the footwells of our steps, the table corners rubbed smooth, the marks on the walls where we have lived the fine and tired stitches in the clothing sewed and mended, the careful fold of the shuck on the tamale, the thumbprint curves of crepe paper flowers trying to make canta out of llores. Learn to read the eyes, the hands, the spine. You must be like a detective or a spy, subtle, unnoticed, unrelenting, for they are out there our stories. To be read in the tracks of tears, now made into wrinkles on the face. In the scars we carry with pride, in the grocery list marked with crayon on a junk mail funeral home advertisement. In the Western Union telegrams of money sent home to Mexico. In the eviction notices sent people whose address has stayed the same for 150 years, you must be persistent, courageous, go quickly, urgently, go into the dark corners, unveil our treasures from the attic, go find it, hear it, touch it, write it down. This is how we keep our history. This is how we also keep our soul. For this poem, Antonia stand and be recognized. Please stand. One of our early historians, Antonia Castaneda, Dr. Antonia Castaneda, she's the inspiration for this poem. She's the historian who told me our story isn't in the history books, it's in the songs, it's in the people's faces, it's in their lives. Our story isn't in the history books, it's in the songs, it's in the people's faces, it's in their lives. My story isn't in the history books, it's in the songs, it's in the...