A Pilgrimage to the Edges of World and Self
Note: Elaine and I returned a week ago from twelve days in the Azores Islands, a long-awaited journey to explore my roots. As we approach the All Saints Triduum, it is a good time to launch a series of reflections on this pilgrimage, which will run through this last quarter of the year (including as part of our annual Enews naming of beloveds who have passed). I hope you’ll take time to read these personal and political musings—inspired by our ongoing discipleship of decolonization work outlined in Healing Haunted Histories—and correlate them to your own ancestral stories.
Introduction: A Genealogy of Potsherds.
Since the start of my public ministry, I have prefaced every bio by identifying myself as a “fifth generation Californian.” This was drilled into me and my sibs by my dad because of pride in his heritage; for me it helps differentiate my social location from the historic and continuing stream of transient settlers who have so freely exploited our homeplace, then moved on.
Dad was proud that his great grandmother Ynez Euñez Nuñez was a Californio (Mexican inhabitant of Alta California), and I delight that her settlement here long predated U.S. conquest in 1848. Somehow, I think, my vocation as an anti-imperial activist draws unconsciously on this heritage. In fact, however, there are precious few strands left to me of this family thread: only a handful of stories, little material legacy, no detailed genealogy.
This came painfully home to me as I watched Elaine, during her research for what became our HHH project, exegete her family tree all the way back to the Radical Reformation in Europe. She could trace most dates, genealogies and narratives with relative ease, drawing on both Mennonite historiography and multiple family books. I am deeply respectful of how over five centuries the dissident Anabaptist movement doggedly preserved its own stories so as not to be erased by the Catholic and Protestant regimes trying to disappear them. Yet I honestly felt overwhelmed by the length and breadth of her people’s communal history, if also envious of it. Because as I’ve gone looking for details about my Latinx ancestry, all I find is potsherds.
It was not until my early 30s that I took real interest in dad’s efforts to reconstruct his lineage (right, my favorite picture of Eduard A. Myers, b. 1923), which were sporadic. He was, after all, a long-assimilated, busy executive. He was, after all, a long-assimilated, busy executive. Nevertheless, we made a few trips together to the Sonora, CA museum in the western foothills of the Sierras, where his great grandparents had settled, trying to exhume fragments of family history.
Yet it was (and still is) a highly forensic undertaking. The local St. Patrick’s Catholic church had burned twice since 1868, destroying baptismal records, and early state censuses were notoriously inconsistent and incomplete. And there were just a few surviving family pictures, no written chronicles (other than obits), oral traditions that are mostly lost, and only the thinnest cultural inheritance passed on.
Still, he’d managed to reconstruct his basic line. His mother Ynez Belle Guerena Myers (left), was born in Sonora in 1887, and married a tire salesman in 1915, son of a German immigrant railroad worker from Ohio. They resettled in San Francisco where dad, an only child, was born.
Her mother, Maria Rosario Mendosa (right), was born in 1863—the 4th of 5 children, like me!—to Ynez Nuñez and Francisco Jose Mendosa. In 1887, Maria married Mexican immigrant Louis Guerena; after he passed in 1919, Maria moved into her daughter and son-in-law’s small apartment in San Francisco. She shared a bedroom with my dad, with whom she spoke only Spanish, presumably in order to remind him of his roots.
Ynes and Francisco were married in 1858 (left, undated photo). Since dad passed, we siblings have managed (also sporadically!) to fill out the puzzle of the family tree that grew from them in California: Aranas, Laveagas, Supervilles, Arants, etc. However, dad knew almost nothing about the immigrant origins of his great grandparents. Only that Ynez Nuñez was born in Mexico City in 1829, and at some point came north to Sonora. And that Francisco Mendosa arrived in California in 1849 on a ship coming “around the horn,” having left a year earlier from the Azores Islands—wherever that was. No genealogical past or story of homeplaces. Not even potsherds…
January, 1991. It is the middle of the First Gulf War, and I’m planning to do a civil disobedience action in downtown Los Angeles with Catholic Worker friends. Anticipating some jail time, I drive the hour down to my parents’ home to “process” with them, particularly in light of some health concerns surrounding my dad. After dinner, he and I can feel the argument coming on, as we’ve clashed over every U.S. war since my brother was in Vietnam. Mercifully, he stands up and changes the subject. “I’ve got some things I want to show you,” he says walking to his office. He returns with a small wooden box of family memorabilia. As we pore over it, he speaks about Mendosa.
“Chas,” he says, using a term of endearment, “I think we have to make a trip to the Azores, and start the search all over again there. How about you and I plan on making that journey together soon.” I agree whole-heartedly. A week later, U.S. flyboys were on a “turkey shoot” in Iraq, and my dad was dead, victim of a botched angiogram.
It has taken me 35 years to fulfill that covenant, which has weighed heavily on my soul. We visited Flores, the westernmost island and home of Francisco’s people since the 15th century, and Sao Miguel, the administrative center of the archipelago.
Elaine was incredibly supportive of this pilgrimage, having discovered the importance of ancestral research in her own efforts to heal the personal and political haunted histories of empire we carry in our bones. Her bestie Cheryl and husband Carl from Winnipeg were great traveling companions, especially navigating the super steep and narrow island roads.
It was truly a revelatory journey, following the faintest of trails left by an illiterate peasant, and the clues that helped me discover branches of the deeper family tree that seeded my own being—and even a third cousin! More importantly, it allowed me to see and feel the remote village of Lajes from which Francisco was driven by poverty, feudal oppression and the travails of empire. I have begun to understand the saudade I have long carried.
Somewhere I have a photo of that generative moment in 1991 with my dad, which my mom thought to take. Frustratingly, I can’t find it to reproduce here (yet another forensic task…). But I hope this introduction establishes enough narrative context of setting, characters and plot for the series of reflections to follow in the coming weeks, about a place once known in Europe as “the end of the world,” and about my search for the edges of both genealogy and self.
New Resource: A month ago, I had a webinar conversation on Substack with Lisa Sharon Harper of “The Truth Is…” Lisa writes:
Ched shares his story and what led to his awakening in the midst of the Jesus Movement. Next we trace the origins of the sickness within the White church. How is Ched processing our current church-supported authoritarian situation? How do our conceptions of Jesus impact our public engagement? What is the core ailment of the church today and what does it need to be made well? Finally, Ched issues a clarion call for the church that made the hair raise on my arms. Literally. It was that thick with meaning, resonance, and clarity. Don’t miss this one! It’s one for the books!
The hour-long interview can be found here.
Blessings during this season of thinning veils. And please, go out and vote against the Trump regime in every possible way: with your feet, ballots, and financial support of the many groups struggling to save the remnants of democracy in the U.S. —Ched
