The other day, Manuel Huamán, lying there quiet in the dark of his grave, saw brown little children dancing, moviéndose bonito, and a scruffy yellow dog running around trying to bite at the girls’ skirts. Looked like they were from his pueblo… or maybe from up in those Peruvian or Bolivian mountains, could be Mexico too, somewhere por los Andes, pues.
He could see the red tierra, see their faces catching the sun and then the sombra under a small tin-roof shed. He could almost feel that air — thick, heavy, like when the clouds stay low on the ridges and the heat pushes down on one’s lungs. But the heat was nothing to them, no. They were laughing, moving, having their fun como si nada.
And the music, ay hermano… That little tune, it had a real heartbeat in it — not like the stiff things the white folks like to call music. This one makes him want to jump in, bailar with them, let his own bones remember they were once alive.
But what stayed with him most was what he heard them singing. It said something like:
Y si un día vuelvo nacer,
pediría nacer en el mismo lugar
que me vio ser feliz si tener nada.
Mi pueblo mis raíces indigena
He, Manuel Huamán, didn’t know where the song came from, de veras que no, but he knew enough about Ricardo Ríos to recognize the echo — that musician from Atlixco, Puebla, the one they call a migrante visionario working allá in New York, an impulsor de la música mexicana en Nueva York.
Saying that doesn’t mean this song only copied him. No, hermano. What he heard… it goes deeper, más hondo. More feeling, more pensamiento, más corazón, than anything that musician from Puebla ever put down.
What did he, a man already muerto, mean by that? Bueno — figure it out yourself, querido lector. Even from down there, he wasn’t explaining everything.
So here, mira — a line-by-line rendering of that little song that once broke his heart, and maybe, if you got corazón left, it breaks yours too👻👻
Y si un día vuelvo nacer,
And if one day I were to be born again,
要是有一天，我转世人间，
pediría nacer en el mismo lugar
I would ask to be born in the same place
只求在这同一个地方降生。
que me vio ser feliz si tener nada.
that saw me be happy while having nothing.
你前世目睹过一无所有幸福的我，
Mi pueblo mis raíces indigena
My town, my Indigenous roots
我的小镇，我的原住民根。
There is no English word for pueblo. The closest maybe is home like in “Country Roads, Take Me Home,” but even that… no llega. When an invader destroyed un pueblo, he didn’t just burn a house — he killed the hearth, the sacred center, he broke the way a people lived and remembered themselves.
The European Wittgenstein once said, “You can’t shit higher than your ass.” But most bipeds are nobodies so full of shit they think they actually can —and who can blame ’em, since some of ’em ain’t flyin’ cargo but first class, and the rest just dreamin’ of not ridin’ cargo but ridin’ first class. But when the plane goes down, all you see is still just shit.
Bueno. No more to say.
Now, before he forgets — and before the day breaks over the mountains — here is the dance that started all this:
Yego’s Chronicles 