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Transcendental Train Yard

A Collaborative Suite of Serigraphs

Wings Press

    PRELUDE PRELUDIO

    Fiery gold crown sunset over Mexico
    death defies life.
    A packed train speeds by
    transports precious cargo
    arrives with the moonlight.

    El ocaso es corona de oro ardiente
    que cae sobre México.
    La muerte, un desafío a la vida.
    Retacado el tren pasa
    transporta carga preciosa
    llega con la luz de la luna.

    MOONLIGHT LUZ DE LA LUNA

    Moonlight Vigilant guardian,
    Luna guerrillera,
    we ask,
    we plead,
    soften the pain
    with your light,
    Coyolxauhqui help us
    remember our true selves
    ¡Gracias!

    Luz de luna, guardián vigilante,
    warrior Moon,
    te pedimos,
    te suplicamos,
    suaviza el dolor con tu luz,
    Coyolxauhqui ayúdanos
    a recordar nuestro verdadero yo
    ¡Gracias!


    MUJERES TRABAJANDO WOMEN'S WORK


    Women's Work is never done —
    at home in the fields, at the office.
    We are workers all.
    Doing work that matters.
    Protesting wars, writing poems,
    doing laundry, fighting injustice,
    breaking bread, living.
    Blanca Estela Sánchez, Emma Tenayuca,
    Manuela Solís, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,
    Dolores Huerta, Jovita Idar, Sara Estela Ramírez,
    Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, Rosa Parks,
    La Adelita, Rosario Ybarra, Virginia Cantú.

    El quehacer de la mujer nunca se acaba:
    en el hogar, en los campos, en la oficina.
    Somos obreras, todas. Elaborando tareas
    importantes.
    Protestando contra las guerras, escribiendo
    poemas,
    lavando la ropa, luchando contra la
    injusticia,
    horneando el pan, viviendo.
    Blanca Estela Sánchez, Emma Tenayuca.
    Manuela Solís.
    Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Dolores Huerta.
    Jovita Idar.
    Sara Estela Ramírez. Gloria Anzaldúa.
    Audre Lorde
    Rosa Parks. La Adelita. Rosario Ybarra.
    Virginia Cantú.

    LA CENA DINNER

    Alone with others a (wo)man forgets
    (s)he is not alone.
    Juntos. ¡El Pueblo Unido.
    Sí. No.
    Jamas sera vencido.
    Juntos
    we eat, meet, talk, sing.
    Somos nada.
    Somos todo.

    Sola/o y con otras la mujer/el hombre se
    olvida
    que no está sola/o.
    Together. The people United.
    Yes. No.
    Will never be defeated.
    Together
    comemos, nos reunimos, hablamos,     cantamos.
    We are nothing
    We are everything.


    WORKERS ON THE TRACK
    TRABAJADORES EN LA VÍA DEL TREN

    Workers son y serán,
    the salt of the earth.
    Trabajan, se ganan
    el pan de cada día,
    se ganan el cielo.
    Se ganan, se pierden,
    se buscan, se encuentran.
    Son y serán.

    Workers are and will be,
    the salt of the Earth.
    They work, they earn
    their daily bread,
    they earn heaven,
    they earn, they lose.
    They search, they find themselves.
    They are and will be.


    TRAPEZE TRAPECIO

    Caminos y mas caminos,
    unos van otros vienen,
    pero todos llegan a su destino
    Desencuentros del corazón,
    meandering pathways,
    veredas only traveled alone.
    Sola.

    Paths and more paths,
    some go, others come,
    but all reach their destination.
    The heart's intricate paths,
    veredas serpenteantes,
    caminante solitaria.
    Alone.


    ANGELS OF STEEL LOS ANGELES DE
    ACERO


    Pechera, cachucha,
    botas-steel tipped worn with pride.
    Angels of steel whisper
    amid the silent noises of the yard.

    Overalls, cap,
    lleva con orgullo sus boots con punta de     acero,
    Ángeles de acero susurran
    entre el ruido silencioso de las vías del tren.


    SOLEDAD LONELINESS

    La Soledad nace del Corazón
    Se anida en las células de mi ser
    Como el pesar de cada día sin ti.

    Loneliness is born in the heart
    Nestles in the cells of my being
    Like the weight of each day without you.

    HORIZON HORIZONTE

    R con R cigarro, R con R barril
    que recio corren los carros, los carros del ferrocarril
    waiting for trains, lives come to lives; trains follow
    tracks
    leading to ends and beginnings
    R con R cigarro R con R barril
    que recio corren los carros, los carros del ferrocarril
    Coming and going -La vida es un tren y los pasajeros
    viajan siguiendo
    su destino
    Camarón que se duerme se lo lleva la corriente.
    The engine hums a lullaby, reassuring whistle in the
    night,
    R con R cigarro R con R barril
    que recio corren los carros, los carros del ferrocarril.

    R and R, cigarette, R and R, barrel
    How fast those train cars run, the railroad
    cars!
    En espera de los trenes las vidas llegan a otras     vidas;
    el tren sigue las vías que llegan al fin o al     principio
    R and R, cigarette, R and R, barrel
    How fast those train cars run, the railroad
    cars!
    Vienen y van –life is a train and passengers
    follow their destiny
    The current takes the sleeping shrimp!
    La máquina tararea una canción de cuna,
    silbido en la noche
    R and R, cigarette, R and R, barrel
    How fast those train cars run, the railroad
    cars!


    LAS CARPAS TENT THEATERS

    Dancers, musicians, standup comics, actors
    Llegan con la primavera —
    tambourines and drum rolls.
    La Chata en el ferrocarril
    Rielera de siempre.
    Sueños y lágrimas. Life.

    Bailarines, músicos, cómicos, actores.
    They arrive with the spring time —
    tamborines y tamborazos
    La Chata by railroad,
    Eternal train traveler.
    Dreams and tears. Vida.

A Contained Landscape, An Ambivalent Relationship: The Railroad and San Antonio's Mexican Colony

Landscape artists in the United States have tended to render the railroad in dramatic, panoramic perspective. In the most typical images, the tracks' sweeping straight lines dominate its surroundings, surpassing such natural wonders as mountains, canyons, and rivers. Outstripped by the mechanical marvel, the landscape appears otherwise untouched in these images, and though the line dividing the artificial from the natural remains stark, nature seems free and unbounded. In artist Marta Sánchez's images of her native San Antonio's rail yards, however, we see landscapes through gaps in chain-link fences, windows, and a screen door grille. Many of the views here are from inside a house or outside a fence, and the trains themselves, lined up on parallel tracks, form an impenetrable wall. In some images, the human body and landscape merge, both scarred by the passing of the rails. In the midst of it all, an acrobat arches her back in a handstand over the ghostly trace of window bars, her graceful legs crossed by telephone wires.

Drawing on memories of growing up near a rail yard and a family history of connection to the world of carpas, traveling tent shows that sometimes toured on the rails, Sánchez offers viewers an intimate portrait of a home landscape profoundly shaped by its conversion into someone else's destination or way station. It is hard to speak of the railroad without referring to its capacity to overcome geographical limitations, but Sánchez's images invite us to see how the train could raise barriers between neighbors even as it made San Antonio a neighbor to the ocean.

Perhaps we needed an artist from the so-called Alamo City to remind us that people already lived in the Western territories that railroad companies, helped by federal subsidies and military force, opened up for development after the Civil War. When workers finished the first rail line from the port of Galveston to San Antonio in February of 1877, they brought new life to a community already shaped by a transcontinental trade system that predated annexation to the United States. Many of the ethnic Mexican mule drivers who had dominated the city's once-thriving cart industry still lived there as laborers years after their violent dislocation from the trade at Anglo hands. Recently, however, economic growth had been slow, and without this vital new link to the coast, San Antonio would never have "boomed" the way it did in the late nineteenth century. As connections to points North and West multiplied, the city became an attractive target for investors and new settlers from Europe and the Eastern Seaboard. English-language journalism of the time betrays the shock many newcomers apparently felt as they stepped off the train in San Antonio. The writer who asked, "This is the United States?" at the sight of a crowd of ethnic Mexican vendors outside the station is typical. As new arrivals came to outnumber the city's Mexican community, they came to see that community as a fading remnant of a bygone age. The depots, whose style recalled the old Spanish missions, helped make that age into a romantic myth. Decades before the Riverwalk, the railroad companies were already starting to remake San Antonio as a touristic mockup of the Spanish/Mexican agrarian society they had done so much to overwhelm.

But if the railroad depots memorialized an imagined Spanish colonial past, the rail lines themselves would increasingly become monuments to Mexican labor in the present. After the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Acts of 1882 and 1884, railroad companies turned to other ethnic groups to meet their labor needs. As the tracks expanded through the border region, ethnic Mexican workers from the country's central plateau moved north to join displaced local vaqueros on the section crews. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, railroads began recruiting Mexican laborers in the El Paso/Juárez area and sending them to construction and maintenance jobs all over the United States. In doing so, they started a pattern that agricultural companies all along the border would emulate in the early twentieth century as commercial farming boomed, aided by modern transportation. Both railroad and agricultural labor were strenuous and dangerous, and the itinerant workers faced a social stigma in the communities they passed through and segregation on the trains themselves.

Though they were barred from membership in most railroad unions, Mexicana/o laborers organized spontaneously throughout the Southwest to obtain better wages and working conditions. Those who settled in Southwestern and Midwestern towns were often forced to live in separate enclaves "across the tracks" from their Anglo neighbors. Although San Antonio's dividing line was San Pedro Creek, rather than the railroad tracks, the rail yards and the main station left a mark on what became the city's West Side. There, the small wooden frame houses that were built around the railroad corridor all over the U.S. Southwest in the 1920s and 1930s are still in evidence today. If the introduction of the railroad had displaced the ethnic Mexican community in San Antonio in the nineteenth century, the city's reorganization around rail-centered commerce eventually led to that community's rebirth in the twentieth. With this rebirth came the florescence of Spanish-language entertainment, as carpas, circuses, dramatic companies, and other performing arts groups used the railroads to travel from town to town.

Although most students of railroad history pinpoint the beginning of the industry's decline around 1920, with the advent of commercial trucking, the drive to recruit Mexican nationals for railroad labor continued through World War II and even after. During the war, the Federal government got into the act, negotiating a railroad bracero agreement with Mexico whose success in the eyes of its framers contrasts with the "failures" of its agricultural counterpart. Although it is not today the center for recruitment of agricultural labor that it was in the early twentieth century, San Antonio remains the tourist town that the railroads helped fashion.

Military bases and military support industries in the city have provided many of the early Mexicana/o rail and agricultural employees' descendants with a measure of social mobility. Today, a solid Mexican American middle class lives alongside a working class that is more likely to be found in a hotel or a restaurant than on a section crew. The railroad still hauls goods to and from the city, and the trains still weave their rhythm into the lives of those who live near the rail yards. But the city's historic passenger rail stations, along with most of the theaters built for Spanish-language entertainment in the early twentieth century, have been bulldozed or converted into museums. Today, IH-35 blocks the view of the old central station from Milam Park, once the site of a thriving market fed by the railroad. The rise of the automobile industry and its collusion with various levels of government have reshaped the urban landscape of San Antonio and most other Western cities to support the sham individualism of personal cars on publicly funded roads.

Now the railroad, once lionized by boosters as the symbol of Progress, once reviled by populists as an iron octopus strangling the nation, stands as an object of nostalgia. The Spanish-language commercial theater industry represented by the carpas, which succumbed to competition from films after weathering war-era shortages and losing some of its brightest stars on the battlefields, also inspires nostalgia. In Marta Sánchez's art and Norma E. Cantú's poetry, both the carpa and the rail yard emerge as reoccurring dream images in which personal pleasures and collective traumas repeat themselves to the tune of the old tongue-twister, "erre con erre cigarro, erre con erre barril. Qué recio corren los carros, los carros del ferrocaril."

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Excerpted from Transcendental Train Yard by Norma E. Cantu. Copyright © 2015 Norma E. Cantu. Excerpted by permission of Wings Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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