Gen. Lucio Blanco is my father's uncle, brother to my dad's mother, and a Mexican Revolutionary. In fact, he was the first to begin distributing land to the peasants, a feat that got him assassinated in Matamoros. Now he's the stuff of PhD dissertations. And he's found a new home in the Library of Congress.
Beyond that, I know nothing. No letters, no pictures, no kind of material goods that link Blanco directly to my father, to me, other than the last name and family stories. I've seen the pictures and letters, though, but they don't belong to our side of the Blanco-Cerdas. They belong to my father's sister, a woman with whom I'm not close. I don't even know if she's still living to tell the truth.
Why do I find myself needing to learn more about my family? I've got family stories, stories told to me by both my parents, but as to hard facts, that's something else. Now I need to search more into my family's narrative... I think it's because I grew up with narrative and myth and because I was generally reared by a man who flew by the seat of his pants, choosing to live in the now, that we didn't have those tangible connections of letters, diaries, pictures, or old pieces of clothing in our family's hold. I think it's because my father always emphasized the now and my mother, well, I don't know much about her relationship to her past. It's as if the past was full of secrets, not necessarily painful secrets, just irrelevant secrets that could possibly get in the way of the children's assimilation and movement up the American hierarchy. I don't know. But I now find myself wanting to learn more about these facts that have created my now.
I find myself wanting to get more engrossed in personal history. So much so that I'm planning to join the Association of Personal Historians. I find myself needing to surround myself with history, narrative, and people's stories.
I find myself turning to dusty books, lost within libraries and meaningful to those who seek the larger truths in story.
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