When I wrote The Flower in the Skull, I was afraid it would be more of a memorial to my ancestors than the revealing / revelation of a living people. I grew up knowing we were part Indian on my mother's side, but nothing more. "Well," I thought as I concluded work on the book, "at least I tried to document who we are, why the history of a people can be so wonderful and terrible at the same time." Then I moved on to my next book.
The internet was rapidly evolving at this time, and Qui Qui Felix, a woman who maintained a Geocities website devoted to the Ópata, contacted me. I was thrilled! With just a few resources at her disposal, she had painstakingly accumulated images, photos, videos, and art spanning hundreds of years about the Ópata on this free website that was popular in the 90s. She arranged to visit me so that she could read and scan the small library I had put together over the years.
Then Ricardo Tánori, a retired psychologist living in Baja, California, wrote to say that he hosted a Yahoo!MX chat group dedicated to the Ópata, and invited me to join. There were not too many people in the Spanish language group at first, maybe twenty-five or so posting sporadically. But still, it felt like a miracle, people who knew the old stories, and even some of the old languages.
The Flower in the Skull is a work of historical fiction based on the life of my great-grandmother, Pastora Curiel. The second volume in a trilogy, it dovetails with the other two novels to present her story from a point of view the characters in Spirits of the Ordinary and Treasures in Heaven would struggle to understand. Pieced together over many years, tracing the names that were not named, the paternity never discussed, The Flower in the Skull traces my lines of descent back to the village where my great-grandmother was born, and from which she traveled a long, long way.
Today, there are over 300 people who identify as Ópata and participate in online discussions. There is a smaller group working on legal recognition from both the United States and Mexico, and, of course, many more who live and work on both sides of the border. You are welcome to look at our website at https://opatanation.org.
In 2022 I visited the Rio Sonora valley and the Banámichi River of northeastern Mexico, where villages located along the river valleys continue to tell and retell stories that illuminate the past. I also met up with Cristina Murrieta, who traveled from the next valley over where she is the official story keeper for the town of Nácori Chico. Like me an Ópata descendant, she is working hard to document the past, preserving it through accounts of song, dance, weaving, pottery, and food. She has published at least two books of myths and stories from the area. Soldiers have been replaced by drug dealers, and ranchers by distillers of mescal, but the beauty of our desert culture continues to shine through our people.
This book is a simple recreation of one of those journeys. If you read this and see reflections of your own family, then this book has served its purpose.
-Kathleen Alcalá
Bainbridge Island, Washington
October 13, 2022
