My sister and I went to see the movie Bless Me, Ultima on Saturday night. I did not think I was going to get to see it because it was supposed to be a special, limited engagement that ended before the weekend, but I guess it got extended.
It was truly lovely. It was hard for me to imagine how such a literary book would be as a movie, but it was wonderful.
Even though it is about the New Mexico borderlands, it feels so much like it is about here. It feels like home. Even though I am just a white woman descended from hungry Irish people who decided they were sick of being hungry for food and got hungry for land instead, it still feels like my story, too, so much closer to me than those Irish land grabbers seem. By hook or by crook, my family made this my home before I was born and it will always be the borderlands that feel like home to me forever. I don't have the right - that is certain - but I cannot help feeling its song in me just the same. I truly don't want to colonize someone else's culture, but this is all we really know now, all we can know, so it feels like we share in it.
Corpus Christi is far enough away from the actual border that the identification may seem a little silly, but we are where the border was supposed to be and you can still feel it, glittering along the Nueces - that we are not really one thing or another here, but always both, all of us.
I looked around the theater, seeing who was there, listening to the old ladies whisper over it ... it was beautiful. I am honored to be allowed to see it and to feel the beauty of it.
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