Texas Book Festival

John Phillip Santos

Before San Antonio native John Philip Santos could lay forth a single word from his resonant memoir Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation, his mere presence at the podium inside the Texas Senate Chamber marked an important and symbolic moment for the history of this state's letters. True, it was probably historic enough that he stood in the chamber wearing a pair of black leather pants and rhinestones without a wink of irony. But far more important were his candor and tact in discussing the peculiarities of being Mexican, intellectual, and strangely enough, Texan. "This is still alien space for Mexican Texans," he said, warming up to the pulpit of legislative power. And when he spoke of the value of sharing his memoirs at the seat of state government, no one could be sure whether he meant to say that he was reaching a "wider" audience or a "whiter" one that day.

Either way, Santos gave a reading that was intelligent, reverent, and fairly political. "It's very tempting while we have this room to pass some legislation," he joked. The older, mainly Anglo audience laughed heartily. When he continued to suggest that the day's new law would "abolish the Texas-Mexico border," the group was far less amused.

To such attendants unfamiliar with Santos' work, he must have seemed unbearably cryptic. It's not every day in Texas that a man with brown skin dresses up for S&M, waltzes into the State Capitol, tosses back his curly locks, and demands that we look to Europe and abolish our national borders. But once Santos became immersed in his reverent tales of growing up in a family of artsy dreamers, of studying the Aztec codices stored away at Oxford, and of having a drink with the master of all masters Jorge Luis Borges, the audience went his way. Seeming to confirm Carlos Fuentes' assertion that "the best novelists in the world are our grandmothers," Santos repeatedly spoke of the tales he learned from the viejitas, or little old ladies, of his youth. Their Spanish, he said, was "like a bow across a violin." As his reading drew to a close, that inherited music came to stop. There was nothing but silence from the listening audience -- the laws of the brown man in leather had passed.