Motorcycles and white tour vans speed between behemoth granite shafts, shove my body by their force, leave me roadside and wandering fields. Little is funny when you’re Chicana and walking a Civil War site not meant for walking. Regardless, I ask park rangers and guides for stories on Mexicans soldiers,

receive shrugs. No evidence in statues or statistics. In the cemetery, not one Spanish name. I’m alone in the wine shop. It’s the same in the post office, the market, the antique shop with KKK books on display. In the peach orchard, I prepare a séance, sit cross-legged in grass, and hold a smoky quartz to the setting sun.

I invite the unseen to speak. So many dead, it’s said Confederates were left to rot. In war, not all bodies are returned home nor graves marked. I Google “Mexicans in the Civil War” and uncover layers to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and Cinco de Mayo. This is how I meet ancestors for the first time, heroes

this country decorates in clownish sombreros and fake mustaches, dishonors for fighting European empire on shared American land Power & Money dictate can’t be shared. Years before this, carrying water gallons up an Arizona mountain ridge to replenish supplies in a pass known as “Dead Man’s,” I wrote messages on bottles to the living,

scanned Sonoran canyons for the lost, and knew too many would not be found. A black Sharpie Virgen drawn on hot plastic became a prayer: may the next officer halt before cracking her face beneath his boot, spilling life on to dirt. No, nothing’s funny when you’re brown in a country you’re taught isn’t yours, your dead don’t count.