The Medicine of Memory

<p>People who live in California deny the past asserts Alejandro Murguía. In a state where what matters is keeping up with the current trends fads or latest computer gizmo no one has the time energy or desire to reflect on what happened last week much less what happened ten years ago or a hundred. From this oblivion of memory he continues comes a false sense of history a deluded belief that the way things are now is the way they have always been.</p> <p>In this work of creative nonfiction Murguía draws on memories-his own and his family's reaching back to the eighteenth century-to (re)construct the forgotten Chicano-indigenous history of California. He tells the story through significant moments in California history including the birth of the mestizo in Mexico destruction of Indian lifeways under the mission system violence toward Mexicanos during the Gold Rush Chicano farm life in the early twentieth century the Chicano Movement of the 1960s Chicano-Latino activism in San Francisco in the 1970s and the current rebirth of Chicano-Indio culture. Rejecting the notion that history is always written by the victors and refusing to be one of the vanquished he declares This is my California history my memories richly subjective and atavistic.</p>