The Weight of Shadows Read Online Free PDF

Porfiriato—like widespread debt slavery and Yaqui people being forced into labor camps—mattered little.
    Popular resistance to Díaz grew, and Francisco I. Madero, an opposition candidate, ran in the election. Madero had gained widespread support, so much so that when the government announced the official election result, a landslide victory for Díaz, it was widely believed to have been fraudulent, and the Mexican Revolution broke out in 1910. The people of Mexico went to war with the ruling class, of which Díaz was a key representative.
    During Madero’s triumphant march to take the presidency there was an earthquake that produced cracks in the national palace—an omen of things to come. Madero had been a figure of opposition during the revolution, but soon after becoming the first new president in over thirty years itbecame clear to his former allies and to the Mexican people that he had been a revolutionary in name only. He kept many of the Díaz-created power structures in place and refused to institute policy that would challenge the hegemony of the wealthy landowning class, to which he and his family belonged. Díaz had been exiled to Paris soon after the revolution broke out, and the United States continued to support the regime most favorable to its economic interests. Henry Lane Wilson, the US ambassador to Mexico, became concerned that Madero would overturn the policies instituted by Díaz that had created foreign dominance of oil, mining, and railroads in Mexico. Shortly after the transition of power, there was a coup orchestrated in part by Wilson and led by Mexican general Victoriano Huerta. When it was over, Madero was dead, and Huerta declared himself president.
    By 1935 most of the oil-producing companies in Mexico were foreign-owned. Sixty percent of oil production came from the Mexican Eagle Company, which was a subsidiary of the Royal Dutch Shell Company, and another 30 percent came from Jersey Standard and Standard Oil Company of California (now Chevron). It wasn’t until 1938 that Lázaro Cárdenas expropriated the assets of nearly every foreign oil company operating in Mexico, to which the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands reacted by boycotting Mexican exports. But the US government quickly backed off when war clouds rolled in across the Atlantic, casting ambiguous shadows on the Americas.
    In all the photographs of my first birthday, Martín is conspicuously missing. After Yoli had gotten kicked out of her house for becoming pregnant, she moved in with Martín’s family while he worked in fields more than two thousand miles away. I spent the first months of my life in a house full of old people—my grandmother and her three brothers—whowere in an almost constant state of elation at their first grandchild being available to them after work each day.
    On several occasions I’ve tried to gently ask Yoli how she felt then, asking if she felt lonely when I really meant abandoned. She’s always said it wasn’t a lonely time, because she lived with four people who considered themselves grandparents, and my actual grandmother was so doting and intuitive, but I’m not sure I believe her. Her mother had already passed away, and she says by that time she’d learned not to care about her father, but I don’t know if I think that’s possible. It must have injured her or, if she’d gotten so good at suppressing things, it must have dragged behind her like a plow.
    â€œEn esos días eras como la chingada,” says Yoli, looking at a washed-out photo of her holding me above my huge white birthday cake.
    She says right around then I’d started pointing with my index, and right before pointing I’d stare at the tip of my finger and pucker my lips, so she knew when it was coming. She’d started asking me how old I was right when she could tell I was going to point anyway, just for laughs. In the photo