American Nomads and the Longing for a Non-existent Homeland

 

Everywhere I turn I am confronted by my own rootlessness. I lack a connectedness to any place. There is no place I can say that I am from. No “homeland”, that is important to my antecedents. No single constant through the changing seas of time and generations come and gone. 

I currently live in New Mexico - a place that in some senses hasn’t changed much in the last 100 years. Outside the cities, the economy and way of life is still agrarian, with some people working the same piece of land since the 1500s. Folks here identify strongly with the land and don’t typically leave if they can help it. 

As an obviously Anglo person, the (correct) assumption is that I’m not from New Mexico. Nuevomexicanos often guess where I am from (always California or Texas) and each time, I have to make a choice about where I want to say I am from, because the answer is really “no where”. 

I come from a specific kind of nomadic Americans - the ones that travel city to city, state to state in search of something more.  Unafraid to travel from coast to coast to coast for newspaper jobs like my father, or to wander the university circuit following research money like his father before him. 

They leave hometowns that never really felt like hometowns as they were only living in those places as a result of their parents’ wanderings. 

American nomad begets American nomad.  

And in the distant stretch of the past, these American nomads left on wagon trains to the Gold Rush, to try homesteading, to seek their fortune Out West, to find industrial work in the North, to find somewhere to carve out a niche for themselves. Chasing the amorphous promise they call “opportunity”. 

Scattered like seeds to the wind, there was never a chance to put down roots. 

I have followed in these footsteps with my own string of cities - DC, Baltimore, Memphis, Albuquerque. Chasing, always chasing. 

This leads to a kind of perpetual discontent that pervades my being now. 

A few years and a few states ago, I was scraping by on a third of what I make now, and felt rich after prior years where I subsisted off a graduate student’s stipend and government assistance. 

Somehow, I have forgotten what it felt like to forgo food in favor of rent, and the stress of the welfare interviews. Now, my salary is high but it still doesn’t feel like enough. 

American nomads by definition are not contented people, for what else drives their constant motion than want. Unlike the rooted folk who feel a spiritual connection to their land, their community, and their way of life, the American nomad is always seeking more, bigger, better. 

This is something I admire about New Mexicans - their notion of querencia. 

Querencia articulates the relationship between place and identity. The sense of place unique to where you grew up influences and shapes you into who you are. It’s a sense of safety, a sense of home, rooted in a physical location. 

Some New Mexican families have been lucky enough to occupy the same land for centuries - surviving changing economic times and government-sponsored dispossession like ancient trees rooted in place. This generations-long occupation of one area leads to reverence for that place and a belief in the divinity of the land itself. 

When I first came across the idea of querenica, I felt a lonely tug of emptiness. I felt left out in the cold, no place for my spirit to return to, I didn’t belong anywhere. 

The Diné (Navajo) bury their babies’ umbilical cords in special places, tying the soul of that child to that place to keep those souls safe.

I knew my soul was untethered, in danger of drifting away. 

Then, I read about the querencia of New Mexico’s poet laureate, Levi Romero, whose querencia lies at his grandmother’s house located in a village in Northern New Mexico where he spent summers as a child, even though he spent the vast majority of his life in Albuquerque. 

In this same essay, Romero tells a story about a man who attended his book signing who had lived in New Mexico for over thirty years. Romero told this man, in a room full of people, that he cannot claim to be from New Mexico because his ancestors aren’t buried here. 

While Romero, a difficult local character at best, and likely embarrassed this man, New Mexicans in general are incredibly suspicious of anyone who wants to come live here. With good-ish reason. 

Anglos’ lack of connection to the land meant my ancestors had no compunction against tilling until no topsoil remained, clear cutting until the forests disappeared, accepting land from the US government without a prior thought about who may have lived there first. 

Because there was no affective attachment to the land, no intimate relationship, just the view of this foreign land as something to profit off, we didn’t blink an eye and continued to build stick frame houses and exploit the land for profit. We didn’t have stories about the lands, the spirits that inhabited it, our family’s connection to it. 

However, if I followed Romero’s “rule”, I wouldn’t be allowed a querencia since I have no idea where any of my ancestors are buried. At the same time, Romero, in the same story where he embarrassed that man, said he finds it strange when people don’t have a sense of querencia. 

So I’m going to disregard his “rule”. 

My querencia lies at my grandmother’s house, where I spent a large portion of every summer until I was 15. 

There’s a particular smell of hot dirt and warm pine needles, dew-cooled agricultural fields, and the scratch of crab grass that brings me back to that small town just north of Sacramento, California. The sound of mourning doves and the morning breeze drifting through the open window and across the cot in the guest room. The fields of horses and tall prairie grass, thistles on the roadsides, quail scurrying across the road, grape vines in my grandmother’s backyard, and the mudpies baked in the sun with cousins who, in the simplicity of those summer months, felt like siblings. 

Summers at grandmas’ was an exercise in imagination. Since we weren’t allowed to play in the admittedly rough slavic neighborhood  she lived in, the backyard was our sole domain. We turned a tire swing into a tossing ship or a rocket to Mars. The weeds in the yard became herbs and we were the witches crafting potions. The blue plastic kiddie pool under a pup tent turned into an ocean for us seals to play in. 

Summers at Grandma’s also prominently featured the animals in her home. Grandma was a cat lady and like many cat-people, cats in need of help appeared in her orbit - kittens from construction sites, cats left behind after the owners moved, strays found on an airforce base. Soon her friends and family realized she liked cats and her house began to fill with cat-themed everything. 

But it wasn’t just cats. When I was seven, a puppy wandered into her backyard and became our beloved yard dog and childhood playmate, Miss Kitty. Years after Miss Kitty’s death, an older dog that would cower and growl at strangers, with numerous health issues, wandered into her yard, suspected to be a refugee from a puppy mill. She cared for this dog she couldn’t pet for years until his health gave out and he was euthanized. It strained her finances, her relationships with her children, but she was staunch that she would keep this sick, abused dog. 

Grandma’s willingness to take in animals that needed help instilled in me the idea that humans should care for the animals in our care until their short lives end, no matter what. 

I have carried this legacy with me, by taking in a kitten who I named Sprout that gets along with other cats but dislikes humans. I have fed her, played with her, taken her to the vet, and kept her happy for the past five years. She’s never sat on my lap, doesn’t like being touched, and swats at my face when she’s hungry. And I know I will care for Sprout for the rest of her life. There is no option in my mind to get rid of Sprout because who is going to want a cat that so thoroughly dislikes domestication? She’s my responsibility and I will give her the best life possible until the end of her days. This is the biggest lesson my grandmother taught me. 

Despite her compassion for animals, Grandma wasn’t the warmest woman - likely jaded by the terrible marriage to my grandfather and the loss of her second husband to cancer - yet her small single-story stucco house felt like home. Even when she yelled at us kids for not putting on sunscreen, or for saying the word “sucks”, she and her cat-decor-filled house still felt like belonging. She died in that house surrounded by three generations, blended from her lineage and that of the man she loved most. 

When Grandma died and the house sold, I had a strange feeling in my chest - the ending of an era. My soul knew I would never return to that house on the corner of Chisum Avenue, never greet Grandma on the porch, never let that metal screen door slam closed behind me again. It felt like my childhood ended and would be forever out of reach, the memories only fading because there was nothing left to anchor them. 

I mourned the loss of a piece of myself as much as I mourned the loss of my grandmother and all the memories she held for me. 

Now in a different hot, dusty place, I hear mourning doves, smell hot dirt, and feel a deep penetrating connection to my grandmother, the most familiar of my ancestors. Their genes expressed in my body; my existence linked with theirs. I am who I am because they were, even without a place to tie us to each other.