Of Baja, the blank canvas on which to cast dreams

I’ve never thought too much about Baja California. The little I know of it comes from John Steinbeck’s “The Log From the Sea of Cortez,” the account of a 1940 marine expedition through the Gulf of California. Steinbeck’s saga is typically charming, even edenic; “The very air here,” he enthuses, “is miraculous, and outlines of reality change with the moment.”

Still, I have never visited Baja myself. Call it ignorance, call it inattention, call it typical American arrogance, yet for whatever reason, Baja California has always felt to me as vague and indefinable as a dreamscape, a kind of alternate reality, slightly out of reach. Or, as James M. Cain writes at the end of “Double Indemnity,” “I found my chair and sat there looking at the coast of Mexico, where we were going past it. But I had a funny feeling I wasn’t going anywhere.”

The irony is that, for many who live there, Baja California represents the real California, more elemental, less corrupted than its northern counterpart, although what this means, exactly, depends upon your point of view. On the one hand, suggests C.M. Mayo in “Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles Through Baja California, the Other Mexico,” Baja has its roots in legend, fantasy, imagination, a fable in a 16th century tale. The word “California,” after all, first appeared in the “chivalric romance” “Exploits of the Very Powerful Knight Esplandian, Son of the Great King Amadis of Gaul,” published in Spain in 1510. “Know ye,” declares its author, Garci-Ordones de Montalvo, “that on the right side of the Indies there is an island called California, very close to the Earthly Paradise, and inhabited by black women without a single man among them, for they live almost in the manner of Amazons. They are robust in body with stout, passionate hearts and great strength. The island itself is the most rugged with craggy rocks in the world. Their weapons are all of gold as well as the trappings of wild beasts which they ride after taming, for there is no other metal on the whole island.”

At the other end of the spectrum is the Jesuit missionary Johann Jakob Baegert, who, in the 18th century, asked about Baja, “What is California? Nothing but innumerable stones and these you will find in all directions. It is a pile of stones full of thorns ... or to quote the Scripture, a pathless, waterless thornful rock, sticking up between two oceans.” The truth, of course, lies somewhere in the middle. If Montalvo’s mythic island is what Hernan Cortes believed he had discovered when, in 1535, he took possession of this thousand-mile spit of sand and mountains, “[i]t is,” Mayo writes, “we know now, a peninsula. And we don’t call it California, but Baja California. Baja, which means ‘lower’: unfortunate adjective.”

“Miraculous Air” -- the title derives from Steinbeck -- is a luminous exploration of Baja California, from its southern tip at Cabo San Lucas to its “lost city” of Tijuana, Mexico’s quintessential border town. Split into five geographic sections (“The South,” “The Interior,” “The Sea of Cortes,” “The Pacific Coast” and “Borders”), the book records less a continuous journey than a series of visits, of relationships, which reveal Mayo’s engagement with this landscape in a way that a linear structure might not allow. Partly, that has to do with her outsider status; raised in Palo Alto and a longtime resident of Mexico City, Mayo understands the fluidity of borders, the way they are often little more than lines imposed. This is especially true in Baja, where, historically, sailors and adventurers came to settle; throughout the book, Mayo describes people with “names like Fisher, Ritchie, and Wilkes, true-blue bajacalifornios all,” and when she stumbles on a church bearing the inscription “Cabeza Y Madre De Las Misiones / De Baja Y Alta California” (Head and Mother of the Lower and Upper California Missions), we get a vivid glimpse of the history the two Californias share.

Outsiders, of course, have always been an issue in Baja -- from the days of Cortes to the present, when a new type of conquistador, the American expatriate, means to take possession of this land. But if Mayo has her own ideas on the subject, she’s not afraid to admit that she has no solutions, that the situation is intractably complex. In Todos Santos, a seaside town in the process of becoming an artists’ colony, she admires the Italian restaurant and the galleries while lamenting the “population of locals, somewhat stunned, like deer frozen in the headlights, by change.” In Bahia de los Angeles, she meets Carolina Shepard, the American-born proprietress of the Museo de Naturaleza y Cultura, a small natural history museum that appears to exist completely outside the local culture, until Shepard points out that “[s]eventy percent of the income in this town comes from tourism, which is mostly based on natural history.... And hopefully, the museum can help get young people to stop and think. Take care of your economic source, otherwise it will slowly fade.”

This is a complicated approach to a complicated problem, an attempt to look past ideology, to see things in a different way. Nowhere is that more vividly expressed than in regard to the ecology of Baja California, where sportfishing has decimated the Sea of Cortes’ once abundant marine life, and the Mexican government builds salt evaporation plants next to the coves in which gray whales birth their young. Here, too, Mayo avoids easy answers, decrying the environmental devastation yet acknowledging that there are other influences at work. “Illegal fishing,” a marine biologist named Tono Resendiz tells her, “is a problem of corruption, but it’s also a problem of poverty. How are people going to live?”

For Mayo, the way to reconcile such a dilemma is in the form of stories, which makes sense, since she is a storyteller; her previous book, the short-fiction collection “Sky Over El Nido,” won a Flannery O’Connor Award. Yet in “Miraculous Air,” she takes the fiction writer’s impulse and blends it with the instincts of a journalist to create a work of nonfiction that elides into modern myth. “Stories make a map,” she declares, in what stands as a kind of mantra, and throughout these pages she weaves bits of narrative and history into her reportage, reminding us how stories can enfold us in ways that simple facts cannot. Sometimes this cuts both directions -- as when, during a visit to the Sierra de San Francisco, Mayo mourns her inability to decode a cave painting: “Here was a story lost, like hieroglyphics undeciphered.”

At the abandoned English colony of San Quintin, however, she finds a “curious satisfaction.” “To see the ruins,” she explains, “was like viewing the Very Bones in a filigreed reliquary: She lived. He suffered. This actually happened. As with the bones, so with the rubble: It was the stories of the people associated with them that mattered -- small, sad stories perhaps, but stories nonetheless, each one opening like a bud into a many-petaled flower.” Often a story will suggest its own resolution, a point made explicit by “Miraculous Air’s” opening anecdote, about the first airplane to fly over San Jose del Cabo, which Mayo deftly echoes in the final pages of the book. There is a circularity to this place, she appears to be saying, as there is to life itself. “The past,” she tells us, “lies behind the present, as strange and necessary as bones are to flesh. But to reverse the analogy, the present laid over the past, they sometimes seem foreign to one another, yet fitting as a fright mask to a face.”

The balance between past and present also marks “Across the Line / Al Otro Lado,” a bilingual anthology of Baja California poetry edited by Harry Polkinhorn and Mark Weiss -- but here it’s somewhat harder to reconcile. Although Polkinhorn and Weiss open the book with a sample of “Poems of Native People,” such work is necessarily sparse in this collection of 55 poets, for among the legacies of colonization was the near extinction of the native populations, whose numbers dropped from 41,500 to barely 5,000 in the years between 1698 and 1772. What this has engendered is a poetry (indeed, a cultural life) that lacks a certain fundamental context, like those cave paintings Mayo cannot read. “The development of Baja California’s poetry has paralleled its recent history,” Weiss notes in an introduction. “Before the 1960s there was very little -- a few bits of verse by missionaries, a small amount of very minor verse by early settlers -- aside from the traditional poetry of indigenous hunters and gatherers. The poetry of the extinct tribes of three quarters of the peninsula is, with all but a very few words of their language, entirely lost to us.”

Because of that, the writing in “Across the Line” is almost completely contemporary, a reflection of the changing face of Baja going back to the early 1970s. This is a place where, Dante Salgado writes, “The night grows long in the desert ... ,” “angels and demons / struggle for California / Who shall win the souls?”

The modern-day nature of “Across the Line” is both a strength of the collection and its most glaring weakness, rendering the material here immediate and oddly rootless at the same time. As with most anthologies, it’s a mixed bag, depending on your aesthetics. The best work -- Ruth Vargas Leyva’s “Scene,” with its haunting image of the poet’s grandmother, or Katery Monica Garcia’s “Epigraph,” which reads, in its entirety:

Yes, I know

because you’ve told me before

it’s not that you love me

I am simply the fly

trapped by the closed windows

inside your head.

Although I’m not crazy about the image

I’ll let you believe it for now

-- is the most personal, the poetry of identity rather than place. One of the most surprising aspects of the book, in fact, is the extent to which place is often a peripheral factor; there are nature poems and poems of the city (primarily Tijuana), but for the most part, they are unexpectedly familiar, with references to Baudelaire and Mingus, laundromats and greasy spoons. At the most basic level, this reminds us again of the elusive nature of the subject; if Baja exists, somehow, suspended between California and Mexico (a “Huge Whale stranded on the American shore,” Edmundo Lizardi describes it in “Baja Times”), it only makes sense that the region’s poetry should draw its inspiration from everywhere, for it is the expression of a constantly rebordered culture, marked by shifting alliances and an ever-changing notion of itself. Look deeper, however, and this raises a far more complicated set of questions, as in: How do you connect with a heritage when that heritage has been eradicated? And how do you know where you’re going when you don’t know where you’ve been?

Such contradictions, it seems, are rooted in the Baja experience, with its unresolved tensions between past and present, tradition and innovation, the old world and the new. “I believe in the California / of myth -- / the only one possible,” writes the poet Raul Antonio Cota, but the myth he seeks is defined in equal measure by cave paintings and ecotourism, Cortes and Planet Hollywood. “Not long ago,” Mayo recalls, “Baja California was a great blankness, a piece of geography I could explore; now it felt less like a place on a map than a wide, swift-moving river of stories ... and here, as I live it, is my story, quicksilver fish swimming by.” Ultimately, though, “not all of [these stories] had endings,” which means this great blankness can’t help but remain part of the narrative, after all.