CNF: Conquistadors
by Maria Elena Gigante
- A curious type of monument in the Andes only appeared after conquistadors slashed open the land, defiling the dead. Vertebrae, salvaged from Spanish swords, were found strung together, reconstructed—bones, threaded like beads, on reeds used as spinal cords, then staked into the dirt.
- “Can’t you wait until I’m dead to do that?” Grandpa growled at my mom’s request to study their genes. Brandishing his family’s coat of arms, Grandpa spoke the king’s fabled lisp. His family came from Spain and never “mixed” in Ecuador.
- Ancestry dot com can estimate ethnicity, for a price: your DNA, in database in aeternum. Ancestry has millions of data points— people eager to dig up royal blood or something shiny to conquer the boredom.
- Conquistador means: one that conquers. Conquistador means: to seek and gain completion; to acquire, to win. The Ancestry results Mom wouldn’t send, at first.
- Grandpa loved to win. His surname is a “city” in Spain. My sister found it, sent a photo wearing a shit-eating grin behind a sign on the outskirts of a desert ghost town, went back to the present to eat paella. Mom wouldn’t send the results because there was no Spain.
- My department is doing a diversity hire: indigenous poet preferred. They must move fast to obtain the best ones.
- When Grandpa left Ecuador, he shrugged off his skin, married a German in Indiana, and folded himself in.
- “You’re passing,” my brother said. “If I looked like you, I wouldn’t feel right claiming it either.” Instead of Spain, there was a list, all brandishing the modifier indigenous: Ecuador, Columbia, Peru.
- Conquistador does not mean Gold, God, and Glory, but textbooks tell a gilded story, propped up by withered, white truths. My department will acquire someone sturdy in their skin.
- DNA is traced and dated, databased, debased. Scientists confirmed: those bony towers in the Andes were built after graves were ripped open, the dead disturbed. We let Grandpa take his secret to the grave before we started digging.
Maria Elena Gigante (she/her) is a queer, nonbinary writer who teaches at Western Michigan University. Previously published in the field of rhetoric, she now writes micro memoirs and flash essays. “Conquistadors” is her first creative publication.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Conquistadors”? “Conquistadors” began as separate pieces, in different genres. I was trying to process my grandfather’s death, and his insistence on hiding his real ancestry, around the same time that I happened on a popular science article about the discovery of Andean burial sites. Then, I was inspired by a talk at AWP by Kimiko Hahn on the Zuihitsu, a genre of Japanese literature that creates connections among fragments of ideas, and “Conquistadors” coalesced from these previously disparate pieces.
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