Tizne is humidity, life, tenderness, and memory.
Reflections on life after an extinct volcano
As I sip a good regional coffee, I think about how I want to live my life as I approach forty, with so little money in my digital bank account. I think about how I’ll fund the art I so deeply love to make, and how I’ll face many of the fears that come to women at this stage in life—fears I can’t escape either. I think about who I am and what it means to me to have returned to Veracruz. I also reflect on my own ingratitude for not recognizing that I’m fortunate to have a home where I can ponder all these things that matter to no one else but me.
“Xalapa is like a womb where nothing incredible happens—until you leave it,” my friend Víctor said as we talked about our desire to follow our artistic hearts.
Migration runs constantly through my family’s story—as it does in so many others. We move for love, we move out of need, we move because life itself is constant motion. Just like the movement caused by an erupting volcano.
In the late 1960s, a strong rumor spread that the Macuiltepetl—an iconic volcano around which the state capital is built—would erupt again. The fear stemmed mostly from its inactivity for over thirty thousand years. That long geological containment led locals to “hear” sounds beneath their land, which they firmly believed to be the lava cooking beneath the earth’s surface. They say the collective fear pushed landowners to sell their plots at very low prices, passing the “problem” on to the poor fools who would buy these lands—lands whose crops would supposedly vanish under a thick layer of volcanic rock. One of those supposed fools was my great-grandfather, a peasant from the Sierra of Veracruz, who migrated to the capital at eighteen with no family support, chasing the hope of a better future and never looking back.
That same great-grandfather later took in my parents and their two small children after the early 1990s liquidation of the rural bank’s employees. The same great-grandfather whose own parents died during the Mexican Revolution, who grew up an orphan herding goats in the mountains. The same great-grandfather who lived ninety years completely deaf. The one who became my afternoon companion throughout my childhood in Xalapa. The same great-grandfather whose small inheritance helped me barely afford a plane ticket for an academic trip to South America during the time I lived and enjoyed the privileges of the big capital. The one who gave us a home for life.
I look out the window of my house and see the same neighbors—descendants of those who once bought land at the volcano’s foothills over six decades ago. I see volcanic rock used in the foundations and facades. I see the now-extinct Macuiltepetl volcano, fenced off to prevent squatters from claiming this space now rebranded as a natural park. I see my garden—not the same one from my childhood, but one that still holds some of the plants my great-grandfather once planted. I see my mother, who managed to become a great professional while also raising and caring for her children in a safe place. I see schools, elementary classrooms, and churches—some partly built by the neighborhood group that included my great-grandfather and other residents.
The search for a better future awaits. Our ancestors, unknowingly, plant the desire to carry on in those who inherit their blood. Memories, recollections, and stories shape those whose only home is the one they carry on their backs. Today, I’m certain that life begins in the most unlikely places—for me, at the foot of an extinct volcano.
I like to think that Tizne, as an endemic species, genuinely lives only in this place.
Caro