The dead descended from their heaven, crawled up from mother earth, swooshed down in the arms of sister wind to greet us, the living, on a cold November night in the heart of Beacon Hill in a place called El Centro de la Raza, otherwise known as the Center of our Beloved Community. They came to visit, not in the heart of night, wrapped in shadows, purveying with fear their ghostly shapes, but in plain daylight, under bright incandescent and fluorescent lights, among throngs of people who on this day had come to El Centro to honor and remember them.
The dead pranced and danced in the throbbing bodies of the Aztec dance troop which, under unrelenting, if misty, freezing rain, performed for the the hundreds of us gathered for the evening.The Aztec dancers spun resilience, defiance, conviction and love until the incense, the calling of the drum, the rhythmic stomping of their feet, our gathered breath, became a river flowing to the ones that went before and flowing out to meet those who are yet to come.
Mesmerized on the sidelines, whirled into a vortex as if I myself were dancing, and inspired by the dancers' dazzling aliveness, their raw beauty, I began to laugh, an open bellied, full hearted laughter. There is no wall, no matter how well engineered, that can stop the flow of people responding to the call of life.
The dead danced for us through the bodies of the living - the steps, rhythms, movements passed down from one person to the next for hundreds and hundreds of years, through the glory of an empire, through the ruin of conquest, through the meanness of political expedience.
Spirit moves through brick, rock, steel. Power is transient. And inside sturdy bodies full of conviction the dead came to tell us they are here: in us.
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