House Made of Dawn

Francisco is Abel’s grandfather. With Abel’s father absent and his mother dead, Francisco takes on the mantle of parent to Abel and Abel’s brother, Vidal. In addition to being a generation removed from Abel and Vidal, Francisco is more connected to their cultural heritage. He exemplifies a different era and is something of an anachronistic relic. The different between Francisco and Abel highlights how much has changed during Francisco’s life. He recalls the 1800s and remembers growing up in a world before the US government formally managed Indigenous people by administering questionnaires and programs. Another difference is that in this older, more racist era, world war wasn’t a reality. Unlike Abel, Francisco wasn’t recruited to fight in a war. Francisco’s connection to his cultural heritage contrasts with how quickly the world changed. He takes part in rituals and ceremonies performed for thousands of years in North America. Within two generations, however, much of this cultural heritage was lost. Francisco understands the spirituality and nuance of his ancestors’ beliefs and tried to pass these along to his descendants. Through no fault of his own, however, he wasn’t successful. Vidal died young, as did his daughter. Abel is so broken by the war and the racism in society that he can’t retain his grandfather’s teachings. Francisco represents the end of an old world and the struggles involved in passing a complex and ancient system of beliefs and culture on to the next generation, despite the rapidly changing world.

However, Francisco shows that he’s part of the changing times through his belief in Christianity. He’s a devout Christian, to the point that he assists the priests in the church. As with his involvement in traditional ceremonies, Francisco is trusted to perform Christian rituals. He believes in both Indigenous and Christian systems of belief, unlike his eldest ancestors, and shows that the process of colonization that has continued throughout modern American history influences even the older Indigenous people. As he straddles the past and present, Francisco straddles two religions.

When Abel returns home after leaving Los Angeles, Francisco is an old man. The grandfather who raised the boy now needs the boy to take care of him in his old age. Francisco spends his final days reflecting on his life. Bedridden, he reviews his memories and tells Abel stories about his life. Abel is present in many of these stories, but Francisco tells them anyway. The stories aren’t just stories. Francisco’s years of involvement in Indigenous American cultural heritage projects has taught him the importance of stories. These stories from his life are a way to educate his grandson, to give Abel the meaning in his life that he has sought for so long. When Francisco dies, Abel is beside him. Abel prepares Francisco’s body according to tradition, suggesting that he instinctively learned from his grandfather about the importance of these ceremonies. Francisco succeeds in passing his knowledge to the next generation, even if he wasn’t able to tell his grandson everything. How Francisco’s body is prepared is a way to pay tribute to his ambitions and his objectives. When Francisco was alive, Abel couldn’t give him the satisfaction of continuing his legacy. In the period after his death, when Abel sets out on a race of the dead, Francisco’s legacy is secure. The stories he told in his final days—which included stories about the race of the dead—are evidently important. Francisco succeeds—but tragically doesn’t live long enough to witness his own success.

Angela visits Jemez after Abel returns from the war. She originally plans to go to the local mineral water pools, which are said to have restorative or healing powers. However, she finds herself attracted to Abel and begins an extramarital affair with him that lasts several days. Her husband is a ghostly presence in her life, and her exact relationship with him is ill-defined. Angela is pregnant with his child but not visibly so, meaning that she can hide her husband’s and child’s existence from Abel. She uses their brief affair to assuage her deep insecurity, which stems from this being her first visit to an Indian reservation; for the first time in her life, she isn’t in a white-dominated community. She’s no longer in a world built for her, and for the first time, she feels like an outsider in her own country. Her relationship with Abel is an attempt to address this strange feeling. By seducing Abel, she seeks to alleviate the subconscious anxiety that she feels and validate herself as a member of the community. Their affair is a demonstration of integration and understanding, combined with pure physical pleasure.

Rather than integrate her into the community, however, the affair confirms Angela’s outsider status. She visits Jemez hoping to use the mineral water to heal herself—to tap a local natural resource to address a problem in her life. She treats Abel as she does the water—as a natural resource at her disposal. Despite her good intentions and genuine affection toward Abel, she can’t extricate herself from the racist world in which she was raised. She views him through the lens of his race, treating him as a strange, alien “other” and fetishizing his ethnicity even when they’re in bed together. Her view of him as an “other” means that she’s performing a transgressive act by being with him, crossing an ethnic divide that society says shouldn’t be crossed. This process of subtle objectification indicates why Angela doesn’t consider their relationship an extramarital affair; her time in Jemez and her time with Abel aren’t quite real to her, and she never quite treats him and his world as such.

After Martinez attacks Abel, Angela visits him in the hospital, which demonstrates her good will and sincere affection for him, even after the tumultuous way in which their brief affair ended. The visit is a sign that, despite her subconscious racism, Angela is a good person. The way she otherizes him isn’t necessarily a failing on her part. Rather, she has internalized the social attitudes of the world around her, reflecting back what she has seen in the world and subconsciously echoing society’s racism. To Abel, such attitudes are alienating and constant. To Angela, who isn’t of Indigenous descent and isn’t necessarily affected, such attitudes are more of a general ambient hum. She hardly even notices the racism in society and casually absorbs it into her unconscious mind. When she visits the hospital, however, she tells Abel a story. Ben listens in and is struck by how closely her storytelling style mimics that of traditional Indigenous stories. This suggests that Angela casually absorbed more than just racism. Her storytelling reveals that her time in Jemez taught her about Indigenous cultures. Angela is no longer treating Abel as an “other” to use for her pleasure; she’s mirroring what she learned from his world back to him while trying to help him heal.