I. PUEBLO DE COCHITI, NEW MEXICO
Carlos Herrera is among the 300 dancers covered in sweat, turquoise paint, and feathers—luminous feathers. The contrast between this iridescent plumage and the rust-colored mesas in the New Mexico desert makes the dancers’ bodies shine electric. They sweep through the plaza, rotating around its center in a giant circle. The procession moves to the beat of a deerskin-and-wood drum, led by a man who solemnly carries a 10-foot-tall staff.
I’m standing at the edge of the plaza, one of more than 500 spectators attending the traditional corn dances, part of the annual feast of Saint Bonaventure, at the Pueblo de Cochiti reservation. As the man with the standard draws near, I can feel the rhythmic intensity of the male and female dancers growing with each beat of one of Cochiti’s world-famous drums. All eyes are on the staff. The brownish-gray elegance of the eagle feathers attached to its lower section gives way to a stunning pair of two-foot-long, bright red feathers. They occupy the highest, most privileged position on the rod, as if presiding over this ancient ritual, impervious to the record-breaking 107-degree heat ravaging the Southwest.
After the initial hours of the morning dance, there’s a break for lunch, and I join Herrera at the adobe house of his father, Arnold, which is near the plaza. I’ve come to Cochiti to speak with locals about the feathers on the procession leader’s staff. Ceremonies like the corn dances can incorporate hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of these lustrous gold, blue, and, especially, red feathers. The quills represent many symbols and contain multiple meanings, forming their own language. From what I learn, the corn dance is a way for the community to pray for fertility of the harvest and in their personal and communal lives. It’s also about water. And possibility.
The birds from which these feathers are taken, scarlet macaws, aren’t native to the deserts of New Mexico, or any other desert for that matter. Yet their presence across the continent led Portuguese explorers to name their part of the New World conquest Terra dos Papagaios (land of the macaws) long before 1507, when German and then Spanish mapmakers baptized it “America”; in 1536, the storied Spanish explorer Álvar Núñes Cabeza de Vaca reported from present-day Arizona and New Mexico that the Indigenous peoples he encountered traded the birds’ feathers “for green stones far in the north.” However, the species’ northernmost habitat begins more than 1,000 miles away, in the southern Mexican state of Veracruz, and continues south along verdant coastlines, through 6,000 miles of rainforests and other lush landscapes leading deep into the Amazon. In the summer of 2023, I embarked on a road trip from my Las Vegas home across the Southwest, seeking to learn how and why the feathers of tropical macaws wound up in this very arid part of the continent. I also wanted to better understand their embeddedness in and significance to the region’s peoples—and to me.
The Cochiti and at least 26 other pueblos have long traded or imported macaw feathers. Hopi, Acoma, Laguna, Santa Clara, and Taos Pueblos have parrot or macaw clans, and the macaw clan is the largest of the many in Zuni Pueblo. Ancient rock art, kiva murals, ceramics, jewelry, prayer sticks, and other Indigenous forms of expression bear red, yellow, and blue images and macaw feathers.
Herrera’s father, a Cochiti elder renowned for his drum-building skills, beckons me to sit down and enjoy the sumptuous meal he’s hosting for family and friends. Over dishes of deer stew, Pueblo-style calabacitas, and Indian bread, the conversation turns to macaw feathers.
“When I was a kid,” Arnold says, “I remember hearing stories about the macaw from my elders. As I got older, I understood better what they mean to us. Not long after, I started trading drums in exchange for feathers. I did so because we believe the dance and the feathers have healing powers.”
Hearing him speak about macaws and healing warms me. I become the nine-year-old boy mesmerized by the winged wonder mimicking human speech, saying “cerote” and other, less expletive, Salvadoran words as it gazes at me in the Spanish colonial bougainvillea garden of my mom’s childhood best friend in San Vicente, El Salvador, their hometown. The then-bucolic village with cobblestone streets sat at the foot of the hulking Chinchontepec volcano, which fed all life there, including macaws. Today, San Vicente is a fast-growing city, and these great birds are extinct in El Salvador, its kaleidoscopic tropical forests morphing into the monotonous desert brown spaces of what scientists call Central America’s “dry corridor.”
Since her death in 2013, I’ve associated the macaw with my mom, the gregarious immigrant lady known to don tropical flowered shirts on the foggiest, coldest, and hottest San Francisco days. This intimate association has spurred my quest to understand the bird’s other, more epic associations—sun, rain, the tropical South, power. But of all the meanings ascribed to the macaws of the desert, the one that most fuels my interest is their ability to convey belonging, the powerful sense of place they elicit here, despite—or because of—their tropical origins.
“When we look at something like a bird from the scientific perspective,” Herrera says, “what they are is a biological indicator of the environment. And if we start finding the times when those species are not able to exist, then that should raise our alarm.” Herrera is a scientist with River Source, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving local watersheds, and his remark has me pondering the scientific implications—and spiritual possibilities—of the macaw’s fabulous out-of-placeness.
This year’s feast is the first one open to outsiders since COVID-19. The pandemic took a disproportionate toll on Cochiti and the 18 other pueblos of New Mexico, especially among Arnold’s elder peers. The pandemic has been followed by hellacious summers, much like the one waiting for us in the plaza.
“As Pueblo people, we have a responsibility to continue to practice who we are, regardless of impacts from the environment,” Herrera says. “We’ll probably dance for a good five or six hours throughout the day.”
Macaw feathers play a critical part in the ceremonies, he reminds me. “Nobody ever said it’s easy to be Native.”
II. PHOENIX, ARIZONA
Heat bounces off Phoenix sidewalks battered by multiple 110-degree days—54, the most in a single year. The clean lines of modern office buildings and the rougher ones of ancient adobe structures blur in the haze of heat mirages. The sense of time feels blurry too.
I’ve just driven southward on I-17 after visiting the sacred northern Arizona macaw sites Wupatki and Tuzigoot. The highway snakes alongside trails dating back to the Sinagua (Spanish for “without water”) people. These ancestors of the Zuni, Hopi, Navajo, San Carlos Apache, and over a dozen other tribes traded and transported macaws and feathers more than 1,200 years ago.
I arrive at the S’edav Va’aki Museum, which is built around the former settlement of another ancestral people of the Sonoran Desert, the Hohokam (“those who have gone,” in the language of the Tohono O’odham). Sounds of nearby freeways, trains, and, especially, planes fill the Phoenix air. Before it became Phoenix, Pueblo Grande (the name given to the site by archaeologists) was one of the largest settlements in central Arizona. Back then, the dominant sounds here were the earsplitting squawks of scarlet macaws.
In front of the modern museum structure are the rocky remnants of ancient canal systems—once the largest in the world—whose hundreds of miles channeled the flows of the Gila and Salt Rivers. Long before there were borders (or the nation-states that prop them up, for that matter), these waters made Pueblo Grande one of the most continuously inhabited sites in what archaeologists call the Southwest-Northwest, or SW/NW for short.
Yet across the SW/NW, mining and other extractive industries threaten macaw remains, feathers, and other sacred objects at ancient sites—the Arizona state motto is Ditat Deus, or “God enriches.” Snaketown, for example, a prominent site just south of Phoenix, is flanked to the north, south, east, and west by sacred Indigenous places endangered by mining.
“[Hohokam culture in] Snaketown dates to as early as 500 [CE] and lasted until about 1150,” says Christopher Schwartz, Phoenix’s city archaeologist and the lead editor of Birds of the Sun, a groundbreaking book about macaws in the SW/NW. The settlement is home, he says, to some of the earliest documented evidence of macaws in the Phoenix area. “During the great drought of 1275 to 1300 CE, for example,” Schwartz continues, “things got really, really dry. Looking at the tree rings and all the rainfall records, it’s clear that this was a time when people were moving on the landscape in interesting ways. You have a big migration of people from the northern Southwest [e.g., the pre-Hispanic areas of Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon] to the southern Southwest as well as into the Rio Grande area.”
Schwartz tells me that the archaeological record suggests that people throughout the SW/NW “probably traded tens of thousands of macaw and parrot feathers” and actual macaws over a period of more than 2,200 years. “You have up to 20 birds, 20 macaws in a place at any given time,” he says with an enthusiasm that bursts through his big round glasses and his bookish demeanor. “You’re hearing them all day long. They’re young, they’re squawking. They’re yelling. You have massive red birds flying above. All of these things create a unique sense of place.” This sense, he says, was a major reason ancient peoples undertook their fabled macaw journeys, carrying the birds from lands of rain to lands with little to no rain.
Some archaeologists theorize that macaws were transported here from Tampico and other Gulf of Mexico communities or from the Pacific coast of Oaxaca. Others have suggested that the macaws’ paradoxical desert presence indicates the location of trade and religious centers that served as northern outposts of the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican civilizations.
“You look at the archaeological record,” Schwartz says of the SW/NW’s ancient civilizations, “and there’s no macaws in the Zuni area. But you have macaws on their [Zuni] pottery, you have macaws on ladles, you have macaw feathers being used in ceremonies, you have macaws on ceremonial attire that people are still wearing.” These images reflect the place of stories and stories of place: origin stories, stories of migration and of belonging told throughout the continent.
“In the Popol Wuj [the ancient Mayan book of origins],” says Schwartz, who has also participated in archaeological excavations in Latin America, “macaws are associated with the sun and carry the sun across the sky. As we get into the SW/NW, they’re also associated with the sun, but also with rains, with the time of year when it’s sunny and summery.” They are, he adds, also associated with the south, light, lightning, Venus, rulership, and other sacred meanings. Some of these meanings, like those of the Popol Wuj, are drawn from epic stories of place.
Later, after discussing with Schwartz the reach of the macaws’ presence across the continent, I think of how the birds’ feathers also connect to stories of a more intimate nature. I first saw the macaw’s preternatural power to create a collective and personal sense of identity and place among Indigenous people in Tucson. There, my friend Leilani Clark, a former immigrants’ rights advocate and a writer whose father is African American and whose mother is Diné and Santa Clara (an Indigenous pueblo just north of Cochiti), told me her scarlet macaw story.
After a childhood of constant flux, during which she thought macaw feathers sported by her mom’s pueblo were “pretty” and then forgot about them, Clark reencountered the fabled bird in early adulthood. Seeking solace and healing from the traumas of rape and racism, she participated in several of her Santa Clara family’s dances. She started noticing the macaw feathers and imagery on jewelry, pottery, and other art of her culture. The bird’s out-of-placeness moved her, helping her find her own sense of belonging-amid-fluidity.
I’ve never forgotten the moment when she described, in tears, how the scarlet macaw reminded her of her Indigenous and Black ancestors’ “cycle of renewal and continuation.” And how she derived “this intense, raw feeling, something so solid—from feathers.”
III. CASAS GRANDES, CHIHUAHUA, MEXICO
Blazing afternoon desert heat along the miles between El Paso and Juárez seems to melt the hard, illusory lines of the U.S. border—and its stories of belonging and unbelonging. After about 15 minutes, I turn onto Carretera 2, the first of two bumpy, two-lane highways leading to my destination: Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, home of the legendary archaeological site Paquimé. Suddenly, another feeling sets in: a healthy disorganization of my norteamericano senses.
East of the road leading to Paquimé, the Sierra Madre forms one of the northern parts of what geologists call the North American Cordillera, a colossal chain of interlacing mountain ranges running from the Alaska Range to the Andes. The water flows and geology of this backbone of the Americas have turned the Chihuahuan Desert—the largest in North America—into a crossroads of sorts: a startling variety of landscapes and human-animal interactions.
Different ecotones—areas of steep transition between ecological regions—remind me I’m returning to a land of unique intersections, a place that blurs the rigid borders of expectation and assumption. Oddly enough, the tropical macaw’s desert dislocation becomes easier to understand here.
And then my stomach starts its own dislocation, tightening from the memory of a previous terror. The last time I was here, in 2015, I raced through the town of Ascensión at about 120 miles per hour. Friends had informed me that local cartels had just removed the mayor and police force to turn the farming town into a sicario training center. Though Ascensión no longer trains narco-assassins, the recent murder of a California PhD student in the nearby Sonoran Desert reminds me why few people come here to research the macaw’s mysteries. I drive (a little) slower. Forty-five minutes later, I arrive safely, having passed through the narco-gravity of it all, and the tiny pueblo starts to reveal more secrets of the macaw’s luminous levity.
A large, dark bronze statue greets visitors crossing the small bridge over the Casas Grandes River, whose waters made Paquimé and, later, Casas Grandes possible. The six-foot figure of an Indigenous man gets clearer as I approach. The man is looking up admiringly at the great bird he’s holding, the scarlet macaw responsible for the town’s official designation: Pueblo Mágico.
Of all the people I know here, none are as qualified to explain the scarlet macaw’s ancient allure as Eduardo Pio Gamboa Carrera. He lives down the street from the Paquimé site, which is where I join up with him and his two German shepherd pups in the cool hours of the next morning.
I first encountered Gamboa in 2014, a year after I began my search for the connection between the tropical birds and my tropical shirt–wearing mom, who had introduced me to them. What most impressed me at that time was how Gamboa’s deep understanding of the scarlet macaw’s presence in the desert, its out-of-placeness, came about thanks, in part, to an odd mix of archaeology and classic rock music. “As an archaeologist,” he explained, “you’re always in the present, the past, and whatever’s in between. It’s like the King Crimson song that says, ‘I talk to the wind / My words are all carried away.… / Where have you been? / I’ve been here and I’ve been there / And I’ve been in between.’ You have to be between what exists and what doesn’t exist, what’s possible and what’s not possible.”
“There you have it,” Gamboa now says while looking at the mesmerizing 88-acre maze of mounds and multistory dwellings, the puddled-adobe apartments that once housed over 3,000 people. “All of this is made of adobe,” he adds as we start strolling through the site. “The history of adobe begins more than 1,000 years before Paquimé and was probably brought here from places like Mimbres en el norte [New Mexico–Arizona, today], but here is where you see its maximum expression.”
Paquimé, Gamboa explains, was inhabited between 700 and the late 1400s and grew with the migration of peoples from Mimbres, Chaco Canyon, Salado, and other civilizations of northern New Mexico. The adobe city was the regional hub of the macaw universe. Its satellite settlements extended 30,000 to 40,000 square miles from its center. At one of those satellites, Cueva de Avendaños, archaeologists found mummified macaws dating back 2,000 years.
“Paquimé is a mix of Mesoamerica and the Southwest,” says Gamboa as we gaze upon the city. He explains how the different architectural styles among the more than 2,000 rooms here reflect a cultural in-betweenness: I-shaped ball courts, colonnades, and platform mounds echo the monumental structures of Toltec, Aztec, and other Mesoamerican civilizations found to the south; adobe structures and T-shaped doors were brought from the north.
We walk toward one of the many ceremonial buildings called mound effigies, which were almost always named for animals. “That’s the Serpent Mound. The serpent is associated with the acequias [collective water-management system]. There’s the Eagle Mound. They’re all important, but here,” Gamboa says, pointing to a large, circular five-story structure of rammed rubble with an adobe precinct and a ramp leading to a water-storage cistern, “here is the heart of Paquimé.”
“This is called the Mound of the Offerings,” he says, “the place where sacred offerings were made. Some call it the Parrot Mound.”
“Why?”
“Because the scarlet macaw was central to life here. When you view it from a satellite, it resembles the head of a parrot.”
Gamboa pulls out his mobile phone and pulls up the aerial view of our location on Google Maps. Sure enough, the round, beaked shape of what looks like the adobe head of a parrot is discernible.
“Wow.” I’m impressed, truly.
He leads me to some pits nearby. “This is the macaw pit, the place where they raised the macaws. Each pit was covered with a straw roof.”
The remains of more than 300 scarlet macaws have been found in Paquimé, the most of any site in the SW/NW, by far. Other sites within an 18-mile radius point to the large-scale raising of the birds and probable trading of them with peoples from what is now called the Southwest. Gamboa strolls over to a 15-by-15-foot space with four adobe walls, Paquimé’s House of the Macaws. A south-facing wall has eight rectangular recesses in it, each one approximately 20 by 40 by 20 inches. These were “nesting boxes.”
“The niches with the plugs in the pits are symbolic of sexual ritual,” he tells me. He’s talking about the stone plugs, known as cage stones, that were used to seal the entrances of circular adobe pens. “Raising, bathing, and putting them into the nest is a complete ritual that symbolizes human procreation, a symbolization of the sexual act.” I imagine baby macaws bathing their shimmering feathers in these brown pits dug from the desert dirt, sand, and rock. I then imagine how, in this Pueblo Mágico and other impossible places, macaws might have represented a walking, talking, flying rainbow of possibility.
IV. ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO
To better understand the scarlet macaw’s ability to enchant an entire continent, I drive 500 miles north of Paquimé and a few miles south of Cochiti on I-25, to the urban adobe home of Louie Garcia in Albuquerque.
Garcia, a ponytailed Chicano Tiwa-Piro Pueblo textile artist who also works as a historian, a linguist, and an educator, has dedicated his adult life to understanding macaws and their hemispheric appeal.
We enter the room reserved for his scarlet macaw, Tonalli (Nahuatl for, among other things, “day,” “day sign,” and “soul”), who is perched in a cage with its door open. Tonalli stares at me with a curious and friendly tilting of her head (Garcia has not identified Tonalli’s sex, but he sometimes refers to the bird as “she”). She greets me by edging closer to my side of the thick branch spanning the cage. Tonalli’s inquisitive stare feels oddly soothing. She transports me to the quiet bougainvillea garden in my mom’s hometown where I first fell under the macaw’s spell.
Garcia lifts Tonalli from the cage and gently strokes her. “She likes to be tickled around the neck,” he says, “but they don’t take any bullshit. They see right through it. They know when someone is not good, when someone is scared of them. They’re very proud.”
He asks the bird to say hello. Tonalli just looks at him and continues checking me out.
“As babies, they imprint, so they bond to an individual,” Garcia says. “And my bird is bonded to me. No one else handles her—or him.… They’re just like babies when they’re young. But as they sexually mature, macaws are very jealous, very noble in that sense.”
The initial draw for people, he says, is the feathers.
“When you imagine people coming into a place or when they’re witnessing a ceremony and they’re seeing these displays of beautiful color and feathers,” he says, “it’s that mental image that people take in and are in awe and wonder about. Whenever I think about macaw feathers, there’s this wow factor.”
Garcia was first wowed while watching Aztec dancers and the Danza de los Voladores de Papantla (flying dancers from the Gulf coast of Veracruz) as a teenager. The performers were on tour and visiting Albuquerque’s Indian Pueblo Cultural Center. “I saw all these macaw feathers—all these long feathers…blue, red, and gold,” he says. “To me, the connection was obvious. It was right in front of me. I said, ‘Hey, they’re using the same feathers I was seeing in the [New Mexico] pueblos.’”
Garcia gathered long macaw feathers and traveled to Mexico, where they’re hard to find. He began trading the feathers for textiles and other goods, which he’d bring back home. In Mexico, Garcia learned about pochtecas, Aztec traders of old who, according to the late southwestern archaeologist Charles C. Di Peso, brought scarlet macaws from the tropical forests of the Mayan-speaking Huastec region around the Gulf of Mexico to the SW/NW area.
Eventually, Garcia’s curiosity pulled him “further and further south,” to Oaxaca and Chiapas and then to the Mayan heartland of Guatemala, where scarlet macaws were deeply embedded in ancient civilizations. Garcia’s journey led him to learn Nahuatl, which was spoken by the Aztecs, and other Indigenous languages at the Nahuatl University in Ocotepec. It also led him to love. While studying in Ocotepec, he met his future wife, Paula, herself a Nahuatl (a person descended from the ancient Aztecs), who joined him on his macaw travels.
Armed with a rare combination of language skills—he is likely one of only a few Puebloans able to speak both Spanish and Nahuatl—Garcia is something of a modern-day pochteca himself. “I think that most likely the traders, or the pochtecas, were bringing these birds up as chicks,” he says. Garcia explains that a baby macaw will depend on one person for hand-feeding and care. He and other experts believe that specialists performed these duties in ancient Mesoamerican and southwestern cultures. Bones of scarlet macaws found in northern Mexican and southwestern U.S. sites have mostly been those of one-year-old chicks. Aztec codices as well as pottery from the Mimbres region in southern New Mexico have images of basket-bearing people carrying scarlet macaws on their backs. Garcia also believes that pochteca and other traders would have “had to develop a pidgin,” he says, “a trade language that would facilitate this exchange” across cultures and languages—and worldviews.
The trade was neither solely nor perhaps primarily dominated by capitalist economic logic and the oft-heard refrain dating back to the 13th-century travels of Marco Polo: “Where parrots, gold.” Archaeologists I spoke to shared that for peoples of the SW/NW and Mesoamerica, macaw feathers were far more valuable than the mineral most coveted during the “Age of Discovery” and the rise of European capitalism, gold.
Garcia joins many archaeologists in concluding that ancestors of the Pueblos went south to acquire not just macaws but also knowledge of rituals and traditions that provided them with increased personal, clan, or family status. Inherent in the bird, in its spectacularly colored feathers, they believed, was the power and knowledge of survival in the harsh deserts.
“I’m also sun clan,” says Garcia, looking at his pet macaw. “Part of my fascination is that all the colors of the sun and the sky are in that bird.… Instinctually, they will greet the sun in the morning by being very vocal. At sundown, they become vocal and real active. So I think that, instinctually, there’s some sort of connection with the sun.”
V. CHACO CANYON, NEW MEXICO
I stop to get gas in Counselor, a northern New Mexico town in an area populated mostly by snakeweed, sagebrush, and sometimes-startling formations like hoodoos. My SUV’s dashboard tells me that it’s 107 degrees outside, the same temperature it was a few weeks ago in Pueblo de Cochiti. All around me, fracking towers, pipelines, and tankers. Signs of another extractive industry—oil and gas.
The area figures prominently in the creation stories of the Diné and 22 other tribal nations, a significance that gives rise to the popular Native phrase “All roads lead to Chaco Canyon.” I heed the expression and drive the 42 miles of dirt roads leading from Counselor to the iconic site.
Prior to Highway 550 and Atkins Road bringing people here, a series of red stairways, steps, and ramps of masonry carved into more than 400 miles of landscape did. These red roads served as trade routes between the people of Chaco and those of the subtropical South with whom they bartered for cacao, copper bells, shell bracelets, and ceramic vessels. And, of course, scarlet macaws.
Between 850 and 1150, the 100 Ancestral Puebloan communities making up the Greater Chaco region covered between 30,000 and 60,000 square miles stretching north into the Four Corners region and about 100 miles southward. Long before Paquimé centered the scarlet macaw universe, there was Chaco.
At Chaco, a pair of park rangers tell me that the Pueblo Bonito site will blow my mind. I hurriedly drive to the site and make the two-minute walk to the sun-splashed, orange-hued canyon wall. Markers along the path indicate petroglyphs, and I slow down. One, in particular, stands out to me. It’s difficult to discern, but after some time, the beak, wings, and legs of a parrot take shape in the rock. A scarlet macaw.
A short distance from Pueblo Bonito’s canyon wall, an aviary—Room 38, as it’s now termed—housed these birds. Archaeologists have found the remains of 30 of them beneath layers of soil and guano here. Macaws were the only species found in this particular spot, likely one of the most sacred of the 650 rooms across the park. I stop to listen to the quiet, but there is no quiet. Finches, warblers, vulture hawks, and other birds are chirping and squawking. In ancient times, numerous birds—turkeys, quail, doves, and others—would have been raised in this canyon city. None of those could speak, though. I imagine the experience of people hearing scarlet macaws speak the language of Chaco or the many foreign languages once heard here. I also wonder what the ear-popping sound of the scarlet macaw was like here. The bird’s squawk, which has been recorded at over 102 decibels from a distance of 15 feet, was likely the loudest sound in the canyon, the sound that was most likely associated with Chaco, Paquimé, Wupatki, and the storied Pueblo of Zuni. An electric drill registers 98 decibels; a Harley Davidson without a muffler, more than 100 decibels.
VI. PUEBLO OF ZUNI, NEW MEXICO
I associate Christopher J. Lewis with baskets, feathers, and maps. Since I met him last year, Lewis has given me directions to places that aren’t on maps, places where dirt roads along dangerous cliffs lead to little-known petroglyphs of scarlet macaws in Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico.
At his home in Zuni, we share a laugh after I describe to him how I, a person who suffers from vertigo, drove nervously down a steep, rocky cliff road with no guardrail. I was returning from the Edge of Cedars State Park Museum in Blanding, Utah, home to the most spectacular scarlet macaw artifact in the SW/NW: a sash made of scarlet macaw feathers. The relic was found in 1955 in a cave near Lavender Canyon.
“Objects like that,” says Lewis, who is an artist and cultural consultant, “are 900 to 2,100 years old. Those alcoves up there are dry, no moisture getting in.” The sash materials—yucca rope, leather, squirrel pelt, and scarlet macaw feathers, including more than 2,000 small ones—are in remarkable condition. “This one [the sash] might have been for ceremonial purposes. Somebody who’s leading a ceremony or something would wear this.”
Lewis steps away into a back room and brings out a yellow-and-blue feather bundle that will be attached to a headdress.
“I made this for my son,” he says. “He wore it during the dance.”
I ask Lewis about the meanings Zunis find in different-colored macaw feathers.
“Reds would be associated with summer,” he responds. “The summer moieties. Blues are the winter. That reminds me. I want to show you something else.”
He steps away again. This time, he returns with a book titled A:shiwi A:wan Ulohnanne: The Zuni World. He opens it to a spread showing a gorgeous, hand-painted map depicting what we today call the southwestern United States and northern and southern Mexico. At the top of the map, in the area representing Zuni, there’s an adobe city with people in white pants and shirts walking in a south-to-north direction. Hovering above these people are flocks of scarlet macaws. Toward the bottom, spectacular adobe structures of Paquimé are delineated. Macaws hover over them, too.
Paquimé men adorned in elegant headdresses and sashes made of macaw feathers dance beside pyramids. Farther down the page, smaller men, also dressed in white, walk toward Guatemala and my parents’ homeland of El Salvador, where I fought in the civil war of the 1980s and early ’90s. Flying above them, more macaws. There are also two larger macaws perched on a branch beneath a spread of purple, red, yellow, and white kernels of corn.
I’m taken aback. “I saw this painting the first time I visited an exhibit in Zuni, back in 2014, after my mom died,” I tell Lewis. “That image helped me see some of the ways the scarlet macaw connects peoples of the North and South.”
“The painting is by my wife’s nephew, Dewayne Dishta,” he replies. “It shows the trade route of when Zunis went south. This is the journey of the Zuni ancestors to the land of everlasting summer.” Lewis takes me over to a picture on the wall.
“That’s Dewayne,” he says, motioning to the photograph. “He passed away a few years ago.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “Wow. Dewayne’s painting had a powerful impact on me when I first saw it.” I sit down and look at the map in the book again. I trace the path from Zuni all the way to my parents’ homeland.
I explain to Lewis how during a roughly two-week period in 1932, the Salvadoran government slaughtered between 10,000 and 30,000 mostly Indigenous people in this tiny tropical country that was once home to macaws. I also shared that my father, who died in 2022, had a Pipil-Nahuatl grandmother and that my father passed unto me the heaviest legacy I carry: Pop was one of the last living witnesses of La Matanza, the greatest massacre in the history of the Americas, the land of the macaw. The weight of Pop, of the war I fought in, of other parts of my ancestors’ history makes me feel a kinship with Lewis, Zunis, and other Indigenous people. The gravity of their journeys jolts me. I breathe deliberately to prevent the tears welling up in my eyes from flowing down my cheeks.
Lewis observes this change in me and returns to the back room. He comes out bearing a tiny plastic bag. “Do these mean anything to you?”
I look at what seem to be small, dark bugs inside. “I’m from California,” I answer, trying to lighten the mood. “I thought these were roaches that we can smoke.”
“No. They’re hummingbird feathers. They’re not macaw feathers, but they can give you some idea of why macaws’ and other feathers are important.”
“Oh my God. That’s so cool. Oh my God,” I repeat as my breath quickens. “In the South, hummingbirds are associated with warriors.”
“Yeah, they take those feathers and tie them to their dance regalia, because the dance of the warriors imitates the flight of hummingbirds,” says Lewis. “They make them dance light and fast like a hummingbird.”
I slow my breath.
Hummingbirds. Macaws. Feathers. I feel a powerful calm come over me. I’m beginning to more fully understand the macaw feathers as a luminous and lightening counterbalance to the dark, weighty matters of my history, present, and future. It’s a journey to find my place, one brightened time and again by the light and levity of scarlet macaws—and the long line of people who, beginning with my mom, taught me to adore them.•
Journalist Roberto Lovato is the author of Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas. Lovato is also an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
