St. Augustine church in Isleta NM

Week 3 Discussion Questions:
3. What is Cather’s attitude toward the land itself? Explain.
Cather brilliantly takes the reader back into time.  She describes the landscape and the old buildings so wonderfully.  She takes the words that we see but cannot say due to our lack of descriptive detail.  She described the Isleta reservation in such a way that I saw a new perspective on an old site I had seem many of times before.  I lived on the reservation for 10 years and always adored the Saint Augustine church.  I knew it was one of the oldest churches in the United States and that it was built in 1613.  I also knew that the mission church was one that the Spaniards used to convert the Indians to organized religion; be it Catholicism as it remains to this day.  My memory of the church was much like the newer picture and when I read Cather’s description I took in a whole new perspective.  I felt I was back with him 4 or 5 centuries before.
When Cather was describing the approach to the old church I saw in the eyes of a tired priest coming home to rest in the safety of the white cross.
              When he approached this pueblo of Isleta, gleaming white across a low plain of grey sand, Father Latour’s spirits rose.  It was beautiful, that warm, rich whiteness of the church and the clustered town, shaded by a few bright acacia trees, with their intense blue green like the color of old paper window blinds.  That tree always awakened pleasant memories, recalling a garden in the south of France where he used to visit young cousins.  (p. 42)

    

     Each time I pass an old tree by the entrance to my parents’ house in Isleta, I am taken back to a time I would rest, with my old quarter horse, in its large shadow.  The cottonwood tree must have been hundreds of year old and it still remains there today.  Will it be there for my grandchildren to see when they come by?  The Indians talk about a coffin made from a large tree.  I remember the story about a man that was buried under the church in Isleta.  His body is said to rise to the surface each year.  The coffin was made out of a large cottonwood tree that was hallowed out to fit Juan de Padilla’s body so it must have been large…. As large as the tree I see now in front of me.