MC Quixote

Cervantes Comes Full-Circle Part 47

On stage, as MC Quixote, she's back in that zone, out of time and space, the music takes her, and she feels like some sort of oracle. The music works through MC Quixote, the words mesh with the sounds, and she just sings and moves, entranced. She doesn't know where she is, she just knows the song list and moves through each song giving everything to this execution of her art in total surrender. She's in a state of grace. (Circle Song)

Transformed, her senses alter, she can't see, hear, feel on her own; something moves through her, like electricity, lightning moving through her, she's become a receptor, a lightning rod, charged. At the end of the set her vision starts to come back and she starts to see the crowd, and she makes the slow transformation back to human; shifting from this other realm of the Muses and Gods.

And who's the first person she sees out in this crowd of hundreds? It looks like her Dad. Maybe, but she questions this, thinking she's still entranced and this is just a vision or some sort of hallucination, she's not really sure. She does wish her dad could be here at this moment, so maybe she has created this vision. It's probably just someone who looks like her Dad. But then she sees him signing,

"I love you." "I'm so proud of you."

And this shakes her back to her mortal self and she just stage-dives out into the crowd towards this vision, her people gently set her down on the ground, light as a feather.

Father and daughter embrace one another, just holding each other in the middle of the crowd. They cry, and then he asks her with his hands,

"Where's mom?" Caylee replies,

"She doesn't know you're here?"

"No, but I knew she would be here."

"Dad, why didn't you tell me you'd be here?"

He signs in an excited way,

"I wanted it to be a surprise."

This was a lie. He didn't want to spoil his daughter's moment, with all the reasons why he came back into Mexico for her concert. He still felt unsettled about the decision to return to Mexico because it will be extremely hard to decide whether to go back to the U.S. oe stay; but he wasn't going to let a border, and all of its cruel inhumanity, stop him from being with is daughter during one of the most important accomplishments of her life.

She can't really believe this is happening, reunited as a family for the first time in seven years. She leads her father by the hand towards backstage and her rock-star persona has now dissolved. All of her family being together is all she's really ever wanted.

It looked as though her mom was going to faint when she saw her dad, that much time and distance between them, and Caylee really has no idea what her mom was going to do.

Caylee was still charged from doing her dream show, her MC Quixote set at the Cervantino, she wonders if all this is really happening? Then her dad rides in like Don Quixote, and now Mom, Dad, Abuela, and Caylee all together, in the same space.

It takes her back to seven years ago, to the going away fiesta / quinceanera at Abuela's house in Coyoacan. All of their friends and family were there to celebrate a leaving and a becoming of a woman. She remembers there was something in that celebration that seemed funeral like.

Just underneath the fiesta in 2009 hung this reality that the father and daughter might not make it to the U.S. They might not be able to return to Mexico, might not see these loved ones ever again. The fiesta was the embodiment of terror and beauty, of leaving youth and home to something unknown, a transiting transformation.

Strangely, she's feeling both terror and beauty now, it lies under the surface of being reunited with all her family. Caylee doesn't understand this tension, she's finally with her whole family and it's scary, and she doesn't know exactly why. She looks up at the sky and thinks,

"With all that good sun, why is there something sad about my homeland."