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without separation. You taught us that our politics would not be effectivewithout a spiritualized consciousness. Conocimiento. You taught us aboutDivine intelligence. But we consumed without digesting. You taught us;the question remains, What did we learn?I did not know you, Gloria, although we worked together. I have onlynow learned to sense you through the grief of my beloved for whom youprovided anchor. What might black women say to Chicana women tohelp ease the pain of this loss? We want to mourn with you the passing ofyour sister warrior. Your loss of her gentle footprints is also ours. We feelyour loss. We hold your pain. We did not accompany you to those fieldsin Texas as you faced the noonday brunt of the sun. I myself never paidattention to your diabetes. I never looked at the statistics before now:diabetes is the fifth-deadliest disease in the United States. Over ninemillion women live with this disease, and Latina, African American,Native American, Asian, and Pacific Islander women are two to fourtimes more likely to have this disease than white women.7 8What might black women say to Chicana women? We grieve with youand we want ceremonies of reconciliation that link our goddesses andgods to each other, patterning new codices of forgiveness and triumph,sisters of the cornsilk and sisters ofyam as your comadre Cherrie Moragaput it. 79 We the basket weavers to dream a new pattern of ourknowing and loving that binds the permanent impermanence of ourfootprints in the sand.One: The Memory of Mojuba: A Spiritual Invocation to Remember 7<strong>Pedagogies</strong> of the Sacred:Making the Invisible TangibleFor more than six of my preteen years, I crossed the intersections ofMojuba in St. James during clandestine visits to friends or the morelegitimate attendance at the Catholic Church, St. Mary's, not knowingthat from Trinidad, Mojuba reached back to a lineage for which therewere no signs, no visible ones at least. "Meet me at Mojuba Crossroads:'No one could plead ignorance as the excuse for arriving late since everyoneknew where it was-Mojuba, not far from Bengal Street. There wasno apparent need to demarcate itself from the other streets from whichthe crossroad drew its name. Mojuba simply claimed the entire space ofthe intersection, and we crossed it over and over again without even ahint of knowing its secret or needing to know from whence it came. Ittook thirty years and another set of crossroads to point me to a pathstraight to a basement in the Bronx, New York, where, at a home thatassumed the bearings of a spiritual workplace, I learned the lineage ofMojuba in a commW1ity of practitioners-PuertorriqueftoI as, Cubanolas, Trinidadian, African American, Salvadorean, Brazilian-living an ancientmemory in a city overcrowded with errant spirits, teeming withyearning not easily satisfied in towering buildings or in slabs of concrete.286 CHAPTER 6
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