And I remember how abuela or as I called her then Mama used to hang the clean linen out over the grass between the wires. She would call me taco and tell me that the crows would steal off with my girlfriend like in the stories the old man used to tell for a few pesos. But all of that is passed now.

The old man was killed by the commandos and my abuela died enroute to the mainland. Today I sit out on the porch in Guadelaja gazing over the great rocks like boulders and tell my children about the great colors and the great spirit of the old country. It was a country with its own history. It received its name after gaining independence from the Pagodans and establishing its own Supreme Pavilion after the years of the great shuffling around. A story from this time says that the people, having had a country of their own forced upon them by a crumbling empire no longer concerned with a few hundred square miles of hinterland desert coveted by no one and containing no natural resources for the wicked imperialists to exploit, held a great council fire and it was decided that the only thing possessed by our country was the country itself. A name and a festering scab on the map was all we had. The elders decided that we would sell the name of the country in exchange for some rice, prophylactics, and tequila.

When the children ask me about the old country, rich feelings wash over me in thick waves and my whole body becomes infused with a fresh warmth like during those first rains after the long summer harvest. I wrap these friendly feelings around myself and fall into a revery.

But there was no harvest. There was never rain. Tropicanistan is a desert country and so we could only dream. They say dreaming in Tropicanistan is like going on a long tequila spree: the escape only makes you more stationary when you wake up. And so it was until one day a man in a traje knocked on our door.

"Hello," he said in a strange language, "Let me show you some of my machines."

While many in our nation greeted the machines with almost slavish reverence, there were still many others who did not wish to believe in the man's strange tools. "This man," Ivan said to me one day, "is lying." Ivan was right, but the man's machines captivated many people like new gods. They brought life to the barren desert land with their devilish efficiency and demonic market-driven alchemy. The man in the suit called his machines Spanners and said that they came from an international industrial product cartel called Proklub. Only the Spanners could save our tiny, desolate nation. We should be very grateful.

The elders were suspicious, but the young people saw the Spanners as a way out of Tropicanistan. "Tropicanistan," they thought, "can only be saved in my absence. Let the others save her, for I hear the jingling of metal coins in the distance!" And so the young left to go make Spanners themselves and the rest either died in the mines, joined the Yellow Army, sold their sappy urine to medicine men from far away, or emigrated to other shores.

It's strange, for those few of us here in Mexico, to hear Spanish spoken in the squares. It's stange to see the sombreros and burritos in the markets. The words fiesta and siesta sound like variations of our nations's playful nonsense rhymes for children. Only the precious memories of our hard life at home give us comfort. A soft breeze makes us think of our perished amigos, lost forever to the agonies of time; oranges conjure up ruddy desert sunsets; crows become symbols of our blurry, ancient religion; and a few errant syllables from overheard converstaion summon the shadows of lyric poetry written in our sonorous, nearly forgotten native lingua.

The people in Mexico have never heard of our country or its demise. When I tell them that they will soon meet the smooth, purring metal of Spanners, they just laugh and say, "No, amigo, my nation will never fall to such inhuman machinary." These words make me laugh. They don't understand what I have seen. They don't understand how I survived after my nation dissolved like so much sand through a thousand little fingers.

So now I sit on my front porch and gaze into the rich, well-wrought evening. I tell my children stories about camellos and sopa. "When the Spanners come to this country, I will be ready," I say, "with the stregnth of the soul of all of the nations and peoples from the great spirits of the lands of the ancient gods of the Democratic People's Kingdom of the Sovereign Nation of Tropicanistan whose symbol is the bright moon and shimmering stars of the fatherland desert."

But this gives me little solace.