1. Julio Villegas
Narciso:
Hijo de Remedios
Child born of sand; heart of cinder, blood of earth; very spirit untouched by the acts of the
spiritless. Regardless of all language, both present and extinct, or the ones yet to be unearthed,
regardless of all diction and of all imaginable vocabulary that could be arranged and
manipulated to convey an idea, manifest an emotion, absolutely no words within any lexicon of
any linguistic form will find themselves significant and proper enough to paint upon this
intangible canvas the image, the soul, the presence, the cultural artifact of Narciso Rodriguez,
my grandfather.
To attempt to construct a chronicle or a pseudo­memoir of the man has been an entity which
itself has become an oppressing weight, in terms of output, in terms of my own capacity to
create a structure from a man who counted both his demons and his days, a man who sacrificed
all that he loved and all that he had known to leave his only home, to make less dismal the
future of his only family. It is inevitable that within the human condition the heart will take
precedence over the paths of the mind, as the mind will come to pacify the rages of the heart,
but to have been raised by the man whose heart has been lacerated continuously, barbed with
all pains, yet carries his memories and his scars as if they were his cross, for this reason I feel
that I can never paint you a true image of Narciso, but if there is any trait more shared and
recognized between the both of us, it is the absolute stubbornness that arises from the
execution of our convictions; that the world we reside in is not a predefined existence that we
must accept. The worlds that we choose to live in are the worlds that we accept. A child of the
earth and the sea, Narciso knew that the liberation of all liberations was the liberation of the
mind.
The man was born amongst seven other siblings in Remedios, Cuba, the child of peasants, a
family of peasants, un guajiro. Perhaps his analytical frugality stems from his father, the great
family stinge, Rosario Rodriguez, or perhaps it developed after the Revolution, when the rations
could barely have fed a family of four, but each month he managed to have fed a family of six,
an accomplishment richer than any jewel or any garment. Out of eight siblings, he was the only
one to attend a school. He was the only one to attend primary, secondary, and post­secondary
in his family of guajiros. He worked as an accountant throughout the 40s, the 50s, the 60s,
forever solidifying his approaches to spending and saving, separating necessity from impulse,
meaningful purpose from temporary happiness. Though he was of peasant's blood, he had the
spirit of an admiral, the mind of a labyrinth, the empathy of a beggar, the heart of all oceans. His
foundations always remained, infinitely apathetic towards the destructions and the strife that
may have impacted the monuments that rested above.

2. The significance of saving all that he possibly could, but still managing to give his children
commendable childhoods, far better than from what he had, was an act deeply harbored in his
ties and friendships with his own siblings during childhood. I only have one sibling, yet, with
everything that I both am and am not, I value her life with a love that neither a God nor a Devil
could influence or take away from me, a love that transcends all ends and forms new
beginnings. I could have never begun any work, walked any path, uttered a reverberated word,
had it not been for the solace from the world and its fragments that was raised above me by the
hands and memories that Narciso possessed. He surpassed any definition of father or
grandfather, for he was both to me, but to limit all that he is with only two titles would not place
upon him, or at least myself, the complete embodiment of all that he is and is not. My
grandfather serves as the unwavering, unfaltering cultural artifact on which all veins and all
paths of soul and mind trace from my own existence back towards. To lose one's roots: it is to
become the very tree that collapses back onto the earth after only the first of storms have come
to pass.