ABSTRACT

When modern Coahuiltecans, descendents of Native Americans who lived in southern Texas and northern Mexico before the arrival of the Spanish, mention in song or ritual the name Yanaguana, they are calling from ancestral memory a story linking them to the springs at the headwaters of the San Antonio River. In the words of Keith H. Basso, author of Wisdom Sits in Places, they also engage in place-making:

Long before the advent of literacy, to say nothing of “history” as an academic discipline, places served humankind as durable symbols of distant events and as indispensable aids for remembering and imagining them-and this convenient arrangement, ancient but not outmoded, is with us still today. If place-making is a way of constructing the past, a venerable means of doing human history, it is also a way of constructing social traditions and, in the process, personal and social identities. We are, in a sense, the place-worlds we imagine. (7)

As the name Yanaguana (up-fl owing water of the spirit) spread to the songs of other native groups, sometimes memory of the location was lost, but recent retellings have given new life to the myth, and thus to the identity that the myth engenders (Pérez).