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Taste for Trouble
Along with great Mexican fare, the late San Antonio restaurateur Mario Cantú served up political intrigue, philosophy, and predicaments.
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His sentence was probated, but that left him exposed when, in 1978, he appeared on television as part of a peasant uprising that Medrano led. Probation authorities scheduled a hearing and Mario fled to Paris. During his self-exile, public sympathy built for his defense. Archbishop Patrick Flores had spoken for him in a letter to the presiding judge, and Mario engaged leftist lawyer William Kuntsler of New York to prepare his defense. When he returned some fourteen months later, the judge sentenced him to a mere six months in a halfway house.
But during Mario's stay in Paris, Medrano was killed by Mexican pistoleros, and the Chicano movement headed down the road to becoming the tame lobby that it is today. Rebel Cantú was left without a cause. Within a year, he was enraptured by a scenario in which the United States—an imperialist power inside its own borders, in his view—was brought to its financial knees by the looming traffic in illegal drugs. "Cocaine is Latin America's atomic bomb," he told me.
Mario's observation, now being put to test by Colombian guerrillas, was critical to him in ways that his friends, me included, were too fearful to recognize. The plain truth was that Mario probably never gave up smuggling. If it had been heroin during the sixties, it had become marijuana during the seventies, and it became cocaine during the subsequent decade. A Colombian, he later told me, had come to San Antonio to recruit him for the trade, bringing with him two kilos of coke, a sample of his product line. The agreement, or maybe Mario's plan, was to extend the market to France. He returned to Paris, where he opened Mario's Papa Maya Restaurant, a place so hip that a French gastronomic society created the Golden Tortilla Award in order to bestow honor on a foreign cuisine. While in Paris this time, if Mario did not distribute cocaine, he consumed it—too much of it, a kilo during a single month, he confessed. The thirty-day rush melded the wires in his brain, though in a way consistent with his genius for imagining things. French mental health authorities pried him from the second-story room where he lived, but the always-daring Mario escaped from the asylum where they had put him away.
Back in the States, Mario opened forgettable restaurants under a variety of names: one in Austin, three in San Antonio, and another in New Jersey, where a daughter lived. All except the current Mario's failed in part because Mario had concocted "Cosmic Chicano Cuisine," a sort of cross between nouvelle and Mexican fare that was too far ahead of its time, and in part because none of his intimates could manage the addled mind that now squirmed inside his skull. Eschewing Karl Marx and the Magón brothers, precursors of the 1910 revolutionaries, Mario became a follower of the inscrutable Teilhard de Chardin, a controversial Jesuit theologian. He saw spiritual signs everywhere. Time and place were no longer exclusive in the physics that he pursued: Jesus had been crucified in Jerusalem, yes, but also on the site where the old Mario's had stood. When the pope visited Cuba, Mario had to make his way to Havana because the Holy Father had, of course, chosen the venue to meet with him.
Mario in his later years was convinced that there is a mystical connection between the names of things and things as God must know them. His model for this article of faith was naturally the true or divine origin of the term "Chicano." In one of our latter-day conversations, he reminded me that the term comes from Mexica, the language of the Aztecs, who referred to themselves as "mexicanos." Spanish speakers pronounce "mexicano" in the way that we all know, with a j or, in English, h sound, but the Mexica—remnants of whom still live and speak the language—pronounce the word in a way that Spanish, lacking a sh sound, cannot: "meh-she-cano." Mario seized upon the "sh-e-e-e."
"What is the first sound that a newborn child makes?" he asked in his always-rhetorical way.
"It cries," I muttered, knowing that since Mario was teaching, I somehow had to be wrong.
"No, crying is a sound induced by a doctor," he lectured. "The first sound that a child makes on its own is when it urinates, and when it urinates, what sound does it make? Sh-e-e-e-e," he said.
For Mario such speculation was only an opener. "And what sound is made," he continued, "when the planets circle around the sun?"
Mario had come to my former home in Dallas to tell me that the planets in their celestial orb sing the same sound that mortals hear in the faithful, untraduced, and original pronunciation of the word "Chicano." For Mario, being a Chicano, or Sh-e-e-cano, was to be a chord in the harmony of the universe. Even when his mind was soaring into such nonsense, Mario was establishing his role as a Mexican American visionary. The niche that he created for himself cannot be legitimately claimed by anyone else—because nobody ever conceived of his people's role in terms as grand, or grandiose, as he.
In the years since Mario went mad, I have often wondered if his fondness for me may have derived from his picture of the region as Mexican and American. By his standards, Texans had to know Mexico to know their own place in life. Just as, by hanging out in open-air markets in Oaxaca and Veracruz, he had learned the ancient secrets of Mexican cuisine, he expected other Texans to go to Mexico for apprenticeships in their pursuits. In Mario's mind, I suspect, I was an Anglo who had made the grade by formulating something of a binational perspective on Texas.
It was not that Mario, in all of his agitation for Chicano Power, was ever hostile to Anglos—far from it. He was hostile to what might be called American triumphalism. He believed that residents of the former Mexican territories of the Southwest should see themselves as heirs to Mexico, living on land that Mexican authorities had abandoned and gringo opportunists had mindlessly occupied.
The final breath of the era in which San Antonio was a Mexican city probably came half a dozen years ago, with the demise of the city's Centeno supermarkets, losers to the Anglo-run H-E-B. Mario commemorated the event with Eloy Centeno, the family patriarch; both men engaged in a short standoff with authorities, refusing to surrender a plot of land. They were descendants of the aboriginal inhabitants of Texas, they said, who could not legally be dispossessed of ancestral rights.
His last years were times of madness and trouble, though, as always, he was buoyed by optimism and outlandish schemes. Like most of his friends, I began avoiding him; several who could not became unwitting members of a new fraternity, composed of people who had called the police to get Mario out of here. His death came to me as a great and merciful relief, a deliverance of Mario—and me—from a relationship that had become a seance with regret. But even as I spoke a eulogy for him at San Antonio's dimly lit San Fernando Cathedral, he was not entirely gone. Mario's ideas and idiosyncrasies will haunt me and a few other old friends until our hearts too are as still as his today.
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