A Snake Falls to Earth

Content Warning: This section contains references to colonialism and the genocide of Indigenous Americans.

Nina Arroyo is visiting her dying great-great-grandmother, Rosita, in the hospital. There is a language barrier between Nina and Rosita: Nina speaks English and has a very rudimentary understanding of Spanish, while Rosita only speaks Lipan Apache and Spanish. Consequently, Nina relies on her phone’s translation app to speak with her great-great-grandmother. Rosita asks Nina if she would like to hear a “historia,” which Nina’s phone translates variably as “story” and “history.” In Nina’s mind, the two are separate concepts.

Rosita tells her story to Nina in Lipan Apache with a very rare Spanish phrase sprinkled in. Nina’s translation app, despite having a database of thousands of dialects, does not understand any Indigenous languages, resulting in a jumbled mess of translation that is illegible. Nina later asks for clarification, only for Rosita to say that she carries “sounds without the meaning” (12), unable to explain her historia further. At the end of her visit, Nina discovers a photo of Rosita from 1894, which shouldn’t be humanly possible; it would mean she is more than 150 years old. Rosita dies later that year, destroying any possibility of shedding light on the historia.