And, in the final story of the section, "Tepeyac," the theme of alienation appears in a number of ways. The narrator, as a child, is visiting here, meaning it is not her place (although she tries to make it hers by naming every person and landmark she passes, counting the very steps between her grandparents' gate and the front door). She is about to return to her country, but that is not hers either, for she calls it "that borrowed country" — as her grandfather no doubt sees it. When she comes back, years later, she will find that nothing is left but her memories, as unreal as the painted backdrops used by souvenir photographers in the square (as she remembers them). The only real thing, perhaps the spirit of the district as it existed/exists on the evening she remembers, will be unnamed and unnamable, and her grandfather will have taken it with him (she says) to his "stone bed."
The irony of this speaker's displacement would function no matter where the story were set, but it is especially sharp here, for Tepeyac is one of the holy centers of ancient and modern Mexican culture, a place sacred to the Mother-Goddess Tonantzin and also to the Virgin of Guadalupe, who appeared miraculously to the Indian peasant Juan Diego there. The narrator's grandfather, she says, is the only person who does not believe in this miracle. Later, as an adult returning to Tepeyac, the granddaughter of an alienated Mexican, she will be twice alienated, a member neither of her own culture nor of his. What she will have, however, will be her memories, precise and exact — or perhaps imprecise and inexact — as memories can be, after everything they are based upon has faded into the past.
