My suegra used to eat butterflies. “There were so many of them, you could grab dozens from the tree in one hand,” she tells me. She smiles, my wonderful suegra, mother of my husband. “We would take the wings off and fry the bodies. They were delicious. There were so many. We didn’t know any better.”

​

The monarchs knew. They no longer return. The ones that died in Santa María did not produce offspring; there were no future generations to pass through there. Over the decades the clouds of orange that flocked to my suegra’s village thinned out, and now there are none.

​

I think about this: about the polemics of eating what the world offers you; about foods that are forbidden, and why; about adaptation. I think about how, in a way, the monarchs are physically part of my suegra. She ingested them and they sustained her, carried her into womanhood. Similarly, they must form a small part of her son, a man I find so beautiful that I blush when I touch him. Is there a bit of butterfly in his blood, his eyebrow, the fibers of his hair? Atza is a child of the generations that nourished themselves with those tiny kings.

​

He and I go to a sanctuary in Estado de México at the onset of migration season. We’re too early, we’re told; the people who are in charge of watching over the sanctuary won’t open it to the public for another couple of weeks. This is to allow the butterflies to establish their colonies undisturbed by hordes of romping tourists. Though mildly disappointed, we settle for a hike up a steep hill, hoping to catch sight of one or two along the way.

​

On our hike, our guide tells us that people from the area used to think that the monarchswere the souls of the dead. The butterflies’ migration patterns often align precisely with the onset of November, which is when Día de Muertos is celebrated and when the deceased are thought to make their pilgrimage back to the land of the living. I try to imagine what it must have been like before there was a scientific explanation for this natural phenomenon; I imagine being greeted with thousands of butterflies at the same time year after year. It only makes sense that the explanation could be as marvelous as the idea that they are our ancestors coming back to us.

​

The name monarch, in fact, is a colonial one. Apparently, English settlers in North America associated the color of the butterflies with the nickname for King William III, or William of Orange. It figures, I think, that the British colonists would call the butterflies monarchs, which becomes monarcas in Spanish. They named these natural miracles after a symbol of power that represented death and destruction across North America, linguistically replacing the butterflies’ spiritual prehispanic significance with one representing imperialism.

​

But the prehispanic peoples had other names for them. There are many different interpretations of the butterflies, according to various legends across different languages and peoples—but the Mazahua and Purpécha peoples were the cultures that thought them to be ancestors. The name in Mazahua for the monarch butterfly is xepje, which translates to hijas del sol—or, in English, daughters of the sun.

​

My husband’s mother is Mazahua. Her parents spoke Mazahua language, as did her older siblings, and she spoke it a little as well. She teaches me a few words—the ones she remembers—and gives me a book in Mazahua with Spanish translations. For a long time, she explains, there was a sense of shame about Indigenous heritage; there was a widespread feeling that one needed to hide one’s language, to bury it with Spanish. Now, finally, that seems to be shifting ever so slightly—at least as far as my suegra has experienced. 

​

The Mazahua name for the butterflies, it turns out, is quite scientifically accurate. Though there are still mysteries as to how butterflies are able to emigrate the way they do, recently scientists have discovered that the sun is a crucial component for calibrating their internal compasses. Processing the positioning of the sun and its UV rays according to an internal clock that is calibrated via their antennae, they navigate my country of origin and make their way to Mexico. As Atza and I see one or two pass us on our hike, I think that they could have passed through Buffalo, where I’m from, on their way. They could have made exactly the same trip I did four years ago when I bought a one-way ticket to Mexico.

​

But they do it so much more remarkably, these daughters of the sun, whose hearts are the length of their bodies. I covet that heart, which is resilient in the face of change, which propels its seemingly impossible journey. I think that if I could eat them to absorb their resilience, I would; just as I would respect and protect them, rescue them and pay them homage. Perhaps, in a way, all of that is the same thing.

​

Atza and I take a moment to pause on our ascent. I look up into a sky so blue it makes me dizzy. I see one speck of orange. Then I spot another. And another.

​

“Mira,” I say to Atza, my jaw dropping. Suddenly, the butterflies that had been flying above us all along are made visible by our altitude. There are layers and layers of them, as low down as the treetops, stretching upward into the atmosphere. The higher we go, the more we see, until we reach a meadow at the crest of the hill. There must be thousands circulating above us, tiny flames blinking when the sun catches them. We’re dropping in on their celebration: it’s a riot of orange lighting up the sky.

 

I observe Atza as he observes them. “Es tan hermoso,” he says. I’m looking at him, my monarch man, descendant of the sun’s daughters, and I think sí, lo es.