![]() ![]() "She trusted Harrington," Joseph-Weil says. They're calling it an "ethno-historical cantata." How can I sing her?'"Īlong with award-winning composer Benjamin Boone, a fellow Fresno State professor, she is working to put Ascencion Solorsano's oral history into a piece called Ascencion. "And there was something about her photo that just mesmerized me, that I suddenly said: 'I have to sing her. "I was so moved by it," Joseph-Weil says. ![]() She first learned about Ascencion Solorsano 20 years ago, when she saw a picture of her in the San Francisco Chronicle. Mezzo-soprano Helene Joseph-Weil is a music professor at Fresno State. ![]() Today, her grandson Joseph is 86, and he's sharing his own memories of Ascencion Solorsano with a different sort of translator: an opera singer. She was a famous herbal healer and the last known fluent speaker of Mutsun, the language of the Amah Mutsun tribe that lived near California's central coast. He'd come to record the oral history of Mondragon's dying grandmother, Ascencion Solorsano de Cervantes. ![]() The man was John Peabody Harrington, a linguist from the Smithsonian who spent four decades gathering notes on native languages spoken from Alaska to South America. "She felt it she had a premonition that he was coming to open the gates for our people and let the Caucasians know the Indian way, the history of our people, which nobody knew for a long time." "Grandma said she knew he was coming," Mondragon said. Joseph Mondragon was just 8 years old when a man with an olive-green soldier's coat came to live in his family's basement in Monterey, Calif. Ascencion Solorsano de Cervantes was the last known fluent speaker of the Mutsun language. ![]()
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