In a remote mountain village in Mexico, a researcher looking into the threatened culture and language of indigenous people receives a letter telling him that his family's homeplace is now lost. The news prompts him to realize the necessity of acting to preserve the heritage of everyday life in any setting. PNS commentator Jeff Biggers has just spent a year in northern Mexico; his writing has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Newsday and Bloomsbury among other publications.

CUSARARE, MEXICO -- We have finished weeding the knee-high corn fields, pulling crabgrass from the furrows we planted by hand. The parcels of land carved from this pine-rimmed hollow at 7,000 feet in the Sierra Madre are confined by rock walls and arroyos. While my neighbor heads for the weekly village meeting I return to our log cabin and re-read Uncle Richard's letter.

Our family homestead, down in Eagle Creek, southern Illinois, is gone. The old pond, the four plum trees, the family cabin, and the corn fields, are buried in a crater, 200 feet deep.

The old log cabin -- where my grandfather once carved out a window in a fit of despair -- finally surrendered to the coal mine, the same coal mine that took his lungs and left nuggets from a cave-in embedded in his head. The man was buried with part of the mine.

The company bought the rest of the land this summer and blasted away our family memories without a funeral. They numbered the logs of the cabin, disassembled it, and plan to reassemble it at a state park. "A part of our lives that only exists in our minds now," Uncle Richard wrote my mother, "will be completely erased when we die, as if it never existed."

I know very little about Eagle Creek. Sure, I know snippets of history, like lines from a bluegrass song, but I don't understand the hidden meanings and cadences of my grandparents' lives. I just learned that Uncle Henry and cousins Elmer and Dallas would often pack a small cardboard suitcase in the off-season and hit the road in search of work. Dallas, who had a peg-leg would stand behind the others so he would be considered fit for a job. The men would send back the few dollars they earned.

My mom told me this after I wrote her about the drought here in our Tarahumara village -- Cusarare, which translates into "the place of eagles." If the rains had not come, the men would have packed up and ambled down the road in search of work.

I probably know more about the Tarahumara than my own family, mainly because I've taken notes, got drunk at their corn beer fiestas, and worked alongside them in corn fields and forests -- things I never managed to do with my own kin.

My ancestors, largely landless Norsemen and displaced Scots and Ulstermen, settled in the backwash of frontier history, crossing the Missouri river into southern Illinois. In the prosperous late 1960s, we my parents repeated our family history, settling in the borderlands of Arizona and Mexico. Arizona was my generation's frontier -- not quite California, not quite Mexico, more western than southern, more invented than understood.

One summer we returned to Eagle Creek. We all huddled on the porch while Uncle Richard pointed out where one of his cousins had accidentally hanged himself, but survived, during a particularly intense game of cowboys and Indians. Then the men entered the cabin and ate first. Then the kids were summoned -- I remember picking at a plate of chicken hearts and gizzards, cornbread, fried okra, while the women chatted in the kitchen and waited for the final round of the meal.

This was probably in the mid-1970s. I was fascinated about the gender division -- and even more fascinated by stories of an aunt spitting tobacco into a spittoon.

From our cabin in Cusarare, I can see goats and cows corralled in the cemetery with its tequila bottle headstones and disheveled graves. I can hear a young woman slapping her wash on the rocks.

An old Tarahumara woman in her skirling traditional dress hobbles down the road, followed by boys chasing wooden balls and then the accompanying band of disinherited dogs.

We came to this remote village, to research the changes and loss in Tarahumara culture and language. In the end, I've learned about my own history and loss -- that there is some meaning in our family's existence, just as there is meaning in the existence of the Tarahumara.

The coal mine may have taken our land, but our heritage, like the memories and experiences that give meaning to my mother and Uncle Richard, will remain, even thrive, as long as I cultivate them in my own way and times. I believe this sets the course for my next journey; I need to return to southern Illinois and seek out "the speechless ones," as Camus wrote, whose lives tend to disappear, unless we take the time to listen to them.

I have been summoned by a little kid. The conjunto band in the village -- a three-string fiddler and his guitar-playing son -- has called for my banjo for the corn brew fiesta the people here throw for work parties, religious holidays and whenever there is occasion for a raucous hoe-down.

I pick a three-finger rhythm on dances, and strum along on the Mexican rancheras. After midnight with everyone drunk on corn beer we'll play that bluegrass standard, Molly and Tenderbrooks, for hours, as if we are down in Eagle Creek.