Hermosillo, 1998

Fred Allebach

University of Sonora

Hermosillo, Mexico

8-98

I have moved to Hermosillo, Mexico and am living with the Navarro family, Francisco (Pancho) and Luz Maria (Lucy) are the parents and Aquiles and Marco are the two sons, of late teen and early twenties vintage. I met Pancho and Lucy during the Quaker service projects I participated in here in Sonora, in the small village of Trigo Moreno about an hour from Yécora, near the border with Chihuahua. Pancho and Lucy generously offered to let me live at their house to get me started with this Mexzican adventure.

I have enrolled as a student at the University of Sonora, (UniSon).

9-8-98

I’m back to the stone age of communication, no computer, tired thumb, can’t save it, can’t word process it, it just is what is it, as Nino Bubic once uttered in his beginning English.

It has been hot as shit, humid, insufferable, insupportable, relentless heat. I had the Texas heat wave for two and a half months, a couple of weeks of the normal 100+ Tucson heat, which is equal to anything from the Texas “heat wave”,  and now just a dose of normal, semitropical desert blastfurnace Mexican heat which regularly gets over 110.  Here I am sweating it out in parts of  the older Sonoran Desert, whereupon plant communities have succeeded and receeded, advanced and declined in broad strokes during the most recent ice ages. Here I am in the Sierra foothills, in the semitropical thornforest where many  cactus and leguminous shrubs and trees find their origin. Here I am baking and trying to make the best of it. I sweat a lot and you can imagine that the daily oven-like conditions are less than enjoyable.

9-16

El Grito de Dolores was last night, Mexican Independence Day. Grito de Dolores means the shout from the town of Dolores, which kicked off the war for independence from Spain. You would never see so many Americans out on a holiday, never. The central plaza of Hermosillo, the Plaza Zaragoza was absolutely packed, people everywhere! The central plaza or zócalo is a tradition inherited from Spain, with the Catholic church on one side and the government palace on the other. Every town has one, generally with big trees, lots of greenery and many benches and places to sit. A modern addition to the area of the zócalo is the depósito or expendio, or beer and liquor store. The Mexicans have a much higher level of sociability, friendliness and public oriented consciousness than the general gringo population further north and this is to an extent reflected by the public spaces which exist to accomodate the people when they need to gather for fiestas and national or regional celebrations. 

It is really fantastic that we are all the same species yet  language separates us with a gulf of almost complete misunderstanding. Our facial expressions and bodily gestures are more or less universal. As Homo sapiens we inherit the smile and the frown and the shrug, the look of confusion, the look of ecstacy and maybe even the famous painter expression of  “scraping face”. Verbal language elaborates upon the foundation of gestures and expressions. First we start with interjections like ouch!, ah!, oh! oops! and then I guess that all graduated to full blown language. Now I am forcing myself to realign my perceptive aparatus according to the rules of another code, another language, another ettiquette, another religion, another history, the whole nine yards. I hear them talking and expressing themselves fully and I know I can do the same in English, yet there is much work ahead for me to exercise the same fluency with Spanish that I have in English. 

It’s cool. I’m reading speaking and writing all in Spanish, researching ancient stories and accounts of the conquest, reading about the original species of Mexican dogs, the explorations of Coronado, Cabeza de Vaca and the anthropology and impact of the Jesuit missionaries in the Pimería Alta, (northern parts of Sonora and southern parts of Arizona). I’m not saying I understand it all but the most expedient way for me is to jump off the deep end and so far that is what I have done.

9-17

I have grammar class every day at 8:AM and everyday the 17 year old son, Aquiles spends a good hour in the bathroom primping and preening. I am dyting to get in the bathroom just for a few minutes, just to get to school on time and he is in there with the hair drier, the gel, the insane consumption of toilet paper, lotions, fancy ass razors  and all sorts of products I figured were reserved exclusively for women. The son of a bitch just watches TV all the time anyway so I don’t understand why he has to look so sharp for that. I have never seen anyone watch so much TV, all fucking day and half the night. He and Marco, his brother are world class channel surfers, sitting there literally all weekend long flipping through the channels, faces numb, minds blank.  Friends come over to visit and they all continue to sit around the TV, very odd. They only talk during the commercials. Apparently a hefty amount of TV per day is common, not only among the Navarros but among Hermosillenses and Mexicans in general as well, according to my informants here at the University of Sonora.

Many of the dandy boys here at the university spend much time in the bathroom. I can tell because they look just like Aquiles. There is generally a much greater emphasis on appearance here among the younger age set and the stereotype is that Americans are very sloppy dressers. I have heard that from Europeans as well. Seeing this from  inside of my own cultural bubble I can’t help but see as foolish the amount of time spent on appearances when the larger significances of life are all on the inside. These guys go to great trouble to appear casual, like they haven’t worked hard at it. Shit I have never seen any guy spend so much time in the bathroom. I feel I am up against a cultural wall. When I am tempted to judge the merely different as fucked up, then that is cultural bias.  I recall phrases like “beauty is only skin deep”, things being “more apparent than real” and that the calling of someone as being superficial means that they are shallow and  lacking depth and so,according to my logic, the emphasis on appearance then all adds up to a surface oriented quest lacking in heart and  and any real significance.

9-19

The famous underwear incident: I was up early and waiting for Aquiles to get out of the bathroom. I was sitting at the kitchen table in my underwear, as I had noticed the man of the house casually wearing underwear and it was also very early and typically, Aquiles and I were the only ones up. I figured there was no harm. The kitten started meowing loudly outside the front door and I took it upon myself to give it some milk and a piece of baloney. When I opened the front door the kitten ran in and I grabbed it and stepped out, closing the door behind me which thereby accidentally locked me out. So there I am at 6:30 AM on the front porch in my underwear with no key. (Previously I had needed to piss out front under the tree because Aquiles was in the bathroom so long). I had to ring the bell and Pancho woke up and came and  opened the door to let me in.

So, I put the milk away and proceeded to continue to wait for the bathroom and Pancho came back out and told me that it was not cool to be wearing underwear outside or in the house as other people might think that I was getting it on with his wife, Lucy. I asked my friend Roberto at school about all of this and he was shaking his head, only the man of the house is permitted to wear underwear around the house and it is a major gaff to have been seen outside with my underwear on. Pancho caught a mildly bad atttitude over the whole affair and for a couple of weeks he would come home from work, barely say hello and retire immediately to his room for a night of TV and isolation. I feared that this might be a replay of my experience in Mexico City where my host family went off the deep end about me borrowing a chess set that was on their son’s desk. They applied the cold treatment for over a week for what appeared to me to be an entirely innocent thing and then refused to drive me to the bus station with all my stuff. A nice sour ending to a generally fun trip to the interior of Mexico in 1981.

11-1

I move into my very own second floor apartment for the staggering price of $70.00 per month. The property is owned by pancho and lucy and they used to live downstairs before they converted it all to three apartmentrs.

11-16

Arriving back from my tri-weekly English tutoring session with a beautiful, exotic, friendly, outgoing and playful 20 year old Korean girl, I put on my Garcia/ Grisman tape and was immediately struck by a wave of nostalgia. “...Oh Shenandoah I love your daughter, away, you rolling river...away... I’m bound away, across the wild Missouri...”

For what do I pine? Luscious young women? My fading youth? The good old USA and all that is familiar? The tape has a melancholoy tone. Garcia is dead and he is on the tape singing about death and dying, there is a certain poignancy to these moments which is fading fast in front of the assault of Mexican street noise, loud VW engines, motorcycles with no mufflers, polka beat music with cascading attacks of trumpets, kids yelling, dogs barking, mothers screaming and  bacon smoke drifting through the window from the local hot dog vendor on the corner.

Pancho told me the story of a piece of nuclear powered hospital equipment that was donated by a US hospital to a hospital in Tijuana. No one in Mexico knew how to run it and it sat around for years and as time went by the current director sold it to a metal scrapper who melted it down and in combination with other scrap, made radioactice re-bar out of it. The re-bar went into the construction of many houses and the stock was never completely tracked down after it became known that nuclear waste had been smelted down and redistributed  to the general population. Pancho said there are many things like that in Mexico and I would have to concur that the level of expertise is far below that of the US. There exists the same sort of infrastructure only the way it is put together is far less complete and less thorough in Mexico. At times it can appear that everything, literally everything is half-ass, broken or dysfunctional in some critical way. An example: there are many, many street signs missing, so it is many times, impossible to find a store or house, people routinely run red lights and pull off wildly audacious driving moves, they don´t use blinkers and the streets are riddled with giant potholes that can easily destroy a tire or front end. This is a part of  Mexican life which takes some getting used to.

A striking example is with the university education. The professors are paid $3.00 per hour and while each of my teachers is sharp and knows their material quite well, the level of challenge presented in the class in the form of homework or research assignments, essays and tests is way below my experience in the USA. Who is going to want to correct tons of fucking homework for $3.00 an hour. No professor gives any homework. My Spanish classes are far easier than I expected and rather than expecting discipline and challenge to be delivered to me through the class, I have to generate intra-curricular learning on my own . Certainly it helps to be in Mexico to learn Spanish but for pity’s sake, the classes are easier that Pima College or high school.

In general Mexico has a system that generates enough energy to get by but no more, the effort matches the reward promised, which isn’t much. People can’t afford plumbers, electricians, carpenters, mechanics, masons, etc, so they all do it themselves and as a result, almost every sink and appliance and construction job is fucked up in one way or another. Toilet seats are especially difficult as it appears that all of them are always all falling off. The majority of toilets will not accept any paper so you must toss your wad in a can off to the side and always carry your own paper because there is never any in any public bathroom. You learn to get used to not expecting things to work right and concomitantly, how to rig and fix stuff to serve for the moment. If you can’t reel in the expectations you are bound to get frustrated pretty quick. I could give more examples along this line but what I have said  serves to illustrate the point.

The flip side of this is that here at the UniSon, a lot of services are free that in the US you would get nickel and dimed to death for. The system here is much friendlier and people are generous and giving rather than always trying to suck a dollar off you like in the US. At any US school they charge for everything and the slugs and office workers are frequently cold and formal. Here, people in the computer lab give me free paper, I can take old, valuable library books to the copy store with no hassle, the people in the poster shop give me any one I want, I had a text book re-bound in hardback for $2.00, I had my car tape deck fixed for thirty cents, my slave cylinder repaired for five bucks. The computer techs at a local shop fixed a bad disk for me for free, saving a valuable document. The over-all attitude is much less usurious. If you only have three pesos, they will still sell you a hotdog or a quesadilla with all the trimmings. In the US, money talks and bullshit walks.

More upsides are to be found in cultural, social and personal dimensions. The people are extremely friendly, open, giving and that stands in stark contrast to the USA where in general people are more individually rather than socially oriented. This translates well at many levels. People here turn out for all kinds of fiestas here, they look forward to participating, expect to participate. In the US it is so much more turned inward, with less interaction, less socializing, each family unit existing as a kind of island or country onto itself. Here is is very easy to get inivted into the houses of total strangers for coffee or dinner. If you admire something they have and say you like it, they give it to you.

I have to say in this respect that I find Mexican society much more satisfying socially because in the US, it appears my friends and associates are so turned into themselves that they have nothing to say anymore. The individual trajectory of the USA is one achieved at the expense of society in general, at the expense of sense of community. Everyone for themself allows for the maximum individual freedom but after a while results in a more profound isolation than you find in Mexico, where all the onus is on how to sew the threads together rather than how to avoid one’s neighbors and associates and follow one’s own path at all costs.

Of course this is all very general but there are condensation points of accuracy here which ring clear and true. The US people I find the most interesting now are younger folk who find themselves on the front lines of questioning and exploration. This is probably, in all liklihood, because I find myself unmarried and without the material to turn around and forget about everything else in life except my spouse, kids and bills. I exist in a different arena than my age set and therefore, I cannot share stories of changing dypers and my associates cannot share the types of challenges I have staked out as being significant. In fact, I am even more of an anomaly in Mexico where it is practically unheard of and unbelievable to be 41 and unmarried or if unmarried, with no children! Most people here find it amazing that I am here to learn Spanish and that I am only a student rather than a business man or professor and they inevitably ask, “are you married?”  I guess I have to call a spade a spade. I am fucking alone, in a foreign country, feeling twinges nostalgia and  isolation and really, that is about it.

11-17

I have noticed a number of contradictions and inconsistencies in the general behavior here. For one, people are generally extremely polite in any one-on-one context. No one will ever walk in front of you or leave the room without saying “con permiso” or excuse me. On the other hand there is a strong current of me first  and the rest can go to hell type of attitude too. This is more at an unconscious level. Many Mexicans have little consideration for the sensibilties of others, for example, driving, shopping and waiting on line are all manifested as aggressive behavior where only a fool gives some one else a break. People in the neighborhood stay up all night talking loudly, laughing and drinking beer in the street or they drench the air with thick BBQ smoke for hours making it impossible to sleep. You try to be considerate and you will get walked all over. This is similar to the cultural differences between “community black” and general mainstream whites in the USA. Whites consider that others are responsible for respecting their sensibilties and therefore, others can be responsible for how they feel. For example, the general view unfolds something like “you made me feel angry”, “you violated my sensibilites” rather than a concept wherein I conceive of myself as being responsible for the maintenance and unfolding of my mental state. I see myself here as up against subtle cultural differences. I notice, observe, take note and try to understand what is making things tick.

The driving behavior is not really that different than the USA where people become faceless objects when inside cars and subject to all sorts of rude treatment that would never happen on the street or on a face to face level. However, road rage is not such a big deal here and the driving is more like Chicago where everybody just knows that being super -aggressive is the style and it is nothing to really get bent out of shape by. I see road rage as being a phenomena growing in cities that have recently achieved levels of gridlock and where previously the driving was a bit easier and more placid. In Hermosillo you don’t get the road rage because there are a lot less cars, the bus system is very good and the city is concentrated so you can get where you want to go in 10 or 15 minutes as compared to Tucson, where the traffic is now unbelievably fucked up and where it used to be much better, more tolerable and possible to get somewhere in a decent amount of time. The bus system in Tucson is horrible as well and not really an option for anyone who has a car. I can drive from Tucson to Nogales or from Sonoma to San Francisco in the same amount of time it takes to drive from the east to west sides of Tucson. That can breed some road rage as in many cases the streets are filled with fucking snowbirds and retirees from Michigan who don’t know how to or won’t drive fast so the rest of us homeboys can get somewhere in less than 45 minutes!

Another level of contradiction here is the apparent dedication to tradtion on the surface while underneath exists a level of anything goes as long as I can get away with it. The surface reality of the family being central to all is undermined by the tradition of the “casa chica” and men keeping more than one woman in separate dwellings. This is congruent with the rampant corruption in politics and government and as such, is not really suprising. If somebody feels they can get away with something in the clear, they will do it. It is not a question of morals or what is right but of situationally, what someone can successfully pull off.  I guess you could say that the same exists in the US where you have all this family, Republican bullshit about traditional values but the reality is of 60% divorce rate, affairs and broken homes. There is plenty of situational corruption and pathos in the USA to talk about and  I am here, however, concentrating on Mexico.

In Sonora, doubly, there is a kind of frontier mentality where resources, nature and life in general has a kind of quality of  “we are the conquerors and we can take and do whatever we want to this land or to these people.” The frontier ethic can be seen in the ascendancy of cattle ranching. Ranching is highly respected and there is practically nothing of the chic US environmental movement. Environmentalism here consists of being against CYTRAR, a toxic waste dump very close to Hermosillo, owned by a Spaniard but taking primarily US toxic waste. “We aren’t going to be the dumping ground of the USA!” goes the refrain and with good reason but turn around and cattle ranching, overgrazing and introduced plants have fucked up the desert ecosystems way worse than in Arizona and New Mexico. The people here are way against CYTRAR yet Hermosillo has no toxic household waste recycling program of it’s own and all the insecticides and thinners and local toxics just go to the dump here to contaminate the ground and water just the same as CYTRAR. Go figure, it is always easier to rally against something than to be for something.

The frontier mentality does not mesh with environmental chic. When you have major economic necessity you can’t afford the luxury of saving resources for tomorrow, you need them today. Add this to a history of me first corruption and a pitifully bad economy and what you get is a practically anything goes environment where the law is that there is no law. How can the government or any group work for the over-all benefit of Mexican society, specifically in Sonora, when the cards are all stacked against any kind of organized, principled stance in favor of husbanding resources for the future? With individuals and families just scraping to get by, the notion of all working together for a common good may seem laughable. If you look at this through the lens of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, people cannot realize the higher levels of their humanity if their basic needs of food and shelter are not being met. Environmentalism in the US is a luxury of the well to do and the middle class, who ironically, achieve their status by profiting from the exploitation of other people and the natural environments of other countries, read Mexico! Where does our cheap gasoline come from? Where do our cheap winter vegetables come from?

11-23

I am back from my third visit to San Carlos to work on a painting job there. The reason that Phyliss is having me is that apparently the Mexican workforce is unable to perfom work to her satisfaction. From the remodeling work I have seen going on at her house, she is pretty much on the mark. She had six brand new custom made doors put in the house and only one of them was sort of ready to paint, the rest had to be removed by yours truly and planed down significantly, the frames chiseld out here and there and the hinges shimmed and reshimmed so that they would close properly and have enough space around the edges to be painted. Only a few of the doors fit correctly into the frames because the carpenter neglected to level things up and went on the assumption that the door openeings were plumb, which they were not. The previous paint jobs show a level of sloppiness and disregard for the finished look that I find incomprehensible. I brought Marco down to help me and after explaining to him multiple times that a clean, straight look was what we were after and that sloppy work was unaccepatable and that dripping and tracking paint on the tile floor was absolutely forbidden, he proceeded to do all of those things, time after time. He said “you can’t get all the Mexican out of me in one day!”

So, Phyliss can pay a Mexican $40.00 a week for a full week’s work but they can’t give her what she wants and so I am there making more than that in three hours. The disregard for detail is really incredible. She has a very expensive sliding glass door that her boys got paint all over, on the screens too. The tile porch and stairs have has cement slopped all around so that to remove it will be a significant job in itself. The new wrought iron screen door arrived looking like my friend’s ten year old daughter painted it and with so many huge dings and gashes in it that Phyliss was furious. The masonry work on the new wall out back had the cap bricks put on upside down and the joints had mortar all out onto the bricks. How can any one see a big fancy house with lots of nice furniture and art and fancy cars and foo-foo women and figure that this kind of work will pass inspection? After having explained to them what the goal is and how things should look, the fellas just don’t seem to get it.

(Phyliss has now proceeded to recapitualte her pattern with me of proposing that painting is fundamentally easy and that any one can do it and that I am charging her too much and therefore she has suspended the work of yours truly. Good enough. )  

This all fits right in with the very real sensation at times that nothing in Mexico works correctly, stuff is always dysfunctional in one way or another. Some days you wake up and the toilet comes apart, the water faucets come off, the refrigerator sounds louder than the stereo and the dogs begin to bark and your car has been hit in the night by a drunk and there are people outside your class hooting and hollering and everyone in class is talking at the same time and you just wonder what kind of insane asylum this place is anyway? You spend an hour crafting a nifty e-mail to your friends and the computer is then unable to reconnect and you lose the whole message. The computers cannot print out your document despite trying five or six times. It is as if there is no sense of quality or if there is, it has been thrown out in front of the equally disarming reality of corruption and the average wage being three dollare per day. That must breed a kind of cynicism and apathy towards life which is really foreign to my own personal experience. To get to a space where I can just blithely accept that this is the way it is, I have a lot of  adapting and forgetting to do.

The beach in San Carlos is great but the rest is for the birds, pure ( “puro” ) gringo, totally tourist oriented, only a superficial flavor of Mexico. It is a fantasy land of diversion and play, Club Med, discos, snorkeling and the Mexicans are but ill paid servants for their rich  and pale masters. One of my professors here says that tourism is a false economy because the only people who benefit are the ones who are not working. The economy does not benefit the workers as they make just barely enough to get by. Maybe this contains some of the expalanation of why things get so fucked up, with no proper reward, who is going to go an extra mile? I have heard also the the government has mandated that the maquiladora industry in general pay the workers only a bit more than the $3.00 per day, so that the government itself is complicit in prostituting it’s own people in front of the greedy capitalists to the north. The people in San Carlos can easily afford to pay the workers more but they insist on paying as little as possible. Another very ugly process is watching rich tourists try and bargain for a dollar with poor Mexicans. This is the height of the definition of “ugly American”.

Again, an interesting facet to the Mexican jewel is that people are at times blithely ignorant of any effect they are having on others. It does not appear to be intentional. There is perhaps an element of selfishness which grows out of having limited resources and whoever does not assert their needs and desires is the one who does not get a good cut of meat or whatever it is people are all trying to get. That is my hypothesis and I see this general behavior translating across other avenues of life where it is perhaps inappropriate. A great example is the way people park at the university here, rather than pull in at a right angle, people pull in any which way they happen to arrive and therefore, when parking is at a premium, there is an incredible amount of wasted space. It is frustrating to be trying to get to class and see some guy parked at a 45 degree angle and taking up two spaces. He is not doing it on purpose, he is unconscious of the ripples from his behavior. A corollary is that with all the funny angled spots that then become available, people squeeze in so tight that a guy can’t even get into his car! People routinely park in no parking areas with no apparent consequence as everyday, every no parking area fills up first as it is closer to the classes. Driving in itself is an exercise in aggressive behavior where no quarter should ever be given. You have to work within the logic of the system, as in not keeping with the flow of the traffic puts you in a more vulnerable position. If your behavior cannot be predicted than you stand a greater chance of cracking up. Driving in Mexico is not for the faint of heart and it is a game played by other rules.

11-25

There is a peculiar custom manifested by a kiss on the cheek. Women offer their cheeks to men and women with whom they are good friends or with whom they have some confidence. I have yet to delve into the true meaning and significance of this as it os fairly uncommon in the US.

You can’t help but notice that people are very diligent about sweeping the streets in front of their houses and also about mopping their porches and inside floors. The neighborhoods might be run-down looking but people are concerned about keeping up the appearance and cleanliness of their particular patch of territory. Mothers walk their young children to school always holding their hands and keeping them close, partly due, I’m sure, to the preponderence of crazy drivers who can appear out of nowhere speeding down small, narrow residential streets. At night, due to the lack of street lights and people who drive with their bright lights on, it is practically impossible to see people crossing the street. It is fucking dangerous!

In my neighborhood there are some well known drunks who have been making noise and bothering people for years. One night a particular fellow was so drunk he could barely stand up and the local kids were having great sport with him by running up and shoving him over and tossing rocks at him. Pancho told me a story about how one time he threatened them with a baseball bat and that cooled thingsa for a few weeks but then they were back to their same old tricks.

11-28

I went to Mexicali with my friend Roberto this weekend and the trip was well worth the trouble. Roberto is a mathematics professor here who I tutor in English and who tutors me in Spanish. Roberto had a conference and I offered to drive him over there. The UniSon math department paid for the whole trip, everything, gas, food and  lodging and through a great fudging of expense account behavior on Roberto’s part, I was able to grub down on a T-bone steak and  tasty machaca burros and sleep in a fancy hotel and have premium gas pumped into my tank. There went the old Toyota, blasting down the road at 140 km per hour out of a swirling haze of dust and grime.  ¡Vamos a Mexicali!

I was sort of expecting it all to be like the Mexicali Blues, dusty streets and 14 year old girls who might whisper in my ear “go on my friend do anything you choose”.  The dusty streets part was right on as all along the border from San Luis Río Colorado to Mexicali was a mess of pollution, smoke and thick layers of dust on everything. They were burning the cotton stubble and the overall impression was just one of a very dirty and unappealing place, kind of like purgatory might be.

In Mexicali we ran into a couple of snafus. First of all the time was different and that laid on some initial confusion. Then, Roberto cooked up the plan that he would go to the conference and I would call his aunt to tell her which hotel I was at and then he would find it, pick up his stuff, go stay with his aunt and then know how to find me in the morning. Well, Aunty Elise had a cell phone which was beyond the service area of the phones I had access to, so I called plan B, Berenice, Roberto’s niece and told her all the contact information. The problem was, Roberto never figured out that he should call Berenice because he himself was able to contact Aunty Elise and figured there was nothing wrong with her phone. So, the next morning I am waiting and waiting and calling Berenice. I parked my car in front of the hotel on the chance that Roberto would see it and then, just as I was getting ready to blow out of town because Berenice told me that Roberto had left Elise’s and had a ride back to Sonora with someone else, Roberto and a bunch of Mexican math professors appeared. At the last minute, out of sheer luck in a very large city, Roberto saw my car.  Mexicali is nothing to write home about, nothing like the song, basically it is huge, dirty and dusty and full of cars so that waiting at traffic lights is a comparable experience to Tucson, Phoenix or LA. 

The drive back was fantastic, twelve hours and hundreds of miles of windy, rainy, wildly beautiful desert. The transition between the stark, creosote bush (gobernadora) dominated lower Colorado River valley into dunes and sand plastered up against the sides of stark and lonely mountains which have suffered and baked through countless and relentlessly hot summers, is the first of a series of ecosysytem changes which are subtle but sure, over hours and hours of Highway 2. Gradually there are stands of small statured saguaros which fade in and out of more gobernadora. Then stretches of ironwood/ palo verde forests appear which are gradually interlaced with larger saguaros, organ pipe and senita  until you have a full blown cactus desert. The Pinacate region shows lots of volcanic rock and barren, lunar type terrain which was actually used for the training of the Apollo missions to the moon.

Driving out of San Luis Río Colorado towards the mountains, the blowing sand cast the sky with muted tinges of reddish haze. With the ascendance of the inorganic forces all around, we could have been driving to somewhere in the outer solar system  Sand dunes and ragged, rocky mountains all set off by a perfectly moody day with a sky filled with dark clouds and winds tossing the sand up to create images as if off the side of  Jupiter or Saturn. Imaginary gas storms from the furnace of hell in interplanetary space. Two cars to Mars, one Toyota to Saturn! I stopped many times to get out and admire the strange, dramatic, moody and impressively panoramic and beautiful scenery of my first trip through the great Altar Desert.

There are a number of military and customs checkpoints rife with young tough looking soldiers with machine guns and bad attitudes. Some narcotraficantes killed 30 soldiers and police not too long ago so now they are really hyped up and are presenting major stike force at every check point. We waited for 45 minutes at the first check point and had ample time to notice dudes with even bigger machine guns hidden behind bulwarks of sandbags. Roberto’s analysis of these folks was summed up in one word: pendejos, which roughly translates to assholes. The first checkpoint is just south of Santa Ana and there they did a fairly thorough search of my car. They always go for the rear panels and while there is nothing in there like drugs or pistols, the continued probing by the police has pulled up the edges of these said panels, making it more inviting for them every time to pry the panels back a little more and create the appearnace that I have been trying to hide stuff there.

At night, inbetween Caborca and Santa Ana, we encountered the worst section of road, filled with potholes, no paint to priovide any reference and loaded with crazed bus and truck drivers blasting down the road out of a haze of torturous urgency. I’m driving 70 mph and then there are cattle which appear as if out of nowhere, “fuck, did you see that cow right next to us?” I was immediately taken by the similarites with Mad Max and The Road Warrior. All we needed was some big grappling hooks and dog collar balck studded jackets. There was a surreal quality to it all amplified by the weariness of already haven driven 9 hours and a kind of settled Mexican fatalism, well here we are, handle it.

12-7

An interesting note, my friend who works for the PJE, Policía Judicial del Estado, (State Police) has the sanctioned use of a stolen Chevrolet truck from the USA.  In order for him to use it personally, as to go out to dinner, he has a different license plate to put on so people won’t know the police are using “official” vehicles for personal use.

Other various and sundry observations: generally the public restrooms are pitifully dirty and none have any toilet paper and as a rule, there is a waste basket on the side to take the used toilet paper and the toilet seat is always falling off. Why, you may ask, are things this way? The dirtiness can be explained simply by that if no one is being paid to clean the toilet, then no one does it. There is no toilet paper because of the general prevalence of poverty, people will steal it immediately and so therefore, the intrepid traveler always carries enough to do the job. The toilets generally do not accept excrement and toilet paper at the same time without clogging, so it is better to avoid the uncomfort and embarrasment of flooding the bathroom with the remains of last nights dinner by tossing the used paper in the waste basket instead of the toilet. The seat is always falling off because through hard use, they break and it is darn near impossible to find the same brand or to find any standard sizes, so you get one screw in and the rest just hangs on off to the side. Frequently you will find toilets left running which have flooded the whole area and all manner of disgusting suprises waiting inside the stalls. Beware!

Many people survive on providing free services which people then feel obligated to tip for. Baggers in supermarkets are kids who are not receiving any pay and make whatever from the tips they get. In supermarket or any other parking lots there are always guys with pseudo-uniforms who watch your car to prevent it from being stolen (cars do get stolen out of the Wal-Mart parking lot and in other places, right under people’s noses) and also blow whistles and direct yopu when it is safe to back out or where there is an available space. These guys live on tips as no one else is paying them. At the gas station if the man checks your tire pressure and washes the window, he is expecting a tip. At many stop lights there are kids and adults who are waiting to jump on your windshield and wash it quickly before you have a chance to wave them off, they will squirt on the water and start scrubbing even if the window is perfectly clean and a gringo is perfect bait because usually they don’t have the savvy to wave them off in time and they aren’t watching for the stealth approach from the rear. There is practically zero begging at the stop lights as in Tucson where it seems every corner has a bum asking for money and not willing to even try to wash your windshield! You don’t see one sign like “will work for food, not one. One begging strategy is to have a written text which they pass to you which explains their situation and if they can get you to read it, then you probably give them a peso, which is equivalent to a dime.

Punctuality is an interesting cross-cultural theme. Being really late or not even showing up is quite common. If people want to actually have people arrive at 9:PM, they will put out the word that the party starts at 7:30 or 8:PM. In the university classes it is common for many students to arrive 20 to 30 minutes late and the teacher herself is frequently 15 minutes late. However, when it is time to finish things up, Mexicans are equally punctual as their northern neighbors. Their sense of punctuality is perfect to finish but not to begin. There is a frase “más vale tarde que nunca” which means better late than never and in the case of my Spanish classes, this is the best it’s going to get.  I feel like a sucker for showing up on time but i can’t seem to get past the idea that if the class or the conference or the lecture is advertised to start at a particular hour, then that is when it is supposed to begin. Many Mexicans do not like the casual attitude towards tardiness. They don’t like it butt it is the way it is. My sociology professor, who is from Chile, arrives and starts lecturing on the hour, wothout fail.

Among the well-educated  there is a great bitterness against the US. These folks are generally unabashed and flat out Marxists who have no qualms about reducing all relations in todays world as stemming from  a source with the ugly, exploitive capitalist,  hog-like, profit maximizing at the expense of human rights and dignity neighbor on the other side of the border. If you see the kind of poverty that Mexico has got going and realize that the average wage is only $3.00 per day and that these same people are getting reamed for clothes, gas, food and many other things that are even more expensive than in the US, then you can begin to see why people are mad. They have good reason. Companies from the US come running to Mexico so they don’t have to pay any benefits or a decent wage and so they can pollute without any messy environmental laws and who is getting it up the ass? The Mexican government can be seen as a willing five dollar whore for the US as they permit all this exploitation on their own people rather than stand up and protest and say “hey! you are cheating us out of any chance to advance as a nation and for our people to earn a decent living while the rich capitalist pigs continue to get even richer while the majority of Mexican people live in poverty, this is fundamentally unfair and to clothe this all in some fancy rhetoric about democracy and freedom is just a whole lot of fucking bullshit!”

12-7

What beats listening to smoking old Grateful Dead early 70s jams while watching your neighbor Marissa’s dogs fuck in the yard? Well of course it would be shagging the Mari-meistress herself and that will certainly grow to be a pertinent question which needs to be asked, does she feel in need of the big one? Besides that continual undercurrent of sexuality which pervades life and which here is made worse by the outstanding beauty of Mexican women, the days are over-all amazingly dynamic and fun. Yes, I am living in Mexico now, with communicative abilities growing stronger by the day. I can go to the central market, which fairly exudes an atmosphere of incredibly intimate and rustic, involved, daily living and I can sidle up to the counter top and order a comida corrida and rub elbos with the homeboys and  not even bat an eye. I have grown accostumed enough so that I am not a wide-eyed tourist. They are easy to spot, sitting ducks for unscrupulous people who want to try and pass the wrong change and make a few pesos. I know the money now and while at first it was quite confusing the intial strangeness has worn off of many things and I find myself more or less at ease.

I am at times bothered by my neighbor’s seeming total lack of consideration.There are a couple of families who routinely drink beer all night in the street in front of my place and Marissa herself has a dog which has such an obnoxious bark and she lets it out at 6:30 AM  and it proceeds to bark and bark and bark to try and get back in the house and she just leaves it out there probably because the dog routinely pisses on the floor and then I get pissed off and blast some stereo at her which I fear may have damaged my chances for a casual shag.

Returning to a persistent theme, that of the fact that apparently nothing works correctly and that there is always some sort of problem, take for example: every time I go to Wal-Mart to shop for food there is AlWAYS a major snafu with the check out person and people end up waiting 20 or 30 minutes just to get through the line. They just can’t seem to master the technology and attention to detail that it takes organizationally throughout the whole store, to ensure that the operation is functional. The announcing system frequently has big problems so all the shoppers are listeneing to massive static and interruptions punctated by XMAS songs in Spanish. At the computer lab here if you try to print a document without fail there will be some problem and it will end up taking you a few days just to get a copy of your work. The printers are old, inkjet jobs that cannot produce a master print good enough to make copies from so therefore I have to go to an internet café or a computer store and pay way more to get a good quality printed text. And then, the fucking machines at the university are infected with viruses, like this is a house of prostitution and your hard earned work all of a sudden is infected. Oh, no hay problema.....

12-9

Many advertisements show people who look just like gringos when the bulk of Mexicans do not have blond hair. Lucy told me that many people will assume that someone with a foreign sounding name is more qualified than an equivalent Mexican, so that if there is a choice between doctors, Doctor Allebach must be better.

When you go shopping for some clothing or anything that has Spanish written on it, forget it. Almost all the merchandise is squarely from the US. The students here are all wearing clothes which boldly advertise American brands and sports teams. You see big fancy jackts with YANKEES plastered all over the back, the professors hate those damn yankees and the kids love ‘em. The capitalism is way out in front in the popular culture.  Here I am dealing with fucking fa la la la in Spanish at all the stores and in the street. There is a goodly amount of Christmas hype. People who really cannot afford it feel compelled to purchase gifts and they get overextended on easily obtained credit cards.  The system is like one giant parasite designed to indiscriminantly suck money off of each and any. The professor’s ranting and raving cannot reel in the fascination with consumer culture and it cannot change the differences in levels of competency, in general, between the US and Mexico.

Here in the computer lab the staff  assume I must be someone important so they give me free paper. University staff are always rweally friendly and helpful but I notice that the Mexican student in the line in front or behind me does not get the same treatment. Generally I believe that gringos receive breaks that average Mexicans don’t get, the police don’t shake down tourists and gringos so much because that intimidates the flow of tourist money and the powers that be must be directing the cops to lay off the tourists. You hear everyday about Mexicans being shaken down by the police and problems they have passing their US purchased goods through customs and how they have to pay more in mordidas (little bites/ bribes) than the actual goods cost.

One very funny gaff in the translation of English to Spanish occurred when Pancho was listening to a song about how “she can be a woman to me...”.  He listened to a few choruses and looking puzzled asked if they were singing “Chicken be a woman to me?”  Spanish speakers have problems with the ch and sh sounds, leveling them all off the ch and not being able to really hear the difference. It is a hard one for them, especially since one of the most expressive words in English, shit, demands a proper pronunciation. Chit just does’t get it.

While I’m at it, Roberto held forth in the car on the way back from Mexicali on the many different types of pendejos, which generally translates as assholes.  His reaction to anyone who does anything stupid is “pendejo”.  A fascinating aspect of Spanish is that you can sum up in one word almost all bodily characteristics, for example: tits are chichis and a girl with big tits is a chichona, a girl with big lips is trompuda, butt cheeks are nalgas and a girl with a big ass is a nalgazana, a person with a big head is a cabezón from cabeza which means head, someone with big ears is an orejón from orejas or ears, some with buck teeth is a conejo or rabbit and someone with a long face is caballo or horse. It goes on and on and is funny as shit, we laugh about this!

Another interesting fact, with the palm facing up and all the fingers together, thumb between the other four and all fingers pointing up, this means to be afraid, the fingers all together signifying a tight asshole. The  hand signal for drinking beer is well known and well employed.

12-14

Let’s talk politics. Nobody believes one word that any politician says. Anything any politician says is automatically classified as bullshit and lies (mentiras). The federal government has slick TV ads proclaiming as to how Mexico is actually growing more than any country in the world, that Mexico is doing really well when all facts from the man on the street are to the contrary.  The people are absolutuely cynical concerning politics as things have been so bad for so long and this has been marked by an endless stream of meaningless commentary and promises on the part of the government.

The  government has had to deal with falling oil prices and other wordly factors such as corruption and siphoning off of funds, which have diminished federal and state income and therefore, gasoline and electric taxeshave gone up 15%, telephone has gone up 32%, the price of bread has gone up 12% and the final insult, the price of tortillas has gone up more than the increase in the minimum wage to 31 pesos a day. This kind of inflation has become customary, people are somewhat resigned to things being this way.

I was in Mexico City in 1982 when the initial peso crisis hit and this has kicked off an inflationary vortex which has devalued the peso immensely. People who had 1000s now have 100s. The actual amount of value which has been lost is measured in large rows of zeros and new money has had to be issued to simplify the math. When you compare this kind of action to the pervasive luxury in the US, Europe, Japan, etcetera you can see that all this free-market global economy hype is just a lot of bullshit designed to keep the rich on top and the poor groveling on the bottom. Someone who may conceive of themself to be poor in the US is really nowhere close to being what it means to be poor in Mexico. Maybe the Mexicans can deflect the poverty better by banding together, closing ranks with family and relatives abd pooling resources while in the US, the individual is left to flounder alone on the shores of poverty. In spite of the poverty, people in general are unfailingly friendly, generous, nice and polite.

There is a strong culture of hucksterism and hucksters in trucks, on bicycles and on foot are always passing through the neighborhoods with bread, tortillas, vegetables, fruit, shrimp, fish, chicken and whatever else you can imagine, brooms, clothing, you name it, they bring it by. Some of the more advanced rigs have loudspeaker systems to announce what is coming and other guys just have bicycle horns or yell.

Everybody at the UniSon thinks I am a teacher and they all call me “maestro”.  As Lucy said, if you are white and foreign, you must be more competent and qualified.

My neighbor Marissa’s dog is a pitiful looking little thing named Tota, with matted dread locks all over and big nasty ones on it’s face and head. It looks like the fucking elephant man. It has an undershot jaw and a nasty high pitched bark which is unfailingly obnoxious. It shits right where I always step in it and it wakes me up in the morning barking trying to get back in Mari’s apartment. I had to ask her to please let the dog back in instead of just letting it bark for 45 minutes straight. Many Mexicans appear to be totally oblivious to noise. Many neighbors have obnoxious dogs and it is like so what, who cares, it is a non-issue for them. If there dog is permitted to run free and attacks everyone who walks bu, so what, that’s the way it goes.

Tota is like an ugly little rat-like monstrosity which today decided that it would start trying to climb the steps and come in my apartment, one, two, three, four times in a row and it keptm on coming back after i brought it back downstairs as the little shit can climb up but not down. A pitiful thing which then pissed on my floor when I yelled at it to leave. Marissa leaves it in the yard all day alone and foo-foo dogs need more attention than that. I tossed old sea shells at it and intimidated it to try and impress upon its hideous little mind that I did not want it around my apartment but one of the endearing characteristics of dogs is that they keep coming back, no matter how much abuse you heap upon them. This abomination of a creature, this dirty little monstrosity molested me only for a little affection in a cruel world. I rejected it flat out and as the cold of the night setteld in and the dog slunk off to some hidden corner of the back yard, I felt compelled to show it some mercy. I came to the realization that here I am, alone in the XMAS season and how ironic to be rejecting another creatures desire for companionship. Here at my feet is the content and ill-kept Tota, just like a good dog should. The only problem with showing mercy to needy individuals is that you then become their keeper.

Here are some select quotes from Cardinal Edward Cassidy: “cuando nuestros sociedades se vuelvan más plurales y democráticas, el respecto a la autoridad parece disminuir.”  Translation: when our societies become more plural and democratic, the respect for authority diminishes.  “El reto más grande en el umbral del tercer milenio cristiano constituye la busqueda de modos e instrumentos para convencer a las personas que nuestra palabra es la verdad.” Translation: Our biggest challenge for the third millenium is to look for ways to convince people that our word is the truth.  The Catholic world view is so refreshingly naive and simplistic, all you do is obey, accept that you are a sinner and do what they tell you, and then everything will be alright. I just can’t buy it “Cards”.

12-18

The semester is ending today and it is kind of bittersweet because my little bubble of reality here is about to pop, leaving me open to the cold winds of the unknown future. I made some good friends and some are leaving for good, back to other countries. Interestingly, nobody knows when classes will start for the next semester, every professor and department has a different answer. There is the possibility for me to teach an advanced English conversation course the next semester and that could be fun if it all works out. In order to work in Mexcio I have to have my original university diploma translated into Spanish by a licensed translator, produce a letter showing somebody wants to hire me, show receipts for rent and utilities, show my passport and pay $140.00. 

The cars in Mexico have a lot of character. It is rare to see one with any age that is not dented, beat up or ragged looking. The older cars are really whipped looking with fenders hanging off, no suspension, one bald tire and one good one, unmatched  doors and hoods, leaning sideways and windows tinted so dark you can´t see any one inside. Many cars and trucks are festooned with dingle balls and plastic jesuses on the dashboards so that the inside has sort of the effect of a shrine. I have a Virgin of Guadalupe (the patron saint of Mexico) and a Jesus pendant in my car as I figure a guy can use all the protection he can get.