Yecora, Holy Week 1999

3/30/99 Tuesday

Departed from Hermosillo at 7:AM and arrived in Yécora at noon, after a torturous drive through twisty Sierra mountain roads littered with rocks, potholes, broken down cars and trucks in the middle of the road, log trucks, buses and semis taking their half out of the middle and scaring a guy half to death. The road from Hermosillo, Highway 16 to Chihuahua City, is more or less straight to Tecoripa and soon thereafter is almost entirely curves.

Indolfo (Lupeto) was sleeping when I arrived and the first news was that Hilario was dead, at 42 years old. He was out hunting turkey with Pedrito, Carlitos, Chiri and Julio and was drunk on bacanora. He fell off a large rock, smashed his face and had a heart attack. The AFSC group left Trigo on Friday, 3/26 and I saw Hilario for the last time later that day in the plaza of Yécora. There was a church service for him in Yécora Sunday and he was buried in Trigo on Monday.

Lupeto and I ate some beans and tortillas and went out and got a cold six (seex) of Modelo Especial and had packed a few away when Pedrito, Chiri and Silvia arrived from Trigo Moreno. They were all looking very downcast and their behavior and evasive, furtive looks fed my suspicion that they had killed Hilario, as he was not especially well liked as the foreman for el Dan, the gringo rancher and as the mayor or comisario of Trigo. The local police also suspected the guys of foul play, especially since Chiri had blood on his hands and scratch marks, from killing a turkey.

By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken, for dust you are and to dust you will return. Genesis 3:6:19

Lupeto told me that the night Hilario died, robbers came down into Trigo Moreno and broke into his house, taking many tools and possessions while the widow, Guadalupe and the baby and two young girls cowered in the back of the house. Other houses in Trigo were robbed as well. (It turned out later that the person who robbed the house was Manuel, one of my favorite kids in Trigo, he is 14 years old and was sent to jail in Hermosillo.)

We all went out and loaded some five bales of hay into Chiri´s truck and he and Silvia headed back to Trigo while Pedrito, Lupeto and I cruised to a small restaurant in somebodies house to eat some type of fish soup called caguamanta. Peter Franken, a University of Arizona astronomy guy died from hepatitis C, two months after eating shellfish in Mexico. Restaurant comes from the verb restaurar, or to restore. Wtach out! The question concerning fish is always, “is it fresh?” and invariably the answer is always yes. What proprietor will ever say  “oh, this fish is two weeks old”? During our meal, Pedrito said he knew an 18 year old girl, real good looking, chichona, trompuda y nalgona, (big tits, big lips and big ass) who went for $50.00 pesos, or $5.00, and we all agreed that would be a hell of bargain.

After finishing our meal we cruised again the dusty streets of Yécora until we arrived at a cantina. The floor was filled with sawdust at five inches thick and the bar was a wall of men dressed in typical Sierra vaquero garb, jeans, pointed boots, fancy belt with large buckle, all with knives encased in customized leather cases, cowboy style jackets and big sombreros. The bartender was called “Apache” and claimed to be the last Apache in Sonora. Off to one side were the more hard core vaqueros and on the other were the more well to do and well scrubbed strangers in town for the fiesta of the Semana Santa, or Holy Week, Easter. Some had small gatorade bottles filled with bacanora, a kind of tequila made from whatever regional agave is available. Here in Yécora, it is made from lechugilla agave. Farther north it is made from agave bacanora. The classical tequila is made from agaves which grow in and around the town of Tequila, México, much farther south. Bacanora made from lechugilla has a fruity, fresh taste.

We stood around and shot the breeze and not soon after I was offered cocaine and marijuana, which I had to repeatedly turn down as I had no trust in strangers nor the desire to have drug related trouble of the Mexican variety. There was a guy (Antonio) from the Mexican equivalent of the Forest Service, with some other hanger-oners, thoroughly plastered, and periodically they headed out back to snort up in the bathroom while the pungent odor of marijuana wafted back through the cantina. I inquired of Antonio as to the presence of jaguars in the Sierra and he told me that yes indeed they were around. Being the only gringo in town, I was the object of much curiosity and not a little the recipient of efforts to practice English, usually with unintelligible pronunciation and terrible grammar. The accent of Sierra Spanish makes it practically unintelligible to me and when they try to speak English, I can´t understand a thing. The typical Sierra  conversation centers around a limited number of topics, local gossip, the weather, farm animals, the status of employment, how drunk one got the other day and girls, muchachas.

After an hour or so in the cantina we took our leave to cruise some more. Cruising and consuming drugs and alcohol while looking for girls is the main activity in town. Around and around the plaza they go, past the police station, past yards and broken down adobe buildings out of which peers the occasional cow or burro, through the ever-present dust, past horses, chickens, wrecked cars, old wagons, out to the cemetery to pass water, down to the bridge to toot up and back around again. At midnight we found ourselves walking around the plaza and pissing behind the mission church, built in the sixteen hundreds, as the bells rang, conjuring up centuries of catholic tradition and contrasting mightily with our indulgence of the appetites and passions and our fallen, sinning state. The 18 year old girl turned out to be more talk than reality but she did provide hours worth of conversation and vivid imaginings.

On one side of the plaza is a group of vendors and also a hot dog stand. Mexican hot dogs are quite good and entirely unlike the American variety. They are wrapped in bacon and fried until crisp and well done, then they are placed in a very agreeable, large chewy roll and topped with some ten to fifteen different condiments. Pedrito ate four and later on, in the early morning, he felt the effects, plus the caguamanta, two different types of medicine and a large bottle of orange juice, as we were awakened by hearing him wretch horribly in Lupeto´s bathroom, so much so that they took him to the doctora at 3:AM. Pedrito has some illness from which he has been sick for years. I don’t think he is even 2o years old. It is common for folks of whatever sex, to all sleep in the same bed and Pedrito and Lupeto shacked up together in a small bed, the only one in the house.

It is curious that drinking and driving and drinking in public and tossing the cans wherever and whenever is entirely accepted. Lupeto said as much regarding littering, that if it has no use, toss it. It was amazing for me to see all this be happening directly in front of the police, with them not batting an eye. At the following nights dance the police were all sneaking beers, keeping a lookout for their superiors, they did the old sneak off to the shadows where you could see then snorting up, smoking weed, drinking beer and bacanora and urinating. The higher up police had hookers coming and going out of the main office, good looking young things making out with gray haired, pistol packing state police, girls coming and going. One fellow told me that in the whole scheme of intoxication, it is the police who arrive there first.

All the local police are dressed in regular clothes, with a pistol or two stuck in their belts, of which they are extremely proud, and covered partially by their jackets. I couldn’t help but wonder what if, after so many beers and drugs, that should they need to actually intervene in an altercation, would the possibility of a shooting be higher? Apparently Yécora is a fairly violent place and many police chiefs have taken up residence in the camposanto (graveyard). In Hermosillo and much of México, the police exist as a chain of fish, all shaking down the ones of lesser status. You regularly see film on TV of police taking bribes and people, with their faces shielded, complaining, yet there exists a kind of fatalism that this is the way it is, ni modo, it can´t be helped.

Yécora is just like an old western movie set, all dusty streets and beat up facades of ancient adobe buildings, livestock everywhere, horses tied in front of cantinas, roosters and chickens running across the streets, large barns filled with feed and farm implements and general stores shelved with simple implements, fresh meat, eggs, cheese and sacks of beans and rice. Off in the distance are large pastures broken up by groves of pine and juniper. The Yécora River runs through the middle of the valley,  surrounded by stunning vistas of the mountainous Sierra Madre Occidental and the Mesa del Campanero, a state bio-reserve. The overall atmosphere is as if you might see Clint Eastwood himself appear from around a corner with an old cigar, rifle and wrinkled scowl, with an appropriately cryptic one liner which would cause one to ponder the brevity of life.

Mesa del Camapanero is not like a bio-reserve in the US. You can see that it has been and is currently under heavy use. People seem to be using the land for logging, hunting, agriculture, etcetera and the only way it is special is with the name.

4/2

Yesterday people started to arrive by the droves, from all parts and in the early afternoon out came los judeos (the Jews). In other places los judeos are known as los fariseos or Pharisees. Their role in the Holy Week is to roam the town causing trouble and hassling one and all. In popular Christian tradition, Christ was betrayed by Judas, one of the 12 disciples, and turned over to the Sanhedrin, a Jewish judicial counsel partially made up of Pharisees. Christians have come to villify the Jews in general, identifying them with evil and with Satan, for the part they played in the judgement and death of Christ. The Pharisees went on to become what is normative Judaism today. Interestingly, in the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, it can be seen that the early Christians were seeking to twist politically the facts of history by blaming more the Jews then Pontius Pilate and the Romans. The early Christians were concerned about being persecuted by the Romans and sought to downplay Roman culpability in the death of Christ by vilifying primarily, the Jews.

To the Catholics, los judeos represent all that is evil and misguided. They dress with hideous homemade masks in addition to all manner of grotesque, Halloween style rubber headdress. Their clothes consist of chaps, dresses, sacks, branches, shirts stuffed with hay and they carry whips, switches, rubber hoses, lassos and are taunted by crowds of boys, who are correspondingly chased. The children all display a high level of captivation by los judeos. Kids pop up from around a corner with looks of fear and anticipation, yelling “judeos!”, at once to taunt them and to announce to their comrades that there is trouble afoot.

The afternoon was marked by a massive driving around town of everyone in their cars and trucks. In the past you could see that it would have been all horses and mules and wagons filled with families. Now the family is sitting all around the back of a pick up truck, seeing and being seen. Everyone is drinking and the streets become littered with red and white Tecate and Modelo cans. One time on the road from Yécora to Hermosillo, we counted an average of ten Tecate cans per mile. The road is dangerous anyway and even more so because half the guys driving it are probably drunk.

We returned to the house and Adele, Lupeto´s wife, was making dinner, at around 7:30 PM, beans with red chile mixed in, potatoes and chorizo and another dish of rice, green chiles and garlic, all served with freshly made tortillas, made new for every meal. Lupeto sold some land to el Dan and bought a house in Yécora, for $12,000.00, so that his 14 year old son, Jesus, could go to junior high school, as the school in Trigo only goes up to the sixth grade. Lupeto and Adele cannot read and many of the adults and kids are illiterate.

When we went to Trigo on Wednesday, in my trusty Toyota, for me to visit Hilario´s grave and pay my final respects, we stayed many hours at Victor and Pina´s house, up on a hill above the cemetery. May he have eternal rest. We could see Hilario´s freshly decorated grave at which had been a band and all the people mourning and ministered by a motorcycle riding, brown robed Franciscan padre.

Pina was making empanadas in the kitchen and served us up a bean soup with coffee. Tene was washing clothes by hand out back, rubbing them back and forth inside an old wheelbarrow half filled with hardened cement, polished smooth after years of washing. There were lots of children running and playing. My favorites in Trigo are Pina´s kids, Miguel, Alberto and Olga. Pina is a beautiful young woman who has another 14 year old son, Manuel, who lives with Tene and Wencho. Pina is pregnant now with her fifth child. You see this beautiful face and hair and graceful, friendly manner and when she smiles, you cannot but notice that her teeth are all rotten. When I first met her four years ago, she was shy to smile but now, with confidence, she gives me a broad smile, with her beautiful face framing a set of half broken, decaying teeth. Almost all the men my age have either no teeth and dentures or hideous grins of rotten stumps stained brown by the smoke of Delicados cigarettes.

Back in Yécora, after dinner Lupeto and I returned to the plaza and at about nine the band started up and people began to dance. The band was some 15 pieces, all brass and wind and two drums. Los judeos were the first to ask the girls to dance. They danced well. The music is all polka. The dancing takes the form of the man, with his right arm around the woman´s waist and the their left arms joined and held partially in the air, with a kind of two-step, with the man directing the woman´s right foot with his left foot and his right thigh placed firmly into the woman´s crotch, the right feet follow and around and around they go, with dervishes, rocking back and forth while a large crowd of families looks on. Groups of single girls and boys and men in cowboy hats linger around the periphery, until, bashfully at first, the girls are asked to dance and soon the whole plaza and dance floor under the ramada is a riot of motion and sound. Los judeos whirl by, close with a pretty dark eyed beauty, they have on big multi-colored conical hats and with their lassos and masks, dresses and garb swinging, are intermingled amongst the rest of the crowd.

Farther away from the dance floor and ramada are groups of men drinking beer and bacanora. Among the vendors stalls are carnival style games of chance, to throw weighted and crooked balls at bottles and monkey dolls. The vendors are selling clothes, almost all of which are American brands. It is practically impossible to find anything uniquely Mexican for sale. Where there is little tourism, as in Yécora, there just isn´t much in the way of craftswork or baubles. Mexicans firmly believe that all American products are of much higher quality. That is what they want. Anything American is highly coveted.

The fiesta has some curious contradictions. Firstly it is all about public participation. Getting out in public and socializing is most important. Overtly, it celebrates the passion of Christ and has a religious pretext. Covertly it is centered in a highly charged sexuality and debauchery. The two elements stand in contrast just as does the arrangement of the public space of the plaza. Every plaza in Mexico, Spain and the rest of South America, has the same layout, an inheritance of Roman city planning. On one side of the plaza is the church. Usually opposite is the government palace. In the middle are many benches and plantings, and sometimes a gondola,  which all invite the people to come out and meet. Off to the other sides are stores and shops. Thus you have contrasted the sacred and the profane, the world and the divine. In the morning you go to mass and cross yourself, sprinkle a little holy water, get down on your knees and pray and in the afternoon you go out and booze it up and try to seduce a pretty girl.

The overall atmosphere, with the rural and rustic architecture, prevalent livestock, charming mountain vistas, public drinking, corrupt and drugged police, public drug use, the undercurrent of religious ceremony, los judeos, the cruising trucks, the bevies of pretty girls, tantalizing, with revealing clothes, tight jeans, breasts heaving, is all a mass of purpose and contradiction.

On the whole the people are quite poor. They are peasants. However, they have a dignity and integrity which rises above the material. The lifestyle is massively different from that to which I am accustomed. Yet I am accepted and honored. For Lupeto to have his own personal gringo to cruise around with is a momentary treat to be enjoyed and he takes many opportunities to explain things to me and to note points of interest.

This morning Adele held forth on the millennium and how all the things said in the Bible are coming to pass and that the devil is alive and well, as evidenced by the many serious problems in Mexican society. The drought, of four years, is explained as the work of Satan. With no rain they won´t be able to plant, won´t be able to eat, this is all, to her an unfolding of the word of God, leading up to an apocalyptic end where the faithful will be saved and the wicked damned for all eternity.

She proceeded to make up a batch of wheat tortillas, which we had with fried potatoes and eggs and coffee, with an orange to top it all off. We will go out at noon to witness the re-enactment of Christ bearing the cross and then to mass later on. There will be another dance and again too on Saturday, all culminating with the dynamite blasting of a large figure of Judas and los judeos burning their masks and figures of their patron saints and asking to be pardoned. It is interesting that Christianity, a variation on Judaism, started out as monotheistic, contrasting with the polytheistic Greco-Roman paganism. But with Mexican Catholicism, there is a whole-hog cult of saints, so many of which it appears entirely pagan. If you call a Mexican Catholic on this, they will hem and haw about how after all there is only one God and they are not praying to the saints as if they were gods, just God´s helpers and messengers. The saints can be seen as a sure polytheistic element, perhaps stemming from the overall Mexican mix of Indian religion and nature worship with the religion of the conquerors.

Late in the morning, Lupeto and I took a walk out to the camposanto and he showed me the graves of his parents. Mexican cemeteries are festooned with all kinds of bright colored things, candles, images of saints, the Virgin of Guadalupe, (the patron saint of Mexico), Jesus, all wrapped in plastic and surrounded by wreaths, crackling and rustling in the wind. As usual, there is trash everywhere and many of the graves are badly deteriorated. We saw a fresh excavation, a large hole waiting to be filled for someone´s final rest. And they of strong faith, while mourning, know that the deceased is now closer to God. Oh death, where is thy sting? Oh grave, where is thy victory?

At the afternoon mass, the deceased lay in a coffin up front with the family all standing around. On the dais was a statue of Christ on the cross and another of Mary Magdalene standing nearby striking  a placating posture. In a movie about the crucifiction we saw this morning, the Pharisees were depicted as taunting, ugly, self satisfied people, “if you are the son of God, why don´t you come down from the cross?”, while the Romans were depicted as just basically cruel functionaries. As the mass wore on, los judeos were outside stirring up a racket, they can only speak through a rosary and the noises they make are strange and unintelligible. Again, the profane laps at the edges of the church as the tide might advance upon a large sea stack, never to be banished, that is, until the day of final reckoning, when the oceans of sin will boil off leaving the church to stand alone, once and for all free of worldly distractions. In the end the priest gave a few words of solemn assurance  and the coffin was born into the back of a pick up truck, followed by the family, walking and crying, with a large procession of trucks and cars, to the sepulcher.

Out in the plaza people were carrying on with the popular activities of drinking and driving around. The police were getting after it early as we got a snatch of one concealing a six pack under his coat and stealing off to the parking lot behind the station. One of Lupeto´s sons, Arnulfo, said again that the police are always the first ones to partake during a fiesta.

A few points worthy of note. Every meal is prepared by the women but they don´t eat until all the others have finished. As we eat, they are making and toasting the tortillas on the stove, pulling one off after another and laying them piping hot on the table for us to consume. The stoves are frequently made of 50 gallon drums. The surface is first wiped clean with a damp rag and the tortillas laid on and flipped with bare hands. The woman have some tough hands. The women are solicitous during mealtime, watching and doing everything they can to ensure that the rest are served to the best of their ability. They make sure you have had enough by continually asking if you want more and sometimes piling it on you plate without even asking.

The manner of raising children is entirely different. American middle class children are fairly pampered and indulged; in comparison, Mexican kids are dearly loved but they must always defer to the adults and do not whine and carry on like American kids should they not get their way. In the presence of adults the kids are reserved and it is rare to see a tantrum or any wanton misbehavior that American kids are well known for pulling off. Should a kid get out of line, the belt comes off quickly. Mexican kids are granted a huge amount of independence and their activities are not monitored closely by adults. They are sent to the store, sent to the woodpile and serve the needs of the house. They must always give up their seat to any one of greater age. Contrast this to the way American children are treated, as if their mental state was the center of the universe and all they need do is push the correct parental buttons to get what they want. Mexican kids play for hours with rocks, sticks and leaves, making up all manner of games. They do just fine without boatloads of bright plastic toys. Later on in life, parents accept whatever path the child wants to take, it is their choice. The whole concept of how life unfolds is different.

Here, Adele´s kitchen is an out room with no door in the frame and a cabinet built into one wall with wide slats open to the wind. It is cold and breezy and we huddle around the stove making small talk and watching the new twist she puts on cooking the beans. We eat beans almost all the time, sometimes just plain beans and tortillas, with a little salt. Day after day of beans and tortillas. They are actually quite good. There is no refrigerator or cabinets. The floor is strewn with trash which is periodically swept out and burnt, plastic, cans and all, in corner of the back yard. The back yard has a table and trash is everywhere. Lupeto´s family seems to be unconcerned with trash. Other families have yards and properties very well organized and clean. All the clothes are washed by hand over a rubbing stone built up into a small sink. The only running water comes from a spigot in the back yard. For drinking water, a pail is filled and placed on the table, with an old margerine container set nearby which everyone dips in and drinks from. This same style is used in Trigo. Many if not most of the houses have no indoor plumbing and use an outhouse. There is a bath house or shack adjoining the house in which people bring a five gallon bucket of cold water and bathe.

4/4

I have just arrived back in Hermosillo after another action packed few days. One great quote from Lupeto: “a man is not man without a knife and fire, if you can´t light a fire and don´t have a knife, you are not a man.” This morning started out with two cups of coffee and some beef soup for breakfast. (Worthy of note is that none of the fat is ever picked off of meat; meat and fat are part of the same and the habit of Americans to pick off the fat is seen as curious and wasteful. With such poverty as you find in Mexico, it is crazy to throw out food.) Adele started talking about her childhood in El Pilar, Chihuahua. She got her first pair of shoes, ever, when she was 12. The had no grinders and ground all their own flour with hand stones, mano and metate. There were no roads, only burro trails. Shopping and buying stuff new was non-existent. All clothes were a patchwork of old fabrics. She said it was a very happy time, simple and uncomplicated. Then she and her sisters moved to Trigo Moreno and eventually ended up marrying the local boys and now she has moved to the “big city” of Yécora, a town of 3000. She is estranged from one sister because that sister, Tene, slept with Pedro, the man across the street and also Pedrito’s father.

Yesterday we went to the plaza around 10:30 AM to witness the flogging of los judeos and to hear their testimonials. The kids all had switches with which they whipped los judeos, who ran around and through them, sometimes striking back. Los judeos by this early hour, were roundly drunk and periodically would lift a mask to take a big slug of bacanora. The testimonials amounted to pledges they all made which were mostly intended as jokes with the local folks however others were serious and involved some sacrifice, such as giving away a cow or pledging some charity work.

Lupeto could hardly wait to start drinking and off he went for a seex pack. When the flogging and testimonials were done, a huge crowd proceeded to the baseball field on the outskirts of town to blow up Judas with the dynamite. When this was accomplished, all headed back into town for the final dance and celebration, with the same band of trumpet blowing fellows as before. We proceeded to drive around a bit with a few pit stops at the cemetary, where all go to relieve themselves (tirar agua), as there are no public restrooms.

Later on in the afternoon we stopped by Jose Juan´s house. He recently sold all of his land in Trigo Moreno, house and outbuildings to a friend of el Dan, for $15,000.00 and moved to Yécora, with his 12 kids, three cows, jack and jenny burros, rooster, chickens, dogs and cats. I saw him in Trigo the day he left, herding all his animals on the old camino real, which was the path to Yécora before highway 16 was built. He now has a small plot, half of which is taken up by his barnyard and outhouses. To piss, one must walk through the livestock to get to the outhouse. The cows all have nice big sharp horns and the jack is no pushover. We offered Jose Juan a beer and after a bit he sent us off to the store for a case of Tecate, which all made short work of.

As it was starting to turn cold around sunset, I went back to Lupeto´s house to get my jacket and a fellow tagged along who offered me cocaine and so, we went down to the bridge, as tradition must be honored, and snorted up a small quantity. Back at Jose Juan´s, another case had been ordered and as we were waiting, Jose Juan thought it would be fine to take a cruise in the Machaca mobile, my car. (In the Sierra I am known as Johnny Machaca.) We went and got another case and on impulse, Jose Juan took me out to dinner and we hogged down huge portions of bistec ranchero and then back to his house, where a fire was now burning in the yard and all gathered round, noticeably more inebriated, laughing and joking.

Jose Juan, being temporarliy flush from the sale of his land, was spending freely and told me it was all the same to him, rich, poor, he had no preference. “God will take care of his children.” He was also amazed that I had no children, “look, I have 12 and you have none!” In the Sierra they get married young and for lack of much to do at night, produce families of large size. Anybody my age with no kids is looked upon with suspicion and this is not so different from the US, where if you are not a sheep in the herd, that is cause for talk.

Adele also said she prefers to be poor, being highly religious, the side of the poor is more righteous and pious. It is said in the Bible that it is easier to put a camel through the eye of a needle than for the rich to enter the Kingdom of God. Besides, there is less property for the robbers to get. Robbery is very common in Yécora and in the countryside. When I told Lucy and Sofia that Adele said she preferred to be poor they said it was “puras mentiras”, total lies. Adele also tolerates Lupeto´s propensity for the drink with total equanimity, it also being said in the Bible that it is not what goes into a man that makes him unclean, but what comes out of his heart which makes him unclean, and Lupeto doesn’t have a bad bone in his body.

Teresa, Jose Juan´s wife was cooking up a huge amount of fried chicken for everyone and we ate many salty pieces each, crowded around the stove in the kitchen. Edrel, a seven year old son, had got hold of a beer and was all silly and bold after having finished it off. Lupeto was totally smashed and he disappeared off for the night, losing his jacket somewhere in the process.  I went off with a car full of guys down to the dance.

The whole town started drinking around the time of the blowing up of Judas and now, by 9:PM, the plaza was made up of hordes of staggering cowboys continuing to chug down beer, bacanora and smoke weed and snort coke off in the dimly lit alleys. The fellows began to take quite a liking to old Machaca and they all wanted a piece of me, arms around my shoulders and neck, tailing me from here to there, where the girls must be and it got to be a bit much and I insisted on retiring. I bought Edrel a little truck for sixty cents, six pesos, and he was entirely pleased.

4/8

In Hermosillo, at the library museum at the University of  Sonora, are some mummies which were found up the very drainages just outside of Trigo Moreno. The local fellows all know where to find them.

4/9

I have visited Trigo Moreno four times over the last four years, as a participant in the AFSC- Intermountain Yearly Meeting – Joint Service Project. Trigo Moreno is located off of Highway 16, near the border with Chihuahua. Trigo Moreno is actually the name of a ranch nearby, there is another ranch called Trigo Colón and what is called Trigo Moreno now is really supposed to be Cienega de Trigo Moreno. The projects in Trigo were initiated by ASA, Asociación Sonorense de Los Amigos, or Sonoran Association of Friends. ASA was founded by Norman Krekler, a Quaker, but since his death a number of years ago, the association has disintegrated. He was a strong, able leader, with vision and poor accounting practices. In the wake of his death there was a power struggle among the various sons and other members, revolving around accusations and counter accusations of theft and mismanagement of funds. There was no system in place for professional accounting and no one had been groomed as a successor. The association now has all but disbanded and no social service work is being done through ASA. After being unable to account for $15,000 dollars of AFSC funds, the AFSC suspended operations with ASA and the majority of people involved, some since childhood, withdrew with significant feelings of animosity. Even though many Quakers from Tucson have tried to work a reconciliation, the damage appears too severe and the prospects for bringing ASA back as a functioning entity appear near zero. The AFSC – IMYM – JSP is now working through former ASA members, Lucy Sandoval de Navarro and her husband Pancho.

Projects in the past in Trigo have included installing solar collection panels and batteries so that all villagers might have electricity for some hours at night. Other programs have included adult education, administered by volunteers living in Trigo for a year at a time and the improvement of the local water system by building a series of cisterns and bringing in PVC piping to deliver the water to people´s houses.

The economy of Trigo has been primarily gold mining. Most of the food was/ is grown locally, in large fields on steep hillsides surrounding town. They grow corn, beans, squash, melons, chiles, herbs onions, garlic, marijuana, peaches, apples, quince and oranges. The gold mine consists of nine different access points up on a hill. It was abandoned by a US company in the early 20th century and now provides small quantities of gold extracted through hard rock mining. The ore is chipped out by hand and sometimes with dynamite. After sampling and testing a vein, visually, by hand and by actually tasting the rocks (people from Trigo are known as “Chupapiedras” or rock suckers), sacks are loaded up with ore and carried down the hill on burros and taken to the mills. Everyone has their own mill and burro. The ore is further reduced in size at the mill by breaking it with a sledge hammer.

To extract the gold, the ore is put into the mill, water added and two large flat stones are dragged over the ore. The mill is circular and powered by a lawn mower engine and a system of pulleys, which drag the stones around and crunch the ore. The ore is progressively pulverized and reduced to a thick slurry. The gold, being heavy, sinks to the bottom. The rest of the water is poured off. Mercury is poured in to separate the gold from the other minerals. The final sludge is put into a cloth and strained out, the gold/ mercury aggregate is added into a small metal cup with a long handle, and taken to a stove to burn the mercury out and there is left a small ball of gold. A good days work will yield somewhat less than $3.00 dollars worth of gold.

Last year a gringo, Dan, came to town and bought some property and a few houses and began to employ some of the locals in ranch work. He pays $100.00 pesos a day ($10.00 dollars), which is practically unheard of in the Sierra. The minimum wage in Hermosillo is $32.00 pesos a day or roughly three dollars and twenty cents. Eventually Dan bought all of Wencho´s land that he used for planting corn and beans, except for his house and a small garden plot near the stream. Lupeto sold part of his land and one building and Jose Juan sold out altogether and moved away.

Thus the local economy has undergone some big changes, some say for the better, others for the worse. Dan neglected to pay his workers social security and one disenchanted worker, Lobo, sued him and now no one has worked for over a month. It is back to mining, only now some have no land on which to plant. They are caught betwixt a cash economy and agricultural self sufficiency. Lupeto has the best plot in town, a big field of bottomland that he uses to raise oats to feed his cattle. He has a plow of the same type used by the Romans and uses two oxen to pull it.

The arroyo in front of Lupeto´s land is lined with big pines, junipers and willows. The whole setting is bucolic and lazy. As Wencho cleared some additional space and cut trees to bring more sunshine to his plot, he piled up much slash, which one afternoon the kids burned, thereby setting afire many living trees which anchor the soil on the steep hillsides above the arroyo. The stream itself is heavily polluted with mercury and all around the mills are large tailings piles polluted with mercury as well.

Four years ago there was only one truck in town, owned by Hilario, now almost everyone has a truck. Dan goes to Yécora everyday, a two hour round trip, and brings back feed, livestock, generators, wire, whatever, he is constantly hauling stuff in and now has many horses, a herd of cattle, a Mexican wife, barns, sheds, a tack room, barbeques, a peach orchard among other things. This is all with the object of creating a dude ranch where tourists can come, rent a cabaña, go horse back riding, hunting and do a little mining for pleasure. He now owns all the land over the mines but not the mines themselves. Dan is constantly seen with a can of Modelo in his hand and two of his main workers are continuously stoned on pot. After Dan has returned from Yécora, the evidence can be seen by the fresh litter of white beer cans along the road.

Growing marijuana or mota, is highly lucrative but also very dangerous, as the buyers are known for a propensity to pay off in lead. People farther up the road on the ranches above have been killed rather than paid off and after one season of growing and not being paid, Lupeto and Jose Juan decided to call it quits rather than risk being murdered. One of Wencho´s sons, Wenchito, is involved in growing and selling. Wenchito and his brother Carlitos were really ripped one night and rolled their truck off of a big curve on Highway 16, a spot now known as “la curva de Wencho”. Both of them have big nasty scars to show for the experience.

Lupeto is crippled too, from a car accident where he tore his achilles tendon and smashed his hip. Hilario was crippled with a broken shoulder from a mining accident. Wencho is the most crippled of all, again from a car accident. Part of his spine is crushed and as a result, one leg just barely works. On this leg he has attached a bungi cord from his belt to the tip of his boot. He swings the leg out, the bungi cord keeping it up, while he rests on his cane made of rebar. He moves with obvious difficulty. The older men and women have hardly any teeth and many only smile or laugh with lips pulled tight over hideous grins of rotten and missing teeth.

The Spanish in the Sierra is very difficult to understand, with a very thick accent and slurred words. The vocabulary and conversation is limited: women, trucks, crops, animals, the weather and gossip, in about that order. The maximum entertainment is a dance with some alcohol and music. It is said that the Spanish is very similar to that at the time of the conquest, some 400 years ago, a Spanish grammar and intonation frozen in time for lack of contact with the outside world.

Trigo has a small school which goes up to the fifth grade and is staffed by a teacher (maestro) who is rotated in and out on a yearly basis. The maestro frequently goes to Yécora or other parts and is often absent. The school atmosphere is unruly, with all ages and grades in the same room, a cacophony of voices and fooling around. Boys and girls of thirteen and fourteen graduate and without the opportunity to live in Yécora, they kill time waiting to grow up and find a spouse by riding horseback miles to the nearest news of a dance.

The adults are mostly illiterate and what they know of the Bible is pure memorization. They are amazed to see me sit and read and write. Over all, Trigo is a world apart. The people are very grateful to have groups coming to help out. The young men are utterly fascinated by the gringas or American girls and hold out the hope of hitching up with one of them and moving to “el otro lado”, or the other side, the USA. The kids and adults all come by to our camp and sit quietly watching the Americans. At night there is always a fire and we sing songs, play guitar and shoot the breeze. The cultural exchange is powerful in all directions. What rich middle class person paying $250.00 a week to do a service project in Mexico cannot be impressed by the lifestyle differences and omnipresent poverty? The same money they pay for one week equals a significant portion of many families yearly earnings. What rural Mexican cannot be impressed by big city clothing, hair and styles, by video cameras and all manner of expensive equipment and accouterments that American teens mistreat and leave lying around?

Should the participants Spanish be good enough and they have the moxy to break free of the group to visit some families, they will be invited to sit around the stove and have a plate of beans and tortillas, an empanada, a cup of coffee and to share in the daily life of rural Mexico. The stories are great! A gringo came to town 30 years ago to do some mining. He crossed the locals with a bad, unsocial attitude and they cut his head off with a carving knife and threw him down a mine shaft. Hunting one night as a youth, Wencho accidentally shot an expensive macho mule, mistaking it for a deer and fearing the owner, he and his buddy gathered a ton of wood and incinerated it, years later finally fessing up over  bacanora and laughs.

Such is life in Trigo Moreno. Should any of the gringos rise early and work hard, they are well respected. Any women who show hard work are highly sought after at the final dance and send off. One last chance for the local boys to ply their charms. A polka with their thigh between her legs, in the hopes of enticing her to marry a peasant and save them from a life of few resources and little hope of advancement.

For one reason or another I am well liked in Trigo. The kids flock around me and as we walk, they want to hold my hands, one on each side and the others fighting for attention. The houses are all open to me and I am welcome to visit anytime.

Addendum about the University of Sonora and Mexico in general:

The University of Sonora is a joke. My Spanish classes are so pitifully easy, that without exception, there is no homework, no exams and the teachers resolutely refuse to do any work outside of the class. I have nine essays turned in, voluntarily, which have gone uncorrected for five weeks. There are no syllabi. There is no structure. It is catch as catch can. The minimum is expected and performed. In my history classes as well, there is no assigned reading, no homework and the level of teaching, while at times interesting, remains at a superficial level, with little synthesis.

It is possible to generalize that the whole context, dating back to the conquest, has predisposed Mexican society to be essentially lackadaisical and unable to grab the initiative in ways that we, as the descendants of the general protestant work ethic, find inexplicable and amazing, even for a relatively lazy guy like me.

For example, take Richard Henry Dana´s observation in Two Years Before The Mast, in 1834, “The government of the country is an arbitrary democracy, having no common law, and nothing that we should call a judiciary. Their only laws are made and unmade at the caprice of the legislature, and are as variable as the legislature itself....In their domestic relations, these people are not better than in their public. The men are thriftless, proud, extravagant, and very much given to gaming; and the women have but little education, and a good deal of beauty....If the women have but little virtue, the jealousy of the husbands is extreme, and their revenge deadly and almost certain.

“In the hands of an enterprising people, what a country this might be (California)....The Americans and Englishmen, who are fast filling up the principle towns, and getting the trade into their hands, are indeed more industrious and effective than the Mexicans, yet their children are brought up Mexican in most respects, and if the “California fever” (laziness) spares the first generation, it is likely to attack the second.”

Dana´s observations serve to illustrate the tendency towards the minimum, contextually based on a capricious government with a long history of corruption and ineffectiveness. If work and quality and individual advancement are not valued, you end up 400 years down the line with a massive disparity in the educational systems of Mexico and the USA. Without solid education, these folks are just not prepared to compete with and deal with Americans, Europeans and Japanese. Only the rich can get a good education and they end up being the tools of a corrupt system. 

I am in the process of interviewing for a job teaching English and History at an exclusive private school. After having guest taught a number of classes, it became apparent that my education was far more comprehensive than the current teacher´s, in the whole department. There is a fear of being made to look bad by an American. What the American ethos represents is contra-indicative to the Mexican style. All my friends have told me that the University did not hire me to teach advanced conversation in English because I would have made the other teachers seem unprepared.

Generally you can explain some of this as the difference between the obedient, non-thinking hierarchy of Catholic authoritarianism, as compared with the more or less individually oriented, think for yourself Protestant tradition, at least with the more liberal Protestant denominations. It is followers versus go getters. Mexico just exists as a ball of entirely different assumptions and expectations than the USA.

Mexicans have learned to expect nothing from the government. To them it is an unending series of lies and corruption, which accumulatively, have created a massive cynicism towards the state. The legal system is similar in one respect to the USA, you have to have lots of money to get justice.

Interestingly, a neighbor here told me that Mexicans from the south are much more industrious and hard working. Many of them are moving north to Sonora, as an exodus from the southern overpopulation and fear of earthquakes. In comparison to Sonorans, the southerners have much more dedication and make the desert folk look bad. The neighbor said he didn’t know if it was the heat, but that in general, Sonorans are lazy people. I get this at the University in a very strong sense.

Another example is with the counterpart to the Desert Museum, the Centro Ecológico,  the labeling of plants is riddled with inconsistency. Many different plants bear the same name and the curator doesn’t seem to be able to explain the differences or know the scientific names. For example, Bursera microphylla, Bursera confusa and Jatropha cordata are all called “torote blanco”. The inability to get it right transposes most profoundly to the government, which when you step back and coldly assess the situation, is content to coast upon patterns of corruption which to realistic estimates, has left between 60 and 80 million people living far below what we consider to be poverty.

Perhaps Dana´s assessment of the lack of law and order has become an entrenched mind set which now plays out in many aspects of society. People frequently run red lights, no one uses car signals, cars are parked in and at any angle, with no consideration for others, people play radios in the library, smoke in the non-smoking section, the no parking section is the first to fill up with cars as it is closest, people drink and party in the street to all hours, teachers don´t show up for class for days, no explanations, classes are supposed to start the Monday after Holy Week and it is big news in the paper that some teachers and students actually showed up, (my Spanish teacher did not and she will be gone all week, without telling any of us), at the computer lab the computers regularly malfunction, littering is taken for granted, my neighbor regularly forgets she is watering and my entrance is a mud pit more often then not, for lack of pavement the city is shrouded in clouds of dust every day yet money is being spent to pipe in gas to a rich neighborhood, the list goes on.

There is simply a profound disrespect and disorder in the public sphere and this is normal, it is the way it is. People act this all out without thinking. It is unconscious. To go against the grain, as I am doing now, can only bring grief yet it is hard to toss my sensibilities and play by such different rules. I have gradually grown accustomed to the reduced expectations at the University and while I can never ultimately accept satisfaction with the minimum, the whole scene has certain endearing qualities, which when contrasted to the self centered, advance oneself at all costs ethic of the US, actually appear more sane and human.

My friend, Roberto, who is a mathematics professor at the University, is a very disciplined, intelligent and hard working guy. He has won two scholarships to study the teaching of math to math teachers at the U of A, only he must first pass an English proficiency test. He has been studying hard for over a year and taken the exam many times but can´t seem to raise his score high enough to be accepted by the U of A. He needs 550 and has around 520 – 530. I have been tutoring him for months and we have a good friendship, he tutors me in Spanish as a trade.

He doesn´t drink at all and has three kids, Beto, Nallely and Xochitl. His wife, Macrina, is a psychologist. He works all day, has had no vacation for five years and routinely gets by with two to three hours sleep a night, trying to cram English study, his math work and family responsibilities into a day which just doesn’t have enough time. He is anxious that his scholarship will be taken away. Actually his English is terrible and he has trouble understanding what I say. I can only hope for the best for him. He has risen to a high status here, from a childhood selling candy and ice cream on the street.

4/19

It is easy for me to say, on the surface, that Mexicans are just not happy unless they are making a lot of noise. Life is a cacophony of barking dogs, booming polka beats and loud laughing, whooping and hollering, frequently stimulated by cold Teacate and burning bacanora, until all hours of the night. As I lie awake at night listening to it all, ears plugged with wax, two fans going and the radio playing to substitute one noise for another, it at times seems that the street below is a public madhouse, constantly erupting with different permutations of noise.

Should this all be interpreted through a white, middle class, American sensibility, the propensity towards noise might be seen as rude and inconsiderate. Yet as I know only too well, Americans are quite capable of being gross and inconsiderate as well. What I am speaking to is not uniquely Mexican.

In some respects the situation is very similar to that described by Tom Kochman in his book, Black and White Styles in Conflict, only this time it is Mexican styles. In general the Mexican style is more public and aggressive, it has more heat and wears it´s emotions on it´s sleeve. Latins are known for their volatiltiy. In some part, this results from the characteristics of the language itself, Spanish and Italian have a tonal range spanning up to two octaves. The question posed by Kochman is this: ¿who is responsible for a person´s mental state? Is it, as broken down by white, middle class sensibilities, a matter of  believing that one´s mental state is conditional upon how others treat them? Or, is one responsible for their own mental state regardless of what others say or do? Did you make me feel bad or did I make myself feel bad? Is it my problem that the noise bothers me or are others really responsible for holding my sensibilities in constant respect? I maintain that it is some of both, people can be assholes and people can also be overly sensitive.

Cultural and linguistic differences cannot be said to be good or bad, they just are. It would not be fair to characterize all Mexicans as being one way or another. The country is incredibly diverse. My experience is colored by the particular people who live here in Colonia Granjas, in a series of three or four houses, who are known and have the reputation for being wild. Droves of kids have wars against lone teens, these kids get beat up but good, crowds of men, women, boys and girls gather to play ball in the street, screeching and hollering, young dandies pull by in souped up cars with huge bass speakers rattling all windows for miles around, thumping the unending polka and spiced with blaring trumpets and accordions, dogs bark relentlessly at passing strangers. Through it all, no one seems to worry that there are neighbors, who have sensibilities that might be deserving of respect.

The morning after is like “On the Beach”, all is eerily quiet, with only ubiquitous piles of trash littered around to show where the action had been. The women quietly pick up and sweep the broken glass, making it all nice for the next go around. Dogs come and rip open the trash, scattering it again, only to be reswept, repacked, all in a continuous process. It is by fortune that my Mexican experience is colored by these particular extremes. A fair analysis demands that I say that many if not most of the people I know here are quite placid, quiet, reserved and studious. They live in their houses and not always in the street in front of them. They have jobs and must go to bed and rise early. They don´t drink everyday and raise life up to a crescendo sometime around midnight. There are many, if not most of the areas within  the Colonia, which are tranquil and well kept. I just happened to luck out and have the pleasure of living right in front of a lot of action.

Is this an ethnic phenomena or just a bunch of drunks? Probably it is some of both. I am coming to the realization that life here is weighted more to the drunk side than to any genuinely Mexican reality. Ethnicity and a pursuit of drinking have some things in common: both characterized by insulation, turned into themselves, so that patterns are repeated over and over again without question or much change. My neighbors are certainly insulated, the same faces appear on the corner every day. They hang tight. They are homeboys. Their reality is delimited by the area around the corner of Calles San Antonio and Granada. Nobody appears to work. All say that the only way so many people can afford to live and eat and drink so much, without working, is by selling drugs. On one of the few occasions I partook with them and some were in my apartment, they were all very much impressed by my books and maps and classical music, although I could not much interest them to discuss anything on an abstract level. (This also fits into Kochman´s thesis, what is important is who you are, not the ability to separate oneself from experience intellectually.)

To further amplify my description of my life in Colonia Granjas, generations of the party families all live in the same houses. The patriarchs and matriarchs, grey and heavy, preside over sons and daughters who drag around screaming grandchildren. The families have a structure similar to what may be termed inner city black, the same mother has kids by many different fathers. The interweaving of relations reveals a high level of promiscuity. The suitors come decked out with cowboy hat, pointy boots, tight jeans and a big shiny belt buckle; they make out with the girls in the shadows, for hours, and somehow manage to find a little private space in the house to realize their passion and off the men go, to be seen only sparingly, and then only to realize more action. The houses are filled with women and kids but hardly any men.

This illustrates the “casa chica” tradition, or of one man having many different women, in different places, only with my neighbors, the daughters all stay at the same home, getting knocked up by different guys; a barn of earthly delights. There is some ethnic action but mostly I see folks stuck in a backwater of day to day drinking, drugs and fucking. There is nothing fancy or subtle to discover, no hidden mystery, just a basic diminished reality reflecting a lack of education, experience and good home training. How could one expect people like this to be considerate of others? They are like a tank of fish that have absolutely no idea they are in a tank.

Mexico, what a huge mixed bag! How to characterize Mexico? With no context it would be easy to make a lot of surface judgements. “Superficie” in Spanish means, the surface. Hence we have superficial in English. Those Romans got up into England too. So, what can I do to provide some context?

There is a history characterized by economic policies which benefit the few over the many. (This is essentially the same as the US.)  A history of  power politics and the self aggrandizement of those in power, starting with the royalty of Spain sacking the riches of the country, and then through the Catholic Church, the hacienda system, which both accumulated huge tracts of land and exploited the resources and workers therein for their own gain, and then to the Porfiriato, where foreign investment to develop infrastructure was welcomed and only the rich realized any benefit, to the PRI and the fixing of all elections and the monopoly of power held for almost 80 years, culminating in another round of being whores for the USA and screwing the man on the street in the name of the global economy. This all adds up to an acceptance of institutionalized corruption. There is the social legacy of institutional discrimination against Indians and mestizos. A majority of people living and who have lived in poverty. The police, military and justice systems are widely recognized as corrupt and dysfunctional. When you seek out the problems in Mexico, there are many and they did not start yesterday. These problems have deep roots.

Should I look on the brighter side I can point to the strength and coherence of kinship and the family. The color and tradition and the way the religious cycle is celebrated adds up to a more genuine than spurious culture. There is the amazing openness, friendliness and generosity of almost all the people, an opportunity to strike up instant friendships and to be able to participate in people´s lives. There is an ability to enjoy the moment, to genuinely be in the present. The positives are almost all along the personal and social dimensions while the negatives reflect the way the country is and has been administered.

In the balance, then, what I am seeing is perhaps, in the face of insurmountable problems, a people who have learned to cope by emphasizing their human qualities. What is left, if the system is in a shambles, but our humanity. It certainly speaks well of the Mexican people that they have not become so jaded as to lose a certain spontaneity and optimism, which allows them to go on in a sane and human manner. These are broad strokes I am painting. I am intending to work up some generalities.

Perhaps by being so Catholic, so Christian, Mexicans have internalized many of the charitable  messages of the Bible and also messages encouraging humility, that poverty is closer to the Kingdom and that to share, down to the last tortilla, is more noble than having all the world´s riches but losing one´s soul. Perhaps the overwhelming poverty has created a sense that we are all in this together, a sense of common suffering. Or maybe by being good Catholics, Mexicans are more inclined to be obedient and accept their lot in life in the hopes of getting something better in the hereafter.

As always, Mexico presents stark contrasts and no easy answers. Robbery, crime and substance abuse are rampant. Is this fueled by the poverty? No, look at the US, wealth provides no immunity against these things. All the public order and high falutin´ rhetoric of the US provides no guarantee against the ill temptations of humanity. The US has the highest crime and rates of violence in the whole world. On the whole, the US manages to shield it´s exploitation and structural problems in ways less transparent than in Mexico.

It is really difficult to get a handle on Mexico. It is at once many things, many things that don´t fit into any neat and clean explanations. Many Mexicans desire the riches and opportunity held out by the US but they don´t want the every dog for himself ethic. They see the lack of tradition and emphasis on individuality in a negative light. They are amazed at the science and technology, at how clean it is in the US. It is as if one brother has excelled to an incredible degree, while the rest of the family has stayed at home and been content to let the river roll by.

4/20

The lifestyle in Colonia Granjas and Hermosillo at times presents me with the feeling of being beyond belief. If it is not one thing it is another. The people who make all the noise take a night off and another family steps up and throws a huge party, replete with PA system and tons of people. If there are no parties, the dogs then take it upon themselves to bark all night. A bitch goes in heat and a whole pack of machos fight and bark all night, three nights straight. For the most part, nobody controls their dogs. They run free. My down stairs neighbor insists on leaving the gate open so her little yappy ass dog can run in the street. In spite of my having asked her to leave the gate shut, to control the dog, I always find the gate open. Other dogs come up onto my porch and rip open the garbage.

I am studying at night, the pinche Tota starts barking in the street. I get angry from the cumulative effect of the noise and go down and shut the gate. Marissa then reopens the gate. The dog goes back onto the street and barks some more. I go down and kick it and it screams bloody murder. Marissa gets mad. I feel bad. My own living space is part of the out of control madness of the Colonia. I have no control. At times I feel the Colonia is an insufferable pit. One month more. I hope this is not representative of all of Mexico because then I would have to say it is not for me. However, in Desemboque and Trigo Moreno, I clearly remember the dogs barking all night long too. Mexico is just a noisy place and not conducive for those who would like to get a good night´s sleep.

When I was living at Pancho and Lucy´s, everything was relatively good, outside the underwear incident, yet even within this tranquil haven, the neighbor would start to BBQ on Sunday night and the cooler would suck the smoke straight into my room. I would have to go out and wait in the anteroom until 1 or 2 AM until he was done. Mexicans will find a way to invade your space, whether it be with sound, dust, smoke, bending your car mirrors or whatever. The upshot is that for a guy who needs to sleep and be ready for school, I have arrived so many times dead tired and without any spark.

Granjas is a relatively nice Colonia, as far as appearances go. It is not among the richest but decidedly not the bottom of the barrel either. I can only imagine the noise and problems in some of the poorer places. I have a friend in one class, a young guy named Ramón. He´s bright, intelligent and curious and lives in a cardboard shack with no cooler or air. For the last couple of weeks the temperature has risen above 38C, or 100F. I think I have it bad. Where he lives there is no pavement anywhere. Even the main drags are unpaved. Every day you can see the clouds of dust that rise from the northwest part of town and gradually drift into the city center, enveloping all in a haze of dust. Some evenings you can´t see hardly a mile.

Roberto lives in an upscale Colonia where there is a watchman employed all the time. The Colonia consists of all University of Sonora professors. Down the street, on Boulevard Encinas, is a huge night club. Every night the Colonia is invaded by speeding cars and trucks and worse, by drunks stumbling through on foot and pissing in people´s yards. It is an ongoing problem for them and periodically they protest by blocking the streets.

In Villa Sol, Pancho and Lucy´s Colonia, just across the street from them, are being built some 20 very small apartments. Pancho knows this means trouble. Every apartment will probably have an average of 4 or 5 people. Up to 100 people will live directly across the street, kids, dogs, cars, drunks and noise. Their little bubble of tranquility is going to be popped on both sides, for on the other side of their property is a switch manufacturing plant and from their bedroom they are bothered by idling semi trucks until all hours of the night.

The rich Colonias are just like the US, a perfect imitation of suburbia, gated communities, perfect lawns, fancy cars, nice two story homes. Every house, everywhere, has burglar bars on every entrance and window. Whatever is not tied down or well hidden and protected, will be ripped off. No burglar bars means that sooner or later you will get ripped off.

So, I go back and forth, obviously I am struggling with the lifestyle in my Colonia and would have to do some serious evaluation of any other neighborhood before I moved in. I am thinking that in the future, should I return to Mexico, that it will be to another place. Hermosillo is known, and it is really hot, sometimes hitting 50C, which is in the 120s or better. Chihuahua City might be an option, a little higher elevation, or maybe even a whole other country, like Peru or Argentina or Uruguay. I still want to make my Spanish a lot better and still need to find an appropriate academic setting to really drive it home. The University of Sonora has not been the answer. Perhaps I could get a BA in Spanish at the U of A?

4/20

I left early in the morning for another trip to the Sierra, with Mike Gray, Luz Maria Sandoval de Navarro, Manolo Sandoval (Lucy´s brother) and Eduardo “Lalo” Ramirez, a mutual friend who is with the State Police. In Hermosillo it had been getting up to 110 F. / 43C, so it was a hot shuffle for three hours until we gained enough altitude to ride comfortably. We were packed into Mike´s Blazer, where three in the back is especially uncomfortable. I now know that I don´t want a Blazer.

We arrived in Yécora at around noon and surprised Adele, Lupeto and Jesus who were very glad to see us all. There was no gasoline in Yécora and we were told that maybe in a few days there would be a delivery. After unloading gifts and other extras it was back on the road to Mesa el Campanero, gaining even more altitude, up to around 6000 feet. At some point we crossed into the state of Chihuahua. Off of the Mesa it is a short descent to Bermudez, a small logging town.

In Bermudez we stopped for a visit at a house of over 150 years. The interior was inviting and comfortable, walls adorned with browned photos of ancient people staring out from the past. Beds were situated here and there and doors opened into rooms filled with the atmosphere. There were shrines of various types, pictures of Jesus, crosses, hanging plants, an old stair case bent and crackling and a covered back porch opening into a yard filled with flowers, strange cactus, herbs and mature fruit trees, quince, peach, plum and apple.

After Bermudez, the road gets very rough. It is about an hour and a half to El Cordón, a village of 7 families out on the lip of an old lava flow. It had been 5 years since Lucy was there, working on another service project with ASA, Asociación Sonorense de los Amigos, or the Sonoran Association of Friends, an outfit founded by a Quaker named Norman Krekler. We were welcomed warmly. As usual, the hosts start grabbing chairs and enjoining everyone to sit while the wife gets wood and stokes the fire to heat coffee water and to start cooking to feed the guests.

By this time the sun was sinking low and much to everyone´s delight, it was cold! After a bit, Tere had dinner ready, which consisted of mashed bayo beans, cheeses and tortillas; bayos are small, yellow-green beans which are grown in this locality. I like the mashed beans a lot, you take your fresh tortilla and break it into a small piece and fold it over the beans for a mouthful. The cheeses consisted of freshly made cottage cheese or cuajada and a dried version of the cuajada to which is added salt and then grated and served in a bowl to be sprinkled onto your beans; it is very similar to parmesan or romano. All over Mexico there are a great variety of cheeses, which have been a pleasure to sample. Knowing that this was all produced locally, homemade, added to the awesome good taste. To top things off was a jar of red hot, pickled chiltepin peppers.

After dinner we retired to the older part of the house, built by Don Emeterio, some 30 years ago. Stepping into the anteroom there is a cozy little fire place, some chairs, beds off in two corners, and some photos of previous service project people. The people really like to have the groups come and value highly any memorabilia which the gringos leave behind. A small TV was playing a cheesy novela or soap opera and everyone was sitting around paying serious attention. The reception was marginal, with a lot of fuzz and passing lines and the sound was full of static, yet it was enough to rapture the audience.

Doña Matilde, Don Emeterio´s wife sat in a dim corner with a shawl over her head, variously poking at the fire with her cane and joining the conversation. She was ancient, face deeply furrowed, barely able to walk, all hunched over, an old crone if there ever was, but with good hearing and clearly spoken Spanish. She still managed to fulfill her wifely responsibilities and continued to cook for the Don, wash clothes and sweep up the house.

Don Emeterio (Emmett), is 79 years old, a bit hard of hearing but entirely mobile, alert and active, with a big smile of false teeth, out herding cattle at the crack of dawn. He is the grandson of the immigrant from North Carolina, Emelio Clark, who came to Mexico fleeing the Civil War. How odd and interesting to run into Mexicans who look exactly like gringos, except for the ever present mustache, cowboy hats, boots and shirts opened half way down the chest.

Two other immigrants accompanied Emelio Clark, Guillermo (William) Moore and another fellow named DeMoss. In El Cordón, Bermudez and farther down the road in Mesa Abajo, they are predominantly Clarks and DeMosses. They all look alike, tall, with light skin, blonde, and some with reddish beards. Their facial structure is entirely different from the common mestizo look of the average Mexican. A general rule is that each pueblo is made up of one big extended family and here we were most definitely in Clarkville, Mexico.

There has been a drought in Sonora for some 4 years. All throughout the Sonoran Sierra it hasn’t rained for 8 months. The live oaks are entirely brown and many pines are browned off as well. Dust blows along with the wind and the topic of conversation inevitably returns to the drought. In El Cordón, they must haul water every other day from Mesa Abajo.

In Mesa Abajo they were lucky enough to run into a gringo service outfit called Piloto Sandía, which specializes in water system improvement projects. Mesa Abajo, the municipio (county), Piloto Sandía and the state of Chihuahua all anted up some $21,000.00 and the villagers put up all the hand work to install a quite impressive system. 1000 feet below the mesa is a cistern in a shaded arroyo which catches water from a spring. There is a solar powered pump which pushes the water uphill into a circular tank made of sheet metal the size of a small swimming pool. The tank lies above the village and various PVC pipes are attached and gravity carries the water off to individual houses and stock yards.

There are fields and small ranches spread all over the Sierra. From the mesas, you can see the Sierra Oscura or Dark Mountains, a heavily wooded area where a fellow recently got lost and  they had a posse out for three days before they found the body. People live in simple traditional ways that have endured for hundreds of years. Directly south is Copper Canyon, Barranca del Cobre and mountains and canyons open up for as far as the eye can see.

The Tarahumara, Guarijío, Southern Pima and diaspora Yaqui Indians all converge in this area. A Guarijío man killed a big jaguar not too long ago. The older guys remember bears and wolves too, but now, after hundreds of years of ranching, and people´s lives depending on the calves (becerros) survival, the large predators are limited to mountain lions, bobcats and coyotes. Last week a cow was killed and half eaten by lions. Times are tough for everybody during this drought and deer are scarce and few far between.

Some of the local talk is about gringos who pay up and over $10,000.00 to come and hunt wild turkey (guajolote or guijolo) and deer and how ridiculous it is for these folks to come and spend so much money. It doesn’t add up to these folks, who are generally pretty poor, that people would have so much money to blow when they are struggling to get by. The talk also runs into who is acting as a guide without the proper papers and ripping off the gringos and not paying taxes to the state.

Back at El Cordón, the houses surround a big corral or open public space, with animals everywhere, mules, burros, horses, cows, bulls, chickens  and roosters. Life there is a constant din of mooing and neighing and crowing and clucking. One morning, I had to throw some rocks at the bull to clear a path to the outhouse.

The fields, while cleared of trees, are full of volcanic pumice, from the size of gravel up to small boulders. There is so much rock that it is impossible to clear it all off. They plow right through it all, with large oxen and old style plows and put up fields full of corn and beans. It is amazing how hard they must work to plant and harvest yet they bring in enough to sell the extra. The people from the Mesa el Campanero area sell their produce as far west as Tecoripa, but farther is the domain of others, there being an informal division of territory based upon accessibility and also whether the people will like bayos or whether they prefer pintos or maycoba beans.

Of note is that you drive all day, way, way out there and arrive at a small pueblo, seemingly worlds away, yet they have nicely built houses with stoves, paintings, couches, nice tables and all is clean and well organized and comfortable. All the villages have a CB radio which they use to communicate with Ciudad Obregón, personal news, emergencies, whatever. This is all in great contrast to Trigo Moreno where trash is strewn all over and the people devolved into intransigent infighting, which prevents them from cooperating and achieving the levels of organization found in El Cordón and  Mesa Abajo. The pueblo of Trigo perhaps mirrors the proximity to Yécora and “civilization” and thus it is easier for them to operate as individuals rather than members of a community. However, any small pueblo is going to have gossip and problems deriving from close proximity, everybody knowing everyone else’s foibles and problems. This is a worldwide phenomena.

4/21

We went to Mesa Abajo to see whether they were interested in having a service project and as I have been saying, it was striking how together everything is. We visited a few homes and kids were sent out to gather the heads of the families and gradually, all were sitting on the front porch of the comisario (mayor). I had the pleasure of translating Mike´s flyer advertizing his different projects, to let the people know what sort of operation this was. The villagers reached a consensus and Mike agreed to bring a group for 10 days in June and July.

Lucy and the former ASA people wanted to introduce Mike to some new pueblos besides Trigo and their thought came to fruition. (After the death of Norman Krekler, there was a falling out of the people amidst accusations of financial mismanagement and now ASA is no longer a functioning entity and Lucy has been working with Mike to continue service work in Sonora). After a good session of porch sitting and joking about how the group should be all muchachas of twenty years, we all went to eat at different people´s houses. Mike and I went to the house of Gerrardo and Blanca where we had a soup of squash, potatoes, cabbage, ground chiltepines and dried meat, accompanied of course by tortillas, very tasty. For dessert, Blanca brought out a bottle of peach preserves which we had along with prickly pear fruit jelly spread on hot tortillas. The ambience (ambiente) was made more significant by knowing everything we ate was grown and produced by Gerrardo and Blanca. We sat around the table and gradually broke the ice between different worlds.

Their kids came home from school for lunch. I took the opportunity to fool around with them and play a few tricks. When you get in good with Mexican kids, you are home free with the parents. In Trigo I have a great time with the kids, when we walk down the road, they all want to hold my hands. Kids are less inhibited than adults; the kids provide a great opportunity to integrate and work one´s way into the village life. In Mexico, kids are honored above all. I had brought a big bag of shells from San Carlos and made a give-away at the truck as we were leaving, and every one got a few choice sea shells, the adults had to join in as well as you just don´t see that sort of stuff out in the mountains.

Doña Maria and her husband, a Clark and the mayor, are first cousins. She is muy buena, meaning very well and amply curved. They have two twenty something sons who are both retarded. Some other things to add about the women: their domain is the house, there they rule. With their old fashioned pedal sewing machines they make bright designs on doilies and table clothes, they make their own shoes, with tire treads for the soles, they make many clothes and provide tremendous hospitality. They hover over the table. Should your cup or bowl be empty, they immediately offer to fill it again. As you eat they are making tortillas and endeavor to supply the perfect meal, nothing cold, no waiting to ask. They don´t eat until the men and the children have finished.

Coffee is the entrance into the house, “would you like some coffee?”. You arrive, first they pull out all the chairs, then you get served coffee, always instant coffee with sugar, then it is “are you hungry, have you eaten?”. Every house is the same. To visit a pueblo means to drinking a lot of coffee! You sit, chat, drink more coffee. The conversation winds itself around to the drought. They have never seen it this dry, ever. Who got a deer? Who died? Who got married? The conversation hits on the daily facets of life’s journey, and all points inbetween.

After giving away the shells we slid out of town and back to El Cordón. Lucy was right to identify the pueblos in Chihuahua as a good alternative to Trigo Moreno. It is a whole other breed of people. It is a different type of Mexico and as always, Mexico suprises and delights. The real action, the pearl of what a person can find in Mexico, is the sociability and simplicity of the traditional culture.

4/24

I slept in front of the fire for the last two nights. What a delight to be half naked, cold on one side and hot on the other! The first night in El Cordón, Lalo and Mike slept up on the beds and me on the floor. The second night, Lalo couldn´t take the sagging, lumpy old mattress and joined me on the floor. The fire was hot, coals of oak and I was rolling and adjusting and meanwhile, Lalo fell into a deep sleep, snoring as if to imitate all barnyard animals. I lay awake, unable to let loose of the focus on his snoring. I slept from 12:30AM to 3:30AM and that was it. The roosters and cows took care of the rest. In the morning Mike and I arose late, missing a dramatic, foggy sunrise and the folks thought, “what a couple of lazy gringos”. I pulled into the kitchen to beg for coffee around 6:30AM and told my story and not long after, Mike came in all bleary eyed and said, “it wasn´t just Lalo, but Fred too”. This all became a big joke and Lalo became “Ronky” Ramirez, from the verb roncar, to snore. All day Mike and I were toasted from lack of sleep.

In the late afternoon and evening it rained some, but nothing more than to settle the dust momentarily, the soil, being so dry, sucked up the small quantity of moisture and it evaporated off almost instantly.

We packed up and left back to Yécora, only to find the main gas station still out of gas, we had 1 or 2 gallons left, at the mercy of Fate. Lucky for us there was gas at the other station, buried within the bowels of Yécora. At the station we ran into Lupeto and Chiri. Lupeto had been drinking all night and he and his socios were fried. Mike wanted to go to Trigo to deliver a roll of fabric to Pina and scope out the scene for future projects, but with Hilario´s death and the advice of all the former ASA people, it was almost a foregone conclusion that Trigo was becoming history as a place to do projects.

Before leaving Yécora, we went and got Jose Juan and he and Lupeto appealed for a stop at the Depósito to buy some more beer. They bought 48 cans of Modelo Especial and we headed out. Arriving at the Rancho of El Dan, the gringo, we found a bunch of strangers and a few familiar faces hanging out and drinking bacanora. It still being morning, it was a bit wild to be getting after cold ones, but with the crowd there, the two cases were made in short work. Mike, who doesn´t drink, and I then went off to Pina´s house where we were welcomed heartily by Pina, the matron and her kids, Manuel, Miguel, Beto and Olga.

Pina and her kids are my favorites in Trigo and all was good. She served us up coffee and hot tortillas with butter and salt. She didn´t have anything else. Her husband, Víctor, was in Yécora drinking all night with the other guys. Mike brought photos and they all became absorbed in that, being able to decide which ones they wanted. Manuel had caught three fish by hand farther down in the drainage and he showed them off with pride. At 14, and the oldest kid, and a  bastard son, he is wild and undisciplined, but a good kid, a friend, with confidence, an innocent Sierra boy with a bright smile. The peach trees had put on fruit in the yard and the season had progressed, round and round, year after year, life in el campo, the country.

Mike left to visit more and then Lupeto showed up, drooling, stumbling drunk, to announce that El Progreso was in town, to provide health care and to give monetary assistance to mothers with kids. Pina left me in charge of the kids and they wanted me to sing in English and play games. We had a lot of laughs. I treasure those moments with them. El Progreso gave Pina $40.00 for two months. They don´t come every month and she gets shortchanged. Mike was honking  to leave and I pulled out $200.00 pesos (@$20.00) and made a present for La Pina. She is pregnant again and quite poor. Although I had only around $350.00 to my name, I figured life would come easier to me than to her. I should have given her more.

I also delivered toy trucks and toy tea sets from Lucy for the kids, which they began to play with immediately. I gave a little truck to Dan´s son Billy and he immediately said “I don´t play with toys”. What kind of macho, cowboy crap is Dan teaching this boy!? Billy did go to his house and got me a piece of lead and copper which he said was fool´s gold. For a kid of 7 years old, he is living it up in México, hardly any school. He had a pair of sneakers which instead of saying NIKE said KIKE, obviously some Mexican shoe manufacturers playing a joke that only gringos would get. Also, in Mesa Abajo, they had a black dog named nigger.

I could see in Jose Juan´s eyes that he was losing his spirit in Yécora. In Trigo he had been a hard working campesino, living in the simple and direct way, but he got railroaded out of town by the coldness of the other families and ended up selling his life in the country for one in the dusty streets of Yécora. He now has his small property, a truck, but he is not happy. He doesn´t like Yécora, it is too noisy, dirty and impersonal and he is quickly spending the money from the sale of his property on beer and whatnot. It is a shame to see such a nice guy get driven like this by the winds of Fate.

After we got back to Yécora, Lupeto went and got another case of beer and Jose Juan had us over for dinner. We returned to Lupeto´s house to find Lucy and Manolo waiting and anxious to leave, they not wanting to spend the night amidst crazy drunks. Jesus, Lupeto´s son was skulking about, obviously ashamed of his father and Lupeto then said “Jesus is not worth anything, he won´t even drink a beer!”. We were out of there, on  our way to Hermosillo via Sahuaripa. Here and there are wild fig trees called tescalama, which have impressive large root systems grabbing all over cliffs and rocks, similar to the strangler figs of South Florida. It grew dark as we entered the Sahuaripa River valley and the smells of the river and cows and horses along the road provided ambience until we arrived at Bámori, a very small town some 30 minutes south of Sahuaripa.

Lalo´s aunt lives in Bámori. He hadn´t seen her for five years. As he was knocking on the door, a neighbor came out and I told her what we were up to and she said we could stay at her house if we wanted. All the doors to the house were wide open, (in the other little pueblos too), what a sense of having entered a whole other reality! There is no fear, the people are friendly beyond belief, the streets fairly exuding the  atmosphere of old México. Auntie took us in and fed us, again we ate, and we all got a bed in nice open rooms with halls opening out into a huge backyard planted with flowers and fruit trees and containing the remains of an old adobe building built by the aunt´s great grandfather. The house itself was built by the great grandfather too. The ceilings hold earthen insulation with echo cactus ribs or splits. The atmosphere of the house is fantastic, rustic, simple, well cared for, in a style much more to my liking than the ultra clean, sterile ways of the US. Here you have tortillas cooking on the lid of a 50 gallon drum in the back yard, mesquite flavors the air, chickens cluck and roosters crow. The people sleep on the back porch, open air, the smells and sounds of the night drift in, cool breezes refresh. The river valley  is very comfortable at night and pleasant in the morning. We get fresh tortillas and eat in the shade of an ancient tamarisk tree. Again there is fresh cuajada, this time with no salt. There is a rock hard hunk of highly salted, dried cuajada which the aunt grates and gives along with bowls of beans and scrambled eggs and chorizo. The dried cuajada can last all year.

Contrast the traditional world, with it´s welcoming arms, circumscribed borders and plethora of small talk with modern life centered in the individual. There is a sense of belonging and uncomplicated simplicity which is very appealing with tradition, yet people cannot go beyond it, the freedom doesn´t exist to question and work from abstract levels. You take and accept what is handed down and that is the way it is. There is security. With the modern world there is tremendous freedom to push boundaries and explore, to question and challenge yet there is no feeling of belonging and membership. You don´t have to accept anything and therefore, there is nothing to fall back on except concepts of one´s own making. In terms of society, tradition represents coherence and meaning, there are forms of social control which reel people in and guide behavior. In the modern world, in the absence of local family and relations, people are free to pursue an individual path and this may be what makes possible the tremendous pathos found in America, the violence, the high divorce, the substance abuse, all acted out in a vacuum of meaning. What people hunger for is meaning, to belong, yet they rebel against the strictures of tradition as being too limiting. The world has always been changing from one way to another. You can see this happening in places like Hermosillo or Yécora, where people are freed up from the confines of the village and start to break out with all forms of delinquent behavior.

In the morning, the Bámori women are out front cleaning and sweeping the narrow streets. All is close and well kept, intimate. The buildings are old, the trees large. Sahuaripa was originally visited by the first Spanish explorers, Coronado, Marcos de Niza and there has been a mission there since the 1600´s. Cowboys walk down the street with lassos and ropes, leading horses, burros and mules. Ballads play from a radio off in the distance, birds sing, roosters crow. It is tranquil beyond imagination. Here are the smells, tastes, sounds and sensations of traditional México, the pearl of what is unique about the country.

The elders all live with their families. They are not farmed out to an old folk´s home. All the homes have an ancient or two, living in a back room and included in life up to the very end. Kids, if they want any higher education, must emigrate to Hermosillo or Ciudad Obregón, where they end up at the famous University of Sonora. They perhaps become exposed to the temptations of modernity and thus, having opened Pandora´s Box, can never regain the innocence of traditional life.

At the house in Bámori, there are Catholic symbols everywhere. The people have crosses around their necks, there are pictures of Jesus, the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Last Supper, shrines and altars. In Yécora there was one house that had a sign inside which read, to the effect of, this is a Catholic home, and no Protestants or evangelizing will be tolerated.

4/28

In the mass media there is pressure to conform to an ideal of perpetual youth, there has grown a cult of vanity, where certain anorexic and buff looks have become the ideal. In rural México, this is an afterthought. In Mexican cities such as Hermosillo, people are seriously preoccupied with appearances and take much time cultivating their looks. The men and women are equally vain. I think the preoccupation with appearance coincides with exposure to American mass media. The less exposed, the less self-conscious, the more natural and uninhibited. Out in the pueblos you find a natural grace and unselfconscious beauty and dignity among the people.

Vanity is certainly a universal human failing, but it is less when the people are not exposed excessively to notions of unattainable perfection. Mexican society in general is much more accepting of different body types and the men seem to prefer the women to be on the chunky side. Chunky is equated with strength and fecundity. They like ´em chunkier than the anorexic images blasted at US women day and night.

I saw a rooster jump up onto a fence, fluff his tail feathers and begin to crow. Whatever hen will do. This is the masculine strategy. The young Mexican women are highly attractive and svelte, yet as the years pass and they have more and more kids, they grow large and ponderous. Mexican couples come in all shapes and sizes and don´t seem to arrive at the moment filled with guilt about appearance. Ultimately, it is who you are that fills the gulf, not what you look like. I even found a phrase in the Bible where it says, “don´t worry about what you look like.” Youth is the time to appear young. The young in the Sierra revel in their time and as the years roll by, they accept their appearance, weight, lack of teeth, with equanimity.