On the Plain of Snakes

by Paul Theroux

  The image I carried away was that of the solemn old woman crouched by a tombstone at the old cemetery at Xoxocotlán, looking severe in her grief and staring defiantly at me, the intruder.

  San Agustín Yatareni

  Now that my lessons in Mexican were over, having conquered the subjunctive mood, I had free time to range more widely. I visited ruins, beautiful ruins. I revisited Monte Albán. It had been a sophisticated city on a hill, and on its high plateau its stepped, symmetrical pyramids were still a marvel. Building had begun in 500 BC, at a time when Britain was a land of quarrelsome Iron Age tribes painting their bellies blue and huddled in hill forts; around the time of the Greek Parthenon (432 BC) and the Roman Forum, but greater than these, nobler in design, and combining the aesthetic of temples and residences with the power of a citadel.

  Monte Albán’s stark main plaza was a complex of pyramids, a ball court, stone platforms, and, dug into the hillside, a sequence of underground tombs, the oldest true city in the Americas and one of the oldest in the world. I went to Mitla, where the ruins were fragmentary and overtopped by a gloomy church. A few miles from Mitla, a surprise, the more impressive site of Yagul, a palace with stone villas and a fort built around the same time as Monte Albán, on a terrace cut into a high hill, lesser known than Monte Albán or Mitla, but in its day the center of a community of six thousand people. And now, no one, not even many visitors. The day I drove there, I was the only gawker.

  So much for ruins. In search of human architecture I asked an American friend from Huayapam—Linda Hanna, who ran a small posada—if she knew of a village where people had left for the United States, or had returned, having been disenchanted or deported.

  “I know just the place.”

  This was San Agustín Yatareni, a small settlement on a country road outside Oaxaca, just where the road tilts upward, beginning the climb to Huayapam. San Agustín was a quiet, concentrated place, baking in noon heat, few people stirring—the low bulge of the thick-walled church of San Agustín, a modest plaza, small houses fronting on narrow lanes, no sidewalks. The village had a certain touristic charm, attested to by the scattering of taquerias, but was an unpromising place for a villager looking for work; and on its fringes were poor houses, tethered donkeys, and agitated goats. But in spite of its size and somnolence, it proved to be exemplary.

  Around 1980 a local man named Adolfo Agustín Santiago departed from San Agustín and headed north to the border. José López Portillo was Mexico’s president, his administration well known for corruption and nepotism. He presided over an oil boom, but that was no help to the people in Oaxaca, and oil booms are notorious for creating criminality and greed. (Look at Nigeria, Venezuela, and Angola, oil rich and crooked.) Mexico soon entered a period of economic crisis. There was no work in San Agustín and very little in nearby Oaxaca. The state was the second poorest in Mexico—which it still is, three-quarters of its people living then, as now, in what economists term “extreme poverty.”

  Somehow, young Adolfo managed to get to New York City, and then to Poughkeepsie, where there were still some factories—Western Publishing, a Fiat factory, some textiles, and IBM had three Hudson Valley plants. In nearby Hyde Park, the Culinary Institute of America was growing. But Poughkeepsie was in decline, becoming cheaper to live in and with opportunities for anyone familiar with tough times, such as a Oaxacan like Adolfo. Western Publishing closed, IBM furloughed thousands of workers, the Culinary Institute still thrived, but Main Street was boarded up. In most respects Poughkeepsie was blue collar and poor, a failing city that continued to fade for decades, and it was so unsafe that many Mexicans kept to seasonal work, returning home in the winter—by common consent, so I heard again and again, crossing the border was a simple matter, until September 2001.

  The largest number of Mexicans in Poughkeepsie, by far, were from Oaxaca. Among familiar countrymen, Adolfo stayed. More young men, and women too, followed from San Agustín. The 1990 census recorded 228 Mexicans in Poughkeepsie; now there are thousands, and it is said by people in Poughkeepsie that they have helped revitalize the city. They are employed in the factories that remain there and in the surrounding plants in the Hudson Valley. They have opened shops and restaurants on Main Street. They work in the trades as plumbers and electricians. They have their own radio station and traditional dance troupe, Grupo Folklórico de Poughkeepsie. And they have introduced their own holidays and festivals—the Guelaguetza festival, a traditional Oaxacan event, now attracts thousands of participants and onlookers. Also known as Los Lunes de Cerro, Mondays on the Hill, it is celebrated at the end of July, with costumes and dancing, in Oaxaca and in adjacent villages as well as in Poughkeepsie.

  This I learned in conversations with people in San Agustín Yatareni. At any given time, a quarter of the village’s population is in Poughkeepsie. The lines of communication are helpful to potential migrants.

  I met Antonio Caldera in San Agustín. He looked careworn and resigned, but was eager to talk about his migrant days. In 1989, when he was nineteen, he was in college in Oaxaca, studying mechanical engineering. “But I was bored. I wanted something else, maybe to become a lawyer.”

  He dropped out of college and applied to study law. But the teachers rebuffed him, saying that they would admit him only if he gave them some money. All he could afford was the tuition. With the idea of earning money, he took a bus to Mexico City, and finding no opportunities there, took another bus to Monterrey. By now he had met five other young men from San Agustín Yatareni, and, using a coyote, they were guided to Tijuana. They holed up in a hotel for several days, and when the signal came—“two knocks on the hotel room door one night”—they slipped out and began to walk east.

  “Walk normal,” the coyote said, fearing that if they hurried, the police would notice.

  Once out of town, they marched. They walked fifty miles, three days to Tecate, and over the border there, where the coyote’s contact was waiting with a van at a prearranged spot—this was before cell phones and text messages.

  “He drove us to Los Angeles,” Antonio said. “Then we flew to New York, and we took a bus to Poughkeepsie. After that, everything was fine.”

  He worked in a Chinese restaurant and lived in a house with eleven other people, all of them from San Agustín Yatareni. This was still 1989. His monthly expenses were $300, and he usually managed to send $800 a month home to his mother, who kept a farm.

  “What about papers?” I asked.

  “I had a Social Security card,” he said. “The Chinese people gave it to me. They had a business, making Social Security cards. They were from China—they knew about these things.”

  After ten years, his widowed mother was ailing, and he returned to look after her—glad he was able to help her. He said that almost three-quarters of San Agustín Yatareni was in Poughkeepsie, about half of them with documents. He missed Poughkeepsie and said that he doubted that, given the cartels’ control of the border, he would ever be able to return.

  I stopped by a small but popular bar and burger joint called Ilegales, which was tucked under a grove of trees at the edge of San Agustín Yatareni, on the Huayapam Road. On the wall was a black-and-white poster showing Donald Trump’s face in profile, and in large letters, DONALD, TU ERES UN PENDEJO—Donald, You Are a Dickhead. Calling the bar Ilegales was a joke, since the owner of the place, José Miguel Martínez, had been an undocumented migrant for some years in the United States.

  A small smiling man in his mid-thirties, in a baseball hat and a T-shirt lettered ILEGALES, fluent in colloquial English, José Miguel looked and talked like any inner-city migrant in the US. We chatted across a table in his bar, though from time to time he jumped up to give an order or explain something to a server. Business was excellent—the place was full, and it was friendly, music playing, laughter coming from the tables, many gringos eating, which meant the word had spread to the tourists in Oaxaca that the burgers were tasty, the beer was cold, and José Miguel’s new venture, Ilegal Mezcal, w
as worth trying.

  It had all started so differently. José Miguel was fifteen years old, living in San Agustín Yatareni and doing odd jobs. He was restless, so when his cousin Luis, who was twenty-one, said “Let’s go,” they set off together, Luis funding the trip.

  This was around 1998, in the last years of simpler border crossings, smaller fees to coyotes, and fewer police, but all crossings involved several days of long walks. The two cousins flew to Tijuana, met the coyote, and were driven into the desert, where they began walking for some hours until they came to a river. The river might have been the seasonal arroyo just west of Mexicali, called El Oasis, which forms the edge of the Laguna Salada, a wide river in the summer rainy season, and in a border no-man’s-land. This was just south of the Jacumba Wilderness Area, the mountains of piled rock I’d marveled at for their rugged oddness when passing through, near Ocotillo.

  “The coyote gave me an inner tube,” José Miguel said. “I crossed the river that way, and we were met at the other side and driven to Calexico.” By then he had traveled eighty-eight miles from Tijuana. “From there we were taken to Phoenix, and I flew to Philadelphia, where I had some friends. I worked in an Italian restaurant, as a busboy and later as a server. I was earning four dollars an hour, but even so, I managed to save money and send it home.”

  After three years José Miguel went back and built a house in San Agustín Yatareni. He also fell in love with a local girl. But he missed Philadelphia, and steady work. “I sort of regretted going back.” He returned to the States to work, to save some more, but stayed in touch with the girl. When he went back to San Agustín Yatareni to get married, and perhaps move on, he found that the border crossing was much more difficult. Anyway, he was a local guy, and San Agustín was his true home. So he stayed and built Ilegales, and to the bar and burger joint he added a brand of mezcal, also called Ilegales.

  He had lived lightly in Philadelphia, undocumented the whole time. He never applied for a green card, nor did he ever have a driver’s license or a Social Security card. He did not own a car or drive one. He usually traveled by bus, or by bicycle.

  “What do I miss? Food and friends. The diversity of culture,” José Miguel said. “And if you work hard, the money’s good. This isn’t true in Mexico. You can work hard here and still earn very little. What I don’t like about Mexico is the paperwork—and especially the poverty. In the States you have poor people, but generally they’re the ones who don’t want to work. Here we have poor people, but poor because they have no opportunities. It’s sad.”

  Then he looked up. A waitress had a question, someone else was calling out to him, the place was full, a clamor in the kitchen, the clang of tin pots.

  “Excuse me.”

  San Andrés Huayapam

  I drove up the road and into the foothills to Huayapam, a simple drive, my car bouncing on the speed bumps, the topes and corrugations. A walk to Huayapam was a hearty tradition in the last century for the gringo expatriates living in Oaxaca, a Sunday outing, verging somewhat on slumming, to see a village of exotic Zapotecs in traditional dress and buy a hand-woven shawl or a rug or a newly fired piece of pottery. From the busy town to the quiet country, a mild hike. In Mornings in Mexico, D. H. Lawrence recounts his walk to Huayapam—a name he must have misheard and misspelled as “Walk to Huayapa.”

  A contrarian by nature, Lawrence begins by explaining his reluctance to go and finally how he relents, walking with Frieda and their mozo (flunky), Rosalino, and stopping on the way. Not a long walk, but he makes a business of it. Lawrence was one of those highly absorbent few upon whom nothing is wasted. A week in Sardinia gave him the four-hundred-page travel book Sea and Sardinia. Less than three months in Oaxaca and he emerged with a full-length novel, a number of short stories, a dozen essays, and some translations. Inflating his one-day walk to Huayapam, he ventures to sum up peasant life in rural Mexico. The essay is a frenzied account of the junket, Frieda nagging, Lawrence ranting, the Oaxacan Rosalino following along, patient and helpful, lugging their gear, playing the role of the comical native sidekick, Sancho Panza to Lawrence’s Quixote.

  “Humanity enjoying itself is on the whole a dreary spectacle, and holidays are more disheartening than drudgery.” Cranky, yes, but this downbeat beginning to the Huayapam piece is not a facetious pose. Tiny, misanthropic Lawrence (“Humanity is a tree of lies!”) was a skeptical spectator by nature, not an active participant, and the interruptions of Sundays and holidays kept him—as they keep most serious writers—from his desk and the novel he was invariably writing, The Plumed Serpent, on this particular December day in 1924. But he took the walk to Huayapam all the same, and brought his skepticism with him. It must be added that another factor that limited Lawrence’s robust appreciation of a ten-mile walk on a hot day at a high altitude was his poor health. He was a physical wreck at the best of times, and in Oaxaca he was diagnosed with malaria, as well as being chronically consumptive, spitting blood some days. Not long after the walk to Huayapam he had his first and nearly fatal tubercular hemorrhage, and died of the disease five years later. But he roused himself for the walk.

  Apart from the church, which Lawrence anatomizes in detail, everything about Huayapam itself has changed in the century since he sauntered up the road. Much of the way is urbanized now, or residential. Where Lawrence saw farms, there are now houses. It is the condition of poorly zoned and improvisational Mexico, sprawling into the fields and pastures, huts and shacks accumulating to violate and blight the pastoral. The road is paved, and Oaxaca has spread into the nearer hills.

  But that is the foreground. And there would be no point in mentioning Lawrence’s piece at all if there was no more than foreground in it. But it is the framing of the walk, the amphitheater of the landscape, and his precision in describing it that gives it beauty and presence. What matters is the sense of place in Mornings in Mexico, some of it gone forever, other aspects eternal. It is true of Mexico in general, it is the appeal of the back roads, it is another reason for a road trip, it is the enduring value of Oaxaca.

  Away from Huayapam, the background—the dramatic, unbuilt-upon steepness of the sierra—is unaltered from Lawrence’s observation of a century ago. “On the left, quite near, bank the stiffly pleated mountains, all the foot-hills, that press savannah-coloured into the savannah of the valley,” he writes. “The mountains are clothed smokily with pine, ocote, and, like a woman in a gauze rebozo, they rear in a rich blue fume that is almost cornflower-blue in the clefts. It is their characteristic, that they are darkest-blue at the top. Like some splendid lizard with a wavering royal-blue crest down the ridge of his back, and pale belly, and soft pinky-fawn claws, on the plain.”

  A little purple, perhaps, but he makes his point. The physicality of the landscape is matched by the physique of the people he sees, like the bare-breasted laundress slapping at clothes in a river. “She has a beautiful full back, of a deep orange color, and her wet hair is divided and piled.” Similarly the naked men bathing: “What beautiful, suave, rich skins these people have; a sort of richness of the flesh.” The immediacy and physicality of the essay, Lawrence celebrating the human body, outweighs its fussing and the triviality in the dialogue of the bargaining for fruit or something to eat. In the end, in spite of all the talk and the misunderstandings, he does not get to know anyone or to listen to anyone’s story. Huayapam is all surface—brilliant surface (“stiffly pleated mountains,” “suave, rich skins”), but with no inner life.

  This superficial observation of human architecture has color—flesh like the contours of landscape—but fails to give the essay any staying power. As for the architecture of the pueblo itself, Lawrence makes a timeless observation when he considers the church of San Andrés, like many another remote and isolated church in rural Mexico, how “your heart gives a clutch, feeling the pathos, the isolated tininess of human effort.”

  What was baffling to Lawrence, and what is unchanged—baffling to many visitors today—is the indigenous language:
Huayapam is still a place of Zapotec speakers. And also, that in the absence of political parties, there is a village council that meets regularly to decide the issues of the day, how they affect the town, basing these decisions on traditional Usos y Costumbres—to the frustration of local expatriates and gringos, who wonder whether they have a future here, and if their land tenure is secure, and does anyone like them.

  To Lawrence the people in Huayapam are unknowable and obstinate, shrieking “No hay!”—Don’t have it!—to whatever he requests, or gabbling obscurely in Zapotec. “It is a choice between killing her and hurrying away,” he writes of an unhelpful woman. As for the water, “We must get above the village to be able to drink the water without developing typhoid.”

  That timid squawk of the hemorrhoidal tourist sounded here reflects the tone Lawrence sometimes reveled in, and it was a squawk I wished to avoid. Though Lawrence habitually fought with Frieda, who was habitually unfaithful to him (“You sniffling bitch!”) and who casually yelled abuse at locals, he clearly enjoyed his time in Oaxaca—the serenity of the place, the easy friendships with the people, the traditional courtesies, the quality of light: “Then comes Sunday morning, with the peculiar looseness of its sunshine.” All these Oaxaca characteristics so helpful to someone who wants to sit quietly and write something.

  Many Oaxaqueños, in the city and in villages nearby, had a vivid experience of the United States. I met two in Huayapam who had ventured across the border, the first on a balmy afternoon, under a tree in a garden at the edge of the village.

  “I was nineteen when I left for the border,” Pedro García Sandoval said. He was thirty-four, yet work and uncertainty had given him the look of an anxious old man. He was employed in Huayapam as a plumber, but his business was slow. He’d been born in the mountains to the west of Oaxaca, in Putla, a district that was partly in Oaxaca and partly in Guerrero. The village was poor. He saw no future there. His older brother was in San Francisco—he’d gone a few years before—and this brother told him how to go about crossing the border.