by Paul Theroux
Germán nodded and with a tactical silence gathered the attention of the table before he said pointedly, “But that was long ago!”
Sitting under a tree at a ritual of mourning and feasting, and being informed of Turner and an era I knew little about (Flandrau’s book is genial, with a reference to what he calls “Diazpotism”; Turner’s is a bitter polemic), I was humbled. Germán was an indigenous Zapotec. What he remembered most vividly about the book was the persecution of another indigenous group, the Yaquis of Sonora, the attempt by the Mexican government to exterminate some and enslave others. When at last I found the book, I discovered it to be an exhaustive account of the abuses of the Díaz period, of oppression and forced labor in Yucatán, of the connivance of the immigrant Chinese, of massacre in Juchitán, and Turner’s terrifying eyewitness description of the sadistic flogging of a Yaqui.
In one of his crueler orders, quoted by Turner, Díaz issued a proclamation: “No more Yaquis are to be deported except in the case of offenses being committed by Yaquis. For every offense hereafter committed by any Yaqui, 500 Yaquis are to be rounded up and deported to Yucatan.”
“The Yaquis are Indians,” the fair-minded Turner writes later. “They are not white, yet when one converses with them in a language mutually understood one is struck with the likenesses of the mental processes of White and Brown. I was early convinced that the Yaqui and I were more alike in mind than in color. I became convinced, too, that the family attachments of the Yaqui mean quite as much to the Yaqui as the family attachments of the American mean to the American. Conjugal fidelity is the cardinal virtue of the Yaqui home and it seems to be so not because of any tribal superstition of past times or because of any teachings of priests, but because of a constitutional tenderness sweetened more and more with the passing of the years.”
Meanwhile, at the funeral feast, women were stirring the big pot of maize kernels, slapping tortillas on a griddle, and passing from table to table with a local delicacy, pan de cazuela, bread dipped in chocolate, which we ate with one hand, a glass of mezcal or soda pop in the other.
Germán began speaking about the injustices of the current government, and a young man sat down heavily next to me. In a frantic voice he told me his name was Rojelio, that he was thirty-seven, that he had lived in Fresno for years, and joined a gang, and took drugs.
“It’s weird to be back here,” he said, his voice rising to a screech. “Nothing works. No water. No electricity. No connection to the outside world. Kids go to school without food. There’s no information here. I needed to reconnect with this town, but I can’t connect.”
He stopped making sense, he was paranoid and accusatory, but his moments of lucidity threw me. Across the table, Germán nibbled the pan de cazuela, dabs of chocolate on his mustache, while the small girls, winking and offering more food, tiptoed among the tables.
When I looked past the guests eating and drinking, at the apparent clutter in the compound, I perceived something unexpected.
Harmony in Disorder
It was a clarifying vision, a Mexican epiphany. The funeral feast the day after the burial was held in the walled back garden of the dead woman’s house. But the house was much more than that, a compound occupying a whole corner block in the village, three dwellings, including a sizable shop.
This illustrated something it had taken me a while to understand about Mexican life. At ten long tables, and at half a dozen wooden benches, sat a hundred or more people, old and young, dressed informally in the rustic way, all eating together—the tripe and liver stew, weak broth, plates of fatty meat and gristle hacked off the bone, tortillas, mezcal, and soda. For dessert, pan de cazuela dipped in a reddish mixture of cocoa-flavored water.
The steady hum of this meal was surrounded by chaotic rustling: ducks and ducklings underfoot, two dogs, seven querulous chickens pecking near a rusted motor scooter that served as a small table, the spreading branches of the trees for shade, a six-foot-high heap of withered corn cobs, two children riding tricycles bumping into the tables, the yard littered with torn plastic and shreds of paper, and at head height, two slumping lines, one hung with laundry, the other with cow tendons stiffening in the heat—or perhaps pale plasticine jerky. Scattered beneath the rope lines: broken toys, unrecognizable; dismembered dolls, heads and torsos; the collapsed tubular frame of a bike; a cast-off car tire; and an old black engine block half buried in the soil. A junkyard, really, but a purposeful one, and a wakeful dog—when he yawned he seemed to grin satirically, showing his teeth.
Three women stood near huge metal pots, one of the pots four feet in diameter, so big the three women could almost have fit inside, the other pots nearly as big, boiling the maize kernels (“for tomorrow’s tortillas”), other women serving food, pouring mezcal, bringing baskets of fruit, cuddling babies, cooking, and in a corner near a hand pump and a basin, three women scrubbing soot-crusted pans. In the roofed, open-sided shed—the ramada—a woman at a table hacked at a slab of meat.
But as I studied the scene, the small children bumping on tricycles or playfully offering food seemed soft and luminous, like dream children.
It was not chaotic; it was a serene tableau, each person engaged and animated in a task—eating, drinking, cooking, cleaning, serving, playing, reminiscing, explaining. It seemed like the interior mechanism of an enormous clock—a Mexican clock, all spare parts, its workings tapping the time, gulping the seconds, clicking on the minutes, a model of symmetry and efficiency: each thing mattered, each person was essential. Even the dog mattered, as the proverb had it: Where there is veneration, even a dog’s tooth emits light. It was something I needed to know.
My epiphany was this: a mass of unrelated and jumbled elements deliquescing to a vision, disarray resolving to order, chaos crystallizing to harmony. What had looked like a mess was a rational pattern, the Mexican world making sense to me. It was all ritual, preordained and obeyed; it calmed me and helped me on my way.
Self-Portrait of a Patriarch
Meeting the older indigenous man, the patriarch at the funeral feast in a small village in the mountains, who read widely and was articulate, self-aware, and analytical, I wanted to know more. This is his story:
My name is Germán García Martínez. I’m sixty-one years old and grew up in the town of San Dionisio Ocotepec. My parents on my mother’s side were farmers, and on my father’s side bakers. My father believed in education for women and hard work for men. For that reason, I didn’t finish primary school. When I married, I worked a long time with my father, but he didn’t allow me to advance. He treated me like a stranger, he didn’t pay me a salary, and he always said, “Why do you complain if you have food and a roof over your head?”
My wife and I decided to be independent of him, because one day my eldest daughter got sick and I asked my father for money for the doctor and he said no. My wife started to sell pepitas [pumpkin seeds] at church, and I worked for other people until we had saved enough to buy a car. With the car, I began to give rides to people to Tlacolula or Oaxaca. In that time there was no taxi or bus. And I began to transport produce for people who took them to sell in the market. This was how I met people from Yalalag who bought plants and leaves for curing leather. I spoke with them and began to sell them the plants, then I bought a mill and began to grind the plants [a moler las plantas], because I could get a better price for them.
My wife and I began to buy huaraches from them and sell them at the market, and it went so well that my father stopped talking to me to the point of disinheriting me, only because I wanted a better life for my children. My mother forced him to give me a plot of land where I built my house, and from that moment he told me that was the only thing I would get from him. So I made my own home.
My wife and I wanted to produce our own huaraches. The first step was to learn how to cure leather. One of the men who bought our plants agreed to teach me, but without taking pay or food or lodging. For a number of years he taught me, and I then began curing our own leath
er. I realized that he had only taught me the basics, and so we wasted a lot of material. In the end, my wife and I succeeded in curing the leather, and we began to learn how to make huaraches, until finally they came out well. We started to sell, and eventually we had seventy clients. This ended when there was the devaluation of the peso, and the people of our town elected me municipal president. At that time, my mother also died.
The business my wife and I had built began to fail. The people who worked with us started to leave for the United States, and I wasn’t able to cure the leather because my responsibilities as municipal president took up all my time. My mother had died and my father loved neither me nor my family because I had been able to advance in life, and he hadn’t.
In my office as president, I wanted to organize the community, include women in the town assemblies, revive community service, and build a water treatment plant long before even the city of Oaxaca did so. We separated organic from inorganic trash, paved roads, dug water and drainage systems, provided computers for the schools, and created an association of seven indigenous communities. For three years in this post, I received no salary, because the town is run by what is called Uses and Customs [as noted earlier, Usos y Costumbres—customary law, or self-governance], which I call Abuses and Customs [Abusos y Costumbres]. But I also feel a lot of pride and satisfaction for what I accomplished as president. I paid a heavy price, leaving my business and taking on so much in that post.
I returned to my workshop, now in ruins. I was depressed, and to my mind I thought the solution was to go to the United States. But my wife disagreed; she fought to move forward with the business, and she convinced me not to leave the country, and to keep working here.
My father, on the other hand, was happy I had failed. Those were ten very difficult years, and I am grateful to my wife and children, who were always there pushing and fighting for us to succeed. Now everything is different, from having no food to always having food on the table, and now I can even go out to eat or take a break to rest.
Afterward, the village elected me to be the president of communal lands [another unpaid position, to direct the use of communal properties and the group of townspeople who are authorized to use this land]. In that job I discovered my love of nature and the importance of caring for the environment and using it responsibly. It seemed my ideas pleased some people in our town but annoyed others, so I became frustrated and even angry, but I also knew that if I didn’t do it, then no one would.
Today I am a man with strong principles. I don’t like corruption. I work for the greater good. I like to read. Some of the books I’ve read are Poder y Delirio [Power and Passion by Enrique Krauze], La Rebelión de los Colgados [The Rebellion of the Hanged by B. Traven], and Turner’s México Bárbaro. I like to help people. I want to protect our lands and protect and restore the environment.
I believe that education is the key to personal and community development. I work to minimize irresponsible consumerism, and for the youth of my town to be able to compete against globalization, so they can have a better future. I believe that collective action can create transformative changes in my community, and that the young can become fountains of inspiration for communities around the world.
In his own words, Don Germán provided me with a portrait of himself as a whole man, recounting his struggles and achievements. It was a reminder that in its essence, travel is less about landscapes than about people—not power brokers but pedestrians, in the long march of Everyman. Once again, in Mexico, as with my students, my chance encounters with campesinos, with Francisco Toledo and Guillermo Olguín and so many others, I felt lucky in the people I met.
In the Mixteca Alta: Santa María Ixcatlán
The crunchy, popular straw hats stacked in the market at Tehuacán, in southeastern Puebla state, and in market stalls farther afield—all of them handmade, of strips of dried palm fronds—were woven in one remote community in the mountains of northern Oaxaca. The bleak village lay like chalky residue in a cup-like valley at the end of a road so bad the place was hardly visited, except for the days of its annual fiesta. On those days, pilgrims came in their thousands to venerate a peculiar relic, the carving of a bruised and tortured Christ, which worked miracles and (so it was said) sometimes dripped real blood.
This poor village was Santa María Ixcatlán, so poor that real money seldom changed hands there. If a villager wished to buy vegetables at the market, or an item at the small shop, or had a bag of maize kernels to grind for tortilla flour at the local molino, such a person would probably barter a freshly made straw hat, woven early that morning, and that was the equivalent of money—5 pesos, or 25 cents. Few people had money in Santa María Ixcatlán, but all had palm fiber for hats, because the palms grew wild on the rocky slopes of the steep valleys, and the fronds were free for the picking.
Yet the village was culturally rich, and well known in other respects. The place was famous in the Mixteca not only for its hats of woven palm, but also for durable and finely plaited baskets. The local church was celebrated too, for the carved image in a glass case behind the altar, the lacerated Christ—from the Stations of the Cross, the Lord of the Three Falls—the relic that attracted pilgrims. Add to this, a little distance from the village, in a hollow by a stream, a palenque of the most traditional kind making mezcal, employing the simplest tools—wooden pitchforks and leather vats—the fermentation taking place in the stitched hides of cows, filled with liquor and looking (the tight hairy bellies bulging) like fat, dismembered animals hung upside down. Finally, Santa María Ixcatlán was the only community in Mexico of Ixcateco-speaking people, and the language was in danger of dying out: though most in the village of about five hundred people knew some words, only three could chat fluently in Ixcateco, and those folks were in their eighties. The population had grown slightly from the three hundred inhabitants recorded in 1579, when the first Spanish missionaries arrived.
I heard of this unusual village from Raúl Cabra, Michael Sledge’s partner. Raúl was a designer and entrepreneur, and he was one of Santa María Ixcatlán’s largest employers, of local men and women plaiting baskets—some ornamental, others with a practical purpose (for laundry or desk accessories), to be used in luxury hotels.
“But you’ll never find the place,” Sledge said.
“I have a map.”
“Probably not on a map,” he said. “But there’s another issue, a more tricky one.” He made a face, stroked his beard, and smiled. “There’s a story they tell about some strangers in the Mixteca. They show up in a village unannounced and begin asking all sorts of questions. This is before they are properly introduced. They’re either from the government or some religious sect. The villagers answer the questions—they’re sort of intimidated. But they see the strangers as a threat, and the questions as intrusive. So, after the strangers have passed through the village, all the people gather . . .”
“Stop, stop,” I said.
“Don’t you want to know how it ends?”
“No more details, please.”
“You don’t like it?”
“I love the story, ‘Strangers with Questions,’” I said. “It’s just that I don’t want to know too much.”
“I still think we should go together. The road is terrible. The village is in the middle of nowhere. You don’t know anyone there. But I have some contacts—the basket makers. And my truck has more clearance than your car. I’m telling you, that road is horrendous.”
It was a good idea that we set off early, going north, past Oaxaca city and Etla, heading to the toll road, because at the first tollbooth a policeman said, “Blockade up ahead. You can’t go through. You’ll have to take the side roads,” and he pointed into the swirling mist, mountain ridges clawed by erosion, the summits visible as bluish crags.
“The scenic route,” Sledge said, turning into a narrow road that led upward, past plowed fields, and curved above the valley. Traveling along one ridge—steepness on both sides—he said, “This wa
s probably the road the Spanish took to get to Oaxaca.”
“I know this road,” I said. “This was the detour I took when I drove to Oaxaca the first time, in a thunderstorm. Another blockade. This is the Camino Real.”
The road continued, winding around the upper slopes, giving onto great vistas, the sierra miles away, the nearer mountains eroded, in the red clay zone of Oaxaca. In the most unlikely and precipitous places, small lopsided huts were propped up on slopes, while cows and horses, tipped sideways to compensate for the angle, browsed in the sparse grass, a slanted landscape of leaning creatures and buildings.
Though I had come south on much of this road on my way to Oaxaca, the rain and dark clouds had obscured the distances then and filled the valleys with mist. I had not realized how deep the valleys were, how high I’d been traveling, but the sun and scattered clouds today revealed the true altitude and the danger—the hairpin bends that were unfenced and unforgiving, the crashed cars tumbled and tipped over at the edges of some of these curves, were proof of that.
Sixty miles of sharp bends and potholes, and then the descent to Nochixtlán, the epicenter of teachers’ protests, burned-out buses on the main street, the slogan JUSTICE AND RIGHTS FOR ALL PEOPLE still daubed in red paint on the overpasses, and on the buses more slogans accusing the Mexican president of being an assassin. A Mexican town that has been vandalized by protesters and the opposing forces of police and army—the blackened buses, the burned-out trucks, the scorched and melted street surface wrinkled like lava—is Mexico at its most dystopian, like a vision of a failed future, a world gone wrong, a place to flee.
