by Paul Theroux
As I left, slipping through the bamboo gateway, I saw a man in a blue helmet parking a motorcycle, lifting it onto its kickstand. He then took out a notebook and tapped one page with a pen. I said hello, and he gave me a cheery reply. Keeping his helmet on, he seemed somewhat unreadable and rather forbidding. Then I saw the logo on his shirt: Banca Azteca. The debt collector.
San Baltazar Guelavila
In the small Zapotec-speaking town of San Baltazar Guelavila, I asked Felipe, a local man, the meaning of “Guelavila.”
“It means Night of Hell, sir,” Felipe said.
“And this river?”
“It is the River of Red Ants, sir.”
“That hill is impressive.”
“It is the Hill of the Nine Points, sir,” Felipe said, indicating the separate small peaks of the ridge with a dabbing finger. “Our soul goes there when we die.”
“The maize in the market is colorful.”
“Our maize has four colors,” he said with pride. “Red, white, purple, and blue. It is from ancient times.”
“That big snake painted on the side of the house,” I said, “it’s unusual.”
We were in the center of town, near the plaza and the market. The town itself was off the main road south of Oaxaca, at the end of a potholed track three miles into the mountains. A mural painted on the flat, forty-foot-high end-side of an adobe building near us depicted the blue archway entrance of the town, a man plowing a field, a woman making tortillas, and another man digging a chopped agave plant to cook in an oven for mezcal. But the largest image in the mural was a sensuous snake, coiled around one upright of the blue archway. The snake’s singular feature was a rose blossom attached to—apparently growing from—the top of its greenish head.
“The snake is a symbol of our town,” Felipe said. “We believe that local people hunted this snake with the rose on its head day and night, because capturing it would bring us good luck.”
“Wouldn’t it be dangerous to capture a snake that size?” It was thick, with a darting tongue, and in the mural about thirty feet long.
“No danger, sir. Because no one ever caught the snake, and as a result they never had good luck.”
Felipe was a cotton weaver who made scarves and caps, his looms located in a two-story building at the edge of San Baltazar. Making adobe and distilling mezcal were the town’s other industries. Felipe had been to the States. He gave me the most succinct version of a border crossing.
“I crossed the border. Everyone was kind. My bosses were good to me. The thing I missed most was eating with my family. It’s very lonely in the United States. So I came home.”
All this time, whenever I arrived in a town like this, I was under the influence of my memories of the people I’d met—many Oaxacans—on the border. Many of the men in San Baltazar had been to the States, including a certain man who Felipe, clearing his throat with an awkward cough, warned me had a superior attitude as a result of having spent a lot of time over the border. That sometimes happened. A person went across, spent years in the States, then returned presumido (stuck-up).
I asked Felipe whether he could round up some returnees from the States and meet me under a tree near the weaving operation, the building with the looms. It was a lovely morning in San Baltazar, finches flitting in the boughs of the big shade tree. We sat on folding chairs, the men, young and old, sitting or standing, and the dog of one of the older men lay snoring at his feet. The sun streaming through the boughs gave them shadow-carved faces.
From his tone, I was sure the first man to speak was the stuck-up one. He was not conceited, but he was the loudest, the most reckless, and in a society where modesty was valued and boasting frowned upon, he might have seemed intimidating. But he was funny in the way of a person wishing to take charge, so humor took the sting out of his bluster.
“My name is Nilo,” he said. “Like the river.”
A big man in a dirty red T-shirt, he reclined on the thick upraised roots of the tree, wagging a sandal on one foot, and rather than facing me, he shouted his answers to the fifteen others gathered there.
“It’s an adventure!” he shouted. “You leave your family—you don’t know whether you’ll live or die!”
This dramatic opening seized the attention of the others, and hearing the shout in his sleep, the dog twitched one of his ears.
“Where did you cross?” I asked.
“Tecate—I walked across,” he said. “It was easy then. I was with twenty-six people, four from this town, the rest from Mexico City. I paid 450 pesos, which is nothing, really”—about $25 that morning. “Now they charge 15,000”—$830. “But you can always get someone to pay, and then you pay them back. Listen, if you work hard, you can pay it all off in a year.”
Nilo’s confidence and his casual way with sums of money impressed the younger men. And they must have noticed, as I did, that Nilo was the grubbiest man in the group, with squashed sandals and dusty trousers, now and then lifting his T-shirt to wipe the sweat from his face, exposing his rounded belly.
“Doing what sort of work?” I asked.
“Construction. I was in roofing.”
“How do you get hired?”
“Not a problem!” he yelled, enlightening me. “The guys doing the hiring are from here! Oaxacans. My brother’s in Utah—he’s been there twenty-seven years. I was in the States for fifteen.” He nodded with authority. “I would have stayed, but my mother was getting old.”
As though to puncture Nilo’s bluster and give it a sense of reality, Felipe said, “It’s dangerous. All sorts of bad things can happen if you go with a stranger to the border. They might kidnap you and force you to get money from your family. You say, ‘I can’t pay.’ So they make you take drugs across.”
Nilo shrugged and made a face, as if to convey the thought, Hey, bad things happen everywhere.
“My brother,” Felipe went on, “the coyote dropped him at a house near the border. The people at the house robbed my brother of everything he had. It was obvious they were in cahoots with the coyote.”
“The polleros come here all the time,” the old man with the dog said, using the variant word for coyote. “They look for people who want to cross. I went with one—it was ’93. I flew to Tijuana and tried to cross in a car. I was sent back that time, but the second time I made it. I was there a year and a half, working in construction and doing other things. I never made much money, so I came home.”
I said, “Given the fact that there are dangers, and it costs money to go across, is it worth it?”
“Yes,” Felipe said. “If all you’ve got is a roof and nothing else, you go there. I was twenty-three when I went. I didn’t even have a roof. And there’s more work now than before. I went across, worked in construction and tree trimming, then got a job in a Chinese restaurant—doing dishes, then I was an assistant chef.”
“Why did you come back?”
“I couldn’t save enough money,” Felipe said. “Even after eight years I was still struggling.”
Nilo tugged at his grubby shirt and howled in contradiction, saying, “If you know how to save, you can save 8,000 in six months.” I took this to mean pesos, about $440.
“At the Chinese restaurant I was making $150 every two weeks,” Felipe said, and raising his voice, added, “I got into debt. I ate Chinese food for a year and a half. I never want to eat Chinese food ever again.”
I asked him the name of the restaurant.
“Chow Mein House,” he said. “In Azusa.”
Azusa is just off the 210 Freeway of Pasadena, on the way to Rancho Cucamonga, though Felipe lived in a house with other migrants in Covina, and took the bus to Citrus Avenue and Chow Mein House.
“How about you?” I asked a young man who’d been listening in silence. He said his name was Isaac. “Have you been to the States?”
“No. But I’d like to see another place. To see how they live there. To know it.”
Another man piped up, “I’d like to leave her
e and find markets for my work.”
“What is your work?”
“Weaving,” he said, and explained, “Making rebozos and ponchos and shawls.”
“You should go. It’s amazing,” Nilo said, talking over the man. “It’s like being a goat in a green valley! You see it and you want to eat it all! You drink and eat and spend money!”
The old man with the dog said, “The work is hard. The pay is low. And sometimes there’s no work.”
“You can’t say there’s no work!” Nilo said. “There’s always this”—and he began gesturing—“you go into a department store, pick up some things, rip off the security tags, steal the things, and sell them on the street.” Encouraged by the men’s laughter, he went on, “Or go to a grocery store, fill your shirt with shrimp”—he lifted his shirt and bunched it with his fists, the imaginary shrimp, to make his point—“and you walk out and sell the shrimp.”
I said, “By the way, that’s against the law. You can go to jail.”
“He’s joking,” one of the men said, in case I got the wrong idea about Nilo.
“Here in San Baltazar I was a rebellious young man,” Nilo said. “My father was gone. I broke windows. My mother was useless. Mothers can be weak! I was always drunk and getting into trouble. I needed my father.”
“Where was your father?”
“In California! He went when I was nine,” Nilo said. “It was the most beautiful time of my life.”
“I had no free time,” Felipe said, protesting. “I worked. I was tired. I slept. Then I worked again.”
I asked, “Did you see anything in California that you wanted to bring back here?”
“A community well,” he said. “We need more water here.”
Two women and two young girls walked from behind a one-story adobe building, the women carrying pitchers on their shoulders, the girls carrying clay bowls, a sudden biblical glimpse—attending women in long skirts, bearing drinks.
“Tejate,” Isaac said. “It tastes good.”
The liquid poured into the bowls was gray, with a grainy texture and a scum of bubbles on the surface, and it tasted sweetish, a thick soup of—so they explained—maize, flor de cacao, peanuts, coconut, and roasted mamey seeds, or pixtle in Zapotec. Because of the extensive grinding, kneading, roasting, and toasting of ingredients, this pre-Hispanic concoction is called one of the most labor-intensive drinks on earth.
“Important people used to drink this,” Felipe said, and by important people, he was harking back six hundred years, because (in the long memory of Mexico) he meant Zapotec royalty, for whom tejate was reserved.
“Drink, Don Pablo! You are welcome here!”
Except for Nilo, the rest of the men were weavers, spending all day at a loom. Nilo explained that he had diabetes and was no longer strong. “Because of my diabetes they wanted to cut my leg off !” But he had refused, and stubbornly, defiantly still walked, though he had no work.
Felipe guided me into the nearby building and upstairs to the weaving room, where there were seven head-high wooden looms, some of the weavers sitting, thrusting the shuttles at right angles through the tight threads, pulling the beams down, working the treadles, and in all that effort—the rattle of skeletal frames and the stamping of treadles—lengthening the cloth by one thread.
(Recalling that, it seems a fit image for what I am doing now, fussing with my fingers and hesitating, then tightening the line and starting again, minutes passing, this memory of weaving enlarged by one sentence.)
Some of the men who had been seated under the tree, talking to me, took their places on benches at looms and resumed weaving. With the clacking and chattering of the wooden machinery in this upstairs workshop, it was hard to hold a conversation, yet I noticed that the men were speaking in a language that was not Spanish.
I beckoned Isaac to a balcony and said, “Are you speaking Zapotec?”
“Yes,” he said. “We speak Zapotec among ourselves.”
A man listening said, “It’s like having a secret language! You can talk about someone who doesn’t speak it and say anything you want while in their presence.”
The town of San Baltazar was completely bilingual, the school taught in both Spanish and Zapotec. But Isaac’s son Alejandro, who was fourteen and said he was a student, was not in school that day, though school was in session. Alejandro was sitting at a loom, weaving lengths of black cloth.
“How’s business?” I asked Isaac.
“Demand is unstable,” he said.
“Yet we keep working,” Felipe said. “We work twelve hours a day. It’s hard. It’s like working in the States.”
The Story of the Brujo
San Baltazar Guelavila was not especially known for its weaving, its adobe, or its mezcal, but it was celebrated for Las Salinas, its hot spring, which bubbled in a deep ravine to the southwest, the valley of the Cerro Oscura—the Hidden Hill. I ought to see it, the weavers said.
“Is it far?”
“A little far.”
That implied very far, and it proved to be the case—it was miles below the town, on a rocky track, circling both sides of a ravine, and would take an hour and a half to get to the valley bottom. This was in the heat of the day, and it meant they’d have to take off work to get there. But none of the men had a car, and there was no regular transport into the valley, so they seized on the opportunity of my having a vehicle and said that I must not miss this wonder of nature. The truth was they wanted a ride, an outing, a lark, to see it again themselves and paddle their bare feet and wiggle their toes in the mineral water.
On the way there, the car sliding and tipping on the loose rocks of the road, they told me a story of a witch, each of the men chipping in with a detail or a bit of dialogue.
“There was a brujo here,” someone said—a sorcerer. “He was so powerful he could eat a whole cow in one sitting.” This was amazing, but it also meant that people’s cows were disappearing. “So they decided to kill the brujo.”
“His name was Tomás Olivera. He lived in this area, near San Baltazar.”
“They looked all over for him—in the hills, in the valleys, even in the town. But no one could find him to kill him, and of course to save their cows that were still disappearing, the brujo devouring them.”
“At last someone saw him high in a cactus, holding on. They surrounded him, with rifles.”
“Tomás Olivera said, ‘Please don’t shoot me in my body. I have enough holes in my flesh. Shoot me in a hole I already have.’”
“Because he was high up in the cactus, they decided to shoot him in his culo—a chosen hole.”
“So they raised their rifles and pulled the triggers, but the guns would not go off. The guns were bewitched! And the next thing they heard was the voice of Tomás Olivera.”
“He said, ‘I am over here!’”
“They ran to that spot, but he wasn’t there. He was throwing his voice. They were unable to find him, although they kept hearing him: ‘I am here’ and ‘I am over here.’”
“At last, as they were still trying to find him, he disappeared into a bottle and was gone forever.”
Magical realism in the remote village? No, just something fanciful, a cock-and-bull story, like the local legend of the elusive snake with the rose on its head—a tall tale to help pass the time on the slow descent into the deep valley.
The hot spring was a pool in a declivity of rock, yellowed with a large, smooth, crystalline scab of hardened minerals from the water. The excitement of the men was like the sudden urgency of children on an outing, dancing along the log bridge that spanned the narrow river, also called Las Salinas, jumping from flat stone to flat stone on the little ledge, and taking their sandals off and wading in the river through the opening between the limestone walls to see the cataract splashing down the cliff face.
At the end of the day, back at the big house near the weaving compound, one of the men said, “Now, we eat.” And he explained that this was the house of the pa
triarch, Alejandro Martínez.
I was led through a bamboo fence, a nearby horse tethered to a tree, and onto a veranda where a long table had been set with plates and glasses.
Ten of us at the table, all men, Don Alejandro sitting at the far end, and through the door to the house I could see another long table, eight or ten women seated with children, and older women preparing the platters of food. Young women brought the platters out to us, slices of sinewy meat, beans, tortillas, avocados, tomatoes, salsa, shredded cabbage, and glasses of goat milk—a pale, viscous liquid they called agua de avena.
While we ate, and talked about the hot spring, and the thrill of crossing the border, and the snake with the rose on its head, Don Alejandro went inside to sit with the women and children, and I counted twenty-four adults altogether eating, some of them family, some weavers, and the one gringo. It was an event, it was a party, and it was also an affirmation of family and community; and I understood Felipe—who was at the table—who had said to me how everyone in the States had been kind to him, but “the thing I missed most was eating with my family.”
Part Four
The Road to Nueva Maravilla
To the Isthmus: Juchitán
The apparent straightness and regularity of the road south from San Baltazar Guelavila to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec is misleading, because in less than an hour it narrows and lifts, veering at a sharp angle—a ribbon of ledge cut into the rock face of the sierra. I had vertigo and a fearsome illusion of slippage on many of the curves where, at the edge, the sheer drop was half a mile into a canyon, and what seemed like villages or people or goats at the bottom were nothing more than a twinkling mirage.
And the distance to Juchitán—about 175 miles, which isn’t much—is misleading, too, because they are vertical miles, rising and falling. And because of the rumors of bandits—highwaymen, carjackers, con men—and the fact of roadblocks, this is not a busy road: some scary trucks, the odd bus, not many passenger vehicles. It is hard to document banditry in Mexico, because the police often turn a blind eye—or the police may also be bandits. John Gibler’s reporting on the killings of the forty-three students in Guerrero state (which is next door) established that many police departments were corrupt, and some members of the force were cartel operatives or narcotraffickers. When the police are crooked, the innocent are victims. As the Federale said smilingly to me, “You know what we can do to you?”
