On the Plain of Snakes

by Paul Theroux

  The man in the doorway said, “They are mezcaleros. We are all mezcaleros.”

  “At the church?”

  “Not a church anymore. For years it has been our palenque. Instead of praying we make mezcal,” the man said. “You’ve seen the agave growing in the hills around here. It is the wild kind. It makes the best mezcal. And not only that—we know how to cook the piñas at just the right temperature. They will be heating the rocks soon.” He smiled and said, “What do you want to know?”

  He gave his name as Felipe, and the names of his children, and he scoffed when the strangers asked if it was a problem that there was no school in the village.

  “We don’t need a school. We have a palenque. There we worship and we work. There’s always work for people who are willing,” the man said.

  “How many more houses?” the first stranger said to his partner.

  But it was the man, Felipe, who answered. “Not many. Maybe twelve. You will find the people cooperative—they’ll answer your questions.” He seemed eager for them to stay, to complete their work. “And then—just there—the church, and you’ll be finished.”

  “It’s not easy, coming to a village like this and asking questions.”

  “It’s not easy to answer such questions.”

  “I guess not,” the first stranger said, glancing down at his clipboard, adding, “Felipe.”

  But the man frowned, seeming bewildered by the name.

  The remaining houses, as the man had promised, were more forthcoming, the people candid and cooperative, offering names and ages, satisfying the strangers. And when the two men reached the churchyard and saw some villagers, they said, “We’re done. We deserve another drink!”

  “In here,” a man said. It was the goatherd, speaking in a confident voice, beckoning them into the gateway in the perimeter wall of the ruined church, to the churchyard.

  There, in a large circular pit, a fire roared so hot a white eye blazed at its center. Nearby was the familiar apparatus of a palenque: the cement platform of a mill, a grinder upon it—an enormous stone mill wheel; the pit of agave shredded into reddish fibers; the vats of sweetish fermenting pulp; sinks and suspended copper pipes set up for distillation; and empty barrels to be filled.

  Somehow the villagers had found their way here, slipping behind the main street, perhaps, like the goatherd. Many of them the strangers recognized, a hundred or more in all.

  But it was the fire that attracted the two men in this high valley of drifting mist. They went to the edge of the pit to warm their hands, and called again for a drink.

  “This is for you,” a man said, in a voice they knew as Felipe’s, and he raised his hand.

  Just then the first blow was struck, a sudden thump like the bar clapping behind the door to secure it, and more blows, landing with such force the men were briefly blinded. They were merely stunned, but numb and helpless, tottering, until they were manhandled into the pit, where they howled.

  Logs were flung over them, pinning them to the flames. Then the agave piñas were piled upon them, and covered with soil, to be baked.

  Amurabi and the Muxes

  The three Juchiteco women staring into the mirrors of their compacts, as though at an adored friend, touching up their makeup in the lobby of the Hotel Xcaanda, were muxes. One conjecture, since the term referred to a trans woman, was that muxe (sometimes muxhe) was an early colonial corruption of the Spanish word for woman, mujer. There were muxes in the market selling fruit, and muxes cruising the back streets, looking for customers or sex partners. Muxes strolled hand in hand—beautifully dressed in sequined gowns and high heels—through the littered streets. Beefy muxes in tight frocks walked with soberly dressed families. A chain-smoking TV crew from Japan sat in the hotel waiting for written permission from the municipal president’s office to interview muxes for a Japanese freak show. Their fixer, Elvis Guerra, a local poet and muxe go-between, held my hand, his fingers damp in the heat, and said sweetly, “I can tell you so many amazing things.”

  I wanted to know everything.

  Francisco said, “There’s a man here who likes your books. He is an expert on muxes.”

  The man was Amurabi Mendez, a genial fellow of about forty-five, and we found him in his workplace a few streets from the main plaza. He owned a shop named Kiddo, retailing children’s clothing—T-shirts, shorts, sneakers, backpacks, all the merchandise brightly colored and seeming to match Amurabi’s sunny disposition. He was slightly built and slim, boyish in a cheerful, winning way. But any hint of the epicene was misleading; he had studied engineering, ran this business, and was a serious writer. He was, as I learned later, widely traveled, and his English was excellent.

  “Sorry to hear you were sick,” he said.

  “Everyone gets sick. Chorro.”

  “That’s true,” he said, laughing at the rude word. “I read The Mosquito Coast when I was an engineering student in Mexico City. I loved it. I’m so happy to see the author in our poor town of Juchitán.”

  I asked him about his own writing.

  “I’ve written a lot about the earthquake,” he said. “I was here and lived through it.”

  “Must have been terrifying,” I said.

  “Yes, but so many good things happened—inspiring things,” he said, to my banal remark. “One day after the quake there were people selling in the market. The houses were destroyed, chaos everywhere, but life was going on, people were active. Here it was, just twenty-four hours after the disaster, and some people were clearing their houses, trying to rebuild. Other people were selling flowers, fruit, meat, and at the stalls women were cooking, making garnaches. It was great. It was inspiring to see how determined they were to survive.”

  In the caste-conscious Mexican mind, Amurabi was a mestizo, that ethnic group of shifting definitions, his mother indigenous Zapotec, his father identifying as Mexican—but of course they were both of them Mexican, his father a little more Latinate. His mother was born and raised in San Carlos Yautepec, about eighty miles from Oaxaca city, up the Royal Road I had just traveled, but the pueblo was a distance off that road, and isolated, a few thousand people, most of them Zapotec, clinging to a mountainside.

  “My father was macho,” Amurabi said. “He called my mother names. ‘Indian.’ ‘Ignorant.’ ‘Primitive.’ He would demand, ‘Don’t speak your language!’”

  “Poor woman,” I said. “But what effect did that have on you?”

  “My mother was so ashamed, she didn’t want us to speak the language,” he said. “So when I was in Mexico City as a student, I didn’t want anyone to know I was Zapotec. That shame became mine.”

  “Do you feel that way now?”

  “No, not at all. I came back here—I’m proud!”

  All this time we were standing at the front of his shop, in the midst of blue backpacks and multicolored T-shirts and rows of girls’ summer dresses.

  “Ask Amurabi about the muxes,” Francisco Ramos said. “He’s the expert.”

  “Let’s meet later,” Amurabi said. “I know a place.”

  The place was Bar Jardín, a sports bar on an easy-to-remember back street, Cinco de Mayo, with TV screens showing soccer matches, tables of yelling fans, and a loud band. Yet such a noisy place seemed to stimulate energetic talk and encourage confidences, or at least frankness, because the speaker was competing with a defiant cacophony and who cared what was said? We drank beer and shouted back and forth.

  “The first thing to know,” Amurabi said, “is that a muxe is totally woman. A gay man attracted to a muxe—it’s somehow not right. The muxe wants to think, ‘I’m his girl—whatever he wants!’”

  “Because he’s my guy!” I said. “A macho guy!”

  “Yes,” Amurabi said. “He hit me and it felt like a kiss!”

  “That’s shocking.”

  “It’s a song,” Amurabi said, and riffed a little: “Yeah, yeah. ‘He hit me, and I knew he loved me.’ Oh, yeah.”

  “So muxes are not gay.”r />
  “Not at all. I’m gay. I know!” he said. “There’s a huge difference between being muxe and gay. Gays have a tough time in Mexican life. They call us mayate. What is mayate—dung beetle? It’s also slang for a black person. In Latin America generally, gays are mocked. At the World Cup last year there were chants: ‘Ehhh puto!’ and ‘El que no salta es un chileno maricón’—‘He who doesn’t jump is a Chilean faggot.’ It’s awful homophobic stuff.” But he laughed and drank and then said, “Francisco says you met Elvis Guerra.”

  “Yes, the other day at the hotel. He was lining up some muxes for a Japanese TV show.”

  “He’s a poet. He has also tried to change the whole perspective and get people to understand. There’s a new generation of muxes now.”

  “For example?”

  “They can be tops—these days, lots of muxes want to be tops,” Amurabi said, using the sexual terminology (common in S & M code) for the dominant partner. “They don’t see themselves as having to be bottoms. Older muxes are totally bottoms. And in the past, muxes wouldn’t fall in love with each other, but now it happens. The old idea was that they were transvestites and wouldn’t fall in love. That’s old thinking.”

  I wondered how a muxe emerged in a family. It is well known that Zapotec society is essentially matriarchal, that women dominate the economy—it is obvious in the market—and it is said that Zapotec women not only run the household but are the decision makers in family affairs. I asked Amurabi whether it was the mother in the family who singled out the possible muxe from her brood.

  “Yes, the family notices certain behavior when they’re young,” he said. “And things go from there. But it’s not easy. Muxes find it hard to get jobs sometimes. They become hairdressers, they do women’s nails. Clothing designers. Embroidery. Dancers. They might become prostitutes to earn a living, especially the young and beautiful ones.” He glanced at his watch. “Right now”—it was ten at night—“many muxes are busy being prostitutes. They’re cruising,” and he waved his hand beyond the shouting soccer fans and the TV screens in the direction of the back streets.

  “I saw some in the market.”

  “Not young ones.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “But for most muxes their destiny is the streets, because the school is closed to them. The university—it’s not open to them. In school, the teacher says, ‘You are Francisco.’ ‘No, I am Rosa.’ ‘No, you are Francisco!’ And they get so sad.”

  Their destiny is the streets—I admired its concision. “You were saying it’s not much better being gay here in Mexico?”

  He laughed. He said, “This very bar—I walked in here with some of my gay friends a little while ago. We were talking, blah, blah, blah. And we heard ‘They’re putos.’ And jotos. And mampo. And mayate.”

  “I know puto is ‘queer.’ What are those others?”

  “Faggot,” he said. “Mampo is mainly a Juchitán word. There’s so many others. Hueco—that’s Guatemala, too. Culero means ‘lazy’ but also means ‘queer,’ like maricón. We are always laughed at.”

  That was putting it mildly. One of the clearest denunciations of homophobia in Mexico was made by the masked Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos in conversation with Gabriel García Márquez in 2001, when Marcos appeared in Mexico City from his jungle stronghold. García Márquez had said that Marcos did not appear to be a traditional Latin American leftist.

  Marcos said that such leftists ignored two important social groups, the indigenous people and the minorities. “Even if we took off our ski masks we would not be as marginalized as gays, lesbians, and transsexuals,” Marcos explained. “These sectors of society have not only been ignored by the traditional Left in Latin America during previous decades—an ignorance that still persists today—but the theoretical model of Marxist-Leninism has been to leave them out or consider them as part of the problem to be eliminated. The homosexual, for example, is suspected as a traitor, as a malignant force for the movement and for the socialist state. And the Indian is a backward element that impedes the forces of production.”

  Amurabi, gay and indigenous, was not just laughed at but was regarded as a problem. He said the homophobia arose from the ambiguity that lay behind much of Mexican machismo, and he explained it with a joke.

  “Paul, you know the saying: What’s the difference between a gay Mexican and a straight Mexican?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Six beers.”

  He said he was proudest of all of the muxe gala, called La Vela—the Vigil—a grand event held every November in Juchitán, often attended by ten thousand people, a thousand of them muxes, all dressed in finery—music, dancing, feasting, hooking up.

  “Juchitecas have no inhibitions,” one of Mexico’s most illustrious writers, the poet, essayist, and journalist Andrés Henestrosa (1906–2008), had written. Henestrosa was born in a Zapotec-speaking family in the small town of San Francisco Ixhuatán, east of Juchitán. He studied in Juchitán and spent his life promoting Zapotec language and culture. A friend and collaborator of Francisco Toledo, he was as expressive in speaking about his culture as Toledo has been in painting it. Henestrosa had added, “There is nothing they can’t say nor anything they can’t do. The Juchiteca has no shame; in Zapotec there are no bad words.”

  “Because of the earthquake, La Vela wasn’t held last year,” Amurabi said, “but we’re going to have it this year. This is something special. It’s just here in the Isthmus—muxes only happen here.”

  The main church in Juchitán is the Parroquia de San Vicente Ferrer. One of the traditions here is that God gave Saint Ferrer a bag of muxes to scatter throughout Mexico. But when the saint arrived in Juchitán, the bag fell apart and all the muxes ended up in this one place.

  “It’s why we are totally in love with this town. We’re proud of it. It’s our heritage. I think there were muxes here a thousand years ago.” Amurabi thought a moment. “This pride—it got us through the traumatic earthquake.”

  Ixtepec and the Shelter

  Juchitán is a stop on the railway line from Guatemala. Exactly forty years before, I had ridden this train from Veracruz, ending up in the border town of Tapachula, on my months-long overland trip to Patagonia. Hanging out the window then, I noted the names of nearby towns in my book, Tonalá and Pijijiapan. Now the railway is in decline; it is merely a freight train rumbling up from the Guatemalan frontier, nicknamed the Beast, carrying migrants as much as three thousand miles in separate journeys on the roofs of its boxcars, an ordeal that has been vividly chronicled by Oscar Martínez in his grim account of the migrant route and the brutal varieties of human trafficking, The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail. He boarded “the Beast, the snake, the machine, the monster” in Ixtepec—indeed, he claims in his book that he rode this train eight times with only minor mishaps. Many riders do not survive a single trip.

  Migrants topple from the speeding boxcars and are crushed by the fall, or lose their arms or legs under the steel wheels. And throughout the route they are preyed upon by rapists and thieves. “Assailants hop on the train whenever it stops, to hide among the migrants,” Martínez writes. “Sometimes the conductor, in previously made agreement with the assailants, slows the train down enough so that they can jump right on.” These are the petty thieves and opportunists who live near the tracks in outlying areas, but the kidnappings of women on the Beast, a frequent occurrence that ends with the women forced into prostitution or slave labor in narco camps, “are orchestrated by highly organized gangs.”

  The so-called Caravan of 2018—a wave of migrants, including many women and children, fleeing violence in Central America—that arrived at the US border (at which point the mothers were parted from their children and each locked up separately) originated fifty miles southeast of here, in Arriaga. In the period I was in the Isthmus, thousands of migrants headed north from Central America, and many of them stopped in the nearby town of Ixtepec—because they were exhausted and hungry, and Juc
hitán was too starved and broken to accommodate them. And also because in Ixtepec there was a migrant shelter, somewhat like the Kino Initiative in Nogales. Oscar Martínez mentions this place in his book as “Father Alejandro Solalinde’s shelter.”

  This part of the Isthmus is hot and flat and unenchanted. Through the steamy savanna of foul-looking canals, of thick grass and ragged palms, the road was potholed and the heat oppressive—over a hundred degrees the day I drove from Juchitán. I went by a series of back roads, and discovered that Juchitán, in comparison to other places, seemed spared the worst of the quake. Hidden in the tall grass was the small pottery-making town of Asunción Ixtaltepec. There, not much had been left standing: the Palacio Municipal and the church of the Virgin of the Asunción were so cracked they looked unfixable. The surrounding peanut and bean fields—the mainstay of the economy—were parched and neglected, and Río los Perros—Dogs River—was an oxbow of stagnation.

  The road was so hemmed in by the dense grass that the town of Ixtepec did not appear until I was almost upon it. It was a depot town, the railway cut the place in half, and it too had suffered earthquake damage. But the cinderblock huts were so small and low to the ground, many of them seemed whole. Another hidden town, of poor houses on broken streets, bars on the shop windows spoke of thievishness, and at piles of garbage on street corners pariah dogs were tearing at wastepaper and scraps.

  This place of obvious misery was heaven for a bewildered migrant.

  The migrant shelter, an albergue (hostel), was a walled compound secured by a heavy gate, on a back lane in a poor barrio called La Soledad, in itself a pitiful name meaning “loneliness” or “solitude.” The barrio was obviously an area where other migrants were living, mainly men and mostly desperate-looking, holed up in shacks and crouched under plastic sheeting. An encampment of migrants lay across the lane from the shelter, where the formal name was painted in large letters on the outer wall, ALBERGUE DE MIGRANTES, and under a picture of wandering figures, HERMANOS EN EL CAMINO, Brothers on the Road. And inscribed over it the biblical text from Matthew 25:35: “Tuve hambre y me dieron de comer . . .” “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in.”