Diary of a Reluctant Güera

The rains. The mango pits tossed in the street. It’s that time of year again. Just when we were finally able to hear firecrackers or helicopters flying overhead without suffering flashbacks of tear gas grenades.

May 15 is National Day of Teachers, a day we’ve come to associate less with apples and chalkboards than roadblocks and riot police. No matter what side of the conflict we’re on, May 15 is a date that’s loomed in our minds for sixth months. We hesitate to savor the peace in Oaxaca, because we know its days are numbered. May 15th is when time runs out: Oaxaca’s Day of Reckoning. We say: “Business is looking up but after May 15th…?” “The tourist as starting to come back but in May…?” “The kids are back in school, but…?” Even the teachers of section XXII don’t seem exactly jubilant to pick up their placards again; it feels more like carrying a cross.

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Mexicans celebrate everything. Living here, you soon stop being surprised by the almost daily processions honoring the Virgin of this or that, Saint so and so, or commemorating the grisly deaths of some political hero. Likewise, each profession has it day (today for example, is Construction Workers Day) and the 15th is Teacher's Day, which has Oaxaca's governing bodies quaking in their boots imagining how the infamous Section XXII is going to celebrate. April 30 is Children's Day, which distinguishes itself from other holidays (including religious ones) by not being a pretext for binge drinking and taco eating. At the Templo de Compañía de Jesus, my friends and I put on a party for the children, which we probably enjoyed even more than they did.

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For a long time I didn’t “get” Mexican music, except for the melodic Latin pop ballads of Maná and Selena’s tequila-spiked cumbias. It took a lot to convert me. It started as an ironic appreciation for Kitsch-Mexicana. I think it was my ill-fated affair with the lead singer of a Duranguense band that put me over the edge, showing me the wrist-slashing bliss of regional Mexican music. I’m still fuzzy about the definitions, what distinguishes ranchera, from norteña from grupera music, but I’ve learned to appreciation a good cathartic wallow in self-loathing to the sound of Banda Recodo, Alicia Villareal and Intocable. I can also get down with Rico Tovar and K-Paz de la Sierra without any irony.

These are picks for the ultimate Mexican songs, by category:

Songs Nobody will Admit to Liking but after several “chelas” (beers) suddenly They Know every Single Word

“La Sirenita” (“The Little Mermaid”) Rico Tovar
“We had a little merman after exactly one year of marriage/with the face of a little angel but the tail of a fish.”

A kitsch classic of ranchero-cumbia, this song a national inside joke. It’s the theme song of a Saturday Night Live-type skit called “Las Nacas,” (roughly “The Hicks”).

“Procuro Olvidarte” (“I Manage to Forget You”) – K-Paz de la Sierra and La Apuesta

Representative of the Durengense trend, which swept the nation like Reggaeton before it. Everybody says they hate Durangense (except my ex-boyfriend) yet they crowd the clubs to dance the Durango two-step (Pasito Durangense) which can only be described as “pinguinesque.”

“La Sirenita” the Durangense remix.
Just when we thought nothing could be worse than the original.

“Con Todos Menos Conmigo” (“With Everyone but Me”) Timbiriche
Featuring lyrics like: “You’re eyes are two green slaps on the face.”
We had New Kids on the Block, Mexico had Timbiriche. We have Britney and Cristina. Mexico has Paulina and Thalía whose careers and rivalry started with Timbiriche.

Love, Alchohol and/or Death

Anything by Jaguares, the melancholy quartet which reaches deep into Mexico’s prehispanic past for their haunting melodies and fatalistic lyrics. The titles speak for themselves:
“Soy Alcohol” (“I am alcohol’)
“Matame porque Me Muero” (Kill Me cuz I’m Dying)
“Hay Amores que Matan” (“There are Loves that Kill”)

“Paloma Negra” (“Black Dove”) Folk song recorded by various artists (I recomend Lila Down’s version) About loving and loathing a partying, two-timing man (the archetypal conflict of Mexican Woman) Could be described as a hardcore version of Patsy’s Cline’s “Crazy. “Para cortarse las venas” -“for slashing your wrists” (but in a good way)

“La Llorona” (“The Weeping Woman”) Folk song recorded by various artists, based on an urban legend about a woman who drowned her children (and herself in some versions) in the river to avenge her husband’s betrayal and has haunted the streets ever since draped in white and crying “Oh my children, oh my children.” Many otherwise rational people have seen her, especially while drunk.

“It’s not me, it’s you”: Break-up Songs with No Mercy

“Ojala que te mueras” (“I hope you die”) Pesado
Surprisingy upbeat ranchera song wishing eternal damnation upon an ex lover.
“I hope you soul goes to hell and your tears are eternal.”

"A chillar a otra parte" ( “Go Cry Somewhere Else”) Pesado
“I know I’m going to enjoy when you come crying I’m going to laughing to see you grovel. You’ll regret ever having met me because today I declare myself your worst enemy. It’s what you deserve for abandoning me and coming back - go cry somewhere else!”

“Insensible a tí” (“Insensitive to You”) Alicia Villareal
Theme of a recent telenovela.
“I’ve cheated on you, many times, I’ve sought out his hot kisses in secret. I’ve lied to you so many times that I can’t keep hiding the truth. I’m living a forbidden love and I can’t keep it quiet any more, because I’m in heat and he makes me Insensitive to you.”

It’s all the Gringos Fault

“El Mojado” “Wetback” Ricardo Arjona’s Grammy-winning tribute to the illegal migrant worker and his suffering at the hands of the Big Bad Gringos.

“Pobre Juan” “Poor John.” Maná
ditto

“Jose Perez Leon" Tigres del Norte
ditto

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Shortly after our arrival in Santiago Nundichi, Don Aureliano asked us to visit his father who was ill. Don Aureliano is tall for a Mixtec man. His face, shaded by a white flat-brimmed sombrero, is gentle and serious. The community looks up to him, the same as his father, Don Jose. Both have been influential in local politics and pillars of the church.

We stepped into the hut, rough hewn pine boards with a roof of corrugated tin, smelling the warm waxy smell from the candles glowing around the images of Christ, Guadalupe, Juquila and others. Politely we shook hands with the group of stooped señores seated before the altar. The most elderly of these I took to be Don Jose, for whom we had come. Then I saw the wrinkled blankets on the bed had not been hastily made, but covered the skeletal limbs of the invalid, which seized and shuddered in time with the tearing sound of his breath. Don Aureliano gently pulled back the blanket to reveal the face, disfigured by pain into a taut beak. White foam streamed from the slit at the mouth, collecting in the folds of the blankets. As his son wiped it away it only seemed to froth thicker, drowning him in his own illness. The eyes stayed shut. I felt the soul fighting the feeble body; fighting to regain it, or fighting to be free of it, I don’t know.

“He was fine yesterday,” whispered Don Aureliano. “went to the market.”

We prayed and said Don Jose was a tough old nut, sure to pull through, but we left full of apprehension. Were we up to dealing with a death in the community? The five of us were not real missionaries, only idealistic youth looking to experience the simple spirituality of village life. As for me, I wasn’t even a real Catholic. Jorge, our leader, was not a real priest. He was a 26-year-old environmental lawyer who had undergone training to officiate Holy Week celebrations, not to bury the dead. For Brenda, a 20 year old med student, Don Jose’s impending death meant searing flashbacks of her own father’s passing only nine months earlier. At the crossroads in front of the house stalked an old woman. In one hand she clutched a spray off eafy branches which she held out in front of her, following them like a dousing rod. Every so often she stopped, made a sweeping motion with the leaves and rubbed the air with an egg she pulled from her pocket. She was obviously performing a traditional limpia, or cleaning, but what for?

Over a supper of bean stew we discussed quietly with Don Aureliano and his wife, Doña Placida. That morning they had taken Don Jose into the clinic in Tlaxiaco, the municipal capital, where they had taken blood and given fluids but had offered no diagnosis. They were afraid that if they took him back there they would send him to Oaxaca, where the treatment was expensive and the staff treated them badly.

“Was he bitten by an animal?” asked Brenda. “Did he eat anything unusual?”

The only irregularity they could recall was that upon returning from the market in Tlaxiaco he had consumed vast quantities of Agua de Chilacoyote, a drink made with strands of a spaghetti squash.
“That it came on so quickly makes me things it was poison or rabies.” We thought of the old woman and the eggs.

In the morning Don Aureliano arrived at our door.
“Buenos Dias,” he said, clutching his white sombrero politely to his chest. “How did you sleep?”
“Very well, thank you.”
“My father just died,” he said with the same understated courtesy, although sadness pulled softly at his features.

In the hut at the bottom of the hill Don Jose was laid out on a grass mat, wrapped in a blanket, only his peaked face showing, the orifices plugged with wads of cotton. Candles flickered around him, and friends and relatives were starting to arrive with flowers. In the undulating candle light the grey and red checked blanket seemed to move up and down with phantom breath. Never the less, there was no mistaking the body from the person. The twisting, moaning, fighting energy of the night before was gone and there was only an empty, shriveled seedpod. Its stillness was beyond rest, or even peace, it was just nothingness. I’d never seen a dead body before; my great-grandparents donated their bodies to science and Protestants aren’t into open caskets anyway.

Mexicans are famous for their familiar relationship with death. They celebrate it, make it into comical clay figures, and dance over the graves. But I can tell you that they mourn it too. Throughout the long day and night we sat with Don Jose’s body, we witnessed the grief of his widow and five children who arrived from as far away as Mexico City. The sons fought tears between gulps of agua ardiente and the daughters wailed, pulling their shawls over their eyes.

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Forgive me Father for I have sinned. You taught me to worship at the altar of reason and and to stand firm against the black and white moral judgements of institutionalized religion. You raised me to bear the cross of liberal guilt, to think for myself, to vote Democratic, to embrace cultural differences.

But I have a confession to make. For the second time I am betraying my upbringing by spending Holy Week with Catholic missionaries in the Sierra Mixteca, bringing food, clothing and good intentions (see "A Nice Agnostic Girl Goes to Church" May 23, 2006)

Why do I stray from the path you showed me?

Maybe I´m rebelling; afterall, your liberal thinking closed for me of the more traditional channels of rebellion, tatoos, dreadlocks, hemp necklaces. However, I thought I got that out of my system when I dated the son of the Manager of the Nuclear Power Plant.

Maybe it´s your fault (blasphemy!) you went too far, taught me to open my mind so wide that there´s even room for organized religion and (gasp!) Republicans.

Actually I think my only motive is to explore and understand this culture I live in. Even you were always impressed by Mexico´s spiritual psychizofrenia, the austere religion of your childhood superimposed on the colorful paganism of the indigenous cultures. You brought home that poster of the Virgin of Guadalupe, supported by the angel on one side, the Indian on the other.

In the name of my Father, my Mother, and the Democratic Party, Amen.

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According to my friend Armando there is nothing in Cuicatlán. No Pitico supermarket. No movie theater. And the worst of all its privations, no cell phone reception. There is the hospital, the penitentiary, and the highly anticipated soccer matches between the two, in which the inmates predictably run circles around the strait-laced citizens of the hospital team. Without these things, Cuicatlán would cease to exist, according to Armando.

“Well is it scenic?” I insisted. He thought hard. He wanted me to visit, but obviously didn’t want to build up my expectations about Cuicatlán’s tourist attractions.
“Well, there’s a muro (a wall).”
“What do you mean a wall?”
“There’s a big wall of red rock.”
“Is it pretty?”
He shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.”

Fortunately I know better than to pay attention to Armando. It turns out Cuicatlán is Oaxaca’s undiscovered Babylon. Well maybe not all that, but it certainly claims its place among the seven wonders, or rather, the seven regions, of Oaxaca. Cuicatlán belongs to the region of La Cañada, whose closest English equivalent is Canyonland. I was prepared for the canyons, the cliffs of petrified sand dotted with tubular cacti and the inevitable nostalgia for Arizona. But when the riverbed appeared, a green jungle between walls of reddish rock, nostalgia gave way to enchantment. In Arizona, river and water are not automatically associated. The word river has to be contained between quotation marks. While during summer thunderstorms it may jump its imporous banks and swamp unsuspecting SUVs, most of the year it’s dry. An especially large “river” may be set off by a pair of Cottonwood trees, which have an uncanny tolerance for the schizophrenic rains. So I was suitably impressed by the lushness of Cuicatlán’s Rio Grande Valley (not that Rio Grande). Over a mile of natural orchard, the green textures of mango, coconut, pineapple and banana trees. In this the dry season the river is wide and shallow but still big enough to qualify as a river by anyone’s standards. Clear enough to see the speckled pebbles on the bottom. Clean enough to drink, they say, although I wasn’t about to test my intestines against this hypothesis.

Armando works at the hospital, at a temporary-looking workstation in a corner of the waiting room. He enrolls people in the Seguro Popular, the Mexican Medicare, and a minimal benefits program unveiled with much fanfare by the Fox administration.
“Do you speak Mixtec?” he asks, meticulously checking boxes on his sheaf of forms. The indigenous woman nods reticently and the bulbous wart moves along the crease of her eyelid like a crawling insect.
“Does your house have a floor of dirt or cement?
“How old are you?”
“But your credential says you are 41, not 38. Señora, stop lying about your age!” he jokes smoothly. Probably she doesn’t know how to read the information on her government-issued ID card. She smiles ashamedly and her wart wanders up to the corner of her eye.
“Where is your proof of residence?”
I’m uncomfortably reminded of the agents at the National Immigration Institute, who survey my dog-eared pile of documents with disdain every time I go to renew my work visa. But Armando is patient; as he scans for missing stamps and signatures he jokes with his colleague about the pounding they took in the game against the inmates. “They took us on a spree! 7-0!” He is temperamentally suited, if intellectually overqualified, for bureaucratic work. In the long lags between clients, when the hospital waiting room assumes a vacant, church-like tranquility, he reads literature at his desk or sings along to the melancholy ranchera songs saved on his computer. There was a six-month lag, when the hospital went on strike in support of Oaxaca’s teacher’s union. He and his colleague were relegated to a folding table outside the ER, the only part of the hospital that remained in operation. Not a soul came to inscribe in the Seguro, but they couldn’t complain, because they continued to get a paycheck from the distant federal government.

Even with the hospital paralyzed Cuicatlán did not cease to exist. The hospital and the penitentiary may be Cuicatlán’s link to the modern infrastructure of the state, bringing outsiders like Armando, but the river is its reason for existence. As long as the Rio Grande waters the mango groves, the insular world of the Cuicatecos will remain intact.

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Their Royal Highnesses Karla (right) and Carolina, accompanied by their exhausted-looking mother.

Sunday I went to Princess Party in honor of my students, Karla, 4, and Caroline, 5, who also happen to be the children of my boss.

Now, for those of you who may not have not spent much time in the company of two to six-year-old girls, let me tell you that princesses are VERY important, they are right up there with Mom, Dad and Spongebob Squarepants in the preschool echelon of influence.

Every little girls KNOWS that she is a princess, until Disney and Seventeen Magazine come along to delude her otherwise.

The most famous Oaxacan princess was Donají, the daughter of the Zapotec King Cosijoeza, who was taken hostage by the feared Mixtecs. During her imprisonment she got wind of new plans to attack her people, and succeeded in smuggling a warning to her father. When the Mixtecs discovered her espionage, they beheaded her and buried her on the banks of the Atoyac River. Legend has it, that a violet iris sprouted from her blood, its roots wrapped around her head, which showed no signs of decomposition.

Donají's sacrifice is honored by an annual dance performance, an image of the princess on the state seal, and a popular local cocktail made with mescal and grapefruit juice.

But if you ask Karla or Caroline about the Princess Donají, you will be met with blank, disdainful stares. EVERYBODY knows who the real princesses are: Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora (from Sleeping Beauty), Belle (from Beauty and the Beast) and, on afterthought, Pocohontos.

"I'm Cinderella," Karla informed me the first time I met her. "And Caroline is Aurora and Caty (her baby sister) is Snow White." She looked me up and down appraisingly. "You can be Pocohontos."

This year, to celebrate Karla and Caroline's birthdays (which are a month apart) their mother, Tania planned a royal ball to honor her pint-sized princesses. For the two months leading up to the party, our tiny language academy was transformed into Walt Disney's workshop, as Tania put together every detail of the party. As she sat at the reception desk, she glued princess decals onto pencils for party favors (snatching them away from Caty before she could stick them in her mouth), or surfed the internet in search of a castle-shaped piñata that fit her daughters' demanding specifications. The staff room was taken over by the dismembered papier mache body parts of the piñatas she was making.

As the big day approached, the circles deepened under Tania's eyes. The princess piñatas were done but she could not find the right cartoon eyes to complete them! Having scoured the internet in vain, she and I set about drawing eyes free-hand on blank flashcards. And she still had to pick up the princess costumes from the seamstress and make 80 princes out of marshmallows and toothpicks!

Does my boss's wife have an obssesive compulsive problem? Is she the Mexican Martha Stewart? Hardly, she's only trying to keep up with the other upper-middle class mothers, who compete to make the cutest table settings, invitations and party favors.

Children's birthday parties, like most thing in Mexico (including our language academy, as you may have now gathered) are family affairs. Not only was Tania expecting the 50 members of Karla and Caroline's respective kindergarten classes, but their parents, brothers and sisters and random extended family members, not to mention their own extended family network (including employees/baby-sitters like myself) and her husband's business partners. Guests at a Mexican children's parties naturally expect food, drink (including alcohol), music, clowns, games with prizes, multiple piñatas and hand crafted party favors (for everyone, not only the children).

I arrived, in true Mexican style, two hours later than the time printed on the invitation. Tania had rented a pavilion, or "salon de fiestas," for the event. Karla and Caroline held court at a childsized banquet table, their puffy pink and blue sateen skirts billowing around them. But it was two year old Caty who drew the oohs and ahhs. She looked every bit the part of Snow White with her blue and gold dress, black bobbed hair and oversized baby eyes.

Tania had attended to every miniscule detail, from the three dolls, sporting the same princess costumes as her daughters, perched on the cake, to the baseball bat for the piñata, which was disguised as a flaming sword. The buffet table was ladden with mini croisant sandwhiches filled with black mole (Oaxacan noveau cuisine?) and hotdogs on skewers.

Fifty some children ran amok, while Tania and her numerous female relatives bustled here and there, replenishing the buffet, stuffing piñatas, and breaking up fights. Her husband lurked in the background with the camcorder. Some things don't change from culture to culture.

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