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.
