Day of the Dead Redux

All right chav@s, we've survived another year and now the time has come to hang with those who haven't. So, this means a few things: a little Ofrenda in my house, first of all. Just a little thing, on my nightstand. Marigolds, "cockscomb" flowers, some pears for my granpappy ol' reliable (who, okay, maybe never wanted to see another damn pear in his life, being a pear farmer, but give me a break, I never met the guy) plus tangerines, sugarcane, a little water, a little salt, some grapes (who doesn't like grapes?) a couple candles... and a little incense thingy that I couldn't figure out how to use properly despite technical advice from many angles. I successfully filled my house with smoke, but that's about it, to be honest.

Anyway, the epic aprovechamiento of the Day of the Dead began on sunday, when we did a mad-dash grocery run followed by an attempt to go to the town of Mixquic (at a bus stop where the bus never came, but on the other hand there was a very cute puppy). We saved the day by jumping on a shortbus to the center of Xochimilco. We got in and there were people EVERYWHERE. In the plaza they were just barely starting to put up a couple of ofrendas in the first plaza (here it's common to put up colossal ofrendas in the plazas as display pieces), and in the second plaza there was a honey fair, where oddly we bought coffee and pan de muerto ("dead guy bread") and this circular bread covered in pink sugar (so it looks like fungicide-coated seeds, so I call it "pan de fungicida", though I remain ignorant of its true name, and which, by the way, I've only ever seen in Xochimilco and its surroundings). Then, passing the honey fair, we found the main square of Xochi, where they had some colossal ofrendas, and, like last year, a life-size pulquería diorama, including drunken papier-mache skeletons, witty sayings, pulque-extraction tools, a real-live agave in a heap of soil and educational labels explaining the history, process and culture of pulque. We got there a bit late but in the early afternoon they have pulque-tastings and such things. There's also a giant list of all the pulquerías in the Xochimilco area.

Then, crossing that plaza, we encountered the Dance of the Silly Gachupines ("Gachupin" is a derogatory term for Spanish person here in Mexico) which has a real name but I don't actually remember what it is, but the concept is that (in this case they were mostly schoolchildren) dress up in big, elaborately decorated velvet robes, giant inverted-truncated-cone hats, and bearded wooden masks and dance around in circles in the street. Originally this was to make fun of the Spanish, who, for mala onda ("being jerks") never invited the indigenous people to their parties. So, the snubbed indigenous people took it upon themselves to make an elaborate satirical ritual of it. The band and the dancers (the smallest of which was a kid of no more than six years, who continually got distracted and had to be repeatedly dragged back to the group by older kids) were followed up and down the streets by firecrackers and photo-snapping crowds. Thus was traffic impeded and were many children and grownups amused.

As it began to get dark-- the power went out! So we were on our way out of Dodge when we passed the darkened, candle-glowing market and I insisted we go in. Candles wedged among piles of tangerines, burning pieces of sugarcane stuffed between fans of bananas, illuminating (or not) the vendors, who continued as normal, barking their goods in the darkness. It was pretty cool.

Then, we stopped in at a prehispanic restaurant which we'd seen on the way into Xochi, where we had a delicious grasshopper soup and corn-smut pasta, with tiny mugs of mezcal on the house (I'm pretty sure we were drinking from a dollhouse tea set) with grub-salt, and an agua-fresca with lime and chía seeds. It was a pretty tasty dinner. Furthermore there was this awesome ambience because of the power outage, just listening to the festival on the street outside, the evening breeze through the window, watching the candlelight move around on the paintings on the wall. It's a very beautiful, and only slightly expensive restaurant that I highly highly recommend to tourists.

Then we went home.

BUT! The Day of the Dead adventure is not over yet. On Tuesday we went to Mixquic, a little bitty town famous for its adherence to traditions. From Tasqueña station we took two HOURS to get there on a two-peso RTP bus, passing the entirety of Tlahuac (which has awful traffic because they're building a new line of the Metro there) . On the bright side, we saw a ginormous skeleton in the center of Tlahuac, which was cool. Anyway, we got into Mixquic hungry and tired, but enjoyed the fair that they had set up around the perimeter of the cemetery before going in to check out the dead. The church of Mixquic is prehispanic in origin, which is to say that it has an archaeological site in the courtyard containing skeletons, carved rocks and ancient statues. It's one of the loveliest churches I've seen yet in Mexico, one of the ones with the outside all stone and serious and the inside drenched in gold-leaf, so beautifully decorated it's sort of hard to cope with. I just sat there in the pews for awhile, staring. In the pulpit there was a long and elaborate ofrenda with all kinds of fruit and candles and everything, and of course on the front wall behind the pulpit was a giant statue of Jesus with, of course, a Virgen de Guadalupe suspended above him. Along the walls were various wooden statues of Jesus in different stages of his life; though as usual, the anguished crown-of-thorns stage appeared most favored.

But outside and all around the church was where it was at. Throngs of people buzzed amongst the graves, composing flowery magna opi to their dead relatives on top of their graves. Whole families, children still bedecked in Halloween costumes from several days before, arranged marigolds, cockscomb flowers, little white flowers that here are called "clouds", candles, sometimes making patterns or designs of the dismembered petals, on the slab of concrete, pile of dirt, mausoleum, tiled surface or whatever that marked the grave.

This, I should mention, is the most tightly-packed cemetery I have ever seen in my whole life. It's incredible. Only one person can pass at a time between the graves, and I suspect that families may bury one person atop the previous on the family site. There is literally zero real estate available in the Mixquic cemetery and I promise you that no grave goes undecorated. For this reason it's a well-known attraction for Chilangos and foreigners alike in this season. And that was how, as it got darker and darker, I became trapped and unable to escape among the graves. The incense smoke rose into the air, clouding my vision and inundating my olfactory sphere. The rumbling of thousands of voices, the silence of the old ladies who sat watching the candles, the sound of camera shutters on all sides... and no escape! I believe I spent a good half an hour twisting amidst the graves after deciding I wanted to leave. But it was nice, actually. Guitars, barkers from the fair, ladies selling cotton candy between the graves... it's sort of weird, really.

Now the one thing we noticed, and maybe you're taking this as tourist advice, so listen closely, is this: there were a ton of police in the fair. So, our conclusion was this: be careful in Mixquic. The fair itself and the cemetery are safe, but definitely watch your back, because if they're putting that much security in place, it might be for a reason. That's it.

Next time: the collapse of Hacienda Mixiuhca. Stay tuned!

So much whatnotting.

HACIENDA MIXIUHCA

The hacienda, due to circumstances described below, has been somewhat neglected of late. Regardless, I'm gratefully pulling tomatoes off the whitefly-infested vines on the daily. I gave one of my Cherokee Purples to my friend Mizraim for his birthday and he was pretty excited. I won't lie-- I talked it up quite a bit... Of course when Marcos found a little heap of them in the kitchen, he asked me if they were purple because they were full of smog. Very funny, Marcos.

The chickens are bigger on a daily basis. They seem to display normal behaviour despite extremely abnormal conditions. The duck is totally neurotic, but she's another story. Anyway, my students and friends are curiously asking me about my weird plans for chicken dinner. The okra is irreparably stunted and still upside down. The upside down cucumber trick was working remarkably well until it sort of dried up (see: period of neglect).

Natural disasters... many times, when it rains, the drainpipe clogs with feathers. This sucks, because my job then becomes chicken-feather scraper (by means of my broom, because I have to do this by half-sticking myself out of a hole in the side of the cage, which I normally cover with a lovely piece of corrugated fiberglass which I found one day on the roof). This means mucking around in chicken-poop mud. Fun and disgusting, all rolled into one. However, this does mean I've got to be pretty timely about sweeping that stuff up. BUT! But my compost bucket is, as of today, full to the brim. I guess I have to get another one? My worms died of chicken shit overload, I think, and so I think anaerobic fermentation is the only option for me. Anyone got any suggestions???

MY BORING LIFE

Since my last post I've gone through a series of iterations of a daily schedule. I'd taken a job with another company, teaching an advanced English class at the National Polytecnic Institute's Centre for Investigations and Advanced studies. I loved the class, a bunch of scientists: a physicist, two geneticists, a couple of biotechnologists and a few scattered others. It was a really fun class to teach and I learned a few useful things from that school's teaching method. However, I happen to think sleeping is really amazing, and it simply wasn't working for me that I was getting home at ten or eleven at night, and waking up at 5 to be out of here at 6 to get to Politécnico at 7:30. I just wasn't going to hack it anymore. So, three weeks of working that gig (see also making some good money—at triple the pay rate of my current job, I certainly couldn't complain about money!) just about did me in. But now I'm giving private clases to this Argentinian dude, who, (are you ready for an AMAZING COINCIDENCE?) in fact, is working on a documentary about the Ginger Ninjas. Yes, the very Ginger Ninjas that biked into our backyard in Davis, camping out in various of our beds, amusing us with their bicycle-powered music, amazing us with their crackpot journey to the southlands.... so, yeah, that's cool.

Okay, you ask, but what about my free time? And I respond, “WHAT free time??” That's right, folks. Working six days a week pretty much kills any “life” you may or may not have had previously. Regardless, I try to take advantage of the scraps they throw me as much as possible. Chiefly this takes the form of adventure-grocery-shopping (1), wanderings in the center of town (2), and eating, nerding out and sleeeeeeeeeping (3). Later I will recount the doings, seeings and beings of the only trip I've taken out-of-town in many moons, but for the time being let's stick with the quotidian.

The Merced (GPG: Mehr-SEHD) is a big damn market. The following is a collaborative piece by Ricardo and yours truly. We wrote it together on the way to Morelos last week. On your mark, get set, go!

The weather's clear and fresh. It's about ten in the morning. We're groggily going towards Mixiuhca station. Instead of sinking into the metro, however, we catch a shortbus heading to San Lázaro. From on the sunny, bumpy ride to San Lázaro we're laughing and talking in Spanglish, both of us pretty lazy about choosing just one language to speak. Then we jump over some puddles to get to the station, flying down th stairs just in time to watch one of the orange trains disappear. Merde. Well, now we have to wait. It feels muggy in the Metro. Some announcements on the bulletin board call my attention. I'd like to attend some of the events posted, and even firmly promise myself I will. However, I won't; that I can take for granted. God bless the 48-hour workweek. The next train has arrived and we get on it. People generally stare at each other like mortal foes on the Metro (says Ricardo), and I try not to be a part of it. Then a guy selling pop CDs breaks the silence. Cat of course starts to dance, which is more than a little embarrassing, especially when she tries to act like she's with me. We get off in the next station, and again we can see the sunlight.

It filters through the multitude of grimy skylights in Merced Station and we maneuver through the masses and rotating gates, ever closer to the throbbing center of barkers, vendors, pickpockets and shady types, old ladies, pirate goods, housewivery, and deliciousness that is La Merced. Tacos de Canasta, fly sneakers, peanut butter, raw meat, plastic everything-you-can-imagine mah-day en cheena. Anarchy: capitalist anarchy at its hairiest. It's this sort of twisted freaky commercial paradise vacation at a toxic waste pond. This photo is of the feet of a clown and his ever-so-many fans in the center of town.

We more or less know where we're going: first to the old lady in the middle of the shoe part, who sells from buckets of multicolor mole, pastes of every kind, a shrewd grandmother with braids who shovels spoonfuls of the stuff into polyethylene sheets by the quarter-kilogram. We get our PB from her, and snake around distracted

clients clogging the passages to buy some cemitas. The Cemita is the holy grail of Mexican bread products: a circular roll, perfect for these amazing deli sandwiches they make in Puebla. Oh god, they're way way way too delicious.

It's a lazy sunday, of course, so then it becomes extremely necessary to dilute the coffee sloshing in our stomachs with some greaseball tacos from the stand with indifferent and snotty taqueros (GPG: tah-KEYR-ohs) but amaaaaaaaaazing food. I order some carne enchilada tacos, and load them down with fried potatoes, salsa, onion and nopales. Then I merrily proceed to stuff my face.

Then we carry our now quite full bellies with us around from one side of the Merced to the other, not listening to the crooning of the sellers. There's one part with mostly fruit, mostly candy and nuts and seeds, another with mostly veggies, another with specialty veggies, and one side hallway which appears to consist exclusively of nopales, giant heaps of cut-off spines accumulating on the floor as the sellers deftly swipe their knives over the surface of the cactus pads.

We come here because it's cheaper, and not so far from my place. Ricardo and I are coöperating on the food front, so into the front lines we go every Sunday. It's kind of exhilerating, between the split-second bargaining, the risk of being run over by a dolly loaded down with ice, carrots or potatoes, the constant worry of pickpocketing or worse, and the general overwhelming goodness of being surrounded by FOOD, glorious food! Heaps of carrots, tumbling piles of tomatillo, buckets of powders, barrels of beans, glass cases of nuts and candy, racks of mangoes and starfruit, crates of tunas, stacks of jars of honey... anything you want, nearly, you can find it. Ruffly, fragrant mountains of leaf vegetables and herbs, delicate displays of oyster mushrooms, fluffballs of alfalfa sprouts.

GETTING OUTTA HERE: an adventure in Morelos with the Usual Suspects.

The last-minute planning, the running from here to there, the dropout. This, the

dramatic backdrop for our Very Rigid Journey. Then we went to my house (happy independence day?) and ate eggplant and drank guava-ginger agua-fresca. It was admittedly not very patriotic of us.

Oh well! Next day we boogied at some early, but less-early-than-we'd-hoped-for hour, dashed off, ate a way-too-spicy taco at Tasqueña station, and jumped on a bus. On the bus I called Lilia, and asked Chato, who picked up the phone, if I couldn't escape from my pals a bit to spend some time with them, at which point he very kindly invited Ricardo and Karen to come eat with us. We then proceeded to miss our stop. We asked the driver “Scuse us, do you know where the next stop is?” to which he responded simply, “Yes.” and left it at that. What a dick. Well, he let us off at the next town, some nowhere place where we threw ourselves in the grass and happily

wasted half an hour soaking in the sun... anyway, caught the next bus back to We ate at this amazing elegant restaurant with a KILLER view of the town, which is situated in this incredible verdant valley, just luscious with vegetation, life spewing with impunity from every foothold. THIS, this this, is indeed paradise! More next time on our adventures in paradise... it's sleepin' time now.

But as a final... thingy, a study in tropical fruit. I dissected a mamey and a black sapote from the Merced on our amazing new electric-blue tablecloth. This is the result of an intensive, even invasive, study of their physical forms. Both are very specifically mexican. The mamey is Enjoy

The Viajezote: a glorious 3-week disappearance from civilization

Today the rainwater is running down the stairs of the lonely basketball courts across from my house. It winds between the cobblestones in the street and out of the poorly-gauged drainpipes of the rooves, up through the soles of my shoes (all of which, I have discovered, have secret capillary entrances designed for discomfort on rainy days), and down through my hair onto my face, neck and glasses. And what do we do on days like this? We drink! No, wait... we blog.

Bueno, so were did we leave things? Oh goodness, we abandoned then so long ago...

Introduction: The Viajezote

5pm, 2 January 2010: Arrive at school with two overstuffed backpacks. Meet up with Alfredo and Jacobo, and we basically have the run of the vacation-swept, abandoned school. But as the weather totally sucks we mostly sit inside a classroom we've taken over and eat and shoot the shit. 11 pm the same day means the arrival of the buses that will take us all away to various parts of the Republic: I am off, in the absence of my closest friends, to the tropics: Chiapas, Campeche, Quintana Roo and Yucatan. We load up.

A full night of fitful rest later, I awaken to a Oaxaca sunrise, a good stretching session in the humid cold of the roadside, and another long haul out to Tapachula, Chiapas.

Part One: CHIAPAS

We arrived at about 6pm, everyone groggily unloading their stuff from the 17-hour torture chamber into the Tapachula Youth Center gym, where we were to spend the following three nights. Then we all hungrily set upon the town, to wolf down not-very-good food (why the food in Tapachula is so bad I will never know, but everyone agreed that Tapachula sucks, foodwise). The next day we set to work: day 1 was a visit to a mango and rambutan farm (the photo of a rambutan, which is like a furry lichi, is not mine, it is from the vast belly of the INTERNET). The kid who showed us around the farm (the farmer's son, actually), was right out of the '70s for his haircut, moustache and cowboy shirt, loaded us all into his pickup truck and took us rollercoastering around the semi-rainforested landscape to get to the orchard (because the bus obviously wouldn't stand such a rough trip). So we went crawling around in his orchard a bit. The soil in that orchard was SO gorgeous... they don't use machinery and they don't sweep the orchard floor, just cut down the weeds with machetes, so the soil was this black, deliciously friable substance with hordes of earthworms writhing within... and since it was the off-season the weeds were growing these beautiful pink flowers (it's some kind of Apocynaceous plant that you see all the time in gardens and nurseries, but in this orchard it's a weed). Furthermore, he fed us the famous and yet little-known jackfruit, a 10-pound mofo that looks disturbingly like a durian. It tastes like a mix between cantaloupe and banana, and has a wet, slimy, resistant texture that makes it kind of an adventure to eat. Furthermore, the inside of the rind produces latex, so you wind up helplessly sticky after you've eaten a piece... it's sort of exhausting.

Anyway, that night we stopped at the Guatemalan border, for the mere thrill of setting foot on foreign soil: frankly, I think northern Guatemala looks a lot like southern Chiapas, but whatever, it was novel to change pesos for quetzales and look out over the river that separates Mexico from Guatemala, see people (illegally??) crossing that river with giant boxes on their backs. I think the border patrol here is a little more relaxed than what I'm used to...

Next day to the papaya factory, and I say it like that because not only is it one of these high-tech operations with its own packing plant and the whole enchilada, but also because of its tendency (welcome to capitalism, Cat...) to convert people into machines. Pay 'em cheap and work 'em to death, then go to Guatemala and get some more. And congratulate yourself for it. The people picking papaya went shoeless in the fields, and the women who washed the papaya in dilute bleach work eight-hour shifts with their hands in the bleach bath. I asked the engineer who gave us the Grand Tour if they switch jobs during the day or at least during the week, and he said, 'Oh, no! These workers are highly specialized. ' Can you imagine working half-drenched in bleach eight hours a day? Imagine your hands, you eyes, your nose, your neurons... The engineer that toured us around was an incorrigible twat with no respect for the earth or human life, as it turns out. But he did give us boatloads of free papaya, so though I don't forgive him, I do have fond olfactory memories of the occasion.

I should mention how unbearably humid Tapachula is. It's one of the low-elevation zones of Chiapas and for that reason totally unpleasant if you're from California.

From there we went to Comitán, where we stayed at a coffee farm. There we learned nothing about management, because the guy in charge was basically an accountant who had bought the farm and had no idea what he was doing, but he was trying to establish an agrotourism kind of thing. There were ziplines and little palm-roof palapas for guests to hang their hammocks. There was also a gorgeous river in which we all did our bathing at night (which is to say we swam around in the dark, floating on our backs and staring at the stars and mars and the moon through the canopy of trees, listening to the chorus of birds and bats and bugs). Here are some observations: 75-kilo sacks (that's how much I weigh) of fresh-picked coffee: both adults and children (all of them Guatemalan imports because they put up with less pay and lots of abuse) carry them out of the hilly fields on their backs, strapped to their forheads. Then they pour them out to dry on the concrete patio... but bueno, the kids have to work with their parents, because what are they going to do, leave their kids alone in the forest while they go pick their coffee all day? They reach their quota faster if they've got a little help anyhow...

Then we moved right along to the heart of the matter: the rainforest. Sweeping due north from Tapachula we passed through Ocosingo (Zapatista territory) and up into Palenque, home of the famous Classical city. The coolest part about Palenque if you've already seen the ruins, is that when you're hiking up the giant hill to get to the archeological site, there are all of these tiny, unmarked paths just quietly sneaking away from the main road and if you're subtle about it, you, too, can sneak off with them, and find yourself entangled with aerial roots, the screaming of the sarahuates (howler monkeys), and the creeks that carry fossilized snailshells in their rocky beds.

The next day we went to Metzabok, and saw another rainforest that's not to hot (though equally as rainy), and a nice lady Doña Cristina, took us around... I think I'm going to have to devote another post to this topic, so remind me to do so.

Part Two: CAMPECHE

Racing across the Tabascan bottleneck to Campeche, we went to Calak-mul, another Classical ghost town, and the adjascent Biosphere Reserve, the latter being the coolest part, because we got to learn about rainforest management. The trees are thick and house more howler monkeys and spider monkeys, toucans, guacamayas (macaws), parrots, and leaf-cutter ants. It's like, epiphyte-central, too. If you perch on top of a pyramid, the other pyramids stick out of the foliage like rectilinear anachronisms. It's not one of the most-visited sites so it's really quite nice to go running around there.

Part Three: QUINTANA ROO

Arriving by night to Bakalar, Quintana Roo, all we knew was that there was a laguna. It wasn't really visible in the total darkness, but we went swimming anyhow, the brave few who support cold water on a cold night. I mean, I couldn't resist, personally, because I was sweaty from rainforest-running the previous day, and that clean natural bodies of water require that I immerse myself in them, period. So I jumped into the starry water and floated on my back again, wandering around the shallows and appreciating the uninterrupted sky.

The following day we saw what a marvel we had been soaking in the night before: the 7-color lagoon of Bakalar, its white sand full of snail shells, its sparkling surface. So we jumped in again, 7 am, even colder than the night before, but who cares-- when you have a lagoon to yourself, you just have to.

So from there we split into two groups, and we went to invade two different ejidos in the region, and I went to Pet-Cakab, where we met Doña Romuela, a little old lady who is the community's traditional herbalist. She devoted the day to showing us around the roadsides, introducing us to the local vegetation and how it can be used in medicine and a little witchcraft. Later, she took us to her house to show us how it works on the treatment floor (that's to say on her bed in her house): she took Rafa, who had injured his leg playing soccer some time before and had a hard time on the hike, and informed us that she was going to heal him.

'Take off your pants, kid.'

So there's Rafa in his underwear, and she's rubbing this weird ointment on his knee and explaining to us how tendons work, massaging his calf and shin and ankle with her tiny hands, as we all sit and stare, barely fitting in her tiny wooden house.

It fits to mention here that the south of Mexico is the only part in which I have seen wooden houses. Wood is an extremely uncommon building material in Mexico, but in the tropical countryside it's the only building material you see. The houses are usually painted candy colours and don't bother with glass windows (some don't have windows at all).

I should also mention that that night began the town's fair, which consisted of a carousel, some arcade machines, a spanish-bingo game and some food stands. But it lit up the tiny square and brought the very small population out. We were staying in the ejidal house, right in front of the square, so it was pretty fun to jump outside and see what was up.

Furthermore, there is extensive exploitation of the forest for the hardwoods they have there, especially caoba. The ejido has a sawmill, and the president of the ejido took us around. It's really incredible how much wood they waste. What's more incredible is the shaved patches of forest where they go cut the trees... But what are they going to do? It's the only source of income they've got.

I'm going to stop here and keep going next week ish with more Quintana Roo, plus Yucatán, another round in Campeche, and the grand finale in Tabasco...

El Viajezote: A Telegraph From The Peninsula

Lost in the Southeast of Mexico STOP Never coming home this place is too awesome STOP I mean you should see the sky here STOP I have been in the most nowhere town in the world and to pyramid central and in fields of mangos and cactus fruit and dug up soil and evaluated it like a real live scientist STOP There will be uploading of a shit ton of photos in a couple of weeks STOP I miss you all and reccomend that we all go live in Yucatán together and sleep in hammocks and do whatever because let's face it it would be awesome STOP

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