And A Little Child Shall Lead You! Cuetzalan, Puebla

This weekend, as is my wont, I ran away to a place where I could freeze my ass off even more successfully than I do in Mexico City. Reading descriptions of Cuetzalan, it sounded like a muggy place where my clothes would stick to me (in a pleasant way), and I would find the need for one of my new bathing suits. Alas, even in Mexico, at high altitudes muggy turns to bone-chilling dampness in November. And hotel rooms that look bright and cheery in pictures can be rather dank in real life. Nonetheless, I had an absolutely wonderful time. Even better once I invested in a sweatshirt lined with shiny fake fur.

In a day and a half, I hit just about all the sights that Cuetzalan had to offer. I stuck around my hotel room on Saturday morning, attempting to study for finals and hoping the chipis chipis (incessant misting rain) would dry up. Around 11, I realized that the mist was simply a fact of life, and headed up to the caves in Pahpalapan, about a 10 minute ride straight up from the center of town. I picked one of the worst moments to go riding around in the back of a pick up truck—a wet, muddy, mountainous road with hairpin turns on a misty day.

The cave tour consisted of spending about an hour and a half trudging through a wet creek bed in the bottom of the cave, looking at stalagmites and anti-stalagmites. My camera screen quit working, so most of my pictures didn’t turn out very well. Our intrepid guide (who I was afraid might be dying of tuberculosis by the coughs that interrupted his explanations) obviously had a lot more experience than the rest of us at crawling up and down slippery rocks.

He led us to the farthest point that could be reached in the cave in a pair of ancient sandals, the kind most indigenous men wear here, that basically are a large piece of leather bound to the bottom of the foot with a few leather strings. Rather than explaining anything geological in detail (which admittedly, would have been boring), he shined the flashlight on various formations and related his own personal ideas of what they looked like—among others, we saw what the guide was convinced were formations shaped like a Buddha, an Olmec colossal head, a jaguar, a soldier, an old woman, a fat woman, a seated woman, and a young woman, a crocodile, a frog head, and a snarling dog. The only one I found puzzling was the frog head—I think it’s because my own limited imagination makes it difficult for me to picture where the frog’s head cuts off from the rest of the body. Where is the frog neck?


Having escaped from the cave without breaking my neck or cracking my skull open, I decided to head down to the other side of town to see the waterfalls. On the cave tour I met a couple girls from Puebla named Gaby and Lu, and they decided to go to the waterfalls with me. By then, we were all covered in mud and soaking wet, so no more harm could be done. Lu even tried to convince us to swim out to the waterfall, but halfway in, we realized it was actually freezing.

Strangely, though I was the only non-Mexican, I ended up being the person nominated to figure out where we were going. Most instructions in small villages in Mexico end up sounding like incantations. Our combi driver told me, “I will drive you to a corner where trucks will be waiting. Before boarding one of these trucks, you should look down the street where children will be waiting. You should choose one of these children to guide you. I would not recommend going alone—the way is hidden, and the path is steep and slippery.”

So we got dropped off by the pick-up trucks to San Andres Tzicuilan, and started asking around for a guide. (yes, another pickup truck on a mountain road in the rain) A 17-year old appeared out of the woodwork with an old creased brochure picturing the sightes of Cuetzalan, and offered to take us to the falls for 50 pesos a person. Luckily, he was old enough that I didn’t have to sit around having deep thoughts about ethics and child labor, and I could just lean back and listen to the people chatting in Nahuatl to each other in the back of the truck on the way to Tzicuilan. All of my Nahuatl started coming back!! A most exciting experience. The falls were totally worth it, and I emerged victorious again, not having fallen off the mountain or broken a leg on the muddy descent.


The town of Cuetzalan was full of things to look at as well. Indigenous people come into the restaurants selling things, which some people find annoying, but I always enjoy it. Especially with the rather bizarre variety some offered. Most people sold key chains, hand embroidered napkins, woven rebozos, but my favorite was an old blind man who came in and offered me coffee. When I told him I had no need for already ground coffee, he offered me black pepper. Again, I turned him down. Next, he offered me pine nuts. Finally, after I had turned down about 17 varieties of dried goods, I gave him some change and went on eating breakfast. Everyone was dancing in Cuetzalan—at my hotel, La Danza de los Huahuas


And in the church more dancers






And a market on Sunday

Day of the Dead II: La Calavera Tiene Hambre

Halloween caught on quickly in the 19th century in Mexico, and for good reason--it means Day of the Dead festivities can start a few days early. And even better for children, it means trick-or-treating can go on for three days in a row. On the day of Halloween, my mom and I found ourselves in Taxco, where not only did children wander the central park trick or treating on the 31st, the 1st and the 2nd, but they hit all the bakeries in town. Wandering into a bakery in the evening to get my daily requisite pan dulce, I was suddenly surrounded by 15 children chanting this:

La Calavera tiene hambre
no hay un huesito por ahí
no se lo coman todo
déjenos la mitad.

La calavera quiere cenar
Cinco de dulce,
Cinco de sal.

(Loose translation: The skull is hungry, isn't there a little bone there? Don't eat everything, leave us half. The skull wants to have dinner--five sweet ones, five salty ones.)

I thought surely the baker lady would send them all packing with a quick scold for disrupting business. Instead, she pulled out the tongs, and gave each trick-or-treater a nice sized pan de muerto. Most of the costumes I saw warranted pounds of candy. In Taxco, an entire high school class dressed as various dead characters, creating a living ofrenda.



And in Coyoacan (Mexico, D.F.), children dressed as horror movie characters


or aliens


and waited patiently for passers by to take their pictures, and give then some sweets for their trouble.

Day of the Dead I: Ofrendas

I have been remiss in not posting about day of the dead--one of the best reasons to visit Mexico in the beginning of November. Near the end of October, you start seeing offerings everywhere--in museums, hotels, parks, restaurants. And of course, on the big day, in the cemeteries. Ofrendas have all the good things your dead loved ones appreciated: corn and candies, tequila and orange soda. A lot of people also cook some delicious dishes for their friends in the afterlife--which is why some offerings start to stink after sitting around for a while--like this one, done by artesans that sell in the market in Coyoacan.



Lots of offerings depict life-size dead people--skeletons, of course--doing all sorts of things. Like painting, with a dead model, too.



Riding dead horses...



Playing music...



And cooking...



Public offerings are sometimes big and intimate at the same time, like this one, to the artist's parents...


But they are almost always big. Here is one of many offerings around the city I saw to Diego Rivera. This one was at Anahuacalli, the museum he built to house his pre-Columbian art...



And finally, in Coyoacan, one for Mercedes Sosa, who died earlier this year. This was my favorite...



She will not be forgotten...

Dog School

One of my favorite places in the city is the Parque México. It is quiet, and lush, and two blocks from my apartment. I find myself wandering through the park almost every day--jogging (rare) or on my way out to eat (common). The only thing better than people watching on the weekend in the Parque México is dog watching on the weekdays. This is partly because I miss my own dog. But really, I think this quantity of well-behaved dogs all in one place should be counted among the great Mexican marvels. Mexicans are always complaining to me about a lack of discipline they feel exists in their culture, but this is certainly not the case for the dogs at the Condesa dog school.

I can walk by with raw steaks dripping raw steak juice all over the sidewalk, and the dogs remain nonplussed, waiting patiently to be singled out by the diligent trainers for a new trick.



My favorite trick that they teach dogs at the Condesa dog school is the "chest to the ground" trick. When the trainer yells "chest to the ground!" the dog immediately begins to scuttle along, its chest brushing the ground, as if it's completing the last leg (the tunnel, by far the most difficult) of a very important obstacle course for chihuahuas.



Sometimes waiting to be singled out by the trainer is just too overwhelming, and a nap is the only way to calm canine nerves.

"Cadillac Rosa" or "I Hope We'll Never Be Alone Again"

I am a reverse snob about most things, and music is no exception. Anything overproduced is anathema, and things that smack of consumerism, like covers of popular songs, are only acceptable if they’re done ironically-like Cap’n Jazz’s cover of ‘Take on Me’—not only is it ironic, but it ends in a series of animal-like screams that express the futility of trying to avoid pop culture and material society.


When I travel, I recognize that this snobbery is part of my cultural makeup—or subcultural makeup, as the case may be, and I try to be as open as possible. Still, imagine my horror when I realized, about a month into my stay in Mexico City, that I had been lured into a bar with a COVER BAND. Being a southern girl, I was far too polite to let the kind young man that did the luring know how absolutely taken aback I was. Much like the times I have been served nearly rotten meat in houses without refrigeration, my motto in these situations is “grin and bear it, and deal with the giardia tomorrow.” Knowing that a couple hours at the Liverpool Pub was unlikely to cause giardia, I decided to treat the situation as an ethnographic experience. I sat back (ok, not really, because I was on a stool), relaxed, drank a couple micheladas, ate an unprecedented number of olives, and listened to Spanish language versions of songs I hadn’t ever liked the originals of—like ‘I think we’re alone now’—not ironic at all, since my companion and I made up the bulk of the audience that night.

Thanks to youtube, you too can experience Cadillac Rosa at the Liverpool Pub on Insurgentes Sur…


I find that Mexico is full of bizarre renditions of familiar music. On the subway, for the equivalent of 80 cents, you can buy CDs of “jazz”—including jazzy versions of Madonna’s “Material Girl”, and “rock from the golden years”—with Spanish language versions of songs like “Long Tall Sally”.

I often find these bizarre renditions where I least expect them. The other day, I walked into the infirmary at my university. I didn’t find the Gregorian chants the nurse had playing surprising at all—I go to a Catholic university started by Opus Dei, so Gregorian chants, rosaries, shrines, and Latin masses are part of every day life. But after sticking a thermometer in my armpit, the nurse cranked up the volume, and exclaimed, “Listen! Listen! Don’t you love it?” as if something really special was happening. I must have looked extraordinarily dense, because she lowered the volume again, and told me, “It’s the Bee-tlays—but done in Gregorian chant style.” Usually I have no trouble deciphering English words pronounced with a Spanish accent, but that day I was feeling confused and congested, and I still didn’t understand. Luckily, the university administrator who had dragged me to the infirmary in the first place came to my rescue. “Ooooh, I love the Beatles. Where do you find these things, Lupita?” It turns out Gregorian chant versions of the most popular Beatles songs are sold by a vendor outside the VIPS (a chain restaurant, kind of like a Mexican Denny’s) at Insurgentes and the Eje 7. I politely commented on the originality of the concept, and the nurse told me I wasn’t dying of swine flu. An all around fulfilling interaction.



I don't think these guys are real monks.

Water + Electricity = Electrocution

Ever since humans invented electricity, this mantra has been an important one to live by. I have always been especially paranoid about electrocution--beyond my regular paranoias about plane crashes and car wrecks. So paranoid, in fact, that I told my best friend in 4th grade that if she EVER, at any time in the future, heard that I had died of electrocution, she MUST investigate, because I am so careful about electricity that it wouldn't be an accident, it would be MURDER.

Latin America is one of the worst places to live if you are paranoid about electrocution. Once, I lived in a village where almost every house was provided electricity by a series of very long extension cords. Not realizing that my entire house's supply of electricity was through one small cord that was draped at about eye level through the central courtyard, I assumed that the cord was a clothesline. I hung a bunch of drenched huipils to dry on it, the cord broke, the huipils fell into the dirt, and we spent quite a bit of time without power. Finally, when my friend's father got home from work, he helped us reconnect, and we all stood around in the midst of a torrential downpour with different bits of electrical cords in our hands. Here is the village of loopty-loop extension cords where I lived:



When choosing my apartment in Mexico City, I nearly turned down a good view and a good location, not because it is a sixth floor walk up, not because it's basically a double wide trailer placed haphazardly on the top of a building--I nearly turned down my apartment because of the shower.



Showers like this work on the presumption that Water + Electricity = Hot Water, not Electrocution. I used to find them rather disturbing, but harmless. Then I lived in a house in Guatemala where something had gone terribly wrong. Every time we touched the faucet to turn the water on, we got a shock. Literally. Everyone had their own special way of dealing with the situation--some people used a towel to turn the shower on, others took cold showers, I used a piece of rubber to touch the faucet, wore rubber flip flops and only put parts of my body into the stream of water. Since then, I have feared these showers. Here is a close up--yes, electricity comes through the cords in the wall, and water comes up from the metal pipe below--and it all gets mixed together in the shower head.


I mentioned my predicament to a couple friends at school, hoping to be reassured that I am not going to be electrocuted during my morning shower. Sadly, it turns out that this fine invention is strictly for the commoners. None of the sheltered rich kids at my university had any idea what I was talking about when I described a Lorenzetti shower head. Here is the view of snow capped mountains from my desk--for this view I risk electrocution on a daily basis.

Reading Rainbow

I have lived in Spanish speaking countries over pretty long periods of times. I used to spend my days reading linguistic theory in Spanish and editing bilingual Spanish-indigenous language dictionaries in Guatemala. Now I spend my days in the D.F. reading long Mexican judicial opinions, articles, and statutes. I have no problem leading my professional and social life completely in Spanish, but the one thing I have never been able to give up is novels in English. Searching through piles of used books in a store or picking through the few books in English that some streetside vendor has gotten his hands on, you can get a pretty good idea of the kind of gringos that have lived in a place.

Panajachel, Guatemala was rife with Vietnam war vets, and most of the novels were detective or spy stories that centered around hard-drinking, hard-living, independent men who have high ideals and a difficult time relating to the rest of the world. The population in Antigua, Guatemala was a little older and more conservative--and more feminine. There was a never-ending supply of Danielle Steele, but, at least on my part, NO demand. Military novels, best sellers, and mysteries.

One summer I lived in the back of an old hotel in Antigua. To get to my room, I had to pass through the American Legion library. At nights, when the library was closed, I would make tea and wander around the musty rooms, made even mustier by the thick colonial walls that had absorbed centuries of rainy seasons. Long shelves were filled with mildewed copies of Reader's Digests from the 50s. It was always a bizarre experience, like a forgotten monument to an American generation in the middle of the Guatemalan highlands.

The eclectic mix I run across in used bookstores in Mexico City belies generalizations about the English-reading population here. I find myself vacillating between "The Canterbury Tales" one day and an installment of "The Babysitter's Club" the next.

There is one thing that many of these books have in common. Even more so than used bookstores in the States, the books are often inscribed, or have, at least, some kind of note on the inside cover. The names almost always sound midwestern and wholesome. "To Len, with love, Sandy." "To Grace, from your grandmother." "The Miller Family." The stories behind these inscriptions, and behind these books, always fascinate me. How did the books get here? Is there more of a tendency to inscribe a cheap paperback when your loved one is heading off into the great unknown? Or did these books pass through a million hands before they ever got to a used bookstore in Latin America? Where are Len and Grace now, and do they know their books are in a foreign country?

Of course, there are other kinds of notes too: "*have read"--this is a sign that the books you are reading are all far too similar. And my favorite, in an Agatha Christie I got today: "Nov. 2000. Me encantas, desde hace mucho tiempo ? P.D. No es broma." A loose translation: "Nov. 2000. I like you A LOT, and have for a very long time ? P.S. This is not a joke."

(If you're looking for used English language books in Mexico City, check out El Ático, on Alvaro Obregon, close to the corner with Orizaba. Next door is A Través del Espejo, with a smaller selection--but I did find a copy of Brideshead Revisited there last week.)