Hell is Other People's Stuff

How many currencies come immediately to mind that bear the picture of a dead donkey? The quiniento (500) peso note issued by the Bank of Mexico, for one. A small military tableau appears on its obverse, the donkey depicted from its least flattering angle, lying flat on its side like an abandoned bicycle. A soldier in mid-nineteenth century military kit is lifting a fallen comrade from beneath the animal, which juxtaposition goes a long way in explaining why the soldier looks very much like the donkey in the encounter. 

The fracas depicted there in miniature is the Battle of Puebla in which Ignacio Zaragoza (depicted on the note just to the right of the donkey) defeated invading French forces in the barley fields of Puebla on May 5, 1862, in a single stroke inventing Mexico's first national holiday and the cerveza with which it is celebrated. Here is a photo of Ignacio, the sort of portrait which might have been taken by a proud parent after a weekly piano lesson.

The French, during the Second Empire, had invoked Mexico's international debt as a pretext for this invasion, passively abetted by Spain and Great Britain who withdrew their own forces from Mexico so as not to upset France's colonial aspirations. Fortunately we live in a world now civilized by the warm glow of global commerce, a world in which every national self-interest necessarily encompasses and buttresses the interests of every other. China's generosity in purchasing national debt and continuing selflessly to adjust its balance of trade with poorer nations such as the United States is merely a case in point. Rest assured, China is no France, sir.

We participated in the global economy ourselves today, and I was able to divest myself of at least part of that 500-peso note in the interests of international amity and the delicate geopolitical understandings that further the universal bonhomie of a civilized globe. We took a city bus to the weekly market, known amongst the cognoscenti as "the Tuesday Market," It is basically a flea market on steroids, convening just outside of San Miguel on one of the industrial ring roads. The passengers waiting at the downtown stop for the market bus were officiously shepherded aboard by a young man wearing a cap blazoned with the logo of a dead scorpion, carrying what appeared to be a well-used guitar. Upon departing the bus stop, I discerned that this is not the official municipal transit workers' uniform - the fellow stood in the aisle, cast his eyes towards the roof of the bus, and from his first chord (his only chord, it proved) promptly disabused the entire busload of any notion that his guitar was well-used. His tempo varied to suit whatever song he took up, and he had, besides that one chord, a flat reedy timbre falling somewhere between Irish tenor and falsetto. The songs were of unrequited love - I caught the words "tristessa" and "Durango," which is pretty much the capital of unrequited love. His delivery was workmanlike and given added piquancy by a furrowed brow.

The market proved a plein aire universe of goods - tables piled with surplus WalMart clothing, antique pipe wrenches, vise grips, sheep shears, kitchen knives and machetes; someone (the same person) selling old tools and lengths of fresh sugar cane; piles of hammers and scraps of lumber, pieces of electronic equipment, computer cables, cell phones and cell phone batteries, odd used auto parts and used parts of used auto parts; tables of kitchenware plastic, wood and metal; glass blender jars without the business end of the blender, caps of all sorts, from baseball caps to flannel caps lined with acrylic fur and earmuffs that would nicely top off a Canadian or a North Korean; nearly invisible specimens of ladies intimate apparel, new jeans with sparkly pocket flourishes, t-shirts covered in logos and legends and more sparkly things; heaps of peanuts and unshelled pecans, meats, fruits, vegetables, and dry goods of every sort. The vendors hawked their wares with a certain energetic elan, walking among the aisles with hands full of samples, many of them abetted by commercial colleagues on competing public address systems. 

It was all just too much. The timid come away only with mesh bags of assorted fruits and vegetable. We were among he faint of heart on this maiden foray - we merely ate some gorditas and came home nearly emptyhanded. But I have higher ambitions: someday, amongst the bananas and the papaya I will bear home with a manly glow a paper sack of assorted miscellaneous carburetor jets - or manifold bolts.

Post-Santa Tristesse

It's the day after Christmas. I'm all alone in the apartment here on Calle de Rosales. The sun is shining outside, the morn balmy, the faithful in the streets making their way to one or other of the neighboring churches. Even Cec decided to attend the Unitarian service this morning, hoping to meet some Americans and get a better sense of the place. She left me sunning myself on the roof, carefully padlocked the grate across the front entry, and walked briskly off with the only housekey. Aqui soy.

The streets in San Miguel are intimate lanes - narrow, cobbled alleys with housefronts abutting the pavement, making narrow canyons of stone and concrete. Along one such narrow way on this dark Christmas eve, a passing group of young criminals ignited a cherry bomb immediately behind my cousin and me as we strolled, deep in amiable conversation, and the concussion ricocheting along the bricks and stones nearly made our clothing uninhabitable. Next door to my bespoken abode of tears is a modest single-story building indistinguishable from its neighbors with a large paved courtyard within the front gate. The courtyard is roofed in well-seasoned sheets of corrugated steel. This quiet Sunday morning, without warning, the sound of jubilant congregational singing accompanied by guitars, drums and keyboard obtrudes itself into the soft matinal air. The galvanized roof panels rattle with Christian fervor like a soundbox. The very houses and stony streets echo back the joyful noise. To my mild consternation, I find I have settled next to an impromptu church, una iglesias evangelicas, and no housekey within reach. The hours pass, cantatory, hortatory, oracular, the irony nearly insupportable.

Otherwise, the general Christmas spirit on exhibit in the streets is subtle. The jubilation of the season has been muted, which (lacking the gene for triumphalism) better suits my DNA. The local shops have not seemed crammed, either with more shoppers or more "gift items" than ordinary (when gifts became "gift items" and "gifting" became a verb was another among lexicography's frequent dark days). The hottest holiday item on the streets, in fact, is fireworks of all sorts, but especially the pernicious and nerve-frazzling cherry bomb, as I think I mentioned. On Christmas day many of the local merchants were open for business, seated in the shadows of their little back street tiendas, dimly lit by the reflected glitter of mylar packaging. The restaurants around the main plaza were packed, the streets were awash in people, the bands in the bars played to full houses until five a.m. The Nativity here seems to elicit a certain frolicsomeness, as do the Day of the Dead and the feast days of any number of the saints. Mexico is not, I remind myself, a Protesant nation with the odd moral repressions one often finds to the north. Its populace is prone to a degree of friskiness at unexpected seasons.

Revolution is apparently no longer one of those occasions. The Bicentenario of the Mexican Revolution, now winding down with the old year, has been a measured and grave affair, occasion for exhibitions of art, panel discussions, political seminars, short haircuts and highway dedications. The Mexican tricolor does not fly from every unhypothecated flagstaff - in fact, though patriotism is by no means dead here, an empy flagstaff seems neither a reproach on its owner nor an invitation to run up another "Old Gloria." It is no more seen as a declaration of antinationalism (or a "war on the flag") than not shopping, or saying "happy holiday," is considered another salvo in a "war on Christmas." Underneath the high-profile poltical and social difficulties the country currently faces, everyone tries to get along. There is no taste for trumped-up disputes where the larger national difficulties are genuine. In Mexico, "Fox" is not news, he's just an ex-president.

Business 101: Truculence as a Marketing Strategy

In the United States there are scarcely any capitalists. The Fortune 500 (or 1000, pick any number) is an esoteric and rarefied club, its members secluded in Westchester or Westwood, jealously exclusive, militantly anonymous, never seen on the street. Most of us can count, even on the hand that’s missing fingers, the capitalists within the remotest purview of our acquaintance. The average citizen, the overwhelming American majority, is a wage laborer, well enough paid but with little share in the corporate profits and none in the company. The means of production are not for those of humble means. Even capitalism on a small scale is being hoovered up daily and hourly by the paint and carpet departments, the lawn and garden centers, the hardware and power tool and light bulb aisles of Wal Mart or Target or Home Depot. Lest this sound suspiciously like Marx’s “Economic Manuscripts” (1844), let me explain.

In San Miguel, you run into capitalists on the street, sometimes two in a minute –  I mean literally run into them. The city is a bustling commercial center, a thriving exchange, each one of its huddled masses a paragon of enterprise, individual initiative, creative and energetic marketing. San Miguel is, in spite of its undeniable charm, a critical nexus for goods trucked into its depots from as far away as the Chiclets factory in Salamanca. Its most notable merchant class is not the sleek banker in his Armani suit, nor the honest and industrious keeper of the abbarote or the neighborhood farmacia.

I speak of enterprise, intiative, creativity, energy, all virtues found together only in the gangs of chicleteros roaming the busy thoroughfares of Mexico on a level somewhere below the knees of the average adult, suddenly looming into one’s consciousness as a little buzzcut head jogging along doggedly in your front, looking you directly in the eye, head craned at an angle 88 degrees to the perpendicular, demanding noisily that you buy a Chiclet, a keyring, a Chinese handcuff, a balloon, one of those accursed yellow smiley faces, an orange dog leash, or a plastic bag of indeterminate stuff that looks like something between florists' moss and moldy packing material but never like anything you'd care to smoke. It is direct sales in its most direct, unvarnished, simplest manifestation. It is not brusque, it is bellicose. It is, in a word, capitalism au naturel.

Direct sales is a disappearing cultural phenomenon, unlamented, diminished by its detractors, overshadowed by the “distributed marketing” enabled by the internet and new social networks. By contrast, in San Miguel direct marketing is not merely flourishing, it is a significant outlet for the creative impulse, the primally human challenge to sell the unsellable, the undesirable, the unnecesary and the impossible. The 'chicletero' is the hero of primitive capitalism. The name itself is certain to enter the vernacular and ultimately take its rightful place in the lexicon of commerce, as it delineates not only a distinct, albeit unheralded, commercial class but also defines a unique approach to informal personal marketing, with its own quasi-ritualistic technique. 

The first technique of the chicletero is brashness of an order usually reserved for something weighing about eight times the gross weight avoirdupois of any one of these miniscule dervishes. "Hey" (pronounced 'ay') is the standard introit or prolepsis for a potential sale, followed immediately by the imperative voice - "you buy . . . ." whatever happens to be on offer (see list above). If this fails, as it unfailingly does, the second technique is truculence - the chicletero scampers further into your path, screws his gaze to meet yours, repeats the same offer louder this time, and with a certain edge which was not apparent in the initial stock offering. Failing a second time, he drifts off port or starboard and repeats the offer, the third time in a markedly sulky tone. He does not tarry for answer but immediately accosts the pedestrian in your wake.

The chicletero is made, not born. His technique has come to him through generations of forebears. His manner betrays the careful example of a father, a favorite uncle, an older cousin, who doubtless crouched before him in his earliest nonage, fixed the innocent gaze in their own sterner countenance, and showed him how it's done.  It is not an avocation for females – there are no chicleteras, only chicleteros. It is not for the timid, not for the halt nor faint of heart. Capitalism eats its own.

Careful What You Wish For

Arriving on vacation in a pleasant spot, careless of the world, it seems almost too easy to pull up stakes at home and move one's domestic machinery to whatever the place. It's natural to look around at a good prospect with a view to staying on - if life on vacation is pleasant here (one naturally reasons) why could not life simpliciter be pleasant here? People have ended up in the Bahamas, Mexico, Cuba ante la Revolucion, Majorca, on little pretext and less forethought. For that matter, plenty of people have moved to San Miguel, too – and some of them have left. It's only natural to want to make permanent a pleasant change of prospect, even in the teeth of better wisdom. But it is also a fixture of human nature that people can't keep a secret to save their souls. If they like a place, particularly an undiscovered, undespoilt, undeveloped and remote place, the first thing they do is tell every one of their friends to a man, advise them to buy property before the secret is out, and before the month is out those unpeopled beaches or colonial avenues or palmy vistas or shoals of endearing seals and otters are featured in every slick travel magazine as one of "Ten Secret [sic] Best Getaways." 

San Miguel is not like that - the city hasn't been anyone's secret for something like 550 years (since the Spaniards accidently decapitated the San Miguelenses whilst baptizing them) and its Instituto has been the recipient of more GI Bill tuition dollars than any comparable academy (should there be such) in the expatriate world. The American and European community here is still large though apparently not so flourishing as in recent years. But it is a city of artists (or 'artistes') of all breeds and seems a place where a sizeble portion of the baby boom has come to regroup after a life of prosperous employment and too much sauce veloute on the meatloaf. Those who have gone native no longer leave the house with a Wal Mart photography department hung around their necks, but you can generally spot them by the holstered cell phone precariously perched at the vestigial waist. The Baby Boom has long since crested, washed up and bubbled away in the sand, on this shore as in every place else.

But if there has never, for more than half a milennium, been any secret about San Miguel, it still has its enablers - the Newcomer's Club that meets weekly (naturally the club meets, with the utmost inconsideration, in a delightfully undiscovered little cafe that Cec and I discovered by ourselves on a main street just off the alley from our house). What better way to learn about prospects here, asked Cec excitedly. We can make lots of new friends. Only by ignoring my instinctive shudder could she eject me from the refuge of a closet and trundle me up the street to face my fellow uninitiates - a gathering (I quickly surmised) each one carrying a large purse and washing down cubes of vinyl cheese with a timid glass of warm white wine. At the end of the alley Cec made an unexpected turn away from the cafe and we marched on up the street to a pleasant restaurant in the courtyard of the old stone Instituto, where across the intervening city roofs we could see the large old parish church perched on its eminence (not on His Eminence) with its illuminated cross on the main steeple.

She expressed momentary puzzlement about not having noticed, on our way, the little cafe of the warm white wine. I remained demure. Nevertheless, making our way back down the avenue towards our alleyway, Cec bolted for the site and I followed dutifully, imprecating the social instincts in general and in particular. Cec stopped in the doorway and closely regarded a long table heaped with large purses and pale glasses of wine. It was as I had speculated, a menagerie of ill use. We left for home.

Gee, I Coulda Gone to Taos

The internet connection at the house in Colonia de San Antonio, a 'connection' only by straining courtesy, is not functioning, so I'm sitting in a Starbucks on Canal Street, a main thoroughfare in the center of a colonial town much older than any comparable bit of civilization in Los Estados Unidos. That is San Miguel as succinctly as I can say it (never having been here before).  The streets that are not cobbled are flagged. When the flags are repaired, gangs of men in old clothes and straw cowboy hats sit clustered in the middle of the street with sledges and chisels, digging up the pavement, carefully chiseling old mortar from the flags, and resetting them in fresh mortar. When they leave work for the day, the street is piled with all the unset flags - no barricades, no flashing lights, no yellow "Cuidado" signs, just an obstacle course for any little car or scooter that might blunder through, which they generally do unscathed. I surmise that the ordinary person hasn't yet learned the immense advantages of assiduous personal litigation.

San Miguel is a city with plenty of parks and green spaces, but it is a city so the landscape is distant. The road from Guanajuato runs through that peculiar Mexican mountainscape of small but abrupt hills and bluffs, small plots of maize tilled between the mesquite, the nopales and groves of small trees with thorny leaves like giant holly. Since it's winter, corn shocks are sitting in the fields, piled everywhere on the verges of tilled land, being hauled away on little ricks or wains pulled by burros. The bus has to slow down to a crawl until some unperturbed son of the soil pulls his ancient tractor aside to let the traffic pass. I spotted a small accipiter hunting over an empty field - a sharp-shinned hawk, I think. We've done a little rooftop birding and have taken binoculars to Parque Benito Juarez - the best siting there was a Bell's vireo grazing off the leaves (all the trees are as green as summer right now). But there are woodpeckers everywhere, ladderbacks and golden-fronted woodpeckers with their clown laugh, Mexican robins, boat tailed grackles that make a racket like parrots. The white-winged doves call from before sunup until dark. And vermilion flycatchers, best of all. The day before Chrismas, the local English-language paper advertised an Audobon-sponsored bird walk along the river outside of town, but when we called the phone number for information, a nice American lady told us unapologetically that it's been cancelled, "Bob is on vacation." Apparently even permanent vacationers require respite from whatever their current vail of tears.

San Miguel is a colonial city (1542 or thereabouts, not long after someone sailed the ocean blue). That means the streets are a maze of narrow cobbled trails up and down abrupt hillsides, all higgledy-piggledy and entirely at odds with rational geometry, but wisely rationing the flow of taxis and aged pickup trucks that can nearly compete in sheer numbers with the glossy Lincoln Navigators and Tahoes that wander in with their cargo of blondes in expensive sunglasses from Texas and California. The residents mostly intermingle regardless of income, nationality, levels of education, rank, creed, wrinkles - apart from some obviously stylish new 'privadas' built to replicate the old stone-and-stuccoed barrios that prevail with their easy promiscuity, pressing their housefronts right to the curb, bustling with little abbarotes and tiendas and restaurantes and ferrienderas and servicio automovil and lavanderias and all the necessities of simple civilization. We've already taken a taxi (25 p., no more) to buy some supplies at the 'MEGA', the supermarket just on the edge of town - it has everything you could want - todo el mondo y mas. It can hold its own with any Starbucks in cleanliness, convenience, ambience and sheer modernity. We shop more locally in general, but I blush to confess that it's a comfort just knowing the MEGA is there.

San Miguel is a city but it's manageable, it's in Mexico but could easily be in the south of France or Calabria or Piemonte, it's crowded at the center but it's navigable, there are Americans nearly everywhere but they're still outnumbered and seem to be well-enough behaved, if still odd, for the most part.  They are generally identifiable for wielding expensive cameras at inopportune moments.