Leaving San Miguel: Taco Memories

At sunset, the light softens on the spires and church domes across town. The evening sky from the rooftop is washed and chalked with soft clouds. Life in the barrio grows quiet in the brief interval between the workaday afternoon and the social nighttime. Church bells begin to toll across the roofs, some anonymous verger switches on the illuminated cross atop La Parroquia and it is officially eventide. 

On some obscure signal, the first strand of birds appears, strung out across the sky, looping westward to roost in the Presa, the reservoir at the edge of town. Behind them another ribbon of birds, furling and folding in on itself as if blown along on a high breeze, hundreds of white-faced ibis flapping along the sky in loose ranks. Each morning they make the same short flight eastward over the town, over the hilltop in the middle distance, to some unseen feeding ground, and back the same way each evening, ribbon on ribbon of ibis. By May they will be nesting in wetlands in Colorado and Wyoming and Montana.

White-faced Ibis



Oblivious to all of this, the long-tailed grackles on the roof across the street are guarding from some insistent kingbirds a puddle of water that has collected atop a water tank; other kingbirds are harrassing a solitary woodpecker in a nearby tree, the woodpecker uncharacteristically minding his own business for once. Everyone, it seems, has a job to do and no one capable of doing it without a mild ruckus.

On the last evening in San Miguel, I walked the three blocks through the darkened backstreets to the bright lights and conviviality of Tacos Diana. Tacos Diana is one of those frequent outposts of the informal economy of Mexico, a small lunch counter on wheels that disappears each day and reappears each evening lit up like a Polish church in the doorway of the ferreteria, the hardware store on Orizaba. Ranged along the counter beneath an awning are some stools, some earthenware bowls of lime wedges and jars of salsas rojo y verde. The offerings are basic - tacos, tortas, gringos and something called a 'volcanes', a crisp corn tostada piled with either chopped beef or chorizo beneath a glaze of melted cheese. Healthy stuff served with pride. The vegetable courses consist of a fine chop of onion and cilantro, bowls of pickled cucumber and carrot slices, and grilled jalapenos.

The chef is a large congenial fellow who works beneath a thick shock of black hair. His wife and helpmeet stands at his side working the grill, which is basically a round platter over a gas flame with an outer trough around a raised middle. The meat and onions are cooked down in the trough where the grease from previous courses has collected, then drained and kept warm on the raised center. When a customer orders, say, three tacos, the proprietor of the establishment sets corn tacos out on a plate, garnishes them with onion and cilantro, sets the meat on a round wooden block hollowed with use into a shallow bowl, and with a knife of venerable provenance and a deep-curved blade that exactly fits the bowl of the chopping block, he chops it fine and assembles the tacos. Some lime, some salsa, a couple of whole jalapenos, and Bob, as they say in Mexico, is your uncle (Bob son tu tio").

This does not begin to capture the ambience of Tacos Diana, the anchor, icon and masthead of which is the stolid wife of the owner. She is in her own right the atmosphere of the place, every bit as substantial as her husband and with a kind of natural glower, all business and clearly no nonsense where he is all cordiality and blessings. Diana, for whom the business is named, is the daughter who stands at her father's right hand, setting up plates, collecting money and dispensing change when she is not seated on the steps of the nearby tienda in congress with her friends and their friends and a good portion of the neighborhood who prefer to bundle themselves against the chill and stand around in lighted spots chatting, trying out their English on the customers ("Jalapeno not too spicy for you?"), eating ice cream from the bright little storefront and generally cutting up like human beings with social business to transact.

But I am loyal to Tacos Diana, and for this reason: on my final evening in San Miguel, when my face, familiar by now, appeared within the ring of light, the mistress of the place looked up at me and - faintly, but definitely - smiled at me. It was the moon peering slyly from behind a cloud. I must return to San Miguel.

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.