<<This post is inspired by a piece of art I saw at a cooperative in Oaxaca de Juarez --- hundreds of notecard-sized paintings on tin by a single artist, each depicting a scene from someone else's life with a sentence beginning "Gracias a la virgen..." While the celebrity of the virgin is still pretty foreign to me, gratitude becomes more familiar every day I spend in Mexico. Here's a recap of the past two weeks, traveling from the state of Morelos to Chiapas, with Guerrero, Oaxaca and Tabasco in between.>>
Gracias a la virgen that when I lost my glasses in the ocean I did not drown as well.
Gracias a la virgen that the banditito who stopped us in the road between Acapulco and Puerto Escondido was not able to open the driver's side door, that we did not run over the other children who threw themselves in front of the car while slow-moving grown men with shovels approached, and that we got away from the whole scene with less agitation and property damage than is generally caused by unmarked speed bumps on MEX-200.
Gracias a la virgen that when the signs warning of upcoming speed bumps are obscured by homemade signs for COCOS FRIOS, at least some of those coconuts really are cold.
Gracias a la virgen that the high road to Oaxaca City from the lowland coast is not even the tiniest bit narrower.
Gracias a la virgen for the gold, the jade baubles, the human skulls inlaid with turquoise, the carved bones, the necklaces made of teeth, the obsidian spears, the animalistic figures and the ceremonial vessels; for the crucifixes, the crowns set with emeralds and rubies; for the saddles, the copper stills, the iron blades and all the books; for the rifles, telegraphs and radios; the cameras, cigars and bilingual audio tours for M$50; for all the things in Oaxaca's cultural museum in the former convent of Santo Domingo, a vast stone complex containing the makings and unmakings of empires past, present and future, items carefully catalogued and overwhelming enough to drive me several times from the hallowed inner rooms to the courtyard, where with eyes closed, mind blank I listened to the fountain spill into a stone bowl.
Gracias a la virgen for AGUA PARA USO HUMANO, but most of all for AGUA POTABLE.
Gracias a la virgen for mescal, too.
Gracias a la virgen for the mescal makers, particularly for Sr. Pedro Aurelio, who doesn't object to looky-loos as he toils by the road among maguey thorns and smoke, waiting a decade or more to cut out the hearts of his crop and clucking kindly at his little black horse as it strains to pull a stone wheel over this season's long-awaited harvest -- a mesquite-roasted, fibrous mess that must be shoveled into a barrel and distilled three times before about 1 liter of mescal for every 20 pounds of cactus trickles out beneath an alter a la virgen.
Gracias a la virgen that right when we were so tired of driving and closely pursued by darkness, a little unnamed road on the GPS led to a dusk-kissed lake with free camping.
Gracias a la virgen for allowing me to climb right up a certain sandstone waterfall in Chiapas, where a million cold clean fists pounded my chattering skull until the roar of it all became like quiet.
Gracias a la virgen that what felt like creatures nibbling at my ankles in the river bed was actually just the current kicking up sand.
Gracias a la virgen that Bruno the dog kept pumas away while we slept soundly in our hammocks.
Gracias a la virgen that so many helpful people care where we are going and how we are going to get there.
Gracias a la virgen that the cave was not as terrifying as I thought it would be and that none of the bats pooped on me as I swam on my back, open-mouthed, beneath their roosts.
Gracias a la virgen that I can visit a rich man's tomb without staying very long.
Holy Week in a region of great tectonic tension-- we stray briefly from Jalisco's highlands to camp on the coast of Nayarit for a few days before doubling back to Guadalajara on Easter Sunday. Semana Santa (aka Holy Week) is like national spring break in Mexico, where census says Christians, (vastly Roman Catholics), make up 93 percent of the population. Suddenly the razor's edge we cut through this dense and heaving country reveals a distended cross section --- Mexican vacationers clog roads and gas stations, overtake mountains and seas. The very pious and the very drunk parade by, while regular folks wait to use the bathroom.
As we head south from San Luis Potosi, pilgrims and penitents walk single file over scorching desert mountains and across valleys of blue agave, carrying icons to a remote sanctuary. We stop for a couple of nights at a ranching village in a canyon about one hour southwest of Guadalajara, sheer pastures willed out of rock and cactus. The central church of Barranca de Santa Clara was damaged by a reecnt earthquake. Tower fissured, loudspeakers toll instead of bells.
Our host is Maria, the mother of a lover of a friend, though her hospitality never hints at the tenuousness of this connection. Degrees in natural medicine and psychology hang on the wall opposite Maria's airy kitchen, in which she prepares us delicious food. She proposes I use white vinegar and tranquility to treat an allergic reaction that has temporarily disfigured my face and dampened my spirits, likely the result of unwise flower picking in the desert of San Luis Potosi.
One side of Maria's face seems affected by stroke - an eyebrow always raised knowingly at you. According to her daughter Fabiola, she was drawn to the church in Barranca de Santa Clara by an 85-year-old mystic and illiterate named El Segundo, who reports from the astral plane while Maria takes notes for an as-told-by book. Story goes, El Segundo's mom died when he was three. Unwilling to accept this loss and ignorant of decomposition, he dug up her grave. But the sight of her rotted corpse only shocked and grieved him more. Then his mother appeared bathed in celestial light to deliver a message: as an adult El Segundo would have powers to travel in other dimensions, to relive the lives of saints and the cruxifixion of Christ, to ward off evil and save souls from hell. All these things came true, Maria says. Bearing in mind the limitlessness of other dimensions, El Segundo prognosticates a bleak future for the world as most of us know it. The end is near, etc. However Barranca de Santa Clara will remain a protected place, a spiritual refuge in times of great suffering.
Moving westward, we cross something like seven mountain ranges. Our prickly path becomes lush green an hour from Sayulita on the coast. Joined by two teenage hitchhikers -- Brian and Beto -- springbreakers on their way to a beach rave, elated to listen to American funk and soul music. They offer us obsidian and crystals, "por protecion"; we thank them with a Taj Mahal CD.
Salt water and a cortisone shot revive me. Chance would have us stay up all night on Monday April 14 to see the moon turn "blood red," the first of four total lunar eclipses happening every six months over the next two years. This rare "lunar tetrad" is a source of meaning for all kinds of believers.
Evangelicals seem inclined to doom. A couple of Americans have been best-selling books aligning the eclipses of 2014-15 with Biblical verse Joel 2:31: "The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the great and dreadful day of the Lord comes."
A cheerier outlook on the beach in Sayulita the night of the first eclipse. Unaware that anything auspicious is going to happen, Alessandro plays his guitar while I navel gaze. Three women pass, then one comes back, inviting us to join a meditation circle down the way. Not a trap. It's a ragtag group of friends and strangers, tourists and local tea-leave readers, lighting candles, singing, banging and clanging on stuff, chanting, playing Aztec ritual, burning wishes and saying thank you to the moon. The MC is a 70-something white guy named Gary, wearing a Mayan calendar tee-shirt. Gary says this will be time for change, a time to let go of something that's been bugging you, a time for relationships to make or break. A beautiful woman wrapped in traditional textiles sings folk songs, her infant son asleep under the thumping hand drum. An unlikely variety of instruments emerge from the candlelit sand. Gongs the size of man-holes.
The moon bruises then bleeds in a contained way, like a smooshed toenail on its way out. Other stars and planets emerge from the falling darkness.
The next day we peruse crowded souvenir markets, admire handicrafts of the Huichole culture. Exquisite embroideries, peyote-inspired beadwork, sacred symbols for sale. Cocos, too. Young women use machetes to decapitate and drain them into plastic bags, cutting bright white flesh into manageable pieces for the throngs of dehyrdated, sunburned 20-somethings that have descended upon Nayarit's coast in the tens of thousands.
Pilgrims they ain't and by Good Friday our pretty little campsite by the beach turns into my own personal Hades, crossed by the river Piss. Its like a civil war reanactment with no history buffs; a religious revival with no religion. Dome tents pimple every inch of ground; every boombox plays a little louder than the one next to it. There's like, five obnoxiously drunk dudes for every one inscrutable, hiccuping girl.
Before the Holy Weekend brings 3,000 people into our five-acre campground, I don't quite grasp how completely the situation in Sayulita will transcend any one puny person, no matter how bitchy, tired or entitled she may feel.
It's only Wednesday, after all. Almost midnight. Murmurings of a tropical shore obliterated by our neighbor's smackfest thinly veiled in nylon. Way way worse is the terrible dance song they are playing on repeat at bowel quaking volume. I implore Alessandro. He cajoles Jorge the night guard: is this really permitted here? Its only Wednesday, after all. Already midnight.
Dutifully, Jorge interrupts the rustling tent while we hide in ours. The music dials down for five minutes, gets louder incrementally over the next ten.
Jorge works 12-hour nightshifts guarding this camp, dealing with the campers. He's paid less than one us dollar an hour. He welded the new zip line. He has another job in the afternoons. "I've been to the US," he says. "When I was 13." "With your family?" I ask. "No, by myself." An uncomfortable look passing over his face. "For work."
He's 44. Wife lives in town with another guy. Son estranged. Sister in Salt Lake City. Mother dead. Father gone. Eventually I ask him what he does for fun and he closes his eyes for long second, sighs and really can't think of anything. "Work," he shrugs. Its 2 am and a marching band strikes up in the near darkness, accompanied by full horn section.
We find refuge thanks to a guy with a massage tent of the beach. He sees us cleaning the surfboards, asks if we are "serious surfers" and then volunteers directions to a secluded spot, something along the lines of "go down the little road out of town to the power plant, park there and walk along a fence, through the jungle via the creek until you hear howler monkies."
Then he apologizes for being so drunk so early in the day. It only takes us the better part of an afternoon to find secluded playa de los burros, where we spend two days surfing a mellow point break, snorkeling and laying around under trees, trying not to rile up any mad little bugs too much.
Back to Guadalajara, reluctantly. An earthquake precedes us by one day. Our host Polo reports he was home in his underwear when it began. For a second he debated putting on pants, then ran outside without them in case the building gave way while he was doing something foolish like putting on pants during an earthquake. On the still street he found himself alone, indecent and embarrassed.
Easter Sunday we head to the city center -- riding with Polo along wide, shop-lined avenues -- fancy storefronts clad in wedding dresses, bars and familiar brands, then down into a pitch black tunnel that leads to the center. Desert sun to reeling darkness, no headlights, the smell of fried chicken. Polo seems unfazed. We emerge in a parking lot and ascend to the roof for a view of the city's sprawling lines, hard edges capped by ubiquitious church domes. Makes me think of all those tents in Sayulita.
In the central cathedral on this Easter Sunday the crowning virgin gazes as she always does, ever downward on the sacristy, a curio cabinet of holy crap and old bones. A line forms for the eucharist as a more haphazard crowd gathers on the north side of the church, under the impassive figure of Domingo de Guzman, patron saint of astronomers. Guzman guards the point of interest, an ornate terrarium blooming with white tafetta and lace, the face of a sweaty cupcake.
A child martyr, her eyes are closed peacefully under smears of pale white flesh and tendrils of copper hued hair. Taped to the reliquary is a color photo of the real Santa de Innocencia from Guadalajara -- a girl of maybe 8 in a contemporary white button-up top, the sheen of sweat on her deep brown skin, her jet black hair in schoolgirl's braids. Story goes, Guadalajara's Inoncencia was the daughter of a very bad man. After she was beaten mercilessly for asking to take first communion, a nun taught her catechism classes in secret, advising that when in a damned if you do, damned if you don't siutaiton, better to ally with good than evil. Following her first eucharist, Inocencia ran into the kitchen to tell her father, who promptly stabbed her in the chest. Blood spurted all over the onions he was chopping.
True story. In a sense, anyway. More than three sources confirm Inocencia's existence in the Guadalajara cathedral; two talk about the well-meaning nun who taught her to pray, the abusive father who stabbed her to death; only one says it happened in the kitchen with a chopping knife. The onions are made up, maybe true. Mulling gospel truth. Only Luke mentions that under torture Christ turned down a sedative of wine and gall, a desert plant akin to nightshade. Only Matthew mentions a sudden darkness and an earthquake following the crucifixion.
At the Easter Sunday Eucharist service in Guadalajara, a procession of open mouths take communion, a cracker for the body of Christ, thimbles of wine symbolizing the blood of the Lamb. Afterwards we find a taqueria overlooking a pedestrian street -- a menu of lips, head, eyes, tongue, and cheek. Tacos vampiro? Meat served with blood, Polo says. We all order ahogada tortas, a regional speciality consisting of pork on a bun drowned in tomato-based sauce. A sandwich eaten with a spoon.
