Tortillas, aguas and tortas: making a living in Zamora

This bulletin’s theme is daily life: an attempt to give a flavour of how one makes a living in a small provincial Mexican city.

Our neighbourhood is Fraccionamiento Las Fuentes: a fraccionamiento is land divided into lots for housing. In this case, care was taken to provide plazas many with large fountains: hence the name Las Fuentes (the fountains). The one small snag is that the fountains contain no water. Nevertheless, the largest plaza at the end of the street is the location of the local church and a place to sit or stroll in the cool of the evenings. Saturdays, scout groups gather there for exercises. Sunday evenings the plaza fills with food stalls, sellers of (certainly illegally copied) DVDs and other inexpensive items, trampolines and other amusements for children.

 

Evening in the square of Las Fuentes

Las Fuentes is a neighbourhood of pleasant middle-class housing, ranging from homes of a modest size to larger properties, often decorated with flamboyant architectural touches: columns, rather baroque pediments and the like. 

Domestic architecture in Las Fuentes

Abarrotes Gladis

We buy much of our daily food from small grocery shops called tiendas de abarrotes: there are three within less than five minutes’ walk from our apartment. These are often lean-tos built onto the front of the shopkeeper’s house. Space is scarce so the shops cram in as much merchandise as space permits. The shops open early and close late. Each has its strengths: in our block the shop stocks berries destined for the American market in their US packaging; a short walk further across the plaza is the somewhat larger Abarrotes ‘Gladis’, which stocks a wider range of fruit and vegetables.

Contrary to popular stereotypes, Mexicans work hard: the legal working week is long and holidays, other than public holidays, positively parsimonious. One way to supplement income is to trade from one’s house of an evening or at the weekend. Across the road from us, the ancient Ford Falcon is moved out of the parking area onto the street to make room for plastic chairs and tables. Food is prepared in the converted garage. Service of tacos, tortas (a Mexican sandwich) and other small food items begins around 6pm and carries on to 10pm or so. A little further up our street, another neighbour has a small food stall outside the house from which lunch is served. On the plaza where the church is located, one man stocks a small range of sweet rolls and pastries in a small glass case. Another house is the location of a small ice cream and iced lolly shop.

Aguas de fruta for sale

Others offer more elaborate food at weekends: a local house sells pozole verde, a stew of meat and hominy maize in a delicious sauce with a good kick of chile. If space is lacking at the front of the house, the alternative is to set up a small table on the pavement, put up a plastic sheet for shade and patiently wait for an occasional customer to pass by. One popular item sold on the street is a range of aguas de fruta, a sort of fruit squash made from fresh fruit: perhaps guava, lime, cucumber, watermelon, or bright purple hibiscus flowers (agua de jamaica). Fidel Castro, in exile in Mexico City before leading the Cuban Revolution, scraped a living selling aguas de fruta.

A little further, up on the main street that runs along the north side of Las Fuentes, is our local tortillería. Here one buys the lunch time or evening stack of maize flatbreads that have been the mainstay of the Mexican diet for centuries. The cheery lady who sells us our tortillas told us that she and her husband start the day at 8am, making the maize dough, and close in the evening, seven days a week, taking only public holidays. A stack of 250 grams is enough for our lunch and costs us 4.5 pesos (roughly 20p).

 

The tortillería

Walking round Zamora, you notice the large number of repair businesses: car repairs, car spare parts, electrical repairs, watch repairers, tailors repairing clothing, sellers of assorted repaired motors and odd bits of machinery, or bicycle parts. In Mexico incomes are low and machinery expensive, so fixing things up until they can be fixed up no longer is an essential part of daily life. It also provides a lot of work.

Our walk into the centre takes about fifteen minutes and takes us past countless small businesses: tortillerías, a roast chicken seller, a small baker, a torta shop, a place that specializes in a great variety of dried beans (another staple of the Mexican diet) and various edible seeds. Then we reach 5 de mayo, the main north-south thoroughfare, and a sea of movement of people, trucks, taxis and small rickety buses whose rasping exhausts emit one of Mexico’s most typical sounds.

Calle 5 de mayo

Across 5 de mayo, the hubbub increases as we reach the edge of the main market. The crowd of street sellers and their customers make movement a slow affair of weaving in and out of people, stalls, young men on bicycles or scooters. On sale are chunks of coconut spiced with chile, tacos, drinks made from tropical fruits, plastic cups of chopped fruit. The shops that line the streets round the market sell clothes, small electrical goods, cheap toys (Mexico is a country of children and young people), mobile phones. The most visually striking shop is a seller of paper tropical flowers: a riot of brilliant colours.

 

Goods for sale  everywhere

Benito Juárez

Monday 19 March is a public holiday to mark the birthday of Benito Juárez, a 19^th century president always referred to as “el benemérito” (the meritorious). Juárez is one of the nation’s heroes. He was an Indian, born in the southern state of Oaxaca, who became a lawyer, and in the 1860s President. When Napoleon II invaded Mexico to install as Emperor Maximilian of Austria, Juárez moved the government out of Mexico City and travelled round the country leading a stubborn resistance. The Mexicans wore down the French troops until Napoleon tired of the project, leaving Maximilian to face Juárez alone. The Emperor was captured and executed on a hill in northern Mexico (the subject of a famous painting by Manet). His wife Carlota became mad and died in an asylum.