Testing times in Mexico

 

Unfortunately, shortly after we arrived in Bucerías, Nayarit, my wife Jan became ill with symptoms that seemed to be Covid. In urban Mexico you are never far from a pharmacy, and on Lázaro Cárdenas street in Bucerías there are six or seven within a 15-minute walk. The first had no pruebas Covid, but the chemist’s next to the fancy liquor store, did. The charming young woman in the standard white pharmacy uniform told me she had two types: one used a drop of blood from a finger, the other a swab inserted into one’s nostrils. The tests that required blood did not include anything to prick the finger, so I opted for the more familiar up-the-nostrils model and asked for two in case of mishaps. She fetched a box, made sure it contained at least two of everything, and carefully counted out two of all the components into a black plastic bag. The instructions were not included, so I asked her to explain to me how to conduct the test. Then she told me the price: rather more than 1,000 pesos (a little over £50 or US$70). The daily minimum wage in Mexico is 207 pesos, a few pennies over £10, so for a working-class Mexican this price is a staggering amount. I asked the young woman how on earth most Mexicans could afford tests at such prices, at which point she suggested that she could call the main branch to authorize a bulk discount. I left the shop £45 poorer and Jan tested positive. A family living on a typical Mexican income would not have had the luxury of testing to confirm whether or not they were infected. Life in Mexico can be very hard but most Mexicans meet life’s difficulties with quiet determination.

 

This rather trivial insight into the challenges of life in Mexico was emphasized by our last social engagement in Puerto Vallarta, a dinner with the family of one of Chris’ colleagues, Eliseo Molina, a physiotherapist at Pasitos de Luz. Eliseo was born without eyes in a rural community in Chiapas in southern Mexico. His mother considered a blind child a source of shame, so she forbade her son to leave the house so that neighbours could not see him. However, Eliseo was determined not to be limited by his lack of sight and, in his words, he managed to escape. State schools did not admit blind children, so Eliseo received no education until he was an adult, when he moved to Mexico to attend the Escuela Nacional para Ciegos (National School for the Blind), a residential school in the historic centre of Mexico City. The school was founded in 1870 by a former governor of the Distrito Federal, as Mexico City was formally known, Ignacio Trigueros Olea, who taught himself braille to become its first teacher in Mexico. The school now has 34 classrooms, sports facilities, and a computer room. Students are taught to use the white stick, to cook, are given a primary and secondary education, and the beginnings of a professional qualification.

 

Eliseo explained that one of his first classes taught students how to navigate the Mexico City metro and bus routes: a considerable challenge in a huge city. He also learned how to deal with pavements (there were none in his rural birthplace) and other obstacles of city life. And the trained to become a physiotherapist. Most importantly, Eliseo met his wife Lupita there. The couple have three children and live in a small neat house on calle Coliflor (Cauliflower Street) in Colonia Campestre San Nicolás, a suburb of Puerto Vallarta, which lives up to its name (campestre means rural). To reach their home Chris navigated deeply rutted unpaved streets, avoiding fallen tree trunks and other obstacles, as well as a small herd of cows. After introductions and a formal invitation to come into Eliseo and Lupita’s home we bounced along to dinner in Chris’ car and a taxi, joined by Carlitos (their son) and Sofía.

 

Over dinner I learned more about Eliseo and Lupita’s lives. Lupita teaches braille in a local branch of the DIF (Sistema Nacional Para el Desarrollo Integral de la Familia: National System for the Integral Development of the Family) ). Eliseo explained that the DIF provides a range of support services, including food parcels, refuges for abused women and children. Eliseo told me that he is a keen supporter of the current President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), because, when he was governor of Mexico City, he provided free metro and bus transport for blind people, and as President has introduced programmes to help the needy. This is not an opinion shared by many of my more well-to-do friends in Mexico, who are (rightly concerned by AMLO’s involvement of the army in many sectors of the economy, such as managing airports, building new train lines, distribution of medicines, and by his authoritarian instincts. However, Mexicans of more modest means are unsurprisingly less concerned by such matters as they are by the challenges of daily life.

 

Eliseo and Lupita explained that they share the cooking, Lupita sweeps and mops the house (a daily chore in most Mexican households). Eliseo gets to work at Pasitos de Luz by taking a local bus to the charity’s original building, where he meets the bus that transports children and staff to Pasitos. I asked him how he knows when to get off his local bus, since Lupita explained that the bus drivers provide no assistance. Eliseo explained that he counts the topes (speed bumps) and turns. When I asked if he ever gets off too early or too late, he replied that this happens only if he is distracted. Unsurprisingly, Eliseo is assigned the blind children at Pasitos. One little boy, Alexis, has no eyes and is autistic. He has been a particular challenge, especially since he forgot all he had been taught about the use of his white stick during the pandemic. His therapy had to start again from scratch.

 

I also asked Eliseo and Lupita if life is very difficult for a blind couple in Mexico, for example when dealing with officialdom, which can be very bureaucratic. They replied that most of the time they coped well with life, but recently Carlitos, who is 15 years old, has had serious treatments for cancer every two weeks in Guadalajara, some 320km away. Dealing with long bus journeys and hospital administration has been very hard for them. Carlitos has had both his legs amputated and recently had tumours removed from his lungs. When we met him, he was walking on a new prosthetic leg and crutches. Over dinner he quizzed Chris about life in London and other aspects of the UK. He listened with wrapt attention and a broad smile. He tells us that he plans to become a doctor. His enthusiasm was contagious, and, to use a much over-used term, inspirational. 

 

Jovita, the cleaning lady in our apartment, told me that she would charge 500 pesos (the price of one Covid test) to sweep and mop the floors with Pinol, the universal floor cleaner in Mexico with a pleasant pine smell; to clean the kitchen and four bathrooms; sweep the terrace; wash and change the sheets; and to empty the rubbish. Two and a half hours later our apartment was scrupulously clean, our son Chris’ disorderly room all neatly arranged, and our assorted bathroom products sorted into neat rows. Public places in Mexico may often be disorderly and scruffy, but homes are always neat and clean. For a morning of hard work Jovita explained to me that she takes two bus rides to Bucerías and two back home, at a cost of 80 pesos, so she would have netted, 420 pesos, not enough to buy a Covid test, for 2.5 hours of unstinting work and her travel time. Jan insisted that this was not enough and insisted that I pay Jovita 600.

 

As we sit having breakfast on our terrace, every morning about 10am a father and two small children not more than. 6- and 8-years old trudge along the beach in front of our building carrying trinkets for sale. The trinkets are of little value, so their daily earnings must be very thin stuff, especially in this low season when the beach is pretty much empty. The children cannot attend school, so may well grow up illiterate, or at best with a minimal education. Another person who passes our building regularly is a man who sells shrimps on a stick, seasoned with a red sauce and a squeeze of lime. He holds an array of the snacks in his right hand. If sales are slow, those shrimps will be heated by the sun perhaps for an hour or more: no doubt a food safety hazard.

 

Many Mexicans scrape a living as that family or the shrimp seller do, but some have it even harder. To reach our building, as you enter Bucerías you pull into a right-hand lane to make a left turn (one of the curiosities of traffic management in the state of Nayarit is that to turn left you turn right first), and wait for the traffic lights by the enormous Chedrahui supermarket. Traffic lights are an opportunity to earn a very few pesos, if you are desperate enough, while passengers wait for the lights to change. You may be a mother working the cars with a small child selling chewing gum or some other small item. Another mother, steps out when the lights turn red, squats down and her small son sits across her shoulders, then she stands up and the boy juggles two rubber balls for a minute or two. He climbs down and he and his mother walk along the line of cars asking for a few pesos as their reward for a brief entertainment. Again, these children miss school.

 

Lack of education, or an inadequate education, consigns many Mexicans to making their lives this way. Literacy is technically high in Mexico: 99.5% of the population is literate, but the level of literacy is poor. The OECD reports that 50.6% of adults in Mexico attain only level 1 literacy, defined thus: “At Level 1 in literacy, adults can read brief texts on familiar topics and locate a single piece of specific information identical in form to information in the question or directive.” Mexico educates a substantial number professionals to a high standard. A waiter at one of our favourite Puerto Vallarta restaurants, The River Café, has a daughter who is completing a PhD in Barcelona, and another studying for a Masters in Puerto Vallarta. But many Mexicans do not complete their primary education.

 

The night-time security guard in our building exemplifies another kind of hardship. He speaks English well and quite grammatically, and understands most of what we say to him even with our British accents. He tells me that he learned some of his English in school, but more by listening to English pop music: Phil Collins, Sting, Rod Stewart etc. And he lived for two years in Greensboro, NC, where he has a 15-year-old son who he hopes to have enough money to visit some time. On an anecdotal level, family separations across the US border are a common theme of conversations with Mexicans who work in low-paid jobs (restaurant and hotel work, driving taxis, cleaning and so on).

 

A friend of our son Chris works in one of the more luxurious hotels selling tours to the (mostly American and Canadian guests). For this work he needs good English and interpersonal and sales skills. He cannot, of course, afford to live close to the hotel where he works, so he wakes at 4am and takes buses to work. He leaves home very early because the buses are so crowded that he often needs to wait for several to pass before one arrives with room for some additional passengers. The buses are thus crowded and almost intolerably hot (they are not air conditioned like the tourist buses). So he arrives sweaty and already tired, but has to put on his smile and get to work. The buses are a municipal service, so one might think that a politician who promised more comfortable transport would be guaranteed to win an election. However, Chris’ friend explained that, while formally municipal, the buses are in fact controlled by the mafia who have no interest in funding increased comfort. I asked Chris about the reference to the mafia, and he responded that friends often point out business activities that they describe as mafia. One example in San Vicente, Chris’ town, is a new and very luxurious bar, which will be beyond the means of most residents of the town. A friend assured him that this was a mafia enterprise to be used for money laundering. Whether this is true or not I can’t say, but the general assumption is that services are not run for the benefit of ordinary Mexicans.

 

One feature of Mexican life is the importance of the municipality and its residents’ attachment to their neighbourhood, which often expresses itself in neighbourhood solidarity and self-help, sometimes in vigorous ptrotest. For example, one evening, as Chris drove us to a restaurant in one of the non-tourist neighbourhoods of Puerto Vallarta along rutted unpaved streets, a young man held a paper cup out at an intersection. Chris gave him five pesos and explained that a collection was being made for materials so that local residents could make some basic repairs to their street. He commented that he frequently encounters such collections to repair streets or to paint topes.

 

We came across (or rather narrowly missed) another form of collective action as we planned to return to the UK from Mexico City. Jorge, the reliable driver who transports us from and to the airport, told us that the terminal from which British Airways flights depart had been subject to blockades by disabled people protesting their inability to obtain a medicine they need. The lack (desabasto) of medicines has been a subject of controversy in recent years. There have been similar protests by the parents of children unable to obtain medicine critically needed to treat their children’s cancer. In our case, the blockade had been lifted by the time we reached the airport.

 

The moral of all these rather miscellaneous anecdotes is that life for most Mexicans is hard, but that most face difficulties that would defeat many comfortably placed people in Europe or North America with resolution and resourcefulness.

And the President said “Let there be light”

 

My long-time friend Jim Murray and I were putting on our formal attire (in my case white tie, in Jim’s the Murray tartan, sporran etc.) in the home of Jim and his wife Leila in Herne Hill, while our spouses were arranging their long evening dresses. Our friend Dudley Ankerson had wangled for us tickets to a Mansion House state dinner for Miguel de la Madrid, president of Mexico (1982-1988). On our arrival we discovered that we had tickets that entitled us to dinner, but not to be presented to the president and to share a cocktail with him: those tickets were reserved for the politically important and those of the right pedigree.

Miguel de la Madrid wearing his presidential sash.

 

I was reminded of that long-ago evening by a conversation in San Sebastián del Oeste, Jalisco, with doña Laura Villanueva, who had invited us to visit her family home. Doña Laura is the 6^th generation of the Villanueva family, whose home is more than 320 years old. She explained to us that she now lives most of the year in Puerto Vallarta near her two daughters, but moves to her mountain home to escape the extreme heat. Unlike other prominent families in San Sebastián, the Villanuevas had made their money not in mining silver and gold but raising cattle. The house has a long walled terrace facing onto the street, protected from the frequent rains of the mountains by the projecting tiled roof. We stepped into a large and elegant living room, with its original pine timber ceiling and restored fireplace. To the left was the main bedroom and to the right two more bedrooms. There had once been a fourth bedroom to the rear of the living room, which is now the kitchen (which was formerly outside on the garden terrace). A heavy wooden door opens, not on hinges but on stout round wooden posts (which as doña Laura pointed out to not squeak) on to a large garden, somewhat neglected now but once full of fruit trees, and no doubt animals.

 

Doña Laura and Jan in the living room of the Villanueva house.

Doña Laura’s father was born in 1913; he died in 2009. He married an 18-year-old girl from Mexico City and brought her to San Sebastián. To judge by their wedding photo, the bride, in a white dress with a long train carefully arranged for the photograph was a petty petite young girl. Doña Laura remarked that her father was always armed with a pistol, although he had never fired it – law and order did not reach such a remote small town so personal protection was necessary. But to return to Miguel de la Madrid. In those days the candidate of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI: Institutional Revolutionary Party) was guaranteed to win the election, but nevertheless toured the country showing himself (only one male pronoun was needed in those days for senior politicians) to the people, and for some reason de la Madrid expressed a particular wish to visit San Sebastián. There was not yet a road connecting the town to La Estancia 9km away on the Guadalajara road, only a dirt track (a brecha) which most travelled on foot or on horseback, but señor Villanueva had a pick-up truck, the only vehicle in San Sebastián, so de la Madrid’s organizers asked him if they could borrow his truck to transport the candidate. He agreed on the condition that only he be allowed to drive his precious vehicle.

 

After taking his tour of San Sebastián and its region, the future president asked señor Villanueva whether he could thank him by giving the town something it needed. Doña Laura explained that her father and two friends had bought a generator to provide street lighting, but it was sufficient for only a few lights and only from 7-10pm, so her father’s request was for street lighting. However, as Doña Laura tells the tale, her father had no great faith in a politician’s promises and told de la Madrid so frankly. Doña Laura shares her father’s low opinion: she told us that the presidents of Mexico had all been “unas robaderas” (outrageous thieves). Imagine her father’s surprise when some time later representatives of the now president turned up to ask him what San Sebastián needed. Señor Villanueva decided to ask for street lighting and a proper road, both of which the government delivered – it was common for governmental decisions to be taken this way in the Mexico I knew as a young man, and it may well still be the case.

 

The plaza of San Sebastián de Oeste in the rain.

Doña Laura went on to explain that her home was once larger, but after the early death of her mother the family moved to Puerto Vallarta, leaving some relatives to live in and care for the family home. Unfortunately, the relatives were none too scrupulous. They sold the property in two parts, and when her father discovered what had happened, he was able only to recover part of his home. The family still did not occupy the home year-round, and subsequently the furniture was stolen from the empty house. Nevertheless, the Villanueva home is now restored and cared for.

 

The Villanueva house. Note how the roof sits above the body of the house.

The Hotel los Arcos del Sol on the plaza.

We stayed in the Hotel Los Arcos del Sol hotel on the plaza. One of the hotel staff explained that the building is about 400 years old and had belonged to the Dueñas family for four centuries. Appropriately enough (dueñas means female owners), inheritance of the property traditionally passes through the female line, but the current owner has no daughters, so her two sons (last name Aguirre) are the future owners. The Dueñas family was involved in the principal business of San Sebastián – mining silver and gold. Metal ore was apparently smelted approximately where the hotel reception now stands. The processed metal was then transported on the backs of mules and burros to Guadalajara, over roads which, in the 18^th century, would have been little better than dirt tracks. The roads ran through mountainous territory which is still sparsely populated, so robbery must have been a risk for the mule drivers transporting the bullion. Mining began in the mid-16^th century and continued until 1888 when the American owners closed the mines rather than negotiate with striking miners. The contemporary visitor to San Sebastián can visit disused mine shafts along the camino de las minas, which slopes uphill to the ancient silver and gold deposits. The last mine on the route is the Mina Santa Gertrudis, a low, dark, damp and uninviting space, which nevertheless, we are told, can be visited by tourists.

 

The interior of the Hotel los Arcos del Sol.

The Mina Santa Gertrudis. The shaft bends sharply to the left after a few metres.

As we returned from our walk to the mines, we stopped at a silversmith’s workshop. The genial smith shows us how he buys his silver as small beads of metal, his equipment for lost wax casting and his small electric smelter to melt the silver. We talked about the pollution caused by processing metal ores in San Sebastián’s heyday, particularly the use of mercury to increase the yield of silver ore. He commented that in the stream that runs through the Hacienda Jalisco (once a mining facility, now a hotel) malformed fish have been found. He also remarked that intermarriage was the norm among the small circle of elite families in San Sebastian (if necessary, marriage with a Spanish outsider might be sought, but never with another Mexican family), and claimed that cancer is now prevalent in those families. This reminded me of a visit two years ago to the home/museum of Doña Conchita Encarnación. The family tree in the museum room traced the marriages between the Encarnación, Sánchez and Aguirre families. No doubt, the Aguirre brothers who will inherit the Hotel de los Arcos del Sol come from the same intermarried families. Incidentally, the silversmith told me that one company (that owns the Palacio de Hierro, Mexico’s Harrods, in Mexico City) has a monopoly on processing and selling silver in Mexico. A nice little earner in one of the largest silver producing countries in the world.

 

Roof structure of the Hotel los Arcos del Sol showing how the roof sits above the rooms below.

You may have noticed from the photo of the Villanueva home that the sloping tiled roof sits above the main part of the house with a substantial open gap between roof and ceiling. This applies to other old structures in San Sebastián. It rains a lot in the mountains, and water runs off the roof into the street or garden, protecting the ceiling below. In Puerto Vallarta, where heavy tropical rainstorms and hurricanes are frequent in the rainy season, almost all buildings, in contrast, have flat roofs which need regular impermiabilización to ensure the structure is water tight – the profusion of buckets catching water leaks on a visit to a large supermarket after a storm suggests that water-proofing is not a precise science. We asked our son Chris why homes like his have flat roofs, seemingly much more ill-suited to the climate than they are in the less rainy UK. He pointed out that if his roof were gabled, water would pour rapidly into the walled concrete patio at the rear, which would quickly flood his home. Rain flows more slowly off the flat roof enabling the drains to cope. However, in San Sebastián water flows off the roof into gardens and on to streets which drain quickly down the hill, so sloping roofs are the norm.

 The population of San Sebastián at its peak was some 20,000 inhabitants, but after the closure of the mines it declined. In 2005 the town had 5,626 residents permanent residents. The people of the town no longer live from mining, but from tourism: hotels, restaurants, the sale of craft items, renting quad bikes and appalling all-terrain vehicles called rzzrs (pronounced “raders”) with which they fill the streets periodically in groups of several at a time or charge up hiking paths. Pedestrians beware.

 

The plaza of San Sebastián on a Sunday morning. Note the public transport to the left. The taco stand outside a butcher's shop served from breakfast to dinner without a break.

On the way out of town a sign directs visitors to the Antiguo Panteón (old cemetery), we took a stroll along a verdant path, covered in places by an avocado tree or two, to a secluded spot away among fields and orchards on the edge of town. There stand the decaying monuments to anonymous residents of San Sebastián, their inscriptions now eroded. Perhaps these once held the bones of the Villanueva, Dueñas, Encarnación, Sánchez and Aguirre clans who lived for centuries in remote San Sebastián.

The Antiguo Panteón.

 

A morning in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle

 

A short drive northwest around the bay takes you to a small town with a large marina called La Cruz de Huanacaxtle. The town derives its name from the huanacaxtle trees that dominate the plaza. The tree’s name comes from the Nahuatl nacaztli, meaning ear. The fruits are shaped somewhat like an elephant’s ear (in English one name for the tree is ear-pod tree). A cross made of huanacaxtle wood stands in a circular plaza between the highway and the main plaza.

 

A huanacaxtle tree in the plaza of La Cruz

La Cruz has a salón ejidal, meaning that the town was granted communal agricultural land under the agrarian reform programmes that began after the Mexican Revolution ended in 1920. While this gave land to landless peasant farmers, the land was not always of good quality. Ejidos were not a guarantee of prosperity, but they did lift some rural families out of the worst poverty. However, the business of La Cruz is no longer agriculture, but tourism which shapes the economy and layout of the town.

 

The cross of la Cruz

The main road that takes traffic to the exclusive and expensive resorts of Punta de Mita is lined by businesses: inexpensive restaurants catering to the tastes and budgets of locals, grocery (abarrotes) shops, hardware and spare parts suppliers and the like. On the hills above the town are condominiums, villas and hotels positioned to have a prime view of the bay. Turn left, as usual from the right-hand lateral lane, off the main road and one of the few paved streets in La Cruz takes you past the wooden cross to the plaza. Trees cast a pleasant shade on the gardens, with the inevitable kiosko in the centre. On the morning we visited, an iguana was the only other creature enjoying the gardens. A small, simple concrete church occupies one corner just past the public toilets, there are four or five restaurants/cafés and the inevitable pharmacy. At a small café an attentive and courteous young Mexican woman served us delicious coffee and French toast with plenty of fruit for 300 pesos (£15/$20).

 

An iguana goes for a stroll

Iguanas are not the only animals in La Cruz. The marina saw no reason to post a sign in Spanish and English, presumably because very few Mexicans enter.

La Cruz, in short, is a very ordinary Mexican small working-class town. However, cross the plaza and one enters another world. The waterfront is occupied entirely by a huge marina, protected by a barrier operated by a languid guard. The yachts and other boats are too many to count, but they alone must exceed many times the combined wealth of all the Mexican residents of la Cruz. As we reached the yacht club building, three buses arrived with foreign tourists all booked in for one of the many excursions on the bay. The buses parked on grass beyond which was a roped off area prominently signposted propriedad privada. Through the trees we glimpsed the sun loungers of a hotel.

 

The marina of La Cruz. In the distance are the condominiums and hotels on the other side of the highway.

A short walk from the marina entrance is the boatyard in which sat a huge yacht worthy of a middle ranking billionaire, the international sailing school and the fish market, where we bought some red snapper and prawns for dinner. A young woman was preparing a delivery of dorado and other fish plunged into ice on the back of her motorbike and then covered in black bin bags.

 

Dorado ready for delivery.

I have rather mixed feelings about La Cruz, sandwiched between luxury accommodation built for foreigners and a waterfront occupied entirely for the pleasure of more foreigners. The ejido was never the rural idyll of justice and equality portrayed in the rhetoric of governments that descended from the Revolution. The ejido provided a perfect springboard with a ready-made following for an ambitious leader (comisario) to launch a political career, which was often accomplished with violence and corruption. Ejidos were often the place where land disputes or personal animosities were resolved with violence. But nevertheless, they did give a lot of rural people land. And four or five decades ago La Cruz would have been a tiny fishing/agricultural village, remote from the attentions of national and regional politicians. I don’t know what land or other property the ejido of contemporary La Cruz controls, but since tourism arrived the town has been shaped not so much by its people as by foreigners whose money has commandeered the most desirable parts and left the Mexicans in the middle. The same applies to Bucerías where we rent our apartment, and thus contribute in small way to the reshaping of the town by moneyed interests, but here at least, the beach remains open to Mexican and non-Mexican alike.