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.