Building a dam in Tlaxcalilla

 

 

The recent item about Tamazunchale, San Luis Potosí, prompted several responses, one of which came from my friend Toby Bainton, who in 1970 was in another small town in Mexico, Tlaxcalilla, in the state of Hidalgo, about 250 kilometres southwest of Tamazunchale, and some 160 northwest of Mexico City. I have not been able to find out much about Tlaxcalilla except that in 2000 its population was 2,932. By 2020 the numbers had increased to 3,479: 1,690 males, 1,789 females. 2,424 of the village’s inhabitants in 2020 were literate. 3,158 locals were Roman Catholic, 69 Protestant, one lonely soul was of another religion, and 248 professed no faith.

 

The image above, probably the only work in the history of art to take Tlaxcalilla as its subject, is Toby’s watercolour and ink painting of daily activity in the town in 1970, which he captions thus:

 

The picture on this card shows a street layout slightly modified through artistic licence, but the houses, the village bar, the stable-yard, the stone walls, and the shepherd boys and their sheep are all faithfully copied from photographs I took in 1970.

 

Toby’s experiences in Tlaxcalilla are reminiscent in various ways of Tamazunchale in the 1920s and 1930s:

 

“When I was on my American Friends Service Committee workcamp in 1970, my village, Tlaxcalilla, Hidalgo, had no running water or sewage system. Your picture of Elfriede in her orchard looks exactly like a backyard in Tlaxcalilla in 1970 – I have photographs to prove it – where people were subsistence small-holders.  We volunteers lived in an old school building and the workcamp organisers made sure we had regular supplies of drinking water, bought from the doctor in the nearby town, Huichapan. The villagers of Tlaxcalilla couldn’t afford regular purchases of water, and no one in the village had any kind of motor vehicle to go and buy it. For them, water was brought to each home from something that looked like a neglected swimming bath, namely the village's one concrete tank of rainwater (containing various pathogens). Fetching water was the occupation of boys about eight years old.  Many families seemed to have such a boy. People went to the toilet in any convenient place, and were surprised at the workcampers' insistence of returning, perhaps some distance, for that purpose to the new school building, which had two enormous long-drop lavatories, one for boys and one for girls. 

 

The purported purpose of the workcamp was to provide running water from a new reservoir formed by damming a stream. The dam was half-built when we arrived. The government (state or federal, I don't know which) provided a full-time 'masón' and two full-time lorry-drivers and two trucks. One of these vehicles had a tipper body and made regular trips to a hillside where sand could be dug out for making cement. The other truck, used for collecting boulders from the surrounding hills, was by then not much more than a cab, chassis and wheels. The villagers provided the labour.  The boys on the workcamp helped load rocks from the hillside onto the remains of the truck so that they could be transported cross-country down to the dam. The rocks derived from government-supplied dynamite. Prickly-pear cactus was used as a lubricating cushion under each boulder to slide it up a wooden beam to the truck. The girls were not allowed to do any work connected with the dam (social norms would have been transgressed), and planted trees instead. 

 

I say that the purported purpose of the workcamp was to help with the dam. I realised afterwards that its real purpose was to show bourgeois students from the USA – and indeed me, the only European there – what life was like in a 'developing country', as Mexico was then classed. The 15 or so of us on the workcamp were 50% WASPs (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant), and the others from Puerto Rico (several), Peru, Colombia, and from other parts of Mexico. I don't know how the hispanohablantes (native Spanish speakers) were chosen.

I'm still in touch with someone from the camp, my friend Katy who now lives in Alaska. She went back to Tlaxcalilla in c. 1980 and the dam was finished, the reservoir full, and the water supply in place.  I wonder what they do about toilets now. 

 

Tlaxcalilla was the quietest village I’ve ever set foot in. The only sounds were human voices or the noises made by domestic animals. Quite a contrast to Mexico City, not so far away, with its hubbub and (one of my clearest memories) innumerable street vendors selling food and drinks of various lively colours. I expect they’re still a big presence there.”

 

I met Toby in 1973. I had just begun my research for my PhD and Toby was the librarian responsible for Spanish-language books in Cambridge University Library. Every morning a small group of Spanish graduates met for coffee (an in my case a cheese scone) in the library’s tea room. Toby was a regular member of the coffee group. He is a man of talents. In2018 Handhel Press published his translation from Danish of Eddie Thomas Petersen’s novel Ønskebarnet, with the English title After the Death of Ellen Keldberg.