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.

Mosquito nets needed for disabled children in Mexico

Jan and I arrived in Mexico on 12 September, our bags heavily laden with Spanish-language children’s books, kindly donated by Anna Ridley at Thames & Hudson, and Owen Llewellyn and Alison Tweed at Book Aid International. On 17 September, I joined our son Chris on his commute from our apartment in Bucerías to Pasitos de Luz, a dazzling white building set among maize, cucumber and watermelon fields, several flooded after a tropical storm a day earlier. Chris tells me that many of the fields are rented out to those who do the hard work of cultivation. He knows one man who lives six months of the year in Bakersfield, California, and six months working his field in Mexico. Jan stayed away this year because she had been ill with Covid and we did not want to risk passing it on to vulnerable children.

 

As we bumped along the rutted dirt road that leads to Pasitos, we were behind the minibus driven by Don Carlos, driver and handyman, and like me a young 71 years, taking parents and children who are not yet enrolled as regulars at Pasitos to a thrice-weekly hydrotherapy session in the specially-designed therapy pool. We also passed Don Chaba, the gardener, as he gamely pedalled his bike to work from Jarretaderas, just about visible over the fields towards the coast.

 

Arturo Ayala (left), Director of Pasitos, Chris, and Don Chaba

When we arrived, wheelchairs were waiting for the children under the white canopy that protects them from the elements as they are helped off the daily bus service. The children then wait, more or less patiently, for their breakfast. As you will notice, the children are all neatly and cleanly dressed, the girls usually with fetching bows in their hair, by loving parents whose limited resources are far outweighed by their love of their children. The young man bottom left with the soulful look is Cristian, whose left arm was amputated. He has a winning toothy smile, but very little conversation other than agua (water). The boy across the table from him is Alexis, born with no eyes and deaf. The young man at the head of the table wondered aloud whether I am Chris’ grandfather. At the next table, one little boy challenged me to an arm wrestle: he won twice.

 

Wheelchairs at the ready

 

Getting off the bus

Cristian, bottom left, Alexis, bottom right, waiting for breakfast

 

I was introduced to two young nutrition specialists who are spending a year at Pasitos as their post-graduation social service: all professional graduates in Mexico are required to do a year of social service. I had already notice that details of the types of food each child can accept are posted on the dining room door: papillas (purees), alimentos mahacados (mashed foods), alimentos enteros (whole foods), niños que comen fibra(children who eat fibre). My breakfast customer was Isaak, an 18-month-old downs syndrome boy, who breakfasted on pureed apple and banana. Like other downs children he has great flexibility and regularly brought his left foot up to his mouth. At lunch my diner was Emiliano, a severely disabled lad, who walks around in a wheeled support. He eats his food chopped but cannot feed himself.

 

Isaak's breakfast

 

The food needs of each child

 

Therapists undertaking professional training or post-degree social service

My child care duties were, as usual in niñeras (nursery). I worked with Lupita, 11 years old, building blocks and identifying colours. She can also recognize numbers and count at least to 11. Our block-building was interrupted by the destructive efforts of a little boy called Sabino and by Emiliano careering around in his wheeled vehicle. During breakfast, Leo had smiled broadly at me. He and I now played with a toy vehicle that has flashing lights and makes whirring noises, and with some bouncy balls. Later the children were changed into their swimsuits for their hydrotherapy session, which they enjoy three times a week. Pasitos has the only such pool for several hundred kilometres. The pool is especially valuable for autistic children en crisis, I was told. I met one little autistic boy with his mother (one of those not yet enrolled in Pasitos) enjoying the company (the boy that is, not the mother) of the goats and pigs at the end of the garden.

 

Going for a walk with Leo

 

The therapy pool

Pasitos’ need for resources is continuous and its waiting list of children far too long. Immediate necessities and capital projects are posted in the spacious lobby. The zancudos (mosquitos) have been particularly voracious this rainy season, so one item on the capital projects list is mosquito nets (50,000 pesos: £2,500 or US3,500). Cash is always very useful, but donations also come in kind, including books delivered in groaning suitcases.

Needs

 

More needs

For information about Pasitos, its work and its needs: https://pasitosdeluz.org/

A Scholar/lawyer/diplomat/politician, Trotsky’s assassin and the Tigre de Santa Julia

 

Our son Chris spent a year as a teaching assistant in a teachers’ training school in Atlacomulco de Fabela, about two hours from Mexico City. The Fabela in the town’s name refers to Isidro Fabela (1882-1964), the most distinguished son of Atlacomulco, whose statue stands in the main square. His parents were landowners in what then would have been a small rural town.

 

I already knew vaguely that Fabela had been a historian of the Mexican Revolution (in which he was a participant), but had wanted to know more since seeing his statue. Our visit to Mexico City this year provided the opportunity. We stayed briefly with a long-time friend, Chris West, whose home in southern Mexico City provides a good view from its terrace of another statue of a famous Mexican Jorge Negrete, a singer whose home once stood on the opposite corner (now replaced with a very ordinary apartment block). Chris joined us for a morning excursion to the Plaza San Jacinto in San Ángel a little further south of his home. On the north side of a charming and unbusy (except for Saturdays when the weekly art and craft market opens) square stands an early 17^th century mansion, the Casa del Risco, named because it was built on a rocky outcrop (a risco). The house was originally a monastic foundation, but by the mid-18^th century it was occupied by secular owners. Fabela acquired the house in 1933.

 

The Virgin of Guadalupe, Miguel Cabrera (1695-1768), oil on canvas, Casa del Risco, Mexico City

Fabela trained as a lawyer. Prior to joining the Revolution in 1911, he was a friend of many members of the intellectual circle known as the Ateneo de la Juventud (Athenaeum of Youth). After the counter-revolutionary coup of General Victoriano Huerta he was obliged to leave Mexico in 1913. In 1914 he was commissioned to persuade the major European powers to recognize the revolutionary regime of Venustiano Carranza, a delicate task when most of the countries he visited were at war. He evidently made a good impression, since France later granted him the honour of Légion d’Honneur. His diplomatic mission also took him to the most important Latin American countries. He mobilized opposition to Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, for which Haile Selassie gave him an Ethiopian decoration. Fabela opposed the Nazi annexation of Austria, as a plaque given to the Casa del Risco by the Austrian government commemorates. He was also honoured by Spain for helping Republican exiles to settle in Mexico after the Civil War. Indeed, a display of his medals and decorations is so large that he must have spent a substantial part of his life receiving honours. Fabela was Mexico’s representative to the League of Nations and a judge at the international court in the Hague. He served for three years as governor of his home state, the State of Mexico, and helped Adolfo López Mateos (another mexiquense, or native of the state of Mexico) become President of Mexico in the year of Fabela’s death.

 

The fountain of the Casa del Risco

While doing all this he found time to teach law and to publish numerous books of jurisprudence, diplomacy and history. And to leave a library with an ample card catalogue, and an archive consisting of 4,000 files and more than 300,000 documents, all catalogued online at https://isidrofabela.org.mx/indice.php.

 

His former home is now a museum where his art collection is displayed, the family dining room and his study are preserved, and his library and archive made available on appointment. The entrance takes the visitor into the central courtyard, dominated by a fountain, elaborately decorated with tiles, Chinese porcelain, Japanese, Spanish and Mexican ceramics. This style of decoration came about because decorated ceramics were so expensive that, when broken they were recycled as decorative displays. The Asian connection is emphasized by a large wooden chest displayed on the first floor. It was used to carry silver and gold to pay for Asian merchandise arriving on the Manila Galleon when it docked in Acapulco in January or February between the late 16^th century and 1815.

 

Fabela evidently had a taste for the Baroque, since most of his collection of paintings, displayed in seven rooms, is Mexican or European Baroque, although in the quiet of his study he evidently spent a little time gazing on a few more modern mildly erotic pieces.  Mexican masters on display include Miguel Cabrera and Cristóbal de Villalpando, and a 19^th-century landscape sketch by José María Velasco. British art is represented by two Henry Raeburn portraits of an aristocratic man and a noblewoman.

 

El sátiro viejo, Ernesto García Cabral (1890-1968), ink on paper

The library reading room was empty except for a schoolgirl engaged in some kind of art project. There was a small display of photographs about a lawyer, Dr. Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón, commissioned by the court to determine whether Ramón Mercader, the assassin of Trotsky, was insane or of sound mind and thus able to stand trial. A smaller display was of a much gorier kind, devoted to José de Jesús Negrete Molina (1873-1910), alias El Tigre de Santa Julia. Cuarón donated the skull to the library as a criminological exhibit. Like many a Mexican rogue, and many a much more bloodthirsty narco gangster today, El Tigre was lionized in popular culture as a daring defender of the poor, in his day by the famous printmaker José Guadalupe Posada, and in 1973 in a film directed by Arturo Martínez, entitled El Tigre de Santa Julia.

 

The skull of the Tigre de Santa Julia

José Guadalupe Posada, The very sensational judgement of Jesús, or "El Tigre de Santa Julia"

 

The presence of such a grisly object among a collection of learned publications and papers is not particularly out of place in Mexico. In 2018 Jan and I visited the original building of the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás Hidalgo in Morelia, capital of Michoacán state. There a room is devoted to the 19^th-century founder of the university, Melchor Ocampo (1814-1861), a scientist, lawyer and liberal politician, and author of a famous letter setting out Ocampo’s definition of the perfect marriage. Ocampo was executed in 1861 by conservative pro-Spanish forces. He had told his daughter that when he died his heart would be in the university he had founded. His literal-minded daughter had her father’s heart removed and preserved in a glass container. If you would like to see Ocampo’s heart, on display, with his writings and assorted memorabilia, including the bullet-riddled and bloodstained shirt in which he died, visit the august centre of learning that he founded.

The heart of Melchor Ocampo

 

The siege of Chilpancingo

 

We are about to leave for our now annual stay in Mexico to spend a month with our son in Bucerías, state of Nayarit. Mexico is much changed, but the sights and sounds, and the rhythms of Mexican Spanish, remind me of my carefree days almost 50 years ago wandering around the country, in particular in the state of Guerrero where I researched my PhD. I have not been back to Guerrero for many years, and recent events there do not encourage me to pay another visit.

 

In 1975 I visited a doctor in Mexico City. He asked what I was doing in his country. When I replied that I was there to study the Revolution in the state of Guerrero he became alarmed. Guerrero was notorious for its violence, and a group of armed rebels led by a rural schoolteacher, Lucio Cabañas, was holding the governor-elect captive in the state’s mountains. The doctor called my landlady to tell her I must not go to Guerrero because I would die. I ignored the good doctor’s concerns and travelled round the state on local bus services. My bus was occasionally stopped by soldiers who checked the documents of all those on board, but they showed no interest in me.

 

Later that year I spent a few weeks in Chilpancingo, capital of Guerrero, living in an inexpensive hotel close to the main square, to consult documents in the state archives.

The (as I would discover) sparse archives were housed in the Palacio de Gobierno, which occupied one side of the square. Chilpancingo was a dull, unimpressive small town served by two bus lines owned by the Figueroa family (the first-class Estrella de Oro and the second class Flecha Roja). Unless you were a native of the city there were not many good reasons to stay in Chilpancingo. Politicians and officials of the state government took up most of the spare housing, and students of the Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero (UAG:Autonomous University of Guerrero) also needed a place to live. So temporary visitors, such as those who had business with the state government, or the very rare wandering historian, had no option other than a room in one of the cheap, and fortunately clean, hotels. There were two cinemas, distinguished by the locals as the one with rats and the one without rats. The city had a café on the square for breakfast, an inexpensive restaurant that served a sustaining bowl of pozole blanco (a stew of meat and hominy maize), and on Thursdays specialist restaurants served the local speciality, pozole verde, flavoured green with chiles and tomatillos. Chilpancingo is flanked by high mountains that form the valley of Chilpancingo. In the rainy season, clouds loom over the mountains in the afternoon and then descend to drench the town for a while.

 

When I was not reading dusty papers in the archive, or watching spaghetti westerns in the cinema without rats, I was trying to meet members of the Figueroa family, whose forebears had been prominent in the 1910-1920 Mexican Revolution. The Figueroas were then (and probably still) powerful figures. Rubén Figueroa Figueroa, the state governor when I arrived in Chilpancingo, a gun-toting old-style politician, was the governor-elect who had been held prisoner by Lucio Cabañas until the army caught up with the rebel band and freed Figueroa in a shoot-out. Lucio and his companions died.

 

While Rubén was waiting to take office, the incumbent governor was Israel Noguera Otero, one of his political enemies. Either because he did not want to risk Nogueda somehow preventing him from taking office, or because he did not wish to receive the gubernatorial sash from an enemy, Figueroa was determined that Nogueda would not finish his term of office. Rubén suggested to the Rector of UAG that he provoke a student strike, which Nogueda would put down by cracking a few student skulls, which would create a scandal and the governor would be removed from office. The Rector refused and a few days later a bomb was thrown at his home. Then in January 1975 (two months before leaving office) a group of rural workers from Acapulco accused Nogueda of fraudulently selling their land. The federal congress promptly removed Nogueda.

 

This kind of manouevring had form in Guerrero. On 22 March 1933 supporters of the outgoing governor, Adrián Castrejón, stationed on the roof of his home, a few yards from my 1975 hotel room, opened fire on politicians who supported the newly elected governor elect, Rafael Guevara, a friend of the Figueroa family. Two dead and one wounded opponent were sufficient to terminate Castrejón’s term early. Guevara’s own term came to a similarly premature end in September 1935 after a shootout in the bullring of Coyuca de Catalán, in the Tierra Caliente region, between his supporters and those of a federal congressman and landowner,

 

Rubén Figueroa’s son, Rubén Figueroa Alcocer, became governor in 1993, but was removed from office when his administration was found to have been responsible for a massacre of peasant protesters. For many decades after the Revolution the basics of Guerrero’s politics can be summarized as a tussle between powerful families in different regions of the state. The people of the state deserved much better, but rarely benefited from good government. The Guerrero which I bussed around in the 1970s was violent and governed (literally) by factional and personal passions, rather than by the will, or in the interests of, the people. But it was a haven of tranquillity compared to recent decades when organized crime has added a very nasty extra dimension to state politics and the lives of the people of Guerrero.

 

In 2015, the Year of Mexico in the United Kingdom, I had lunch with the young woman at the Mexican Embassy in London who was responsible for the year of cultural events. She was also, she told me, the Human Rights Attaché, a very hot potato, since in 2014 43 student teachers from the teacher training school in Ayotzinapa (to the west of Chilpancingo and where Lucio Cabañas had studied) had been killed by organized crime gunmen. The scale of the massacre, the fact that the bodies were rapidly disposed of (the remains of only two have been found), and the courage and persistence of their parents who still demand the truth, made international headlines. The government of President Enrique Peña Nieto initiated an investigation which succeeded in its goal of obscuring any scraps of truth, but also allowed an international panel of experts to conduct its own enquiry. The exact truth is still not known, but it is clear that municipal and state officials and the state police knew what had happened to the students, and some had a hand in their murder. The army was also involved in the murky affair

 

The attaché told me that she was born in Pungarabato in the Tierra Caliente (Hot Country) region, and was most surprised when I told her I know exactly where that town is. Her father was a cattle rancher there, but life had become so dangerous that he had been forced to abandon his business and move with his wife to Mexico City. I suspect that the attaché avoided mentioning these personal details when addressing UK human rights groups. When Jan and I were in Zamora, Michoacán, in 2018 I met a fish farmer who sourced his tilapia from Guerrero. He assured that if I went back to my old haunts, I would be dead. When he travelled to Guerrero to collect more fish, he was met at the state’s border by his suppliers who escorted him while he collected his fish. I had ignored the solicitous advice of my doctor in 1975, but I did not feel inclined to ignore the fish farmer.

 

But back to Chilpancingo.

 

Chilpancingo derives its name from the Nahuatl chilpan (wasp or wasp’s nest herb) and the suffix tsin, meaning small. The site has been occupied, archaeologists tell us, since at least 1000BC, probably earlier. It sits on transport routes from the coast and east-west into the mountains. This location has long been the key to Chilpancingo’s modestly prosperous economy. In the 16^th century the town was of no great importance: its elite was subordinate to the ruler of Oapan to the northeast on the great Balsas river. But in the 16^th and 17^th centuries Chilpancingo grew rapidly as a convenient place to rest and top up supplies on the way to Acapulco, home to the Spanish empire’s trade with Asia from 1565-1815.

 

Chilpancingo’s position on the Acapulco road and other routes, and its elevation to state capital in the 19^th century, mean that it has frequently been the target of political upheavals. Mexico’s first Constituent Congress met here in 1813 and declared Mexico’s independence (not accomplished until 1821), although the menace of Royalist forces drove the insurgents out of town to complete their constitutional labours in Apatzingán, in the neighbouring state of Michoacán, several hundred kilometres away. The rivalry between the Bravo family, from whom Chilpancingo gets its full modern name, Chilpancingo de los Bravo, who were prominent local insurgents and landowners, and Juan Álvarez, the dominant insurgent on the coast, was the source of regular turmoil in the decades following freedom from Spain. In the 20^th century the forces of Emiliano Zapata, the leader of the peasant rebels of the state of Morelos besieged Chilpancingo during the Mexican Revolution. And in the current century a favourite tactic of anybody with a grievance has been to seize the Chilpancingo toll booth plaza on the motorway that carries traffic to Acapulco.

 

However, on 11 July 2023 a siege of a different order, sadly indicative of the state of politics, and of the absence of law and order in Guerrero, took place. More than 2,000 residents of nearby towns fell on Chilpancingo, stoned local police, troops of the National Guard, taxi drivers and reporters, and took thirteen public officials hostage. They also seized a bullet -proof vehicle of the state police and used it as a battering ram to break down the doors of the Palacio de Gobierno. The state government then opened negotiations with the spokepersons of the protesters, two men who it seems are members of one of the organized crime/drug cartels that operate in Guerrero, Los Ardillos (“The Squirrels”). An agreement was reached and the hostages released.

 

It seems that the roots of this episode lay in the struggles between different organized crime cartels to control the production and shipment of drugs. Apparently, the bishop of Chilpancingo had negotiated an agreement between Los Ardillos and another gang known as Los Tlacos (a tlaco, a Nahuatl word meaning ‘half’, was a low value coin in Spanish colonial days). The bishop persuaded both gangs to divide control of local bus routes (and their revenues) in and out of the state capital between themselves. Los Ardillos, it seems, were protesting some breach of this agreement.

 

The governor of Guerrero since October 2021, who sanctioned the negotiations and the agreement with Los Ardillos is Evelyn Salgado Pineda, a member of the Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional (MORENA: Movement of National Regeneration), the party of the current president of Mexico Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). Evelyn’s former husband is the son of Joaquín Alonso Pineda, who is rumoured to be the financial fixer of the wife of Héctor Beltrán Leyva, a member of a powerful family of drug cartel leaders.

 

More to the point, Evelyn’s father is Félix Salgado Macedonio, nicknamed El Toro (The Bull). Félix was born in the Tierra Caliente of Guerrero in 1957. He began his political career in traditional fashion as a federal congressman, then as a federal senator, followed by a period once again as a congressman. Next, he was Presidente Municipal (mayor) of Acapulco, the wealthiest municipality in the state. He is currently once again a federal senator. Until 1987 he held office as a member of the Partido de la Revolución Institucional (Party of the Institutional Revolution), which controlled Mexican politics until 2000. Salgado ran for the governor’s office three times. His first attempt in 1992 as a candidate for the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution), resulted in defeat by Rubén Figueroa Alcocer, candidate of the still-dominant PRI.  Salgado ran again for the PRD in 1998, but lost once again to the PRI.

 

His third attempt in 2021, ended under very murky circumstances. This time he represented MORENA, which was stunningly successful in elections that year. But then in January 2021 Salgado was accused of rape by two women and by another four of sexual harassment. AMLO dismissed the complaints as a media campaign orchestrated by his political opponents – the president has been consistently hostile to feminist groups and dismissive of campaigns to counter sexual violence. However, more than 100 MORENA Congresswomen signed a letter demanding that Salgado withdraw his candidacy. This letter was particularly significant because members of MORENA very rarely contradict AMLO: this suggests that, as the saying goes, there was no smoke without fire, in fact probably quite an inferno. In February the Commission of Honour and Justice [sic] of Morena considered the matter and confirmed Salgado’s candidacy by thee votes to two. Although feminist groups publicly protested this decision in the main square of Mexico City on 8 March, MORENA ratified Salgado’s candidacy. However, the Instituto Nacional Electoral (National Electoral Instituto), an institution heartily loathed by AMLO and his Morenistas, then declared that Salgado had failed to correctly report his pre-campaign expenditure and expenses and declared him ineligible to stand. All was not lost, however, since Morena anointed Evelyn as the replacement candidate. Thus go Guerrero’s politics.

 

Reports in the press speak of Salgado’s links to organized crime when he was mayor of Acapulco and of other links with drug cartels. At this distance it is impossible to confirm whether these accusations are all true, but it is most unlikely that a man with a long and well-connected career in Guerrero’s politics is at least unaware of who is running organized crime networks in the state, especially since Los Tlacos originated in his home territory of Tierra Caliente. Guerrero’s politics, however, are a very perilous and murky game: a number of Evelyn and Félix’s relatives and political allies have been murdered. Recently, one of Félix Salgados’ nieces, Zulma Carbajal Salgado and her husband were ambushed in Iguala, in northern Guerrero (site of the student massacre of 2014). Zulma survived; her husband did not. Zulma’s brother Justino was shot dead in Iguala in 2013. I spent a week or so in Iguala in 1976. It was known for the tamarind trees that lined its main plaza and was the commercial hub of northern Guerrero. Otherwise, not a lot seemed to happen there – if only it were like that now. In the last few weeks José Guadalupe Fuentes Brito, a businessman and uncle of Evelyn’s chief of staff, was murdered on the Acapulco motorway in Chilpancingo, along with his son and an unfortunate mini-bus driver who happened to witness the crime.

 

I thought I had glimpsed plenty of dirty politics when I was in Guerrero in the 1970s, but compared to the state of affairs now those were positively tranquil times.