Columns

On a chilly December morning in a nearby mountain pueblo, a number of people gathered at Deovijilda Lara’s tacos al vapor stand to get some warmth in their bellies. At 7 a.m., Deovijilda’s public market puesto seemed the first and warmest stand open. Dressed in several sweaters, wool knee-length stockings, faded flowered dress and an apron whose bulging pockets served as a minor pharmacy, a requisition center and a cash register, she presided over an assortment of steaming sartenes, cazuelas and ollas.

Mexico’s holiday season folk plays, called pastorelas, were once so controversial — and popular — that Catholic Church officials banned them twice in the 1700s. Over the last few decades, Mexican cultural observers are lamenting their gradual disappearance.

While many in the United States are doing a little better this winter than last, others are still feeling the economic crimp caused initially by the 2008 Great Recession. A significant portion of the United States and Mexico are on thin consumer rations.

Along with a slew of Christmas-born pastorales that will soon be taking place, especially in rural areas, all the way into February, there are a salto of gracious — and boisterous — holiday gatherings going on right now. This celebratory time turns the final page of the year into a torrent of hen-scratched reminders across a new year’s agenda as we race through dense, exhausting, heady days. So much for dreams of life in the slow-paced Jalisco highlands, where huge haciendas once dominated not only the pace of life but the pace — and health — of the economy. And, yes, even during the Nueva Galicia (as Jalisco was then officially called) Christmas and turn to the new year, the pace was quite different than it is on the very same ground today.

It’s “snowbird season.” Thousands of visitors escaping punishing northern cold are — or soon will be — enjoying Jalisco’s sun and more amiable temperatures.  And that means cultural collision. Last week I overheard several visitors exclaiming that there were fewer cultural differences than they expected, though a couple did concede that some things did puzzle them.

Winter in the Jalisco highlands arrives the second half of October, but this year the fall air didn’t turn chill and crystalline blue until a few weeks after Dia de los Muertos. In the wake of November’s Day of the Dead, along the flanks of Cerro Viejo, which backs into the western crescent of Lake Chapala, one’s breath plumed the air like shreds of pale fabric caught in the morning breeze. The fields of corn had already turned ocher, and now those plots of maiz quilting the lower foothills and the valley below seemed to catch fire as fingers of dawn light reached them. The western slopes of the mountain, facing away from the day’s beginning, remained in the last chill, purple grasp of night.