Guillermo (Memo) Sanchez was a handsome, rather short, muscular young man who had been carried as an infant on his mother’s back into the mountainside above Jocotepec as she and his father worked the family milpa there. In 1972, a good number of local residents, though they resided in the pueblo of Jocotepec, were still actually cerro Mexicans, living primarily by cultivating and harvesting domestic and wild flora and fauna from the northern mountainsides.
It was only after Memo, then 17, had been working some time as a peon — a stonemason’s helper — for my wife and me as we built a home on a lower slant of a mountainside called Las Agraciadas, that I noticed that he couldn’t read well. A number of people living in Nextipac, a barrio of Jocotepec, mostly older folks, were illiterate. They told time by the Joco church bells. They possessed a knowledge of smaller numbers, and weights of common merchandise. This was easy because they seldom made large purchases, and almost never of “sophisticated” — and therefore “complicated” — merchandise.
I watched Memo work and interact with neighbors, his family, and with us — we lived fairly nearby and early on became friends with his parents. Memo, who in my naiveté seemed to be missing out on a huge part of the world in which he lived, was canny in concealing his handicap.
Mexican literature was considered by most of the world in its “boom” period, mainly due to Octavio Paz’s internationally applauded analysis of Mexican culture and character “The Labyrinth of Solitude,” (first published in Spanish in 1950, in English in 1961), and Carlos Fuentes’ controversial novel, “The Death of Artemio Cruz,” famously declaring the Republic’s 1910 Revolution a failure. “Labyrtinth” was translated into English by Lysender Kemp, who was then residing in Jocotepec.)But Mexico’s then large illiterate/semi-literate, population — certainly Memo and much of “educated” Jocotepec — knew nothing of these books, or their history, some of which was taking place in their midst.
Memo played soccer at the field near his home and flirted alternately shyly and aggressively with local girls who dressed in long skirts and rebozos.
The ramshackle Nextipac school offered first through sixth grades. School was only considered “possibly” necessary by local residents through the third grade; only “wealthy” families kept their children in school until the sixth grade. Girls were not expected to complete more than three years of schooling, if that.
A major problem with being unable to read was something I hadn’t immediately recognized. Though I previously had spent stretches of time in Mexico, it primarily had been among aspiring and professional bullfighters, and their friends--all of whom had enough education to read well. And, therefore, I was now discovering, were able to reason in fairly logical ways coherent with Mexican cultural logic.
Yet I was to run into men reared at a time in Mexico’s history when primary schooling was simply out of the question due to social upheaval: revolutions, uprisings, political chaos — or deep poverty created by over-greedy oligarchic government. Memo, for instance, lived with his parents and siblings in a wattle-sided, tarpaper-roofed jacal at a time when the central aim of the Republic’s presidents seemed to be competing for who could step down after his sexenio (six-year term) with the largest treasure.
Campesinos and laborers worked hard, long hours for a pittance. For a great many campo (rural) families, that meant sharecropping, cultivating fields of maiz, frijol, calabaza (corn, beans and squash) on property owned by someone else, paying the owner a traditional fifth of the crop. Large families played a historically critical role in family farming. Therefore, Catholicism and agriculture coincided in this endeavor: family farmers needed their own labor force. Families of ten-14 children were not uncommon.
Often an impediment to reasoning with folks who had no education, or a poor one literally possessing no true “book learning,” created problems when campesinos went to work for others. This was especially true as more and more foreigners migrated to Mexico after WWII. For one thing the imaginations of Mexican laborers with a traditional rudimentary education — or none at all — tended to be both abbreviated and illogical, in comparison to those very few benefiting from a better education.
For those, like Memo, in work situations throughout their lives, there seemed to come a moment when such men — and women — would abruptly, and with a seemingly unwarranted flare of anger, quit jobs they and their families depended on, simply because they were asked to perform very ordinary tasks they didn’t understand, or were told to perform a task for reasons they couldn’t fathom. This, and absenteeism, were the common causes for loosing a job, often one they liked — up until that explosive moment.
Illiterate folks, it became obvious, were prickly because they didn’t want their inability to read, or to fathom what was being asked of them, made a known fact.
Of course, because they were poor and poorly educated, some employers took advantage of them. Payment was always an opportunity to exploit the poor in general, and the illiterate especially. But such incidents tended to stun baffled foreigners. There seemed no reason for a hotly offended refusal, an angry flare-up. What had happened? In such cases, where employer and employee respected each other and were on friendly terms, associated with one another after work, it marked the end of any hope of friendship.
But even to those who were innately bright, observant, continuously aware of their surroundings, illiteracy was an onerous burden.
Adult schooling, now commonly available, did not exist then. It took an uncommon amount of courage and luck to seek out a teacher, a mentor, to ask for that kind of help.
This same problem existed during the United States depression for the offspring of formerly middle-class families, abruptly thrown into poverty. Infants and small children of such families suddenly became burdens as unemployment soared and hard-times lingered in the wake of the depression.
Many were infants born into marriages splintering under the pressures of the economic destruction that continued up to the world-changing tragedy of Pearl Harbor. Such infants were “farmed out,” to rural families because their mothers, who had never before worked outside the home, now had to seek employment.
For such people, ranch and farm families meant fresh air and healthy food for their children. Yet many rural folks running such ranches and farms in that era often possessed little education — sixth grade was common, some with high school educations. As the educational system shattered, the nearest schools often offered threadbare classes. Thus, “displaced” children, reared until they were eight or ten years old by semi-“foster” families, received only rudimentary learning.
Memo’s problems, while different, grew. Eventually, because at a pressured time, I missed recognizing the blunted mental habits nourished by illiteracy had placed Memo in an untenable position, anger flared and our friendship foundered for several years. But today, he again is a friend and a valued employee.
Apropos here: A reader just passed on a copy of the tough, controversial and exceptional film, “The Reader,” produced by Anthony Minghella and Syndey Pollock. Starring alongside Ralph Fiennes, Kate Winslet won a Best Actress Oscar for her role as 36-year-old, uneducated tram conductor Hanna Schmi.
She aids a bright 15-year-old student whom she finds vomiting in the entrance of her apartment building— he is coming down with scarlet fever.
When Michael, the student (played by German actor David Kross) recovers, he returns to thank her. In their ensuing relationship he introduces her to books such as “The Odyssy,” and Chekov’s “The Lady with the Little Dog,” but she has to ask him to read them to her.
The film flashes forward to 1966, when Hanna, who had worked with the SS, is accused of having issued a report on a church fire that killed 300 women in 1944. Though she did not write the report, she refuses to a demand to provide a writing sample. When she refuses, Michael realizes she is illiterate, and would rather falsely admit to the crime than disclose her handicap.