In 1995, a campesino named Jose (“Pepe”) Peredo married into the large extended Hernando Diaz family, which was big enough, and generally self-sufficient and insular enough to possess the aura of a clan. He was an unlikely candidate to be accepted by his wife’s many kinfolk because he was both poor and so promiscuous in his personal life that he had two gringo friends. Despite her family’s early skepticism, it was this social adventureness that first attracted the 17-year-old girl who was to become Pepe’s wife. Younger members of the clan were the first generation to become “more broadly socialized,” said a gringo permitted past the rancho’s tree-trunk anchored front gate.
Pepe had been reared in a small pueblo of under 4,000 people that was the cabacera (equivalent of a country seat) of one of Jalisco’s poorest municipalities. In 1999, municipal fathers boasted that it had a population of “over 5,000,” and ten localidades (towns). It had three medical facilities and ten schools, including a new kindergarten, eight elementary schools and one high school. But it had no “cultural centers,” though it boasted a library, two restaurants and three fondas. There were no hotels or supermarkets, but two small pharmacies. It sported one empty jail (housing detainees only after a major fiesta, or an especially exuberant weekend), 50 ranches/farms, and one priest who was overworked. The municipio’s ten localidades and smaller pueblos were widely scattered across a mountainous topography.
Last August 18, Pepe’s successful search for rustled horseflesh appeared in this space, including the fact that he had several children. A close reader of words in this space wrote a letter, noting that while many middle-class Mexican families are now having fewer children, many poor Mexican families often have more children than they can satisfactorily care for – by foreign urban standards – or educate. Begging mothers with children in tow, was his example. Pepe has eight kids. This reader argued that a vasectomy – “simple, safe and cheap” – was the answer to this problem.
Coincidently, columnist Jeanne Chaussee, writer for the Reporter since 1986, noted August 25, “Why is it that so many people moving here from other countries seem to think that Mexico didn’t exist before they arrived?” And she nimbly dented the seemingly incorrigible propensity for foreigners to criticize so many things Mexican, without understanding them. (Fodder for another day.)
Certainly regarding vasectomies, a thoughtful questioner has to begin with a well-known inclination of males everywhere. A good many tend avoid doctors’ offices. When they do consult a sawbones, they often don’t follow what they’re told to do to cure what ails them. I’ve known men who have died because of that behavior, and today know some who are dying because of that turn of mind.Once beyond that, stand cultural hurdles, even in so-called “advanced societies.” Specifically, men are wary of discussing their genitals with people who have ready access to a scalpel. Prostate cancer practically wiped out a generation of men not long ago simply because they refused to 1) admit the problem and 2) follow the advice they received. And in Mexico, while machismo is in retreat, at least in urbanized areas, it is less so in rural areas, often because of education. And because the people administering government-funded health programs often post less able medical practitioners in the campo, vasectomies are often not even considered. Besides, contraception is still frequently seen as the purview of women. This often can range to brujos to a well-known local mid-wife.
In talking with both men and women in recent years about the matter of contraception, vasectomies are not the first, or second, option that comes to mind in Mexico – and in a lot of other countries.
Pepe, who attended school, off and on, for six years, has made sure his kids are getting the best education his local community provides. His oldest son, 17, is a notably bright young man, who is diligent, observant and known for being unusually cumplido. He not only finishes work assigned to him, but has the initiative to look for what else needs doing. When not in school, he usually has worked with his father as he grew into his late teens. Yet, he is a teenager, displaying a quick sense of humor and penchant for baggy denims with the knees worn through. It doesn’t take much ranch work to make denims fit that fashion. At the same time, his initiative stretches to working for other families, when he finishes his chores at home. His younger brothers – and sisters – possess this same active learning gene. The only boy with problems is a nine-year-old, who, it seems, has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). And because treatment is not well understood even by most clinicians, and certainly not by campesinos, the family is taking care of him themselves – and he has calmed down considerably. (Many will criticize this, but the boy was thrown out of school by local “authorities” several times. A “social worker” and those doctors available to the Peredo family were of no help, for the simple reason that even in the United States “most clinicians have not received adequate formal training in the assessment and treatment of ADHD,” according to well-known researchers. Besides, treatment of this problem continues to be “controversial.” For instance in the United States people who don’t believe in climate warming, evolution, analytical logic, thinking and research, or in racial equality, tend not to believe that ADHD even exists. The Peredos are far ahead of such cognitively disadvantaged folk.)
At the same time, the Peredos are able to thrive among family members and friends whose lives are based on a number of profoundly “Mexican” beliefs that today are both centuries old and considered pure myth. Example: The rainy season particularly is a time when duendes – small, elf-like creatures, often malign – flourish, residing in lush copses of low-growing trees, brush and muscular wild plants. Their appearance is vague, ghostly, and they sow sickness among those who disturb them.
Like many people, Pepe is opaque about his attitude regarding duendes. His relations with gringos has moved him toward “modern” concepts, especially education for his offspring, and to considerable extent toward “modern medicine” and “modern linear logic,” which evidently puts him, in such instances, ahead of a good many “educated” people in the United States. Nonetheless, the Peredeos tend to hedge their bets, utilizing both a traditional curandero (curer) turn of mind, and modern medicine and logic in unlocking some problems.
One of the problems that “educated” foreigners have with such folks is that the “western logic” is often doubted by rural Mexicans (but less fiercely than it is being questioned, indeed, attacked by “creationists” and others in the U.S.).
When my wife and I sold the Reporter in 1994, I spent a lot time recuperating from 20 years spent in the grasp of the constantly challenging and educational chaos of weekly journalism in a culture that then was antipathetic to freedom of the press. I became associated with the clan that Pepe Pedero married into, a far-flung, nearly undecipherable extended family. Those people were unshakable believers in duendes, and a host of folkloric myths. The logic characterizing this clan was what today is often called “the old logic.”
It could be baffling, for it was not linear. And my efforts to assist this populous family – during a time of economic wreckage – entailed the subtle introduction of linear thought. The foundation of this was three simple-seeming maxims: 1) Always think before you act. 2) Always think before you speak. 3) Will what you say and do unlock the problems you wish to solve rather than merely assuage your emotions.