With much of Mexico’s media daunted by presidential command and recent murders of journalists, “anonymous” social media reports and careful cantina talk become indispensable sources of unintimidated news. But, despite the admonitions to the media from Mexico’s new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, to sing rosy songs rather than report continuing cartel butchery, local, careful chismorreo was putting the reported – and unreported – total of victims since Mexico’s new jefe took office December 1 at more than 5,000. That exceeds the 4,200 the media was reporting during and after President Obama’s innocuous visit to Mexico last week.
The conventionally accepted casualty count of 4,200 jumped during Obama’s visit, with several journalists being kidnapped and hacked up. Media sources reported May 7 that Mexico’s Interior Department insisted that in “April drug-related deaths have fallen 14 percent from December into March, compared to the same period a year earlier.” It added that “non-drug-related deaths actually rose by 6.8 percent during the same period.” This fostered the question among the media and the citizenry whether some deaths had been reclassified to improve the country’s image.
“Your President Obama is crawling into bed with Peña?” one cantina friend said. Reared in the United States, he had expected – and wanted – a more candid visit. In fact,
most media savvy Mexican friends shook their heads at Obama’s televised speeches here, and most ignored Peña Nieto’s. They had disbelieved those same words the first time they’d heard them; now they were bored, becoming insulted by the president’s openly mendacious public pronouncements.
As for the economy, during the Semana Santa\Cinco de Mayo\Dia de la Cruz, holidays, some supermarkets lowered selected prices, as other merchants boosted them.
As the cantina conversation began heading for disgruntlement, I mentioned I’d seen Agustina Romero in El Trapiche pueblo on her favorite gray mare, La Paloma, during the holidays. “How old is that mare now, Fragio?” I asked Profagio Mendez, her uncle.
“About 18, 20, maybe. You brought her yegua (dam) when you came to help us out. And that was ...”
“Early 1995.”
He quickly ticked off time with his fingers. “It’s May. The mare is I8, I think. Agustina started riding her a lot when she was five and Paloma was about four. Augustin (her father) give the mare to Agustina the next year. We had Palillo break the mare in when she was four. Under everybody’s direction, of course. Which he hated.” Palillo means toothpick, and is the traditional nickname in Mexico for many males who were notably skinny, or at least slim – which he still is.
“Proper” females in Mexico in the ‘sixties were expected to ride side-saddle, for women didn’t then wear pants. Another obstacle for Agustina was the that teen-age females also almost never went beyond their homes unless chaperoned by other girls, preferably by female relatives. The problem for young females with equestrian enthusiasms and talents in pueblos such as Chapala and Ajijic was that very few families could afford a side-saddle.But when Agustina started riding astride Paloma’s back, wearing denim jeans in the 1990s, fashion happily had changed greatly. At five, when she first climbed, aboard Paloma – with help – the adventure went much better than her mother feared. That was because she’d grown up with the foal. The two were, in many ways, like playmates. Agustina had been feeding and watering Paloma for some while, a sure path to any freshly weened foal’s heart. But that made Paloma’s diet eccentric: anything that Agustina, as a toddler, was fond of she shared with the foal, which meant a lot of strange, home-made sweets. Her father said such feed would stunt the foal’s growth, but it didn’t. Agustina also made some people suspicious because she carried on long conversations with Paloma. From the beginning no one else apparently had such on-going “dialogues” with Paloma. People could see that Agustina was talking to the animal, but few believed that Agustina was, as she seemed to be, hearing something in return. Besides, who knew what sounds a horse made that could prompt prolonged exchanges, anyway?
Palillo was a rather shy, watchful young man by then – good, if a bit hard handed, with horses, as most campesino ranchers were. But before Paloma was given to Agustina as a birthday gift the mare began developing the bad habit of trying to scrape Palillo off on one or the other corral gate posts as he headed her out in the mornings.
“Poppy, she doesn’t like the way he jerks her around, see?” Agustina would say.
“Horses are large, quick animals,” her father would say. “That makes them dangerous sometimes. We’ll see how all that goes when she becomes yours. Horses, especially young ones, don’t know how much damage they can do just by shying from a sudden shadow of a zopilote sailing overhead, or birds darting from a bush. That’s why you always have to have a firm seat when you ride. You understand that because you already know that horses don’t like surprises.”
She would nod, and if you watched her around livestock, you would see her filing away what American cow hands called “critter lessons.” And anytime she wasn’t doing chores, helping her mom, or studying, she would be practicing with her cut-down throwing rope. One got used to her brothers, sisters, and other non-adults complaining about her throwing a loop around a foot as they walked by.
“She’s getting too good with that damned loop,” people would tell her daddy, smiling, turning complaint into a compliment .
Once she had Paloma for her own, it was hard keeping her in sight, which fretted all her extended family so much she was given curfews whenever she wasn’t in school. Strangely, Agustina, even as nubbin, was good at following them. Campo folk always know where nature’s clock, the sun, travel’s, whatever season it is.
As she grew, her roping, riding, and ganado knowledge – critter savvy – also grew. And she was culturally shrewd. Though machismo was supposed to be waning, in mountainside ranches, farms, and the few highland pueblos, it was vigorously alive. So after rodeos (row-DAY-ows), meaning roundups, were finished and cowhands would engage in horsemanship competitions, Agustina would find some weary female relative or friend and they’d head for home. She was being (reluctantly) “allowed” to take part in roundups on Paloma – primarily because she was a surprising horse-savvy child, and because her family and her father was popular among other ranchers and horsemen. She enjoyed rounding up often wild and dangerous cattle, and had no urge to tinker with machismo’s delicate balance. Agustina had enough problems living with her mountainside kinsmen and male friends. For even before she was in her teens, she was more able to calm – and ride – the crankiest horses than Palillio or his friends. She was a horse talker – not a whisperer. She was known by some as la brujta de caballos, a title she sharply rejected. She simply liked animals, domesticated or wild, and that affection made her both the ranch’s prize horse handler – and was something in which she took delight. She was talented horsewoman – even before she thought of herself as a woman. Other ranchers got used to calling on her before they sought a veterinarian. She true “magic,” they said, when it came to calming a loco horse, or helping mares with troubled birthings.