Present scrambled circumstances are bourgeoning. They are dipping foreign visitors (long- and short-term) to Jalisco’s “Lakeside” into a changed and squeezed together “North Shore.” It’s a place that increasingly sees itself painted a shade of metropolitanism... almost. Often, this, in turn, seems to frustrate some outsiders who are trying to join together a scrambled “almost” with the vast and handsome lacustrine expanse once ambitiously known as the “Chapala Riviera.”
To great extent the “not quite” conversion often squeezes outsiders uncomfortably into an authentic Mexican milieu which more than a few find not merely puzzling, but dismaying. Local government, for instance, made the daily traffic tangle more challenging during Mexico’s traditionally long-haul Navidad/Año Nuevo vacations by uncoordinated urges for additional “modernization” such as digging up main pueblo thoroughfares. The result: A string of enchanting villages that once could pridefully be labeled “The North Shore Riviera,” had become a tangle of frozen-in-place traffic jams.
This effort seemed to continue lighting emotional fuses of various species. Inevitably, this traffic “mystery” ricocheted back to over-worn exclamations: “These Mexicans! Digging up everything again. It’s a dizzy mess!” Vitriol now and then poked up its useless head: Bumpy Yankee and EU passing claims of superiority. Native residents whose families ‘have always lived here” had thought such epithets had gone away.
When my wife, Beverly, and I, ensconced on Malibu’s surfing shoreline, agreed to a year’s stay in Mexico, she enlisted in a college course of Spanish. Simultaneously, as a long time south-of-the-border aficionado, I mercilessly loaded her with piles of “must read” texts ranging from analyses of ancient Mexico’s centuries-long history twined in a tangle of mores, of baffling mental, social and verbal habits.
Fairy fresh from Minnesota, my wife was already being escorted to the then hugely popular Tijuana bullfights, stepping carefully behind the scenes to meet matadors and the mozos performing the dicey task of maneuvering bulls into the readying corrals. She took on this overload with attentive care. And soon, prepared for deep-dip Mexican adventures, we landed at No. 12 Constitution, Ajijic — then just recently outfitted with street-side windows. And soon one year magically stretched into dozens.
The ease of assimilation occurred in great part because we arrived well soaked in a year’s worth of preparatory study and a social mix ornamented with Mexican-shaped Spanish, literature, friends and the country’s greatest bull fighters: Luis Procuna, Carlos Aruza.
The Mexican ways of dealing with time (slowly and decidedly mixed), problems (ditto), and wonder (gringos here were viewed as lightly dusted with a coating of locura — craziness), were already familiar enough to my wife to prompt an understanding smile, which charmed our hosts. That understanding dealt with the fact that, due to a dazzling and fierce history, both logic and perception were inventively non-linear.
She already knew why Mexicans didn’t act like gringos, a circumstance that after centuries remains a constant question for many visitors.
As guests in their country we had the opportunity to learn how a Mexican’s world worked, especially in the uncertain presence of odd-acting foreigners.
My wife was more than happy that she’d read all those brain-rattling books: ”The Plain on Fire,” by Jalisco’s great author, Juan Rulfo; ”The Under-Dogs,” by Jalisco’s Mariano Azuela; “The Edge of the Storm,” by Agustin Yañez, who would become Jalisco’s governor, and the nation’s secretary of Education; and Juan Jose Arreola, source of Jalisco’s pixilated view of government. In other words, the brightly jolting run-up to the great Mexican/Latin American cultural “Boom” of the 1950s-1970s.
Pueblo women at that time were poorly educated, if at all. My wife’s knowledge of all those Jalisco writers impressed many of our new Mexican acquaintances, even those who were unschooled.
This combination greatly helped shape permanent significant changes taking hold on our lives. By piling up both the intellectual and widening physical experiences we became different people. The physical experiences were the result of explorations of large portions of this grandly stretched-out Republic. We turned our station wagon into a live-in van, complete with curtains, a mattress, Coleman lanterns and stove, and carefully chosen armory, which was legal then. Thus equipped and squinting at a poorly conceived and incomplete map, we drove off on a series of months-long camping trips. On returning, we told friends we’d learned tons, which was deliciously true.
Sadly, today’s drug wars — and the conduct of government security and armed forces — make such instructive adventures far too dicey.
But it’s the personal differences between foreign new-comers and Mexican residents that seem to make for a volcano-full of pesky, often bumpy misunderstandings. For Mexicans this could mean canastas full of undecipherable, often exasperating encounters. Novels by Rulfo, B. Traven, the marvelous humor of host countryside explorations of Mexican culture, if attentively noted, can point a path into, and through, such tangles of bucolic logic. Even the pleasantly simpler novels by Dane Chandos, “Village in the Sun,” and “House in the Sun,” are useful here.
Once the horizon shown with the idea that Mexico was going to be a much longer experience than we’d planned, money became a prime subject. I painted ultra modern paintings. But people with money to spend went for impossibly wide dark-eyed Disney-like children.
The Lakeside’s best photographer joined me in photographing the area’s many brothels slowly waking in the morning. There then were a few United States retirees with artistic interests; the burdels caught the interest of some though not all of them.
Short stories were sent to publications in the U.S. and England where foreign art was not frightening, and tastes were neither frail nor frozen stiff. Some of those began selling.
My resourceful wife lined up a group of Mexican seamstresses, and we exported Mexican designed clothing. Quexquemetls — two rectangles of colorful cloth joined so that they formed points which hung over the shoulders like a cape. And huipils, of simpler design, had a square neck, no sleeves, and came in varying lengths. Also my wife and her seamstress friends resourcefully came up with many designs of their own. Another success.
These activities involved intense personal contact with Mexicans. Necessity dropped a graduated course of local language constructs. And pueblo behavior called for an untangling view of the world and methods of dealing with it — all robustly non-linear.
As the foreign population began to grow, so did differences. Misunderstandings often prompted foreigners to call on my wife. Her patient solutions were simple: Stop repeating the same words that weren’t persuading anyone of anything. She would simply change the vocabulary, dumping all pejoratives. Her purpose wasn’t to verbally punish, but to persuade how to perform a task in a way that a talented if uneducated ajjijicteca could understand. “Just dump the accusations,” she’d say.
Yet still today one can often hear foreigners trying to force an employee or a merchant to do something by utilizing disdain.
“If you need therapy,” my wife would say, “go see a shrink.”