Fresh to Chapala’s Lakeside area, Spencer Adams resided next to a German woman who reportedly had killed his husband just a while back.
For a maid, she had a bruja named Siva who kept Spenser – and several other venturesome gringo patients – free of a cluster of fevers that harassed newly arrived North Americans, particularly of the various forms of diarrea, all of them traveling under the sobriquet la turista.
Siva had an inventive sense of humor and welcome sense of concern for her foreign – and seemingly hopeless – patients. The first time Siva saw Spencer’s scarred chest she narrowed her eyes and said nothing beyond, “This tastes terrible. Drink it anyway, three times a day, sin falta.”
Spencer claimed he had received the Army’s fastest wound stripe. He stepped into a freezing Korean combat zone commanding a group of .30 caliber machine gun crews. And immediately had the sensation that one of his grandfather’s stallions had just kicked him in the chest. True, he did get his men into their assigned foxhole positions and everyone firing, including himself. But that was short-lived. He was abruptly slammed into the frozen mud bottom of his foxhole.
The maid that Spencer hired — with his bruja friend’s approval — was Yolanda (Yoli) Rios. She was a shy, but lively informant on all things Mexican. Spencer was even soon getting along fairly well with her father, Anselmo (Selmo) Rios. Selmo was suspicious of young men hanging around his daughter. He was wary especially of gringo military types, whose daily work meant spending part of the day alone with his almost 16-year-old daughter. He tended to stop by to see how Yoli was doing until she complained.
While training in California, Spencer had became a surfer. In Ajijic, he quickly made friends with several fishermen. Once they saw him maneuvering far out on the water during windy days, they stopped charging him to use their canoes. Some of these fishermen couldn’t swim well – some not at all – and were reluctant to swim far out on the lake when the wind was up. That was when Spencer did his “serious” swimming and surfing. No Mexican in Ajijic had seen a surfboard. And Selmo had never seen a gringo with such a rough, if slowly fading, scar on his chest. Oddly, surprisingly, that somewhat changed Selmo’s attitude regarding this North American when he was alone in his house with Yoli. Selmo’s branch of the Rios family included two other female children and four boys, all of them younger than Yoli. A lot of mouths to feed, bodies to clothe.
But in Mexico City, according to radio and newspaper reports, young people who in Ajijic were not being taken seriously were cheerfully exercising a broad catalog of ways to challenge the national government of President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz. Hundreds of the capital’s university students were purposefully exercising behavior aimed at seriously, often even cheerfully — organizing challenges to that government.
The world, for several reasons, clearly noted that Mexico — the administration of Diaz Ordaz specifically — had won the honor of being host to the Olympic Games in which the nations of the world would participate. And Diaz Ordaz, leader of the long and brutal governing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), was determined to utilize all the nation’s resources to demonstrate every capacity to do this with (hopefully) a world leader’s élan. It intended to energetically demonstrate this in a chest-beating way for elaborate worldwide observance. ¡Viva la tele!
For ajijiqueños such goings-on in the nation’s capital were not only distant and undecipherable, but rife with “questionable” political and fiscal tangles, mysterious maneuvers and apparently top-level rip-offs. Waves of protests elsewhere intensified in the 1960s reaching a new high in 1968, even in the United States. Repressive governments bristled with widespread police crack-downs, shootings, executions and, soon, even massacres reached Mexico, and South America.
“When news of student rebellions in Europe reached not only Spain, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and China, but also Berlin, Rome, London, Paris, Brazil, Argentina, Italy, American cities, and eventually Mexico, that’s when ‘hundreds of thousands of young Mexicans felt the hour was enveloping them,” noted one media outlet.
And while muffled, this seismic unrest touched Lakeside. Though word of such waves of unrest were to touch Lakeside, Spencer’s friends, gringo and Mexican, warned him not to go the swiftly blood-rinsed capital, where students were suddenly being slaughtered. Foreigners with any connections with the media were being targeted. Spencer had quickly made contacts with a series of U.S. newspapers and magazines to write on the “Mexican Massacre.”
Selmo led others in bringing pressure on him as Guadalajara papers and Mexico radio reports described the massive killings ordered by President Diaz Ordaz, and carried out under the direction his brutal Minister of the Interior, Luis Echeverria, soon-to-become one of Mexico’s most infamous presidents in 1970.
As Spencer’s Spanish flourished under the tutelage of Siva, Selmo and, more thoroughly, Yoli, his writing and involvement in Mexican politics became more emboldened during the bloody results of those two administrations, first that of Gustavo Diaz Ordaz (Jalisco gave him a home in La Lomas del Manglar, between Ajijic and Chapala), and the brutal, crazed six-year presidential term of Luis Echeverria.
(Second of a series.)