Columns

Something pushed against my pillow of denim jacket and pants rolled around my boots.  I slept near Lea Rosser’s VW station-wagon.  It was parked beside a drying river bed.  Stealthily, I reached for the intruding hand just as it clasped a near-empty tequila bottle rolled in my pillow. 

A gentelman in an old fashioned slant-crowned sobrero and field-darkened huaraches stopped me in the middle of downtown Guadalajara the other day.

“Oye señor,” he said, “can you tell me how to get to the Palacio Federal, por favor?”

The two of us stood in the middle of the crowded sidewalk, people pushing around us in both directions, some detouring into the street. Mexican faces. This wasn’t normal tourist territory and there wasn’t a gringo to be seen.

My wife and I landed in a small pueblo that, on the drive down, no one beyond Jalisco seemed to know of.  We quickly moved into a recently renovated house in Ajijic ... and found home.  This was the early 1960s. 

Putting aside a recent dip into life’s and the electronic world’s bumpy lessons (illusive wifi presence) that mauled a useful column into unintelligible mush, ventures into new territory are exciting, metamorphosing experiences.  But such change demands both unwavering and lively attention.  Thus the Zen Master Ikkyu’s brusk command when asked by a student for “a maxim of highest wisdom.”  Ikkyu slashed his brush across his tablet:  “Attention. attention, attention!”  

President Enrique Peña Nieto is generously feeding a eager and hungry nationwide gambling market, even among near-empty-pocketed campesinos.  He’s stimulating a Niagara-sized, eager exchange of money among betting-inclined folks who find the antics  of Mexico’s chief executive an inexhaustible source of bizarre-loaded – and richly humor-wrapped – gambling game.  (“Chinga!  Not even he would be loco enough to believe something like that doesn’t stink,” said one Jocotepec friend, speaking of Mexico’s president, whom he judged recklessly wayward).    

The Raramuri indigenous people, with a population of about 60,000, are the largest tribe in the Republic north of the Valley of Mexico. With quiet, individualistic determination they cling to the sheer rockslide flanks of some of the most remote barrancas of Mexico, surrounded by a demanding environment in which even the smallest error can be dangerous, a large mistake, fatal.