Columns

For three weeks rolling displays of the Mexican flags for sale in all sizes and materials have been plying local streets, announcing the September 15-16 national celebration of the beginning of Mexico’s bloody 11-year struggle for independence from Spain.  Thousands of people were killed just in the first months of the 1810 uprising.  And for the most part, the rebellion was led by disillusioned criollo  and mestizo Catholic priests.

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.

It is June 24, 1524. Hernan Cortes kneels before twelve ragged and barefooted men, and kisses the soiled, frayed hem of the habit of their leader, Martin de Valencia. At that moment the Spiritual Conquest of Mexico began.

Foreigners and Mexican city folk driving on “secondary highways” between pueblo-sized communities this time of year often complain of horses and cattle grazing on rainy season-born wild grass and weeds along the sides of roadways.

The unrelenting nemesis of journalists and editors is a twined one: Space and time.

Time means deadlines, space dominated by journalism’s commercial engine, advertisements, determines how long a story can be. August 4, a discussion here about the cultural and emotional cost of illiteracy in modern societies, used the eye-opening German novel, and film, “The Reader” — and got its tail cropped by space considerations. This lead some readers to believe that in both novel and film forms, “The Reader” attempts to defend an illiterate woman who became a SS guard during World War II. If that were the case, “The Reader” wouldn’t have found a home here.

Guillermo (Memo) Sanchez was a handsome, rather short, muscular young man who had been carried as an infant on his mother’s back into the mountainside above Jocotepec as she and his father worked the family milpa there. In 1972, a good number of local residents, though they resided in the pueblo of Jocotepec, were still actually cerro Mexicans, living primarily by cultivating and harvesting domestic and wild flora and fauna from the northern mountainsides.