Juan of Words

¡Mexico Lindo y Querido!

It doesn’t take much to send me flying down memory lane about the good old times we used to have in Mexico.  Life there has always seemed so much simpler than life here, at least for us who have always gone down there to visit only, never to live permanently.  Every time we get to reminiscing about those times we can’t help but compare how carefree everything is in Mexico.  What to eat and what to eat next are about all the hustle and bustle you have to worry about when you’re there… and even then, not so much because usually your family will get deeply offended if you don’t accept their offer to eat at their homes.

¡No me vaya decir que no, porque me voy a sentir mal!

The air feels fresher.  The water looks cleaner.  It’s like you’re literally one with mother nature there! Por lo menos, in the serros of El Sauz it still feels like that.  We’ve gone back to Mexico a few times over the last couple of years, and after talking about “the old country” over lunch today, I couldn’t help but want to share these pictures with all of you.  They always just put a smile on my face!

cielitolindo.mp3 (you have to play this track before reading) 

This is the entrance to our ranchito in the serros - quite literally the mountains of Cerritos, San Luis Potosi.  Until a couple of years ago all the roads were dirt and rock.  Those paved streets are brand new!

As you drive in you start seeing houses on either side, but everyone has at least one third of an acre of land for their houses.  Electricity and running water are still pretty iffy, though, going out sporadically for hours at a time.

Here is our family home, which our parents have had since they began their lives together over four decades ago.  We used to have a stick kitchen in the front of the bloque rooms, but we tore it down after we got a propane-powered stove.  The room on the right is the new addition.

Had my mom had the opportunity to live longer periods of time in Mexico as an adult I know for a fact we would have all kinds of fruit and vegetable trees in our terreno – lemon, oranges, aguacate, etc.  Since she hasn’t… we do have lots of matotas de nopales like this one.

Anyone that comes to El Sauz from el norte can easily be spotted if they’re driving around in trucks like this one.  I will say, though, that a lot of people have much nicer trucks now than they did when we were growing up.

Downside to only visiting Mexico every couple of months or years: your property starts to look like this.  As a kid this is what I hated most… having to help my dad clear the brushes from the land with talaches and machetes.

It’s still not my favorite thing to do, but I can make myself enjoy it now… and it’s easier now to handle those tools.  That’s me in the gray sweater and the cap.  Those fires in the early morning smell so good.

Well, it’s not like they have dumpsters or dump sites for this stuff in El Sauz.

Heating up cold water for your bath is still regular practice in El Sauz.  At our place we use a water tank at the top of the house to run the shower, but there is no water heater connected to it so the water is cold.  I learned the hard way why taking a bath with only the shower is a bad idea.  Uuyy, I still get shivers thinking about that cold shower I took in record time.

Once night falls it’s all about hanging out with family and getting ready to sleep by relaxing.  Some of my fondest memories of Mexico are of staying up late with my cousins, sitting around a fire, and telling each other tall tales and scary stories.

Boots are probably a good idea for El Sauz.  While we do now have some paved roads, most of the rancho is still nothing but dirt roads and walkways.  I can’t tell you how many brand new pairs of shoes I ruined over the years as a kid.

I hope my brother doesn’t kill me for sharing this picture.  It’s one of my favorites of us together because you can really tell how well we have always gotten along.  Though it doesn’t seem like it, we were actually working, digging a hole to make barbacoa before heading back to Texas.

My mother, on the left here (notice the rebozo), recruited the help of my uncle to prepare the cabrito.  She obviously didn’t trust any of us to prepare it.  ¿Porqué sera?  Notice the serros in the background off in the distance.  Ahh!

Last, but certainly not least, this is one of the tanques de agua in El Sauz.  The one that used to be right next to our house was dried out when we went for this trip.  That’s my oldest nephew laying on the ground with the shades.  My brother added the cool yellow graphics.  ¿Apoco no les gusta la foto? 

We should definitely make this into a post card!

Now it’s you’re turn.  Share your stories and/or memories of Mexico, or your own country.  I would really like to hear them!

¡Bienvenidos a Mi Cerritos, San Luis Potosi, México!

Today’s post is a very special one for me!  My writing often takes me back to a different time and place – one where life was always a little calmer, a little more independent, a lot simpler, and just the right dose of cultura and orgullo.  That place, for me, has always been very clearly defined.  It is the place where my parents grew up, where their parents grew up, where our deceased relatives are lying in their final resting spots (in the cerro of El Saúz), and where every summer as kids we spent magical days and nights learning who we were and the importance of where we came from.  That place is Cerritos, San Luis Potosi, México!

So yesterday, when I was surfing the net and happened to come across this collection of pictures of Cerritos, of all places on Facebook, my heart literally skipped a beat.  I was excited to have found such a great batch of images that so accurately bring to life the memories in my heart and mind of ‘Mi México’.  Even more excited that I could finally draft this post and say ¡Bienvenidos a Mi Cerritos, San Luis Potosi, México! 

I hope you love it as much as I do.

Burradas And Progress In Mexico – True Confession

Sometimes it feels like we grew up at the end of an era.  Where burros and ox were at the brink of retirement, arroyos and pozos were all but dried up, rocky roads and mountains just literally days away from being reshaped, redeveloped, redefined, and all the while we were oblivious to the changes happening around us.  Going to the rancho meant packing our most worn clothes, tennis shoes that were on their last breath before they detached at the sole and created the illusion of having their lenguas fuera every time we lifted our feet off the ground, and preparing to work harder than we ever had to on this side of the border.

It was exhausting, but there really wasn’t anything else quite like it, especially not in our crammed little apartments de este lado. The ox wagons from our text books came to life in El Sauz, usually with my grandfather riding majestically atop them headed to the arroyos with a huge tanque to fill up with clean water, my mother’s stories about grinding fresh corn into nistamal and then into tortillas were happening right before our very eyes, even their anecdotes of how much harder everything was in Mexico became our reality as we made our way back from the pozos where we were collecting water to be warmed over fire with a pail of pond water on each shoulder.  I remember thinking “man this is awful… I don’t want to take a bath.”

And a lot of times I didn’t.  Instead I’d change my clothes, wipe my face with a wet towel, splash my hair with water and pretend I was clean.  Nobody really minded or even noticed because the truth was that a few minutes after we took a bath and changed into something clean we’d be just as dirty once again anyway.  Especially us kids who liked to spend most of the day running around the hills of the rancho, laying out on the tan-colored ground underneath trees with exceptionally large branches that were perfect for shade, and just generally getting ourselves into trouble one way or another.  Eventually one of my siblings, usually my sisters, would tell mamá how I hadn’t taken a bath in days and she’d force me to grab my two little pails from the cement block kitchen, run down to the pozo and haul back enough water to take a proper bath.  In these instances I’d have to heat my own water over the fire myself.

“¡Apúrale!  Tienes que bañarte… ¡Apúrale, antes de que agarre un samandoque!

It never got that far.  By that time I was usually feeling pretty dirty myself.

Now, that Mexico is no longer there.  It is, but it’s changed.  In so many ways that it feels the same but at the same time it doesn’t, if that makes any sense.  Nobody rides around on an ox-wagon anymore; people don’t carry their own bathing water these days; they have running water and the pozo from our earlier visits is now just a dried up crevice on our side of the rancho; the ride to the pueblo that used to take almost an hour through mountains and difficult-to-tread-roads full of rocks and bumps now only takes about 20 minutes on newly paved streets; there’s a tortilla truck that drives around selling freshly made and warm tortillas de maíz; even televisions and video games have replaced part of the sense of adventure for children in El Sauz, along with cell phones and the Internet which they can access in the pueblo for a few pesos.

I’m reminded of the movie Muriel’s Wedding where the father of the bride kept repeating the line “you can’t stop progress!”  It was about something completely unrelated, but for some reason it’s stuck in my mind for years now.

Still, not even “progress” changes everything.

One of the last times I went to Mexico, a few years ago now, I was too lazy to take a bath every day because even though technically we did have running water in my parents’ home, which now has four rooms instead of two, we did still have to heat up the water over fire so that it would be warm enough to tolerate.  It was the fall and one thing we still don’t have in El Sauz is a water heater.  After a few days of holding out on a shower I couldn’t take it anymore.  I myself had to take a bath to be comfortable.  “How cold can the water be?” I thought to myself and closed the restroom door behind me determined to take a real quick shower without any warm water.  I’d done it before on this side of the border and hadn’t suffered any dire consequences “so how bad could it be?”

Despite my siblings ridiculing and then sincere concern (my younger brother actually came around the house to knock on the restroom window and make sure I hadn’t passed out) I stayed in the restroom and roughed it out in the cold water.  More than a few colorful phrases escaped my mouth during the whole five minute ordeal, I’ll tell you that much!  I can’t remember when I’ve taken a quicker shower en toda mi vida.  I came out of the restroom feeling a little accomplished and more than anything else embarrassed for acting like I didn’t know any better.

You might not be able to stop progress, but, as it turns out, stupidity is pretty unpredictable as well.