Thunderstorm

Central Mexico can roll out a thunderstorm.

Dark, billowing clouds filled the valley late this afternoon, and the sky has not stopped grumbling and cackling for hours since then. This is arid land, and it is not the rainy season; historically, that comes in June through September. But Guanajuato has been in a drought, and the rainy season has been minimal in recent years. Our bike ride yesterday took us past two presas, or dams, with water hanging low below the historic watermark. Water is being rationed in the city: No water runs three days a week. This sounds severe, but, oddly, we have not been affected by it. Our apartment has had water every day, and so has every other place we have been - perhaps because the storage tanks above most of the buildings compensate with stored water on the off-days.

So we are glad for the rain. I had to run to get the clothes off the line; now they are draped all over the apartment, and we are cozied up with soup on the stove. The hypnotic thunder and rain are perfect for getting lost in a book. I will settle in with Lacuna, the new novel by Barbara Kingsolver that is set in Mexico in the early 20th century in the circles of Diego Rivera and Friday Kahlo.

Uphill

I am tired from my head to my nalgas (butt) to my toes.

Today we took an incredible four+ hour and gazillion kilometers mountain bike ride from the center of Guanajuato, up the orito old mining road, through several tiny pueblitos like Concepcíon and Santa Rosa, and then back down the steep and winding highway and through the tunnels and into town. We were guided by a super guide from Bike Station Guanajuato, Eduardo, who has lived here his whole life. Mi corazón está en Guanajuato, he said as he led us through town at the beginning of the ride. My heart is in Guanajuato. He has big dreams of growing the biking community here, and the area definitely has so much to offer. The ride wound through cactus and forest and past old mines and churches and revealed spectacular mountain views. It was also a gnarly climb, and once we left the dirt roads and turned on to what could loosely be called a single-track, it was very difficult for someone of my limited technical skills. At one point, near the top of yet another steep stretch, I shouted jubilantly, ¡Voy a hacerlo! - I'm going to do it! - and then tipped over on my side.

As I pushed my bike ahead of me, I wondered, Will the uphill ever end? Can my legs and lungs not magically get stronger?

And as I muddle my way through each Spanish conversation, whether on a bike or in a classroom, often speaking nonsense, I wonder, Will I ever be able to speak with ease? Can I wake up tomorrow and magically be fluent?

Callejón Temezcuitate

We walk down Callejón Temezcuitate to get from our apartment to el centro. The flagstone alley is like the word “Temezcuitate” itself: a long, interesting zigzag that is hard not to trip on. It lurches down the hill, wedged between red, yellow, white, blue, and green concrete houses. We wobble down it best in running shoes; clogs and cowboy boots have not served us well. Sometimes a toddler taps a toy drum on the street outside a house’s open doorway; sometimes teenagers kick a soccer ball in the steep and narrow space; sometimes we follow a tiny old lady in an orange rebozo shawl as we make the descent. We have passed burros loaded with bags of potting soil; we have been passed by a pizza delivery motorcycle. We exchange "buenos dias" along the way.

A Guanajuato Movie Recommendation

Yesterday evening I attended a "Cine y Literatura" class. This was my first experience in a class in the Departamento de Letras Hispánicas, and I loved it. The course focuses on Mexican film. Twenty students are in the class; half are Mexican students from Guanjuato and the surrounding area, half are international students, ranging from Norway to Wisconsin to Alaska. I was impressed by the professor, Luis Palacios, and by the students (I envy their great bilingual skills), and by the room itself - this high-ceilinged alcove with a weary wooden door in the old convent building, but with a great multimedia set-up - such a juxtaposition of antiquity and modernity.

For the first class, the professor showed a film based on a famous Mexican novela by Jorge Ibarguengoitia that is set in Guanajuato: "Estas ruinas que ves" ("These Ruins That You See"). It was perfect as a fun introduction not just to Mexican cinema but also to the city of Guanajuato itself and to university life. The film is a silly and sexy comedy from 1978 in which Guanajuato features prominently (though it is called "Cuévano" in the film). Watch it, and you will get a great look at Guanajuato: its streets, buildings, tunnels, and hills. It's in Spanish with English subtitles - and you can get it through Netflix!

Paperwork and People

I would not normally think of bureaucratic paperwork as an exercise in community-building, but that is how it felt today.

We made our second trip to the Registro Nacional de Extranjeros today with three other individuals who are here from Oregon. They all are engaged in interesting, inspiring work, and the trip to the immigration office was made more fun just by their camaraderie. The typist who helped us complete the last few items on our forms and re-took our photos because they were not exactly 2.5 cm, the guys from Virginia and Texas who shared their paperwork stories with us while we waited in line, and even the immigration officials themselves who were remarkably kind and helpful (and smoking fast with their rubber stamps - which they stamped at least 40 times for each of our sets of paperwork) - all of these people eased our way today.

And our paperwork is submitted! (Note the blue thumbs up from the fingerprinting stage of today's process.)

As we waded through this bureaucratic process, and as we negotiate the "unknowns" of each new day, I have felt so dependent on and grateful for the kindnesses of people along the way - complete strangers and new friends - who make it easier. It may seem trite to say, but it is anything but: We really need to help each other out. And smile. It can make all the difference.

Plaza de la Paz

Our days run through the Plaza de la Paz, an open, radiant plaza in the center of Guanajuato. The plaza is about a 10-minute walk from our apartment, and we pass through it on our way to the main university building, to the copy shop where we continue to print and copy many official documents, and to other daily destinations.

Amidst the many tight alleys and smaller, cloistered plazas of the city, the Plaza de la Paz opens up under an expanse of blue sky. It is lined down its center with green hedges and bunches of bright red poinsettias, and it is anchored at the top by the Básilica de Nuestra Señora de Guanajuato, a beautiful Baroque church of yellow-gold walls and orange cupolas. The Básilica draws our gaze every morning as we look down on the city from our hike in the hills, and we slow down to look up at it as we pass through the plaza each afternoon. The church was built between 1671 and 1696, and it houses a wooden image of the Virgin Mary. This image, I understand, spent 800 years hidden from the Moors in a cave in Spain before traveling to the "New World" in 1557, a gift from King Philip II to the city of Guanajuato in gratitude for the bullion that was being pulled from its mines and shipped to Spain.

Uno Dos Tres. . .

We signed up for a salsa class.

The challenge, for me, is trying to learn two languages at once: the Spanish directions and the language of steps and hip swings.

I think I did better with the Spanish vocabulary tonight (rápido, rápido, lente - quick, quick, slow).

But, soon, we hope to look like some of the more advanced students in our class (in the video clip).

As the instructor, José, said, "Paso a paso" (step by step).

Saturday Night Paseo

Last night, Mark and I had our first real Saturday night on the town in Guanajuato. We ate dinner on the plaza right next to the glorious Teatro Juarez, which proved to be prime seating for watching the evening paseo unfold.

A group of about 40 people gathered on the steps of the theater next to us and engaged a group of Estudiantinas to perform - They are a kind of minstrel group of men dressed in Shakespearean-like garb, who sing songs and wander through the streets of town to entertain people. They mingle around the plaza and beckon to passers-by, then sing songs and tell jokes and lead their audience on a tour through the streets.

After dinner, Mark and I joined the stream of people strolling around the Jardín de la Unión, Guanajuato's zócalo, or central plaza. It is a wedge-shaped plaza, and the center is filled with trees whose dense branches form a green ceiling over the area. Along the edges, tables spill onto the sidewalk from restaurants and cafes (and, I'm afraid to say, a Starbucks), and a few stores display ceramics and jewelry and T-shirts.

You can join Mark and I for the two minute walk as we circle around the entire plaza. It is 10 p.m., and the zócalo is full of people of all ages: chatting with friends, listening to music, eating dinner, taking photos. We pass a mariachi band (you'll hear the horns) playing for a group at one of the restaurants.

The music, really, is amazing: Within 100 meters and a few minutes, we watched the Estudiantinas perform traditional songs like "De Colores," we passed the flashy horns and accordions of a mariachi band, saw a ranchera band (decked out in white cowboy hats and perfect white pants with their guitars and amplifier), and then heard the driving rhythms of cumbia surge out of a corner bar.

Sueños

Sólo venimos a dormir,
Sólo venimos a soñar,
No es verdad, no es verdad
Que venimos a vivir en la tierra.

- poesía indígena

We do not come to live on the land,
We only come to sleep,
We only come to dream.

(my interpretation of an indigenous poem posted at La Alhóndiga)

This morning Mark said that he has been having mixed dreams - one moment, he'll be walking across snow in Hailey, and the next moment he's walking on the cobblestone streets or cactus-lined paths of Guanajuato.

Sometimes wandering through the narrow callejones and finding my way through the currents of the beautiful but still unfamiliar Spanish language, I feel like I am in a dream - especially when something unexpected suddenly appears in front of us, like a burro loaded with piles of sticks, or a huge green bus barreling down an alleyway that seems way too small for it, or a tiny hole-in-the wall doorway that opens to a flower-filled patio.

I think the colors and sounds of Guanajuato are imprinting themselves on my dreams.

But I must also admit: I've awakened each night with a jolt of anxiety about another blank that needs to be filled out on all the registration paperwork we still need to complete!

La Alhóndiga

At its core, La Alhóndiga is a granary, but it feels like a statehouse. Certainly, it is one of the most notable buildings of Guanajuato and of México. It was built originally at the end of the 18th century, in the glory days of Spain's silver mining empire. In 1810, it became the site of one of the most important battles of the Mexican independence movement when Miguel Hidalgo led a group of criollos (people of mixed Spanish and indigenous descent) against the Spanish aristocracy. This was half a century before the U.S. Civil War, and the museum asserts that Hidalgo was the first person to declare an end to slavery on the North American continent. (Later in the war, Hidalgo was killed and his head was staked on one of the corners of the Alhóndiga.) Today the building stores history rather than grain. It holds artifacts and tributes to Mexico's past, and the stairwells of the stoically white building are painted with vibrant, torrid murals by Chavez Morado.

Tamales Full Circle

Several times now, in the evening we've passed an older man and woman sitting back from the streetlamp on a corner near our apartment with two silver pots, one filled with tamales and one filled with a chocolate drink. Tonight we stopped and bought a little bag of tamales on our way home. Back at our kitchen table, we unwrapped the yellow husks to wafts of steam; we savored each bite of queso con chile verde and carne de cerdo; and I remembered one of the first times I had ever heard of Guanajuato. A few years ago, I met Gris, a woman living in Hailey who grew up in a small village here in Guanajuato and learned to cook from her grandmother. Gris taught a cooking class for the college in Hailey, and she makes excellent tamales. So, saludos a Gris!

Proofs of Belonging

Meet neighbors.
Find out where to buy sugar and toilet paper and the best corn tortillas.
Be able to leave street maps discreetly in your pockets.
Fill out many forms.
Indicate what type of nose you have.
Make copies of papers.
Make more copies.

These are all steps in coming to belong here.

How do we prove that we belong in a given place?

As part of our FM-3 visa status, we are required to register at the Registro Nacional de Extranjeros, the National Register of Foreigners. This means making a LOT of copies (of our entire passports and visas and grant documents and more) and completing several forms, one of which asks for very specific information about physical characteristics, including what kind of nose you have (options: straight, convex, concave, or wide) and what kind of eyebrows (thin, full, or waxed).

So today we drove an hour to the picturesque town (and expatriate enclave) of San Miguel de Allende, where the Registro is located for the state of Guanajuato, to try to complete our paperwork. We were helped promptly and amiably, but learned that the rental agreement we brought as proof of our domicile would not be accepted because it is in English. We would need to have it translated by an official translator and stamped with an official seal. This required us to drive into the center of town (kudos to Mark for driving the pick-up truck on narrow cobblestone streets crammed with tourists!), pay $40, and then receive the translated document only after the Registro had closed for the day at 1 p.m. So, we will have to return to San Miguel de Allende for a second attempt in a few days. (But in the midst of this paperwork adventure we were able to meet friends from Hailey, Ted and Marty, for lunch in San Miguel, which was delightful!)

Coming back to Guanajuato late in the afternoon, we took a wrong turn and ended up lost in the maze of tunnels that go under the center of town. These are old river beds that have been converted into subterranean roads that bypass the tight cobblestone streets of the colonial downtown area. The tunnels even have bus stops and intersections, and every few minutes they surface in the daylight of a chaotic plaza, then drop back underground in medieval passages. We spent about 20 minutes trying to find our way up and out of this tunnel system. It seemed like the perfect metaphor for our day of paperwork: It's confusing, but we know there must be the proverbial light at the end, and then we'll be back on familiar ground.

The University of Guanajuato

The main campus of the Universidad de Guanajuato dominates the center of town when viewed from the hills above: It's a tall, bright, white, heavy building amidst the jumble of colorful smaller buildings and the orange, yellow, and gold domes of several churches and theaters. A long, steep staircase climbs one side of the building; climbing it seems to emphasize the work of acquiring higher knowledge! The building itself is relatively new - just about 50 years old - but it is attached to a Jesuit seminary and church that dates back to 1732. (The top photo here shows the main edifice of the building; the second photo shows Mark looking out on the town and the Pipila monument from the steps of the university.)

The Departamento de Letras Hispanicas is located at the Valenciana campus, just 5 km up the hill and outside of the city of Guanajuato. Valenciana is another old silver mining town, and the campus is located in a former convent. Like the main campus, it is attached to a church built in the 18th century. This Valenciana campus, the ex-convent, is a wonderful pink and beige and gray building of bricks and plaster with a stone patio open to the sky at its center. It is a bit crumbling and very romantic; it feels like it has a past, which I love. The classrooms are narrow but with high, domed, brick ceilings. The atmosphere makes me want to sit with great tomes of books and write notes by longhand in leather-bound journals. (The third photo shows me in front of the church end of the Valenciana campus. I was desperate to take lots of photos, but as this was my first day meeting with members of the literature department, I was trying to appear less like a gawking tourist!)

Una Mapa de Metas

A Map of My Goals

So far, we have been focusing our energies on navigating the quaint and maze-like streets of Guanajuato, reading maps and road signs, having fun wandering and getting lost and un-lost. Tonight I am focusing on a more abstract map. Tomorrow I meet with the chair of the Departamento de Letras Hispánicas and the coordinator of the graduate studies program at the Universidad de Guanajuato to discuss my teaching responsibilities and other ways I might participate in their academic programs while I am here. The plan is for me to teach a course on the Literature of the U.S. West to master's level literature students. So, I have been reflecting on my core goals for this Fulbright-García Robles experience.

1. I aim to deepen my understanding of the West (or el Norte, as it is called in México) by learning more about México's history and literature and how they interface with the history and literature of the United States. My scholarly and creative interests have been focused on the American West, my homeland, since my college days. I am fascinated by how the mythology of the West - of cowboys and rugged individualism and manifest destiny - has shaped the larger American story and national identity. And the West's mythology keeps shifting: contemporary western literature in particular encourages us to think of the relationship between space (landscape and architecture) and our sense of belonging, and it encourages us to think of how cultural exchanges (rather than conquest) create a vital and meaningful mythology to make sense of how we live in the West today. My studies of the West provide a door for me to enter into a study of México, and my studies of México I hope will provide new insights into my familiar West.

2. I want to challenge my interpretations of key works of American literature by teaching them in a different cultural context. I am so curious as to how students' questions and comments will be similar and different to those I've encountered from students in the U.S. A defining theme of the books we will study is one of shifting cultural terrain, so the books will provide a particularly pertinent subject for cross-cultural dialogue.

3. I hope to improve my ability to serve Latinos and to promote positive cross-cultural relations in my home community in Idaho. At our neighborhood elementary school, 60% of the students are Latino. Right now, I know of two College of Southern Idaho students who are here in Guanajuato visiting their hometowns. Geoffrey at Cafe Tal yesterday told me that Guanajuato has the highest migration rate to the U.S. of any state in Mexico. I believe our community is made stronger by meaningful cross-cultural collaborations, and I hope that by increasing my fluency in Spanish and my understanding of Mexican history and culture, I can contribute to such collaborations.

Habits We Are Starting

Already, we are establishing a few anchors to our days:

1. Walk and/or run in the the hills around Guanajuato every morning with Bill. Today, as we started up the hill, we met a neighbor, Alicia, getting her exercise on the camino, and later, Mark met Mauricio, who was with his horse moving a few cows through the hills.

2. Go to the open air market each Saturday and Sunday. You can buy everything from fresh vegetables to honey to jeans to candy to mariachi CDs. Here is what it sounded like as we were buying bananas today (1 kilo for 5 pesos, or, 11 bananas for 40 cents).

3. Go to Cafe Tal, a tiny, friendly coffee shop just down the hill from our apartment. The coffee is great and so is the beso negro - the black kiss - a shot of rich chocolate; we like to sit in the open front window and watch the street activity; the owner, an American named Geoffrey, gave us each a beso negro as a welcome today, and he seems to have a lot of great information to offer.

Morning in Guanajuato

This morning we walked with Bill up the hill by our apartment - to shed 47 hours of driving and to get our bearings.

A jumble of colorful blocks chuckles down the hillsides and into the little valley, forming the town of Guanajuato. In the morning sun, it looked so cheerful, and a few dogs and chickens shouted greetings across the valley. We ran across a couple of donkeys and horses roaming the hillsides, and two hummingbirds.

Saturday is a market day, so we walked into town and through the many vendors selling their wares, heaped in pretty piles along the road. We purchased aguacates (avocados), tomates (tomatoes), zanahorias (carrots), fresh tortillas, and those fresas (strawberries) we'd been hankering for since we passed all those roadside stands yesterday. I asked the vendor if it was the season for strawberries right now, and he said it's always strawberry season here. We had a gringo moment when one vendor, an elderly woman, told us our items son veinte (they are twenty pesos), but we heard cien veinte (120), so we handed her five times the cost of the vegetables. She kindly returned the excess pesos to us immediately, but not before we spurred some giggling in the little crowd. But we are OK with providing a little comic relief. We have no illusions about how often we are going to have to feel a little foolish as we figure things out and improve our language skills, and we already are grateful for how generally patient and generous people are.

(Note: Total cost of 5 avocados + 5 tomatoes = 20 pesos = $1.60. We couldn't buy one avocado for that price in Hailey in January!)

¡Guanajuato!

¡Llegamos! We have arrived in Guanajuato!

The road to Guanajuato and through the heart of Mexico (in the photo above) is beautiful - green, rugged, textured with cactus and brush whose names we have yet to learn - and the scenery was made all the more dramatic by shifting thunderstorms and periodic rain.

Along the road from Matehuala, we drove through the altiplano, a high valley plain, and for miles the road was lined with tiny thatched huts and mysterious roadside stands. The stands featured long, transparent snake skins hanging from small bottles of golden oil - snake oil, we wondered? And there were hides of various desert animals and heaps of cut cactus, and then giant billboards declaring: Don't damage the wildlife. It was a strange stretch of road.

When we turned west off interstate 57 toward Dolores Hidalgo, the roadside stands instead featured fresas y cajetas - little baskets of strawberries.

We were driving along the Ruta de Independencia, 2010, as many road signs declared. 2010 is Mexico's bicentennial, and central Mexico is the heart of Mexico's independence movement. And we felt like we were on our own ruta de indpendencia for 2010 as we travelled down the road to this new adventure.

Marcos, the husband of our landlady, said to us this afternoon as he pointed to just one landmark in the town, "Guanajuato es lleno de historia." Guanajuato is filled with stories.

Into Mexico

The entrance to Mexico struck me as tight - we left a crush of neon signs and gas stations and fast food restaurants in Laredo, crossed a bridge where we paid a $3 toll, drove along a three or four lane roadway, stopped in a narrow area where they checked our truck, then immediately turned left into a tight jumble of houses and tiendas in Nuevo Laredo.

The landscape then opened up to a wide plain of scrub brush and cactus along the cuota (toll) interstate. We were thrilled to pass a huge flock of sandhill cranes in a field, like familiar friends. More quickly than we expected, mountains appeared in the distance, and before we reached Monterrey, we were driving through rugged canyons. Southwest of Monterrey, we entered a wider valley, but we remain between mountain ranges, green and lovely. Along the road, we passed horses, donkeys, goats, and lots and lots of vulcas, which we think have something to do with tires and/or car engines because the word was often painted on tires along with promotions for llantas (tires) near the road and next to shops that seemed mechanical. Road signs are proving to be a fine primer for our Spanish. We also are learning to convert kilometers to miles.

In the photo above, I'm at a stop in Matehuala with Bill, who is a trooper.

A few more hours of driving tomorrow, and we will reach Guanajuato!

La Frontera

We rolled through the Texas Hill Country today and we have reached la frontera at Laredo. Laredo feels a bit like Las Vegas, with lots of neon signs and hotels and fast food restaurants and malls and then suddenly the border-crossing. We plan to start bright and early in the morning and reach San Luis Potosi by the evening. Vamos!

A Long Line to Texas

If the year were 1840, we would have entered Mexico today as we passed through Pueblo in southern Colorado.

Instead, in this 2010, we cut across the corner of New Mexico state and entered Texas. And drove through Texas.

Texas pushed me into existential thinking. As Mark said, it is odd to be in a landscape where the highest topographical feature is the berm along the side of the highway.

And this evening, in our eleventh hour of driving for the day, we became hypnotized by hundreds of red lights - mounted on top of towers - flashing in unison across a huge expanse of land. It seemed as though we were driving into some kind of extraterrestrial grid. Finally, we discovered that the red lights were at the center of windmills - hundreds of them.

To Texas's credit, a line of pink rested on the horizon for a long time as the sun set across the plains, and then gave way to a wonderful spread of stars.

Crossing the Rockies

Today we folded our way across the Rocky Mountains - from the Wasatch Front in Utah, along the craggy canyon of the Colorado River, to the Front Range and a view to the plains on the east side of Colorado. It was a spectacular ride through a landscape of red cliffs glazed with white snow, green pines, frozen pale blue rivers - and we were very grateful for another day of clear skies and clear roads.

In the photo, Bill enjoys an outing on a ranch road between Green River and Grand Junction.

Tonight, we lodge with my Carleton College roommate Jenny Fick.

Tomorrow: to Texas!

Sunny Skies, Open Roads

The morning sun shone brightly off the snow on Della Mountain as we packed up the rest of our stuff - including the two chickens and Bill the dog. The Kaminskis, the worlds'-greatest-neighbors, brought us cinnamon rolls and waved from their front window as we drove away, and we shared coffee with our dear friends Mike and Liz at Zaney's before heading out of Hailey under a crisp, blue winter sky.

We love our home, and leaving for a few months heightens our sense of attachment to the familiar - the walk up to the ball field in the morning with Bill, the Log Cabin coffee mug and the special sugar spoon, the view of the mountains from the corner of the couch and the red plaid blanket.

As we drove south, past Silver Creek, Timmerman, Sweetzer, Bear River. . . other than the perpetual cloud bank north of Shoshone, the landscape unfolded smoothly and sunnily as we drove to Utah. We had a late lunch at Grandma Belva's house in Salt Lake City, and dinner and a sleepover at the house of Mark's sister, Stephanie.

So, the road trip - 5.5 hours down and 40??!! to go - is off to a good start. We avoided falling on the ice as we jumped out of the truck in the Davidsons' driveway in Jerome (where we dropped off the last meat from our freezer) and we avoided running out of gas when the "low fuel" light came on south of Snowville. We've had two delicious meals and fun conversations with our great, generous family members along the route.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow we leave for Mexico.

Tonight we are excited, giddy, nervous, nostalgic. Our things are packed into boxes and bags, most are loaded in the truck already. The house is tidied (more or less). And it's not even midnight!

It's time to start writing and moving into this new adventure.

To begin, a few words on the title:

Choosing a title for this blog felt like choosing a direction, setting a tone for the journey. Of course, I spent too much time agonizing over it.

paseo - a walk, an outing. This word has an easy, flowing sound: pah - SAY - oh. The first time Mark and I visited Mexico, we were impressed by the people on paseo strolling outside in the streets and plazas in the evenings, walking and talking with each other. It felt friendly and communal.

In the web address for the blog, idgto = ID for Idaho, and GTO for Guanajuato, the states that frame this experience. Vamos a pasear entre los dos. We're going to take a walk, a ride between the two.

I wonder what we will see and who we will meet. Even as I am thrilled to set out, I already miss my family and friends.