Dolores Hidalgo

The road to Dolores Hidalgo winds up from Guanajuato and through a beautiful mountain range. The mountains are green with flashes of copper, covered with deciduous trees that remind me of scrub oaks, but bigger. At points on the high road you can see all the way out to the plain to the north. It is spacious and wonderful. The drive is about an hour to Dolores Hidalgo, because of the twisting road (with no shoulder) and the compulsion to take in the view while also watching out for the occasional cow or burro loaded with sticks.

As the road rises out of the mountains to flat ground, there sits Dolores Hidalgo - the epicenter of this year's bicentennial independence celebration in México. This is where the priest Miguel Hidalgo organized the indigenous and criollo peoples against the oppression of the Spanish aristocracy and imperialism. On the dawn of September 16, 1810, Hidalgo rang the bell in the parish church, la Parroquia de Nuestra Señora de los Dolores, and gave the cry for independence. Then he and his group of followers began the march to Guanajuato, where they would engage in their first battle at Alhóndiga.

The parish church, completed in 1778, has a beautiful detailed stone facade, and inside are impressive retablos carved in wood. The church sits in front of a pretty and tranquil plaza, of course. At the center is a statue of Hidalgo, and all around are lovely trees, including a glorious jacaranda bursting with purple blossoms. All through the plaza and streets, people stroll and sit on benches eating ice cream. Dolores Hidalgo is famous for unusual ice cream flavors, such as avocado, corn, and tequila. Mark and I were conservative with our ice cream choices this day; however, halfway through my ice cream cone, I realized that nuez, which I knew was some kind of nut, is actually walnut, to which I am allergic. Alas, next time I will try avocado.

Tell Me Your Favorite American Books

The library associated with the Valenciana campus of the Universidad de Guanajuato, the Biblioteca Luis Rios, contains a narrow section of books from United States literature - perhaps just a hundred or so books in all. The spines of the books reveal many of the big titles of some of America's most famous authors: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Lousia May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Jack London, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner - just one or to works by each author - and then several copies of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Most of the works are Spanish translations; some are in English.

Through the Fulbright-García Robles program, I have the opportunity to donate some books to my host institution. I already have one set of books to donate, related to the seminar I am teaching here, "The Literature of the West in the United States." The books are:
The Professor's House by Willa Cather (1925)
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner (1971)
The Chinchilla Farm by Judith Freeman (1989)
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy (1992)
Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place by Terry Tempest Williams (1992)
The New Encyclopedia of the American West edited by Howard Lamar (1998)
I chose these books for the quality of their writing, the trends and preoccupations they represent for United States literature in general, and - in particular - for the way these regional narratives span the geography of both the U.S. West and Mexico, prompting a dialogue between the places and the cultures as each narrative shapes its own mythology that challenges conventions and stereotypes. They all push the borderlands.

But I can choose a few more books to give to the university. I would like to donate the English version and a Spanish translation of each book.

So, without limiting the focus to a particular region or time period, what five books best represent United States literature? What American books should beckon readers in Guanajuato? It's an overwhelming question. I ask for your help. Please post a comment or email me (jdavidson@csi.edu) with your nominations for five U.S. books to donate to the Universidad de Guanajuato library. I will need to order the books by April 15. Thank you, friends and fellow readers!

Palm Sunday

Today people carried small bunches of braided palm fronds in the streets of Guanajuato as they walked to and from church to commemorate Palm Sunday. We were following our own Sunday ritual of sitting in the sun on the steps of Teatro Juarez, drinking coffee and reading the local newspaper - engrossed this morning by an important column regarding last week's visit by a large contingency of President Obama's cabinet to México City to meet with President Felipe Calderón - when two different religious processions passed, each led by a figure dressed as Christ, riding a burro, and followed by people carrying palms and singing. Each headed to a different church.

A little later, another procession passed: a small ATV pulling a wooden wagon filled with a mini-rock band cheerfully playing drums and guitars and a tambourine - and wearing lucha libre wrestling masks - and promoting the university's book fair.

Altars

The steps of Teatro Juarez, the alcove of a church, the corner of the tiny neighborhood tienda, the front of a neighbor's house - all became sacred spots for a day or two as people all over Guanajuato constructed altars to honor the suffering of Mary, Mother of Christ, on Viernes de Dolores, the Friday before Palm Sunday. Over the past two days, it has been enchanting to turn a corner or peek in a doorway and see a gorgeous altar there. At the center is always a picture of the Virgin Mary, sorrowful and full of grace. Her image is framed by draperies of deep purple and white, by multicolored papel picado banners, and by branches of green-silver leaves like aspens. Bananas and oranges are stacked around or even hang above the altar; a few altars have pineapples and fish. Candles flutter on ledges and thick bouquets of purple and white flowers stand at the front.

I am in love with this tradition of altars. Anyplace can become holy.

Flores y Dolores

Semana Santa, the holy week leading up to Easter, begins today. It is Viernes de Dolores, the Friday designated in the Catholic tradition for honoring the sorrows suffered by Mary, mother of Christ.

But to walk through the streets of Guanajuato today is to revel in joy, for here, the day of sorrows is also el Dia de los Flores, the day of flowers. It is glorious! Beginning last night, the streets were lined with golden lights and filled with unfathomable flowers: fresh lilies, roses, daisies - fragrant and bright - and delicate paper flowers shaped like calla lilies and poppies, sprinkled with glitter.

Between the stalls of flowers are rows upon rows of colorful paper baskets lined with blown and dyed eggs that are filled with confetti. People run around and break the eggs on each other's heads. The cobblestone streets shimmer with confetti in today's hot sun. There are children's toys - all kinds of dolls and figures mounted on sticks that children carry around like giant popsicles, such that little princess dolls and angels and lambs bob up and down on their sticks above the crowds. And the streets are gushing with people. Families and children and friends stayed out all night, enjoying the churros and tacos and cotton candy in the streets and accumulating bundles of flowers. We've been told that the woman with the most flowers at dawn on Dia de los Flores is the most beautiful woman in Guanajuato.

Mark and I lasted until 2 a.m. last night (maybe our latest night ever), and then we returned to the Centro at 9 a.m. this morning. If anything, the crowds had grown and were more energized than ever. Little girls ran around in pretty spring dresses and painted faces. The fresh flowers and confetti-filled eggs seemed to have multiplied over night. The vendors had been at their posts continuously. One viejita vendor, a little old lady with long gray hair, dozed on the curb behind her piles of delicate paper calla lilies. She had been there all night, sitting placidly behind her bundles of flowers as throngs of people surged by and a brass band blasted music behind her in the Jardín de la Unión.

The doors to churches, storefronts, and homes have been graced with altars to the Virgin Mary. Each altar is distinctive but with common elements: the image of the Virgin sits at the center, framed by draped fabric and banners of colorful papel picado (cut paper), piled with flowers and fruit, and bordered by burning candles.

Tantas cosas tan bonitas.

In the streets of Guanajuato, the flores honor and salve dolores with verve.

¿Para Qué?

As México celebrates its bicentennial of independence and its centennial of revolution, it is also imagining its future. In Guanajuato, there have been a series of talks and panels about the future and about social change. This morning we attended a talk by Maestro Mario Luis Fuentes, a prominent commentator and the director of the Centro de Estudios e Investigación en Desarrolo y Asistencía Social. He identified three critical areas for social change in México now:

1. Trabajo - Work. People need jobs. He said there are young people in their twenties who have never had a job because there is no work to be had.

2. Sistema de salud - Better health care for everyone. And he focused on the need to address mental health as well as physical health. He said there is growing awareness of the abuse of sleeping pills and such, indicative of a quiet epidemic of depression.

3. Sistema de educación - Stronger public education. Young people need to develop skills and hope for navigating their aspirations in the world. He said the words he hears among young people today are, "Para qué?" For what? What does anything matter when there are few jobs and opportunities? Where is the meaning?

The dialogue could be the same in the United States.

El Pípila

Surging out of the bluff over the south side of Guanajuato is a hefty stone monument to El Pípila, a hero of the Mexican War of Independence (not to be confused with the equally strong figure of Mark, in the foreground).

According to the legend, on September 28, 1810, Manuel Hidalgo, the priest from Dolores Hidalgo, and his troops of campesinos reached the Alhóndiga, a large, stone, seemingly impenetrable granary building (see January 22 post) where the Spanish aristocrats were holding their ground.

Among Hidalgo's troops was Juan José de los Reyes Martínez, a young, strong, but perhaps somewhat debilitated miner; his nickname was el Pípila, the hen turkey. But on this day he would transcend his nickname. He strapped a stone slab to his back to protect himself from the Spaniards' rifle fire raining down from the walls of the Alhóndiga, and he ran with a torch to light the building's wooden doors on fire, allowing the troops to storm the building and initiating the first battle in the War of Independence, and the first victory for the Mexican troops.

The epigraph on the monument reads, "Aún hay otras Alhóndigas por incendiar" - There are still other Alhóndigas to burn.

Primavera Limpieza

This weekend marked the vernal equinox and the beginning of la primavera, and here in Guanajuato we felt that annual compulsion to do some cleaning. It’s not that we are shaking off winter – it has been a pretty consistent, gloriously sunny 80°F here for the past several weeks – but perhaps it’s the idea of tipping past the half-way point of the equinox that makes us want to clean the slate, freshen up.

And the community of Guanajuato was promoting spring cleaning this weekend, too, holding its first annual spring clean-up work days around several tourist areas and a dam. Two TV stars took a break from filming a telenovela on the steps of Teatro Juarez to join the effort and pick up trash. The local paper stated, “Se invita a la población en general para unir esfuerzos teniendo como objetivo en común el mejoramiento de nuestro medio ambiente en la capital y sus alrededores.” The general public was invited to work together toward the common goal of improving the natural environment of the capital and surrounding area.

So Mark and I donned red rubber gloves and did a walk-around, picking up trash on the street outside our apartment. Why did it take us nine weeks to get around to doing this? The fact is, there is a lot of roadside trash: Sabritas potato chip bags, Coca-Cola bottles, white plastic forks, Marinela cookie packages, graying papers, gum wrappers, and, of course, the ubiquitous plastic bags.

Residences here are not equipped with giant plastic garbage barrels on wheels that allow one to produce copious amounts of trash and deal with it by walking a few steps into the garage. Here, collective garbage bins are located sporadically around the neighborhoods; one disposes of household trash by carrying the bags down the street to the nearest bin. While we collected our bag of litter this weekend, a woman walked by with her own bag of trash and offered to carry ours, too, the ten-minute walk to the bin. She was willing to make our trash her burden. Maybe that’s how we should think about the garbage we produce: What are we willing to carry down the road?

Ballet Folklórico

Wow - The swishing skirts, stomping feet, whooping, and whistling - the ballet folklórico es un espectáculo! México has a vibrant tradition of regional folk dances. Tonight we saw Universidad de Guanajuato students perform "Y arriba el norte" - folk dances from the north of México: Chihuahua, Durango, and Baja California. Big cowboy hats and full, colorful skirts filled the stage; loud music and the railroad-rhythm of stamping feet filled the auditorium of Teatro Principal; the enthusiasm of the dancers reverberated off the walls. The music and their feet did not stop for an hour.

Mark and I were so energized by it that we want to revive square-dancing when we return to Idaho!

For the Reading List

The settings of Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel, The Lacuna, seem so unlikely: the Yucatán Peninsula and México City, and then Asheville, North Carolina, in the 1930s and 1940s. The main character, Harrison Shepherd, is the son of an American bureaucrat in Washington, D.C., and a Mexican mother who takes her son and leaves her husband to return with another man to México. Harrison has a solitary childhood in the jungle on the ocean, and then, in México City as a young man, he finds himself working in the house of the artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, as their cook and plaster-mixer and secretary, at the time when they are secretly housing the Russian revolutionary Lev Trotsky. Later, Harrison returns to the U.S. and becomes an accomplished novelist, until he is victimized by McCarthyism, accused of being a communist and betraying his country with his novels. While Harrison is the focus of the story, he does not the narrate it; it is framed for us by his secretary, Violet Brown. And she tells us that an important segment of the manuscript is missing. We have to fill in the gaps.

Initially, I thought these disparate pieces could not hold together. But as often happens for me with Kingsolver’s novels, by the end, I was enamored of the characters (especially the figure of Frida Kahlo) and moved by the conflicts of the times in both the U.S. and México.

The novel focuses on liminal spaces and how people inhabit them – how people move between familiar and unfamiliar places and cultures; how people make sense of each other and form relationships when, as the fictionalized Frida Kahlo states in the novel, “The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know.” The novel asks us to question how we approach “the thing we don’t know” – with fear, or with respect and a sense of wonder?

And I loved reading The Lacuna over the past weeks because of how it interfaced with my time here in México. I read about Frida Kahlo’s Coyoacán house in the novel, and then I walked through its rooms. I read about the main character, Harrison, mixing the plaster for Diego Rivera’s murals in the National Palace in México City, and then I saw the murals. I read about the cenotes on the Yucatán Peninsula, and then I looked into their depths around Tulum. The novel made me see more, and what I saw shaped how I read the novel. It was like swimming in a cenote, as Kingsolver describes it, moving between pools of experience that are separate but connected.

Guanajuato Sounds Like This

. . . horns and bongo drums on Tuesday evening, as a small municipal band plays in the gazebo at the center of the Jardín de la Unión. Dense green trees frame the plaza and filter the evening light, and elderly couples dance around the stage.

. . . violas on Thursday evening, as a quartet plays classical music in the intimate patio of the Museo Iconográfico del Quijote. The four violists stand in front of a giant stone statue of Don Quijote and his lance.

Asesoría

I hold a regular office hour, an asesoría, at Café Tal, to be available to students for questions and discussion outside of class. When I'm not meeting with a student, I'm the one getting a lesson. I sit at one of the tiny, wobbly tables next to a window that opens to the street, with a book open in front of me like a shield, and I practice the art of eavesdropping to try to absorb all the Spanish around me. As people walk by the window or gather at nearby tables, I try to make myself invisible behind my book, and I strain to hear recognizable words and phrases in their conversations. I catch the placeholder words first - pues (well), entonces (then), pero (but) - and numbers. A child trots by with his mother and I hear, "pero, por qué. . ." (but, why?) Four teenage girls, laughing and checking their cell phones, talk about jewelry: "La plata me cuesta cuatro mil pesos. . ." (the silver cost me 4,000 pesos!?!). It's good and interesting practice in listening and in observing human behavior, and I get to remain anonymous. It's a kind of retreat from the rest of the time when - still - I feel like I'm running naked through conversations, exposing all the words I don't know or can't string together.

Evasion and exposure. This is how I'm developing my Spanish.

Orange Blossoms

White blossoms are frothing from the orange trees in the garden around our apartment, and the scent is divine - sweet and deep - reminding me of the syringa, Idaho's state flower, in our yard at home (I now understand syringa's common name, "mock orange"). The fragrance drifts in through the kitchen window while I'm doing dishes; it lingers around the towels on the clothesline; it says the day is beautiful and fine.

Mayan City of Tulum

The stone temples and walls of the Mayan city of Tulum have stood on the cliffs of the Yucatan Peninsula overlooking the Caribbean Sea for some thousand years. When the city was inhabited (up until perhaps 500 years ago), the buildings would have been brightly painted with colorful frescos. Now the paint is largely gone; the walls are gray and eroded; iguanas bask on their exposed ledges - but to call them ruins does not capture their presence. Now, the buildings appear to grow organically from the cliffs, opening into archways that frame the sea and sky with elemental force.

The Mayan culture is known for the sophistication of its writing, mathematical, and calendar systems. The Mayans were among the first civilizations to use the concept of "zero." Looking through the ancient arch of the Temple of the Winds to an ocean of the most extraordinary blue, I think they also must have understood infinity.

In Memoriam

Murphy Dog died yesterday evening, 10 March 2010, in Boise. He was nearly 16 years-old.

We feel far from home.

Murphy lived with us for the last nine years. He gave us many great walks to the ball field and along Silver Creek and the Big Wood River. He endured poorly-planned hiking trips. He liked to roll in the snow. Only once did he ever take food from the counter - and that was for pancakes. He was a good and gentle dog.

It meant so much to us to know that my mom was taking good care of him over the last two months. She gave him lots of love.

Last evening, we climbed the hill above Guanajuato at sunset to say good-bye to Murphy. A black lab trotted along the road in front of us and disappeared into the brush along the hill.

Where the Sky Is Born

Dawn first breaks over México along the Yucatan Peninsula, rising in pinks and purples above the turquoise Caribbean Sea. While a chunk of this area has been consumed by massive resort development in just the last thirty years, nearly a third of the coastline has been protected as an impressive natural area, the Sian Ka'an Biosphere Reserve. The name, in the Mayan language, means where the sky is born. It is a nexus of sky and ocean and freshwater, mangroves and savannas and jungle. A thousand years ago, it was part of an important Mayan trade route. Traders would travel by canoe down the coastline to Honduras. On the edge of the mangroves sits the rock remains of an ancient lighthouse, where bonfires were kept burning to guide the boatmen through the lagoons.

We ventured into Sian Ka'an with Mark's sister and brother-in-law during an extended weekend on the Yucatan Peninsula. We rode bikes into the reserve - until the pedals fell off two of the bikes - and then we resorted to car transportation. We then took a boat tour through the brackish lagoons and saw manatees, a crocodile, brown pelicans, tri-colored herons, night herons, frigatebirds, snowy egrets, osprey, and a roseate spoonbill!

With cenotes (sinkholes, or pools, connected by subterranean tunnels through the limestock rock) connecting fresh water and salt water, the sky meeting the ocean, the viney mangrove trees extending the jungle into the lagoons, and birds mediating between it all . . . Sian Ka'an feels like a frontier of transformative processes. I am glad to know that this is where each new day approaches México.

The Story of Nina Complot

I love this contemporary children's book by Karen Chacek, an author in México, D.F. The story is fanciful with a slightly dark edge; the illustrations, by Abraham Balcázar, are hilarious.

Little Nina Complot (complot means conspiracy plot in Spanish) surprises everyone when she comes into the world as a girl, rather than the boy that 19 doctors had predicted. She continues to surprise her parents because lloraba tan fuerte que, cada tercer día, sus gritos rompían un cristal de la casa - she cries so hard that every third day her screams break glass in the house - and her mother has to flee through the bathroom window to go shopping.

Nina grows up to be an alert and bright little girl - capable of saving the world. Y el fin del mundo iniciará un día miércoles a las 6:30 a.m. - and the end of the world approaches one Wednesday at 6:30 in the morning, when an ancient old lady plugs in a noisy old vacuum cleaner and sets off a string of chaotic events in the apartment building where Nina lives. . . .

I won't give away the ending!

Nina Complot is published by a great small company in Oaxaca, México: Almadía. I met Karen Chacek at the Feria Internacional del Libro when we unexpectedly found ourselves in a radio interview together. Serendipity can lead to the best discoveries.

Postcard from Flat Hattie

Dear Real Hattie,
¡Hola! I am having a super time here in Guanajuato. This city is right in the middle of México. It is filled with pretty, colorful buildings, and it is surrounded by mountains. The sun has been shining brightly every day in a beautiful blue sky. When I left Idaho, it was snowing, but here in Guanajuato, it is sunny and warm, and flowers are blooming. I like walking through the little streets here because people are friendly and there are lots of little carts selling fresh fruit and yummy treats. In the evening, musicians wander through the streets, too, playing guitars and accordions and even trumpets! Today I watched corn tortillas being made. Piles of corn go in a funnel, get mashed into dough, and eventually slide out on a conveyor belt in circles that are almost as flat as I am! Fresh tortillas are delicious to eat. In a couple of days, I will get all snug in a cozy envelope and begin the trip back to Boise, Idaho. I am excited to visit your school class to tell you and your friends more about México and to share some souvenirs.
Un abrazo (a hug),
Flat Hattie

Flat Hattie Arrives in Guanajuato

Mark and I were thrilled to welcome our first visitor from Idaho today: Flat Hattie, the alias of our niece, Hattie. Hattie's elementary school class is exploring the world by sending their aliases to far-off places. Flat Hattie was tired when she arrived because it took her 19 days to travel from Boise, Idaho, U.S.A., to Guanajuato, Guanajuato, México, by parcel post - so we took her for a short walk down the street Callejón Temezcuitate to buy a coca-cola and some galletas (cookies) at the neighborhood tienda. She made friends with Norma, who is just a few years older than her. Now Flat Hattie is resting. We have a big day planned for her tomorrow.