Bit and Pieces from Mexico Part III

Yaqui Dancers and Las Vegas
In the midst of their “training” to be men, Yaqui Indian boys go on a 40 day ordeal where some portion of that training involves dancing. If you ever pull up to a signal light or a toll booth and there is a masked youth with feathers, shakers and clearly dressed in Indian garb, then you have come across something special. They dance for you. It is not just any dance and I will not try to describe it as I can serve it no justice with words. But the experience moves you. I always breakout the pesos for these men in training! They live in the desert and must come to the city as part of their experience.

You will also find other performers hawking for your money in various locations and these are clearly NOT Yaqui Indians. There is the fire breather who does an act with a flaming baton, twirling and tossing it high into the air and of course the coup de gra, blowing the flame from his mouth, all during the course of one red light cycle. Nothing like a mouthful of kerosene for that gingivitis. How they do this in the middle of the summer in the intense heat is a testament to the human will to earn money or is it simply a death wish?

My favorite street performers are a family of 3. The husband (on trumpet), the wife (manager with baby in sling) to collect money, and the son age 3 or 4 and no taller than a garbage can, on drums. The songs I have heard them play (and there is not much you can catch during the length of a stop light) is what the Aussies would call “a ripper” The little boy rails with a driving rhythm and dad lays down the "color" on the trumpet. While this is no Louie Armstrong and Buddy Rich, it is a family that clearly has its eye on Vegas.


Cleaning Happens
My perception of reality was again turned upside down as I pondered the day by day activities in the neighborhood here in the city. You would think by hearing how many friends and family in the U.S. have employed Mexican help in their households as cleaning people that there must be millions of Mexicans working in the U.S. to cover this task and that is probably right.. Upon thinking a little deeper on the topic you might assume that like rocket scientists, there is a finite amount of cleaning people from Mexico to go around and by now there must be none left in Mexico. After all, many of our friends here in Mexico also have cleaning people working at their homes as well. In fact if you drive around the city you will notice that the place is teeming with people cleaning various things. If you venture down to the zocala you will find scores of people waving towels as you drive around the square, urging you to park your car in their area so you can have your car cleaned. There are always people sweeping and mopping all over the city. I am really beginning to think they are all sweeping the same pile of trash. They just keep passing it around the city tag team style.

When the grass pops up between the cracks in our sidewalk in front of our house, we don’t bother to pick up the phone and call someone to clean it up. We don’t even bother to think about cleaning it up ourselves. Why you might ask? We know that it is only a matter of days until our doorbell will ring with someone eager to take that grass out. We had someone come by just a few days ago for that very reason. We agreed on a price $50.00 pesos ($4.21). This particular worker put in a good 2 hours work and when he was finished he rang the bell for his payment. We noted that the walkway was not swept and queried the man who replied, “I don’t sweep walkways, get your housekeeper to sweep it.” Were we witnessing an evolution in the field of sanitation or possibly the emergence of a new division of labor in the Mexican economy? Time will tell. What did happen was that the man left the walk un-swept (he will not be hired in the future), but within hours our doorbell rang again with a women who noted our unkept walkway and offered to sweep it so she could afford to buy much needed medicine for her child.

What has upended my reality in this case is that the Mexicans cleaning houses in the U.S. are simply the overflow of cleaning people in Mexico that have spilled over the border. Mexico is so overstocked with cleaning people that the pressure of all those people (simple physics here) has pushed them northward into Arizona, California, Texas and beyond (some have been found as far away as Canada) Imagine that! 2 illegal border crossings.

I’m thinking all the good cleaning people have stayed in Mexico to be close to family and friends, but if that is true then why does it seem that the whole country is strewn with garbage? Everywhere you go; garbage. It came to my attention when we recently spent a weekend at a beautiful beach near-by. I noticed all the groups of Mexicans with family and friends that had come to be at the beach that day and when they had left, they had also left all their garbage right on the beautiful beach. I mentioned this to our host who surprisingly commented that every morning the Americans who own houses on the beach clean up all the garbage left by the Mexicans! As our host was saying these words I could feel the neurological pathways in my brain twitching and clicking as the sound of new neural pathways like floodgates poured open. The irony and symmetry of it all was too perfect. Americans hiring Mexicans to clean their houses in the U.S. and Mexicans selling beach front property to Americans to clean up their beaches. There is a deeper intelligence at work here. Let’s pay attention!

The Bicycle
In our town you will not find anything resembling a bicycle path. No special lanes with silhouettes of people biking painted on the street, no signage telling you where the path meanders through town. In fact you would be hard pressed to find anyone willing to take the risk of riding a bike. Just recently I noticed the first intersections painted with yellow lines to indicate pedestrian cross walks. Drivers here in Hermosillo are still trying to come to grips with what these painted lines actually mean. You see, under normal circumstances, pedestrians are fair game. I have noticed while crossing busy streets that cars actually speed up as they approach pedestrians. It is my assertion that these new clearly marked crosswalks could well be interpreted by the average driver as an area you would be more likely to find pedestrians for sport.

Once you are out of the city and traveling on the intercity 4 lane high speed divided highway, you are more likely to find bicycle riders. As a rule, the roads on these highways do not have shoulders. What you get are 2 lanes in your direction. If you need to stop for any reason there is no place to put your car. Bicycle riders have overcome this problem in their own unique way. They simply ride their bike into oncoming traffic, usually in the left lane. Many of these people on bikes have them all stacked up with firewood making the experience for someone driving a car that much more profound. I see this often as I drive the 3 hours between Hermosillo and Nogales almost once a month (and never again at night). I think this practice is a form of population control, or a proving out of Darwin’s theory relative to survival of the fittest.

Putting out the “Garbage”
When I arrived in Hermosillo I had 2 garbage pails with wheels and covers. They were nice. Our garbage gets picked up on Tuesdays and Fridays in the early morning. As an average American, I was used to putting out the garbage in the evening so I did not have to crawl out of bed at 6 am to beat the truck the next morning. After being here several months, one evening around 5 pm I put out a garbage pail and at 5:30 pm I noticed the pail was missing, garbage and all. Also of note here in town, if you want to get rid of anything (and I mean anything) all one need do is put it out on the sidewalk overnight. Just about anything and everything will disappear (including garbage and the pail). Who needs special pickup!

The Volkswagen Beetle
No one living in the United States would give this thought a moment of consideration, but after spending any length of time in Mexico you will notice the Volkswagen, the Peoples Car. There are many of them and they are everywhere. I have even seen them used as taxi cabs …… imagine that! God forbid you have luggage. The thought I am referring to is the thought of where do discontinued early model cars go when they die? If you live in North America I can assure you that one place they go is Mexico. Maybe they come here for the weather, or possibly the amazing highway system (I kid, I kid), but whatever the reason, the fact is that if you happen to be looking for parts for a 1932 Volkswagen, I know where you can find gobs of them. The Volkswagen thrives in Mexico, and they are kept alive in many ingenious ways (duct tape was invented here).

Their usefulness is expanded to move beyond mere passenger vehicles; in fact down here they also can be outfitted to function as a pickup truck. I kid you not. I was passed one day on the highway by a “Volkswagen” with the following “upgrades”. At each bumper of the car was an iron pole soaring vertically to the height of the roof of the car. On the top of the car, attached to the vertical poles was a very tall iron roof rack, the sides of which extended another 4-5 feet above the height of the car. Close your eyes and picture this. There was more volume of space in the roof rack than in the entire car. I do not know what the owner of this “stock” car might have used the rack for, but what I do know is the engine in a Volkswagen is a 2 cylinder, air cooled, rear engine, manual transmission. With a full tank of gas and 3 people in the car you would be hard pressed to attain 40 mph downhill. In any case, the Peoples Car thrives here, all model years are available going back to inception.

As an aside, a little know fact is that during Apollo moon missions, it slipped out that the space capsule was no larger than a Volkswagen and to give you a feel for what the astronauts had to endure, image spending 3 days in a Volkswagen with 3 people in it where you ate, slept, pooped etc, which after arriving at the moon, you had 3 more days on the return journey to look forward to. Once news of this got back to Mexico, sales of Volkswagens soared. It was in fact the reason why Volkswagens became so popular here. Mexicans began sleeping and eating and even living in their Volkswagens with families of 8 or more once it was obvious you could go to the moon in one. A small slice of Mexican pride also had it in for those gabachos, wanting to one up them by showing NASA that Mexicans were training for the Mars mission years in advance!