Pantanos, aprendizaje y profundidad: Hogares y homes

Michigan: Today is it very frigid in Queretaro. Yesterday the heat exhausted me and today the cold is making my fingers very resistent to typing this right now. Reminds me of Michigan. Just like the clay pumpkins being sold on the sidewalk or realizing that the trees will only fade slightly as the dry season sets in but will never blaze aflame as in Michigan this time of year. Sometimes I think I would like to go home sooner than later but then I remember that bitter snow and think otherwise. Luckily, I think I may have found a job that I would love to have in the south of Ecuador. Still, Michigan remains my home.

Guanajuato: To really live in a place, you have to experience it at its greatest depths and in turn, experience your very self at your own depths. It involves love and suffering and all of the sentiment and pensamientos in between. You slide from one extreme to the other, until you realize that there is really not too much difference between the two or even between the middle-area shades. A few years ago I stayed in Guanajuato for a month, but it wasn’t until recently that I really felt that I had lived there. Nestled in that pueblo, which is nestled among hills and colored cement, is a community, a family, which I had the great pleasure of joining, albeit only for a week. Once I had a great learning experience related to the concept of perspective that is especially apt for cases such as Guanajuato and the community that I am writing of. For instance, to middle aged extranjeros who are studying at Escuela Mexicana and staying in Casa Mexicana, who pass Bar Fly daily in their comings and goings from school and cafes and home, probably perceive it as nothing more than a bohemian bar, which, in all honesty, it is. Still, perhaps what they note most is the reggae music, the scruffy youth drinking on the balconies at noon, the artists and musicians who roam to and fro. Fresas don’t even consider the place, I imagine. When I first came to Guanajuato almost 3 years ago, I thought: Wow, this bar plays Sublime?! It’s a great find for young kids, for sure, but I was also slightly repelled by the debauchery that took place there and sometimes felt a bit out of place.

But now, I have a unique insight into this bar, which is granted to the aforementioned family and their friends. This is due to the fact that the bar keep graciously offered us hospedaje for a week after we showed up with all of our belongings one night with no place else to go. A couple of the nights we slept in the room of one of the bartenders, but the others, right there mero in the bar. As our luck would have it, during the Cervantino festival the bar didn’t close until 4 am. This really meant 5 am (after convincing people that the music had, indeed, stopped). This really meant 6 am (after counting the money, putting down the beds, kicking the very last kids out). We made friends with a few of the bartenders, the others dealt with us politely or curiously but in the end we got to know them all. The dynamics of the group are interesting. Most of the workers are from Guanajuato and most of the regulars are foreigners. Transience permeates the atmosphere and makes every encounter all the more intense.

Some days we only wandered between the bar and the café, less than a block away, where regulars and bar and café employees mix and eat and smoke for hours. Other days we walked a few more blocks, but never leaving the sphere of the Bar Fly-Santo-Casa Tomada community. I thank all the folks there with all of my heart, especially Yaros for that pinche smile, Uriel for his awkwardness and understanding, Leo for his pats on the back, Galo simply for his presence (Te lo dije!!), and the rest for their smiles, energy, and welcoming spirits. What depths we all fell to and rose from and flung ourselves back to, what a home.

In Guanajuato we also saw a beautiful theatre performance at a collective artist’s space, called La Casa Tomada. Dancing and theatrics and video screens flowed together like icebergs, jagged yet fluid.

Leaving Guanajuato, we took what must have been the slowest city bus in history. It moved even slower than history and the entire city of Guanajuato scraped and dragged over us. It felt like hours, a lifetime, an eternity and I must have thought a million times about jumping off the bus but realized that then I would just be suspended in that eternal gravitating force that surrounds Guanajuato. A sad voice and guitar are on the bus, they are singing, “hay que saber perder.” I put on my sunglasses and bite my lip.

Querétaro: After the intensity of Guanajuato, Queretaro was like returning to the womb. Renato met us at the Central, carried our things, asked us how we were. Such simple encounters can mean so much. He took us home, his mother, as always, fed us and took care of Abigail when she got sick. Queretaro is a home where I may not fall into black holes, but where my laundry is washed and folded and where we drink chocolate milk in the morning with our fruit and honey and where we watch television and listen to music on lazy Sunday mornings. Sometimes you can’t go home, and sometimes you can.

Mérida: I am always grateful for experiences that I could not have otherwise had without knowing certain folks or by being in the right space at the right time. Renato submitted a short story to a literature conference for university students taking place in Merida, Yucatan and was accepted. He invited me to come along and, Merida being one of my favorite cities, of course I jumped at the chance. Though I almost got kicked off the bus in the beginning (they thought there wasn’t enough space), everything turned out fine.

We traveled hugging the Gulf of Mexico, only stopping for gas and bathroom breaks and once to eat lunch. At some point I woke up while we were somwhere in the middle of Mexico, a place without names or purpose to me. I had been dreaming and I woke to an eerie and dreamlike landscape, an ocean of fog. The land rushed by in silence, past palapas that sell fried chicken and fish, palapas that sell coca cola and cigarettes, palapas that sell internet and copies, palapas where clothes hang to dry and babies sleep and machetes are sharpened before dawn. I think we were in Tabasco, a long, sticky, salty state, where marshes met us on either side of the road, only interupted by graceful snow-white birds with long necks and aluminum-sided shacks. Sometimes the land disappeared entirely beneath the fog. 24 hours in the bus from Queretaro to Merida. People kept repeating that- 24 horas- and it didn’t really hit me until I was violently ill for 12 hours on the way there. But, as soon as we hit Merida, la verdadera cura, I felt completely fine. Que raro.

In Merida, we went to as little of the conference as necessary to free up plenty of time for the beach and cenotes and wandering around the city. Most folks from Central Mexico rarely get the chance to travel so far south and took advantage of the opportunity (and also to make plenty of jokes about Yucatecans, mostly regarding the size of their heads). Puerto Progreso isn’t the most tranquil or clean beach (it is a shipping port, after all), but wading out into the Gulf, a crystalline green with a clear blue sky over head, salt water and warm breezes, felt perfect. We were able to get to the beach twice. Another day, as soon as Renato finished reading his story, we took off for a nearby cenote. Cenotes are little fresh water holes that are all over, above and under ground, in Yucatan. We went to one that was in an arqueological zone, where they let me enter for free even after they noticed that my Mexico student id was no longer vigente. There was no way of knowing how deep the cenote was but some stones around the edge allowed us to rest a little in the water. The water was deep green, without depth, covered half way by lily pads, and the water was fresh and cool.

During the night, after the intense heat of day had let up some, we walked around the city. One night we watched Yucatecan dance and trova in the Parque Santa Lucia, a beautiful display of tradition and Yucatecan culture. I didn’t get my hamaca, but I’m sure I’ll be back. Ah, Merida, I would love to make you my home.