Pulular

Gente: The Cervantino is Guanajuato´s annual, several-week long arts festival that takes place every October. The festival officially began yesterday and now the city is bubbling with tourists, artists, musicians, journalists, police, and us. Events range from pricey ballets to spontaneous street movement to bars out-drink-specialing eachother in ridiculous ways. Video cameras and VIP pass-wearers stand out all over the city, preparing for the intensity of the complete immersion of the festival. Even though I lack the resources to attend most of the "official" events, it´s still a good time to be in the city.

Abejas: We´ve been working, busy as bees, on the Beehive project. Showing the posters to people and talking about them is moving along well. We´ve got some presentations lined up and we meet new people every day who are interested in what we´re doing. When Amolia took a flyer to a popular bar for young travelers, the owner promptly took one, left, and returned a few minutes later with 20 copies of the flyer at twice the size. A good sign. Our first real presentation (maybe even with a projector!) will be this Saturday morning and will be our testing event to practice our presenting and guiding of discussion. It will be a step up from just throwing the posters down on the UAC campus (in Querétaro) and waiting for people to come by and talk to us, which also was fun and productive but in a different way.

Indexing: Another productive use of my time is trading Abigail Spanish practice/tutoring for a beer or a snack. Too bad she's such a quick learner or the deal might really pay off.

Literatura: I can see now, as I crawl through El Laberinto de la Soledad, why Octavio Paz was so unwelcomed and heavily criticized by the intellectuals in Mexico when he first released this book. In the first chapter, he notes what he observes as the differences between people in Mexico, people in the U.S. and "los pachucos," Mexicans who leave Mexico to live and work in the United States. He describes the pachucos basically as social denigrates, who forget their own, "old" culture and refuse to embrace or even become a part of the new culture. This, Paz says, leads them to become like shadows, without substance, hiding behind their own resentment for both cultures and ultimately, themselves. This also leads the pachucos to act out in agression, which becomes a fundamental part of their identity. Paz also had interesting ideas about the differences between the "north americans" and Mexico. Although he makes comments such as that North Americans drink to forget and that Mexicans drink to confess, the most significant difference he notices is that in the north, people are "abierta," open. And in Mexico, "cerrada," closed.

In the second chapter, Paz goes into great depth and detail about the closedness of Mexicans, and the masks they hide behind to prevent anyone from discovering who or what they are. He says that for Mexicans the greatest fear is that someone will get past your defenses, beyond the máscara. This affects familial relations, work, education, love and pretty much every aspect of life. Later, he goes on and on about the ways and historical reasons that Mexicans hide themselves from others, refusing to assert an identity and so they become lost in their surroundings, completely complicit in becoming a "fondo," a background. He says that while some people walk, Mexicans scurry. And also that Mexicans utilize "la mentira," the lie, as a fundamental part of their verbal communication. No wonder his book didn't make people, especially Mexicans, feel that great. His ideas are interesting to me but his approach doesn't seem to be the best if he was trying to get Mexicans motivated to analyze themselves (which he states early on in the book). Still, I've only read two chapters and I know the next ones move into more broader aspects of the Mexican culture, rather than focusing on psycology and semantics.

La rosa de los vientos

Brillante: Guanajuato still amazes me with its colors. Despite the otherwise normalcy of a small, colonial Mexican city, I feel as if I've stepped into an explosion of shades and tones. My eyes aren't accustomed to seeing such a wide range of color and it makes me wonder why people limit themselves, or are limited, to colors that come in a rainbow or a box of crayons. Haven't they witnessed how rain water, steadily washing away paint over years, adds a subtle shadow to a cobalt-colored wall? Or how the rust from a gate adds an extra element to a maroon home? Colors are so much more than what are eyes can perceive, I've been trying to catch many of them with a photographic device that is even more limited in its capacities. Luckily, our eyes reflect.

Préstame tu maquina del tiempo

Mañanas: I love the calm of mornings, which usually begin with a plate of fruit, a bit of yogurt, a small cup of coffee, or the occasional sweet chocolate milk or banana licuado. Renato usually puts loud music on while he gets ready for school and when he leaves, I go through his hundreds of cds. On a recent tranquil morning, I listened to the discography of Rodrigo Gonzalez (imagine a Mexican version of Bob Dylan), while reading Octavio Paz´s El Laberinto de la Soledad, along with my trusty diccionario. I think I actually spent more time looking through my dictionary, fascinated by how meanings connect to other words and expand into more meanings and create a whole web of ideas, sensations and possibilities. While I was looking at the multiple meanings of "extraviado," Rodrigo, in his gruff Chilango voice, sings "ha perdido su camino"- which fit perfectly into Paz's sentiment.

Familia: Renato´s family is amazing. They let us stay in their home for 2 weeks without ever asking for anything or seeming to be bothered at all. His mother, Marcela, cooked us ample and delicious breakfasts on the weekends, filled the table with fruit, tortillas, yogurt, honey, soup, quesadillas and homemade salsa for lunch, made us warm chocolate milk before bed and made us toast and tea in bed when our stomachs were hurting. Gaby, the youngest sister, sings loudly for most of the time she is in the house, practicing for the rock group she sings with. Martin, dad, usually keeps to himself but when his favorite futbol team, America, wins he´s in a good mood for days and will tell jokes and talk with everyone. On the weekends, Martin´s family gathers at his mother´s house and Marcela gets together with her beautiful group of sisters for a day-long lunch. The entire family is lovely and friendly, and they always make me feel like part of the family when I visit. When I asked Renato if it was any problem for them, he assured me that though they are a humble family, they were happy to take care of us because simply, that´s what people do. Ah, Mexico, who would want to leave you?

Things we take for granted: We are driving down the dimly-let, wet, Calle San Diego, looking for a birthday party for the sister of a friend of a friend (in Mexico, if there´s a party, everyone is invited) after losing the car that we were following. We know the address: 109. On the right side of the street we see 175 and the numbers appear to be lowering. Ok, so we know which side of the street it´s on, at least. Driving further along, we pass through all of the 100s and never see 109. So, we keep on driving and low and behold the numbers start back at 200 and are lowering again, but this time the odds and evens have switched sides of the street. Then the numbers jump erratically: 205, 147, 212, 27. We decide looking for the address is no longer a good idea and decide to go back to where we heard loud music coming from a house. Tony runs into the house because it´s too dark to see if its the right place from outside and of course we should have trusted our first instinct- go where the music´s the loudest and forget numbers.

Vas a Queretaro?

Sol: Everything in Queretaro is orange and yellow and the shines hot hot hot. The city is familiar, but not too much so because my memory continually plays tricks on me. It´s both nice and funny to see random folks I met over 2 years ago, who must wonder at my continual passings-through. I hang out at the university regularly and still tell people that No, I don´t study here- but I did 2 years ago. They don`t mind. I don't feel much time has passed really, things move slowly here. And I enjoy this immensely. Solo quiero irme despacio, with one foot falling at a time, being carried forward only by natural momentum and falling contentedly where it may. I am happy doing just one thing a day and letting the rest of my day's time fall around it. Like when we walked to the arcos, Queretaro's ancient aqueduct, that was a day for me, from there I could stare at them for hours, happy as a cat on a warm, stone wall. Me dice un hombre pasando por donde me quedo sentado que tengo ojos de gato, igual que el.

Las mananitas: I was lucky to pass my birthday in Mexico. A delicious, round, walnut-and cherry-covered cake and mango flan. My Mexican mother, Marcela, and her daughter, Gaby, singing me the Mexican birthday song, while dad snaps pictures with a disposible camera. I blow out one big, red candle and cut the cake. Later, friends bring wine and tequila, which puts me to sleep nicely. I am really getting used to, and enjoying, going to bed at a decent hour, must be them birthdays and how they keep on comin´.

Palabras: My Spanish rises and falls, I forget simple words and remember silly ones. My best purchase so far has been a Spanish dictionary, designed for middle-school students but good enough for me. I can´t contribute this entirely to my dictionary, but this morning I wrote a letter in Spanish. I gave it to a friend for corrections and the most correcting he did was taking out a few commas and suggesting a different word in one place. Well, that felt good. Now to work on speaking.

Luciernaga, luces mas contenta: Last weekend we went out to the country with the family of a friend's. There they have a tiny garden that is somehow filled with every type of fruit and all kinds of flowers and vegetables as well. We wandered through, fighting millions of relentless mosquitoes, tasting apples here and pomegranates there and the smallest baby tomatoes and the biggest, juiciest blackberries. We try to play poker but move quickly to black jack. Pancho's dad likes to insist that he won. We move to another cement square nearby, for pulque and elotes. The pulque is sour and delicious, the elotes are blackened by fire on the outside and blanketed with limon and chile on the inside. Elotes and pulque are good precursors to jumping on a small, black horse named El Cantante. We ride around for a little while, my horse sings for his yegua but can never seem to catch up. Although it gets chilly at night, the wind in the back of the pick up truck during the ride back feels good.

Monterrey

North: Monterrey, in my mind, is like almost any other large, sprawling, impersonal city. At the same time, we met amazing people there who truly made our stay worth it. Our host, Irais, offered us a lovely sunlit living room floor to sleep on. Sebastian made us pasta and supplied us with endless amounts of Swiss chocolate. We might have done better to just stay home and cook because in the city we wandered indecisively up and down the same streets, finding mostly fast food, shoe stores and internet cafes that were without internet. Yet, we were greatly rewarded on our first day though when our wandering brought us to a magnificent Frida Kahlo exhibit, only 30 pesos for students, at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MARCO). I on-and-off hitched onto a tour and learned more about her work and life, so much tragedy and beauty that at the end of her life, according to our guide, Frida said "Vivi, y vivi intensamente. Ame, y ame intensamente. Pero, espero no regresar." I really enjoyed reading some of her letters, too. In one, she tells her doctor her opinion of "Gringolandia" after she'd spent some time in New York. She said the thing that truly bothered her about "gringos" was their hypocrisy, their endless ambition and blood thirsty desire to be "somebody." She said, "I don't want to be anybody" Me either, Frida. A tremendous tormenta delayed our departure from Monterrey, but as with most fast and heavy rains, no harm was done.

la fuerza de gravedad

Distance: Watching the earth roll out from under the tracks of a train or the wheels of a bus, travelling at the speed of gravity, is a good way to learn distance. Airplanes, phone calls and emails can make distance seem obsolete, but as we travelled for an entire day just through Texas, the land stretched out like a drying hide, I could appreciate travel and communication in new ways. Even after arriving to Mexico, I feel much further from Michigan than I have before. 35 hours by Amtrak to San Antonio.

San Antonio: It shocked me in a way to come across the Alamo while meandering through the downtown of the city of San Antonio. In my mind, the Alamo was always crumbling and dusty, sitting out in the desert, surrounded only by even more dusty land. But, no. Instead it sits pretty, surrounded by green gardens, well-lit at night, and directly across from Ripley´s Believe it or Not, a Haegen-Daaz ice cream shop, and a robotic Davy Crockett amusement ride. And instead of desert, office buildings, busy streets and department stores surround this building that sticks mythologically in the American psyche, when in real life, to me, it amounts to a Disney World attraction, in both its false construction and its atmosphere. We found the River Walk to be a lovlier part of San Antonio and we walked it both at night, tranquil and quiet, and in the morning, greener and tourist-ridden. In the morning we took our breakfast tacos (something all the Texans in New York told me they missed most about Texas) and tequila down to the river and made a nice breakfast out of it before hopping on a greyhound, headed across the border.

La Frontera: Crossing into Mexico by land was considerably less a hassle than what I remember from the airport. The bus stops, U.S. citizens get off the bus, run large parcels through the scanner and pay 23 dollars for the visas (and an automatic 6 months, no less) and back on the bus. Making things even easier, the Greyhound tooks us right to Nuevo Laredo´s main bus terminal and within 7 minutes we were on another bus bound for Monterrey. Things move swiftly moving south.

Cosas

En mi bolsa: Ropa, pasta de dientes, lentes, libros.

En mis manos: Una guitarra, un libro, un bolígrafo.

En mi mente: Pensamientos, dudas, esperanzas, recuerdos.

Nubes Tenues

Lengua: Necesito practicar mi espanol. Durante el ano pasado he lo estado perdiendo poco a poco, especialmente los sonidos y como formar mi boca en una manera para producir palabras comprensibles. Escribir o leer, estoy mas o menos bien. Pero hablar, es algo diferente. No quiero que me digan, -"Te ha comido la lengua el gato?" Que pena, pero pronto hablaremos hermanas, no?