After All, This Is Mexico
I'm sitting behind a small desk in the English department of a Ciudad Juárez politécnico -- a sort of combination senior vocational high school cum junior college -- across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas.
All sorts of wonderful experiences have come my way in this mysterious romantic world that the savants insist in calling "language acquisition."
At this very moment two Mexican coworkers come sauntering in. After a perfunctory exchange of Spanish greetings -- including the ubiquitous "Juárez Soul-Shake" -- they drape themselves around the nearest pieces of available furniture and carry on with whatever subject has them turned on at the moment.
At first I find these men's accents unintelligible.
Surely both of them are Torreonenses. From Torreón, Coahuila.
I know for a fact that the younger man, Ricardo, is. Because he has told me so. Perhaps his older friend Marco is, too.
The way they are carrying on there in our office, as they nonchalantly prepare their lunches of sopas or dried instant pasta bought from the nearest Colosso superette, turns into an exercise in applied linguistics.
At first one and then the other will leisurely throw his lasso of burbling, liquid sound around whatever object or topic catches his fancy, and then with the same unhurried skill, yank his target up close for better scrutiny.
For a good ten minutes I am lost in awe as I try my feeble best to grope around here and there, hoping to identify some remote common ancestor of this fascinating pattern of speech.
I am almost certain that perhaps unconsciously, these men are recreating a remote era of history -- long before modern Spanish as we know it. Perhaps an early form of some gypsy dialect.
Of only one thing can I feel sure, rightly or wrongly. This manner of speaking has an old European ring to it. I am quite sure it isn't one of the known Native American languages.
Nor for that matter, is it a variety of the colorful argot of the legendary Tin Tan whose statue is next the market place. For all that, Tin Tan is surely a dapper figure in his zoot suit with a turkey feather sticking out. And his compadre is none other than Don Quixote, who, lance in hand, stands bravely defying the "Colosos of the North" from his lonely guard post at the northernmost edge of the Bulevard Francisco Villa. Tin Tan: "The Pachuco!"
Indeed this whole scene in our office begins to remind me of the movie "El Bulto" -- "The Kickable Shapeless Blob." We'd watched it in video in our class in Contemporary Mexican Literature at a branch campus of Mexico's Autonomous University. When the hero -- an intrepid press photographer wounded by government thugs during a demonstration in 1971 -- wakes up after a coma of twenty years or so, he discovers that the then-head of the hated American CIA is now President George Bush.
Perhaps the news is so unsettling that the poor man suffers a relapse, for at one point in the movie the hero's mother begins to sing him a haunting lullaby, but in a dialect even our highly qualified female professor couldn't identify for sure. Catalan? Basque? Who could say? After all, this is Mexico!
After ten minutes of fruitless mental effort I gradually come to realize that the main topic under discussion by my coworkers is that of artesian water wells that spew forth hot mineral water with alleged curative properties, and that these wells are to be found not only in Ciudad Juárez but also in Torreón.
Torreón, like Juárez itself, was one of the most fought-over pieces of real estate during that long savage phase of the Mexican Revolution that didn't end, up here in the North, until the last time the two cities changed hands between the warring armies of two contending generals in the spring of 1929.
By this late date both sides had bombers being flown by North American anglo pilots who callously dropped their lethal loads for "fun and profit." Pilots in the hire of the rebels reputedly earned five hundred dollars per week. Those killing Mexicans for the federales supposedly earned a thousand a week.
General Calles, whose embryonic bomber squadron rained terror on Torreón in the Spring of 1929 -- giving this unhappy city the dubious distinction of becoming a "historical first" for this part of the hemisphere -- as his eighteen thousand-man column clashed with the twenty-two thousand man rebel contingent under General Escobar, who in turn was backed by the corpulent Sonorense, General Manzo, and others.
The final battle, one of the longest and bloodiest of the Mexican Revolution, actually took place at Jiménez and La Reforma, Chihuahua, leaving a bloody toll estimated by at least one contemporary Ciudad Chihuahua newspaper of four thousand dead and eleven thousand wounded in its wake.
Torreon, Coahuila, across from Gomez Palacios, Durango.
As recently as March, 1995, you could look out of the window of your southbound passenger train as it trundled across the bridge between the two cities, and ended the eighteen hour eleven-dollar trip from Ciudad Juárez, and still see the enormous monument to Christ the King in stately majesty, on a nearby mountain rivaling anything erected by a bunch of Brazilian guys down in Rio.
Torreón, home town of the region known as La Laguna, birth place of such current border media personalities as Anabel Bonita and Mario Gómez, a city one of whose squares has a full-size statue of Padre Miguel Pro. Father Pro, a martyr to the insatiable anti-Catholic hatred of General Plutarco Elías Calles, who in turn was a darling of at least two U.S. Republican regimes, those of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover.
Torreón, paradoxically, the site of one of the main -- if not the only -- Moslem mosque in Mexico, a result of the strong Middle Eastern influence brought by waves of immigrants of Syrian and Palestinian origin...
Well, at any rate back to the conversation . . .!
Having worked as a warehouseman and receiving clerk for a number of years in a water well supply company in Denver's north side, my coworkers' present conversation about medicinal artesian water wells interests me no end.
I bravely wade in, and the two men, Ricardo the young janitor, and Marco our seasoned senior maintenance man, cheerfully bid me welcome and with an unaffected courtesy switch to a more conventional style of Spanish. I am able to learn a lot from both of them.
Finally their break is over. They have to go.
But the main thing I've learned, or perhaps relearned for the zillonith time, is that neither I nor anyone else can ever really get to "know" Mexico. And, yes, that statement includes the Mexicans themselves. Born and raised in Mexico of Mexican parents.
Anyone, of either Mexican birth or descent, who is so rash as to claim that to them has been given the insight to say "I can tell you all about Mexico, because I know all about Mexico," is, in the biblical sense of the word, a fool.
Why?
Because to try to define "Mexico" is like trying to define "jazz" -- or as one jazz great is alleged to have stated: "If you gotta ask then you won't understand."
For Mexico is literally unknowable - not by Indian, or Mestizo, or European, Middle Eastern, Oriental, African, nor Anglo-Saxon -- for Mexico has been moulded in varying degrees by all the above. And all in turn flavored with a heavy dose of the romance and orthodoxy of early Spanish Medeival Roman Catholicism mixed with a tough, durable, viral strain of Manichaenism, plus just a dash or two of gnosticism and varying echoes of pre-christian Native American beliefs.
And so we might say that while Mexico is none of these things, yet in varying degrees Mexico itself is all of them.
"Hey, then, Dennis. In that case, what's your claim to fame?"
Well, yep! You're right: I'm guilty as charged. Because all this is nothing more nor less than the opinion of your latest "biblical fool" -- no wiser than his peers!
As concrete facts go, the most unshakeable fact of all is this one:
Mexico simply is.
Period.
And therein lies the romance.
I swig the last drop of my umteenth cup of Chihuahua-packaged café combate, shuffle a few more papers and file folders and head for the door.
What I've grown to think of as my love affair with Mexico has lasted now nearly half a century.
And, do you want to know something?
It just keeps getting better....
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