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For the
ten days we’d been chronicling Jalisco, this severe, fascinating place
had been seeping into our systems, establishing itself inextricably.
Ironic, really; while we’d been following, step by step, the
yearly ‘Journey Home’ of Martina Guzman to the small, alpine village
of Jesus Maria, impossible outsiders struggling with the language, the
customs, the proprieties… we were being ‘Mexicoed.’
By journey’s
end, we’d seen the travel poster version of Old Mexico; the agave
fields, the cloudless vistas, the splashy fiestas, the broad, striated
mountainsides; we’d interviewed cowboys, tequila makers, small-town
mayors, mariachi musicians…
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More than that, we’d spent time sharing
and experiencing the daily lives of individuals; Martina’s
eighty-seven year-old grandmother, who’s lived in the same small house
since the Criada wars of the Twenties; two small girls hawking candy
outside their mother’s tiny food mart; an exuberant fourth-grade
classroom who couldn’t wait to share themselves with counterparts at
Burton School in Detroit. The
power of this ancient land, so regularly dismissed or misunderstood, or
worse, resigned to Madison Avenue images of talking chihuahuas or Frito
Banditoes, had become a reality to us.
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We’d felt some of the magic that keeps tugging at the
hundred or so Mexicantown residents, who, like Martina and her
family, return to Jalisco, year after year… it’s not the
pristine mountain air, not the omnipresent sunshine, not the
ageless art, not even the sincerity and simplicity of a culture
which has survived the cataclysm of Western expansion.
To understand the concept that is Mexico, even a shred of the mindset,
requires more. By
journey’s end, we’d taken the first step.
We’d been Mexicoed…and it was obvious to all of us,
but surprising only to those of us without roots down here…
that we’d be back. |
