On the highway to Mexico City, our bus takes us alongside great agricultural fields: agribusiness. Smaller, family-worked fields are also visible. Farm 'technology'—I can't think of a better word—spans two centuries.
Time itself seems altered as we take in the sight of plows pulled by ox teams or horse teams. Modern tractors pull plows in other fields. In Mexico the ancient and the modern live—they co-exist—side by side.
The bus speeds past fields where laborers are picking product—radishes, maybe?—from plants with deep green leaves close to the ground. In many fields, a man or two works with a manual farm tool—hoe or machete. The poignancy of this faithful trabajo (work) tugs at me. Setting aside the timeless quality of the men’s labor, I can’t help wondering about the efficiency of their traditional methods.
We see a variety of farm conveyances. It seems we’re watching a split screen showing two centuries. Horse-drawn farm carts loaded with harvest plod steadily down a nearly empty road running parallel to the highway. A few miles later, modern pick-up trucks outfitted to carry farm products to market pass our bus on the highway.
We pass both irrigated fields and fields lacking irrigation. We pass an area where pueblos creep up the sides of cerros (hills), undoubtedly to preserve productive farm land. We pass immense white-roofed greenhouses where fruits and vegetables are grown both for domestic consumption and for export: hydroponic lettuce, berries of all kinds, and much more.
Then we observe a curious phenomenon. With unsettling regularity and set right smack in the middle of large, fallow, open fields stand modern, multi-storied buildings. Their size and style shout ‘Multinational Corporation’. Few, if any, cars are in the parking lots. It’s difficult to know what purpose these buildings serve. Signage is minimal. Warehouses? Could be. It remains a mystery.
Changing buses in Mexico City, we head for Cuernavaca, which has been a weekend and vacation destination for Mexico City’s wealthy and landed classes since Colonial times. On the road to Cuernavaca, we observe a transition.
The modest pueblos we passed entering Mexico City slowly yield to increasingly visible wealth. Upscale fraccionamientos (large subdivisions) hint at the luxury of homes nestled safely inside secure walls.
Arriving in Cuernavaca, I feel like a country mouse in the Big City. Capital of the State of Morelos, Cuernavaca is another world—another tile in the cultural mosaic that is today’s Republic of Mexico.
When we were new arrivals in Pátzcuaro, our Mexican friend Norma observed that “Mexican culture has many levels, and each level is rich.” Each time I encounter yet another facet of Mexican culture, my appreciation for the wisdom of her observation grows.
A Connecticut friend wrote that he’s eager to read my description of Cuernavaca. His mother is Mexican-American, and he recalls spending summers on his uncle’s ranch just outside Cuernavaca: “We rode horses to the mercado (market) in Cuernavaca for comida (mid-day main meal).”
I’ve heard similar comments from Patzcuarenses (Pátzcuaro born). In both pueblo and state capital, it is safe to say that the days of tying horses to hitching posts are gone forever—although I hasten to add that horses are still used regularly to deliver firewood to houses in Pátzcuaro.
The truth is, I can’t write about Cuernavaca right now. Our time there was a private visit to renew—and extend to new family members—a cross-cultural and cross-language friendship that goes back almost twenty years. A valued friendship was warmly, joyously, inclusively renewed. In today’s world, it doesn’t get much better than that.
But it doesn’t leave me with a lot to write about Cuernavaca either. Instead, I find myself feeling the profound difference between a modern Mexican city—perhaps especially one as cultured and beautiful as Cuernavaca—and Pátzcuaro, where we live. It has taken days for me to be able to articulate the feeling, but it has to do with how residents in the two locales regard time and space.
Reed has written about how in the global world the Internet and social networking tools erase ‘time’ and ‘space’. As a corporate consultant, I participated in real-time video conferences attended by people located around the globe. ‘Time’ was ‘now’ regardless of what ‘time zone’ local clocks showed. 'Space’ was defined by the computer ‘screen’ we all watched, regardless of where we were physically located.
Cuernavaca strikes me as a modern, possibly even global city more or less decoupled from the land in a way that ‘frees’ the notion of time from the seasonally-based agricultural cycle. Once ‘liberated’ from the land, time becomes more ‘progressive’. People are more inclined to schedule X-event to occur on Y-date at Z-hour.
In contrast, life in Pátzcuaro is still inextricably linked to the land (‘la tierra’). Now we await the arrival of the spring rains, expected any day. Campesinos wait for the rains to arrive so they can begin planting maíz (corn).
Yesterday morning I heard cohetes (rockets) going off at 5:00 AM, calling the faithful to mañanitas (morning prayers). Today I found out the cohetes were for the Fiesta of San Isidro Labrador, patron saint of farmworkers (Labradores).
But there’s more. Several people described San Isidro to me not only as the patron saint of farmworkers, but as patron also of the rains and of the earth. I take notice whenever reference is made to natural elements. I’ve come to expect a connection to Mesoamerican culture.
My vigilance is rewarded. Tlaloc is the Aztec god of rain. Coatlicue is the Aztec goddess of the earth and of fertility. One might be forgiven for imagining that the Catholic Saint Isidro of Farmworkers rests atop this ancient Mesoamerican belief. It's one more dramatic example of syncretism—the intermingling of two or more belief systems.
It was all beginning to make sense. Last Friday I had passed by Plaza Chica (Little Plaza, or commercial square) on my way to run an errand at the Post Office. Streets on two sides of the Plaza were closed to traffic, and the large area in front of the Teatro Emperador (Emperor Theater) was filled with young Purhépecha women wearing traditional dress for fiestas.
A banda was playing traditional Mexican music. Dancers were performing the Torito (Little Bull), beloved balet folclórico (traditional folk dance). Men and women on horseback watched the proceedings. Men dressed as women (as for Carnival) clowned around while passing around a box and asking spectators for donations.
It was the first day of the Fiesta of San Isidro. The sights and sounds of fiesta—the vibrant colors, traditional banda music, dancers and dances—are a vivid reminder of the sensual connection between Pátzcuaro’s daily, cultural rhythm and this pueblo’s ancient relationship to the land.
The Mexican writer Maria Luisa Puga observes that Patzcuarenses live as if time and space were ‘naturally’ one. In this place called Pátzcuaro, it is time for the rains to arrive.
It is time to plant seeds in Fertile Mother Earth where they can receive Tlaloc's life-giving rain. So it is that in this time and place, the cycle of life continues…as it was millennia ago in Mesoamerican culture, as it is today, and as it shall forever be....
No comments:
Post a Comment