Mexico Culture: Campesina Wisdom

I've been back and forth to the U.S. a couple of times in the last month. Dropping in and out of both cultures has heightened my awareness of the unique qualities of each. In New York I had lunch with a long-time, beloved friend. She urged me to continue writing about the people I meet here in Mexico.

As I begin this New Post, Evangelina immediately comes to mind. I'm just a few months older than she: I just turned 70; she’ll be 70 in December. We are both grandmothers, but my grandson is nine-months old; hers are teenagers. She has worked at the Casa Mariposa for over thirty years. Her youngest daughter, now 32 years old, played in the niches for storing firewood under the kitchen counter.

Evangelina is a short, stocky, strong campesina (countrywoman) with a broad, pleasant, morena (brown) face and large brown, expressive eyes.  Always neatly dressed, her hair is graying, except when her daughter periodically ‘colors’ it. She has a keen sense of play, a vivid imagination, a delightful sense of humor and a generous spirit.

Intelligent, she wanted to go to school, but school wasn’t possible. The couple who built Casa Mariposa over thirty years ago were professors of Social Work from a university in the Midwest.  Each year they brought down groups of students to do field work and improve their Spanish. They all lived at Casa Mariposa and held seminars in the large sala (living room). Although Evangelina couldn't understand a word, the seminars fascinated her. Those years with the visiting students were clearly the high point in her life.

But Evangelina's wisdom doesn't come from education. Her considerable wisdom is campesina wisdom, and it comes from a lifetime spent close to the land and to her family.

Once a week, she helps me with the house. We begin the day by pouring each of us un cafecito (cup of coffee) from beans grown in nearby Uruápan. Then in the timeworn fashion of women everywhere, we lean against the kitchen counter, and we chat about whatever's on our minds. Sometimes we chat about family. Sometimes we discuss the latest happenings in Pátzcuaro. And sometimes, not always, but many times, we talk about our lives, and we reflect on what we've learned about what it means to be human.

When we first arrived, I was puzzled by her periodic assertions that "Todos somos seres humanos" ("We are all human beings"). Over time I have come to realize how devastating to Mexican self-esteem was the never-ending derision of Mexico’s Spanish colonists, who complained that the indigenous peoples were "lazy, ignorant...." Well, you get the idea. Sounds a lot like what some of us in the U.S. have said about African-Americans, doesn't it? And for precisely the same reason—as an insidious means of social control.

Early Spanish accounts, interestingly, describe the indigenous as intelligent, curious and cooperative. In the early stage, monastic orders were charged with educating the brightest of indigenous men to prepare them for ordination, but when both their tutor-monks and the Spanish vice regal government realized that the indigenous seminarians were outshining their Spanish mentors, the program was gradually altered and eventually phased out. At about the same time, Spanish accounts of the indigenous changed: later accounts describe the indigenous people as sullen, stupid, and uncooperative.

Here in the area surrounding Lake Pátzcuaro, Bishop Vasco de Quiroga intervened on behalf of the Purhépecha people—a proud nation never defeated by the Aztecs. In his defense of the Purhépechas from the worst of Spanish excesses, Bishop Quiroga insistently reminded everyone, "Todos somos seres humanos." Tata (Father) Quiroga is held in such high regard by the Purhépechas that he has been nominated for beatification.

But the damage has been done, and so Evangelina asserted to us, strangers in her workplace, "Todos somos seres humanos." It is impossible to relate all I have learned from her during our kitchen chats. Early on, it became evident that her life has not been easy. She spent part of her childhood in an orphanage run by the nuns. She doesn’t complain; she says she liked the order and the discipline.

When Evangelina married a Purhépecha man, she quickly learned that her life would not be easy. She told me, "I had a choice. I could be depressed, or I could decide what I wanted to accomplish. I decided that I wanted all of my children to finish school." And they have. One is an accountant, one is a social worker, one is a teacher, and two work for the government in international trade. I should add that although what Evangelina has accomplished is heroic, she is not alone. These campesina women are the backbone of Mexico. More on that in a later post.

Over time, I’ve pieced the story together. School is not free in Mexico, so there were always school expenses: uniforms, textbooks, and school supplies; fees for traditional dance (balet foklórico) and for sports. Evangelina and her husband live in the house that her husband grew up in. The property is perhaps half an acre—sufficient for a good-sized vegetable garden, fruit (including avocado) trees, and a chicken yard.

In the early years of their marriage, her husband was a fisherman bringing home in his traditional canoa (canoe) Pátzcuaro’s famous white fish, but this was before the water level in Lake Pátzcuaro fell so low that the Lake receded from their land. The good news is that the family has a corn field on the now-exposed lake bed.

As Evangelina explained to me one day with a teasing gleam in her eye, “If one of my children needed money for school expenses—it's not a problem. I've always had eggs from my chickens and fruit from my trees. I’d just take some eggs to sell in the market, or avocados from my trees, or I’d bake tortillas to sell.”

Her entrepreneurial spirit derives from Mesoamerican culture, when a network of trade routes linked marketplaces among Mexico's city-states over two thousand years ago. Evangelina's entrepreneur-ism manifests the daily operation of Mexico's informal economy—the much-debated informal economy that makes up 40% of Mexico's economy overall. Forty percent!

Just after Christmas, we had taken down and stored away a wonderful gallina piñata (piñata in the form of a hen on her nest). But when Evangelina saw that we had removed the piñata, she lamented, “Oh, you think that the gallina (hen) is only a piñata for Christmas. You don’t realize that the gallina is the symbol for the domesticity that means a contented family.” Needless to say, we restored the gallina to her place of honor hanging in an arched opening between the breakfast and dining rooms.

Just recently, Evangelina observed to me, out of nowhere, that all of us are the people we present to the world, but we are also deeply private spiritual beings as well. Then she added, “I feel that I am like the leña (firewood); first, it burns brightly as it provides heat for the family, but as it burns the leña becomes smaller and smaller. I look at my clothes and see that they are too big, and I say, ‘Hmm, I am getting smaller. Like the leña, I have done my major work in raising my family, now my body is diminishing…just like the leña’.”

The roots of Evangelina’s identification with a natural process (la naturaleza) reach deep into the Mesoamerican culture that is the substratum of Mexican culture. This ancient culture presupposes a close link between man and nature, such that man and nature are mutually obligated each to the other. It is this reciprocal relationship that is the basis for the idea of mutual obligation—reciprocal relationships—that remains a primary value of traditional Mexican culture to this day.

I wish I could communicate the calm acceptance and bemused detachment with which Evangelina uttered these words. Where else would I ever have heard such a description of the aging process? Nowhere that I know. It was as if she were an interested, kindly bystander to this process called ‘aging’.

When I began taking Spanish, my teacher commented that the Purhépecha women on the colectivos (vans used for public transportation in our rural area) have a deep sense of their own ‘place’. My teacher said, “They get on with all their baskets of things to sell, and they make themselves comfortable. The rest of us accommodate them.”

Reed has written about the verb estar (to be in the sense of location), and in an earlier post, I told the story of the young American woman visiting in Oaxaca. One morning she bought a breakfast tortilla from a vendor on the street, who asked where she was from. Our friend replied, “From the United States,” then watched spellbound as the woman drew herself up proudly before announcing, “Ya estás en mi tierra” (Now you are on my land). My land, my place. I belong to this land; this land belongs to me.  This sense of place gives rise to a profound self-confidence unknown to us in the 'developed' world.

It was with this certitude that Evangelina told me about the burning leña as metaphor for her aging body. Such is the wisdom of the campesina.  I don't know about you, but I can use more of this wisdom in my life.