Mexico City: Reading Circle, Friendship and Bacalao

Reed and I are fortunate to have been invited to join a Reading Circle that meets one Wednesday a month, led by one of Mexico's best known men of letters. In the spirit of the season, for December he selected El principito, "The Little Prince."

Mexico takes the Advent season, the four Sundays leading up to Christmas, very seriously. The Saint's Day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Patron Saint of Mexico, is celebrated on December 12. Beginning December 16, Posadas, commemorating Joseph and Mary's Journey to Bethlehem, are held on the nine evenings preceding Christmas, during which devout families make a novena by reciting the rosary on each of the nine nights; in traditional communities, young people taking the role of Joseph and Mary knock on neighbors' doors and, rebuffed at every house, continue their search for an inn; all this is, of course, followed by neighborhood and family fiestas. Pastorelas are performed throughout Advent. Suffice it to say, not a whole heckuva lot gets done work-wise during the month of December in Mexico!

So it's not surprising that the five women members of the Reading Circle decided to get together the evening before the December meeting to prepare Bacalao, the dried cod stew that is Mexico's traditional Christmas Eve family dinner. What a pleasure for me to participate in a women's get-together!

Women Get Together in the Kitchen

As she greeted us, our hostess Ángeles handed us each a white chef's apron, and we got right to work. I learned how to roast tomatoes on the comal, the traditional Mexican skillet used to prepare tortillas. But I learned that the comal is also useful for roasting tomatoes and chiles poblano.

Comals toasting tortillas and a 'roast' of mushrooms, small onions and chiles.
Six-burner stove tops are not uncommon in Mexican kitchens.  
(Photo: © Alvin Starkman 2008, in
Authentic Mexican cuisine at Oaxaca's La Casa de los Sabores cooking school)

Roasting and skinning chiles poblano is a skill that has absolutely eluded me, so I was delighted to learn the tricks of the trade, as it were! Unfortunately, I was so engrossed with roasting tomatoes and peeling off their skins that I forgot to take a picture.  Fortunately, I found this photo of an identical, well-used comal on the Internet.

While I roasted and peeled tomatoes, Heidi set about dicing onions.

Heidi was born in Mexico, but her German parents immigrated to Mexico after World War II. Verónica, the young woman who befriended  and invited us to join the Reading Circle, is the granddaughter of a German immigrant. Our hostess, Ángeles, is Spanish-born and arrived in Mexico as the bride of her Mexican husband forty years ago.

The grandfather of our dear friend in Pátzcuaro, whose family roots are in Chihuahua, was a Mennonite from Switzerland. Two decades ago, my translator at Pemex who remains my friend, is Japanese-Mexican, whose grandfather immigrated to Mexico. Actually, now she's Japanese-Mexican-American, since she and her family live in Denver (her husband is a U.S. citizen by virtue of his New Jersey-born mother, who also came to Mexico as a bride and has now lived here for close to fifty years).

All of which reminds us not only that Mexico is itself quite a 'melting pot' but that national boundaries and ethnic identities are growing ever-more fluid.

Once the onions were sautéed and the tomatoes roasted, peeled and pressed through a sieve, they were added to the onions. 

Pureed tomatoes and onions simmer

While tomatoes and onions simmered gently, the other women set about picking apart the dried cod that our hostess had already soaked. Verónica and I undertook the task of dicing an entire bunch of flat-leafed parsley. The seriousness of this task is not to be underestimated. 

When I showed Ángeles my first attempt, she gave me a stern look, "Más fino," she ordered. When Verónica's first attempt received the same stern judgment, I offered to take over parsley-chopping to Verónica's evident relief. I found that by making four passes—turning the chopping board 90-degrees after each pass—the final result passed Ángeles' exacting standard. 

Dried Cod ready to be picked apart

As the photo shows, the meticulous work of picking apart dried cod is definitely best done by a group of women chatting companionably about other things. We learned about the experiences of adult children engaged in work and study outside Mexico: one is in graduate school at Harvard; another works for the International Monetary Fund in New York; still others work in Europe—in Spain and Germany. This is such a cosmopolitan, well-traveled group that our participation is not only special but a genuine pleasure.

Picking Dried Cod
Left to right: Ángeles, our hostess; Heidi, reaching for more dried cod;
Emmy, listening intently to Verónica, who invited us to join the group.

With the cod well picked, the conversation turned to cooking. Ángeles brought out treasured cookbooks. In addition to her well-worn Spanish cookbook, to my surprised delight, equally well-worn copies of Julia Child and The Joy of Cooking were part of the trove!

Ángeles sharing her Spanish cookbook with Emmy

The women's international palate is quite impressive.

 Bacalao: Ángeles added small, boiled potatoes, Spanish green olives,  and the
entire bunch of finely chopped parsley to the simmering base of onions and tomatoes.

When all that remained was for the Bacalao to sit overnight to let the flavors marry, we chatted some more before calling it a night.

Reading Circle

The next evening we arrived at 6:00 PM for the Reading Circle. When we walked in, the buffet table was already set up for our cena, supper, which we would enjoy after about an hour of discussion.

Everyone was there: Ángeles, our charming Spanish-born hostess; Emmy, English teacher and perspicacious wife of a professor of philosophy at an elite Mexican university; Heidi, nutritionist, source of spirited, no-nonsense insights; Verónica, gregarious attorney specializing in Family Law and networker par excellence; Aureliano, delightfully cultured retired businessman; husband Reed, and Eusebio Ruvalcaba, 'el profe', the professor, the Reading Circle's leader.

Mexicans make free use of titles and nicknames; el profe combines both. El profe wears his considerable erudition with a patient courtesy that nurtures the best in all of us.

Deep in Discussion (left to right): Aureliano, Emmy, Ángeles, Heidi (arm only), Reed

The group's discussion of The Little Prince was sensitive and insightful. As a group, we were touched by the vulnerability of the Flower and by el Zorro, the Fox, asking The Prince to 'tame me', then memorably describing what it means to be tamed. We explored the themes of attachment and separation and together we recalled the child, la niña and el niño, inside ourselves. At times, the comments were vaguely biographical, providing rare glimpses into the personal lives of our fellow readers.

At the break, the Bacalao commanded the place of honor on the buffet table.

Bacalao in front of the Poinsettia flanked by plate of melon slices interspersed with prosciutto, another plate of cheese and crackers and another of butter cookies. Out of sight is a basket of deliciously fresh, thick-sliced Mexican white bread.

For dessert, I brought d'Anjou pears baked in apple cider (real cider, pressed in Mexico!), with a filling of maple syrup (we 'import' it from Trader Joe's), chopped walnuts, golden raisins, cinnamon and nutmeg—easy to prepare and absolutely delicious! Verónica brought scrumptious butter cookies ... such a repast!

Aureliano and el profe (right) helping themselves

Over the Bacalao, the conversation ranged far and wide, encouraged perhaps by the champagne contributed by Aureliano. When the group begins talking like this, we sit back and listen with rapt attention to viewpoints otherwise inaccessible to us.

So enjoying a communal supper with new friends, we ushered in the Holiday Season in Mexico. In the same spirit, to all of Jenny's readers:

Season's Greetings With Warmest Good Wishes for a 

Healthy and Fruitful New Year!

Green Shoots 1: Living Mesoamerican Community

Sometimes it's tough to remain optimistic in the face of what feels at times to be an unrelenting drumbeat of disheartening news. To my surprise, I began discovering astonishing evidence of life's irrepressible capacity to regenerate itself and even flourish in small communities both in the U.S. and in Mexico.

As many of you know, Reed and I lived for three years in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, México. Pátzcuaro is a small city—a Pueblo Mágico ("Magic Pueblo") on Mexico's Eje Volcánico (Volcanic Axis) at 7,000 ft. about 250 miles west of Mexico City. We treasure the generous hospitality extended to us by this historic Mexican community. 

While there, we were introduced us to the work of Gustavo Esteva, activist and 'de-professionalized' intellectual living in Oaxaca, one of the southernmost and poorest of Mexican states. Esteva presents the practice of hospitality as a traditional Mesoamerican way of life:

"For thousands of years, peoples of this area of the world have been hospitable toward the 'other' as a way of being in this world. All their original cosmologies conceive the 'other' as the only way to define oneself: the other is not really an alien, a foreigner, but the other part of oneself. But for 500 years these peoples have been constantly invaded by inhospitable people.

"By extending hospitality to the Spaniards, the people were colonized. By hosting other gods, their own gods were destroyed. By hosting 'development,' their environment and livelihood were seriously damaged. It seems to be a miracle that after all such experiences they could still retain hospitality as a defining trait. They have done so because they know that [hospitality] is not only a condition for survival, but also the only way to live."

Learning Spanish is turning out to be a life-changing experience. For us it involves learning to see the world—to structure reality—in new ways. I've been surprised to learn a new word in class while thinking, "Hmmm, never heard that word before," only to be astonished to hear the word seemingly everywhere in the following hours and days. That's been my experience with the word 'community'.

At first, I thought 'community' was truly lived just here in Mexico, but in the last week or so I've been astonished to discover evidence of grassroots communities flourishing in the most unlikely places in the U.S. as well. This blog series titled 'Green Shoots' relates my journey of discovering community.

At the end of November 2009, I had knee replacement surgery. During convalescence and rehabilitation, I read a lot. To my surprise, the novels I had chosen shared a common theme: namely, the power of community among poor and marginal people based on a web of caring rooted in dignity, respect, and a sense of mutual obligation.

Here's what I read—all in English: La Maravilla by Alfredo Véa, El Milagro [Miracle] Beanfield War by John Nichols, Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts (most poignantly, the chapters set in the shantytowns of Moombai-Bombay, India).

I also read Gustavo Esteva's powerful, thought-provoking, Grassroots Post-Modernism: Remaking the soil of cultures. Esteva comes from a proud Mexican family with both Spanish (paternal) and indigenous (maternal) roots. As Esteva tells it, he benefited from educational opportunities made available to people in 'underdeveloped' countries—the quotes are Esteva's to indicate he never felt 'underdeveloped'.

After completing his government-sponsored education, Esteva began professional life as a Human Resource Manager first for IBM, then for Procter-Gamble. He subsequently left corporate life to work at the highest policy levels in the development arena for the Mexican government. It is important to note that 40% of Mexico's economy is informal; that is, it is a cash economy outside the formal, developed economy. Update: Recent government statistics, revised to include domestic workers, farmworkers and low-level employees working (illegally) on a cash basis in corporations, indicate that 60% of Mexico's workers labor in the informal sector.

Disillusioned by the potential of the neoliberal model to provide full employment, Esteva moved to Oaxaca. From Oaxaca he has worked with activist movements all over Mexico, most notably with the Zapatista movement in Chiapas. Esteva is recognized as a leading global critic of the development model.

In Grassroots Post-Modernism, Esteva argues powerfully against the Global [Development] Project championed by first world nations. He argues that the Global Project will never be able to provide work for all the peoples of the earth, then concludes that it is necessary to find spaces for the subsistence economies of marginal people to continue alongside, but separate from, the formal Developing-Developed global economy.

"We know very well that things can be operated at the human scale, at a scale of real people who know each other and can take decisions. Of course, we recognize that there are areas in the cities in which they are so individualized [that is, a system based on individual rights, rather than on communal mutual obligations] that they cannot take decisions together.

"Also, we know that many people in the cities ... want representatives, and they want to be governed by others. [They say:] 'I pay him. I elect him. I want honest people and professional people to deal with all these problems. I want to take care of my own business and other people will do the government'.

"What we see as our real challenge is how we can have the harmonious coexistence of the two different systems. Let them have their representatives. Let them have their administrators. For them, not for us. Let's share some spaces, but basically have different ways of doing things.

"This is not imperialism in reverse. It is not saying that we want to impose on them our own way. The people in the communities [indigenous villages where land is owned and worked collectively], the people in the barrios [urban neighborhoods] have a way, and we want to keep that way going. We will respect other people who want another way. And the other way can be something like elections for representatives. Something like representative democracy."

At the heart of Gustavo Esteva's thinking are two core ideas: hospitality and community.

"A community ... is a group of people linked by obligation, by mutual obligations, not by rights. ...this is the original meaning of the word community in Latin, in Rome ...the very modern Western idea of individual rights [has been superimposed] on the notion of real community; that is, a community of people [linked by] obligations. And that is for two hundred years only. In two hundred years, with the creation of the nation-state, with the creation of the possessive individual, with homo economicus, we have created this idea of individual rights as the stuff and foundation of the society.

"Again, radical democracy is basically a language of freedom, and freedom includes respect for the 'other'; it includes looking for harmony."

Esteva advocates striving to replace tolerance with hospitality:

"...we are trying to go from tolerance to hospitality. This is something that I have been writing about for the last twenty years. To be tolerant implies that I am assuming that the other is not the right way. The color of his skin, or his religion, or whatever, are not the right way. But I am so generous that I am tolerating him, tolerating his presence. The dictionary says that 'tolerance' is 'to suffer with patience' and sometimes the people who tolerate lose their patience and stop being tolerant. Of course, it is better to be tolerant than intolerant, but still tolerance is only the most civilized form of intolerance.

"We are saying that we are talking about hospitality, in which to be hospitable towards the other does not imply that you follow the other, that you admire the other, that you like or dislike the other, but [it means] that you accept profoundly that he has the same right that you have to be here on the planet. You open your arms, and your life, your heart to the other being very different, to his/her 'otherness'.

"What I am trying to say is, when you are talking about hospitable society, radical democracy means for us a society in which different people, people who are fundamentally different, can co-exist in harmony through a hospitable attitude about the other. In our view, that means the Western tradition is basically a tradition of inhospitality. A Westerner may or may not tolerate the other but he cannot hospitably accept him. He tries to transform the other into someone like him, to create something that can be described as one world, with whatever kind of cross or sword, with many different purposes.

"What the Zapatistas are saying, that is our belief now, is that we want a world in which many worlds can be embraced. Radical democracy implies how we can have a kind of intercultural dialogue with the others and co-exist in harmony. The society of the different. How can we organize this harmonious coexistence of the different? All that is radical democracy for me."

So there you have it at the grassroots level—sights and sounds of traditional Mesoamerican community seeding Green Shoots in our post-modern world. 

Still Curious?

There is a lot more to Esteva's work than could be covered in a single post. If you're up to having your fundamental assumptions about what it means to be human challenged, Grassroots Post-Modernism is for you (available used from Amazon.com).

Poking around on the Internet for more about Gustavo Esteva, I discovered an interview with him on the web site of In Motion Magazine. Titled "The Society of the Different," this excellent four-part interview quotes at length and verbatim from Grassroots Post-Modernism.  Web address: http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/global/gest_int_2.html.  More accessible than Esteva's book, one eye-opening segment reviews the history of maís (corn) in the traditional, Mesoamerican culture and the indigenous cosmovisión (worldview).

Mexico Fiesta: Ucazanaztacua Day 1

Sunday: Fiesta in Ucazanastacua - Day 1
High Mass, Juego de Basketbol, Castillo, y Baile

Sheer amazement at this ancient pueblo on the lake (population: about 125 souls) carved out of the mountainside. Its tiny (20' x 30'?) church, with its Moorish style dome of blue and white tile, was built around a huge boulder, which forms one wall and juts a bit into the church space.

All the houses are connected rabbit-warren style by means of stone stairs and paths; outhouses; running water is to a big tub on outside of house; Spanish moss on the trees! (See explanation below)

High Mass (priest sang; incense used) was celebrated outdoors in part of the stone plaza in front of the church. The Mass combined Pentecost Sunday and First Communion for about ten young people. The Holy Spirit is the patron saint of Ucas, so this was a celebration of it's patron saint. Don Jorge (here on the left), is a padrino, godfather, of one of the girls taking first communion and therefore sponsored her. (Our friend, Alejandra, is at center. She was taking pictures for Don Jorge.) The total length of the mass: 2 hours, this included a rain shower!

Comida (dinner) was served at 2 pm at the casa of our friend, Don Jorge el padre (to distinguish him from Jorge el joven -young). We enjoyed beef-stew and corundas, which are a corn-based, seasoned cereal-like substance baked in cornstalks -- kind of like the corn-meal part of a tamale pie. We were served at a long table (sat eight on a side). The etiquette is to leave when you have finished the meal, so the next rotation can be seated.

Then we embarked on half-mile walk along the Lake shore to reach the cancha or basketball court where young Jorge and his younger brother, Hugo, our English students, were playing in a basketball tournament.

Don Jorge (ecology specialist), told us that Ucazanastacua benefits from a microclimate such that during the winter months (when the sun is in the South), the pueblo receives the sun's rays in two ways: 1) Direct sunlight; 2) Reflected sunlight: during the winter the lake is often as still as a mirror. Given the sun's winter angle, the sun's rays actually reflect off the lake and hit Ucas -- hence the Spanish Moss.

We saw a Great Blue Heron-like bird; white egrets; ducks -- and we passed by numerous grazing cows. Words almost fail me: how to describe the views along this lake with its ranges of cerros ("hills" that are really mountains). The rains have cleared the air of dust and smoke (wildfires) so these ranges are visible again. We counted five ranges of mountains reaching up toward the Purépecha Meseta (Mesa or High Plain).

Clearly, this footpath is the "main road" to the basketball court (cancha), where we went to see Jorge's sons play. I've always wanted to walk along these foot paths, which crisscross Michoacán near Lake Pátzcuaro -- and I did!
 

Young Jorge was the organizer of the tournament. Unfortunately, Jorge's and Hugo's team didn't win. We left after their game in order to have sunlight to guide us back to the pueblo. The path crossed five or six cercas (stone walls). At each cerca, some stones had been removed to allow walkers to cross -- in effect, a stile.

When we got back to Don Jorge's house, his wife and daughter, Erica, were sitting on their porch chatting and enjoying the lake view. We had a wonderful conversation with Erica, who has just earned her Licenciatura (Bachelor's degree). More on this conversation later. They offered us posole, a delicious corn-based soup with ham bone. Mmmm good!

Everyone else arrived just as we were finishing, so Reed and I vacated the table and went to sit on the terraza (front porch). The sunset colors were remarkable, but Mother Nature was just warming up. Shortly after dark, we began to see sheet lightning in various colors so far in the distance we couldn't hear the thunder. Then the lightning strikes began -- what an incredible light show it was! At various times, we were joined by a variety of small children -- all of whom had something to share and seemed to enjoy just interacting with us. It was great!

THEN at about 11 pm, we went to the little plaza, just outside the church (where Mass was celebrated) for the baile (dance) and Castillo (Castle). The castillo is a constructed frame (this was the biggest I've ever seen, maybe 3-4 stories high) where various fireworks displays (pirotécnica) are arranged. Each display picture is an image elaborated in fireworks; these images, such as a rooster, a man doing something (forget what), etc. These "pictures" are on arms that spin on different planes -- much spinning!

Folks -- you have no idea how close everyone was to the fireworks! Liability? Forget about it!!! I'd say, about ten to twelve feet más o menos. We thought the show was over when young Jorge (our English conversation student), more or less grabbed me and pushed me away from the front of the church. He rescued me just in time, because an entirely new "wheel" began to go off on a spinning picture above the door of the little church!!!!! Much excitement.

We finally left at about 12:30 in the madrugada (between midnight and dawn).

We slept.

Ucazanaztacua Day 2: Jaripéo