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This post is a much different format from my standard. I hope you enjoy it.
Setting the Scene
The porch was the first place I sat when I arrived in Tamaula and the family was the first I was introduced to. I should have known they would turn out to be special people and that porch would turn out to be a special place. I’m living in this rural Mexican community for 6 weeks to summer to teach English in the middle school and to do research about access to water and the water supply. I’d been here about three weeks before I got around to asking the question. I wanted some time to develop relationships with the people here and, the way I figured, they weren’t going anywhere and neither was I—so there wasn’t any harm in waiting.
The porch belongs to Doña Mago and Don Rey. They live in a small, one-story house with faux bricks painted on the side facing the road. Doña Mago told me a couple of weeks ago that the entirely dirt front yard would turn completely to mud during the rainy season and she’s been proven right. There’s barbed wire hung in a somewhat protective circle all around the house to hang laundry and there’s a fence bolstered by a 15 foot long pile of firewood. The rockier part of the yard starts as you go deeper inside the property. There’s a clothes washing sink-like rock that they use frequently even though they also use a newer washing machine that they keep on the porch. Further on there’s the outdoor bathroom and shower with a water tank on top and a water heater on the back to provide a real shower despite no running water. Beyond lie the horses, donkeys, hens, turkeys, and cactus garden that I haven’t quite figured out yet. It’s a useful yard; each area has a purpose. There the children play. There the women wash. And there the men saddle the horses and donkeys to work in the fields.
Sitting on the porch happens just about every night. It’s a lot more refreshing than the stuffy rooms with too-small windows and more doilies than could ever be useful. Doña Mago sits in the center. She lives in this house with her husband, 3 daughters, daughter-in-law, and two other UNC students who are working in Tamaula with me this summer. She’s a 57 years-old mother of 12—4 men and 8 women. Several children are in the States, several live in other houses in Tamaula, and the youngest circle in her immediate orbit. She has the loudest and quickest laugh in addition to beautiful, long, shockingly gray hair. Though she is what others here would describe as “bien gordita”, she actively manages and participates in the work of her domestic kingdom. I haven’t seen her ride her donkey up the mountain to get water but she leads it there on a regular basis.
I ask her the question: “Si pudieras enseñarme solamente una cosa, ¿qué me enseñaría?” Like most of what I say this question is followed by a quick laugh. I’m not sure why she finds me so funny but it might be because I tell her that my best friend in this town in one of her little chickens with a broken leg. It also might be because I have to refuse her attempts to feed me about 2-3 times per day. I live with a different family and eat there three times a day, but Doña Mago still feels some kind of intense need to constantly try and make me eat more. After she laughs, she says she needs to think about that. I tell her to take her time; she doesn’t have to answer right away. I want an answer with thought behind it more than I want to hear something right away.
Don Rey comes back from putting up the horse for the night. He sits a couple of feet behind Mago in a comforting position. He has a warm, wrinkled face with kindness etched in each line. His eyes are deep-set, sunken by wrinkles and decades of squinting. His eyes have that very cliché mysterious twinkle, like he’s always telling himself a funny story or joke and enjoying it alone. He, like Doña Mago, has a quick laugh; his is deeper and stretches out a little longer. Doña Mago interrupts her laugh to talk again while Don Rey seems to savor laughing out loud. I don’t even need to bring up the question this time. Shortly after Don Rey took his seat in the normal place Doña Mago told him about the homework assignment I had given her. “Ask him, ask him. He’ll give you a good answer,” said the daughters.
“OK, Don Rey. I already asked Doña Mago and she said she needed some time to think about it but I want to ask you too. If you could teach me one thing, what would you teach me?”
The Lesson(s)
“Como montar en caballo,” came his immediate response. “How to ride a horse” is what he would teach me. I, of course, ask why. I’m not surprised by his answer. Out of the list of skills Don Rey possesses this seems to fit the definition of a skill. And it’s something that has to be taught to someone. His answer to why I need to learn to ride a horse came equally quickly—“So your feet don’t get tired.” This, I’m guessing, is the most immediate and obvious benefit from riding a horse. I know that there’s more here so I keep pressing him. “Why should I ride a horse? What else can I do riding a horse?” He answers in a very grandfather-like, “well”. He reclines a little lower in his white, plastic chair and emits a short sigh. “Well, all men need to ride horses to work.” Now I think we’re getting somewhere. Horses are essential for providing livelihoods (I should learn so I can work). Riding horses is also representative of Mexican manhood (I should learn because I’m a man). It’s at this point that Doña Mago decides to turn in her homework a little early.
“I’ll teach you how to make tortillas; you should know how to make tortillas.” I want to know why, so I ask. The answer seems pretty obvious to Doña Mago, “Well, how are you going to eat before you get married?” There are at least two interesting assumptions in this response. The first is that I’m going to marry a woman who can make tortillas and the second is that if I don’t have tortillas then I won’t have anything to eat. These assumptions might not apply at all to my life back in Virginia and North Carolina but after staying here in Tamaula I can understand where Doña Mago is coming from. I like this lesson, too. Like riding a horse, making tortillas is a very useful activity—it feeds people. It’s also something that needs to be taught. If this were a homework assignment I’d say that Don Rey and Doña Mago have certainly come up with something that answers my question almost perfectly. I asked them what they would teach me and they came up with two essential activities that need to be taught. However, and it might have been a result of the language and cultural barriers, I don’t think they understood that I was looking for something deeper—“life lessons” doesn’t translate into Spanish with the same kind of weight attached to the phrase. So, I turn back to Don Rey and probe further.
“When did you learn to ride a horse?” He was about 10 years old when his father taught him. I imagine that his father was about 10 years old when his father taught him. And on and on, perhaps back to the days of Spanish colonization that introduced horses to the country. “Why else is it important to ride a horse?” I ask. His answer indicates that it would be harder to say reasons why riding a horse isn’t important. Horses here are the plowing machines. All the fields around Tamaula are plowed by one man behind two horses. You can ride a horse to go work somewhere. Before some of the men in the town got trucks in the last 10 years the horse was a heck of a lot faster to get down the mountain than going on a donkey. You need a horse to go collect firewood that the women use to cook. This seemed like the perfect point to pivot back to Doña Mago with her tortillas. I was also starting to get a sense of how these two skills are interrelated and representative of a self-sufficient, very different life-style.
Doña Mago also learned how to make tortillas when she was about 10 years old. That seems to be an important age here, in a way that turning 10 can’t be in the United States. Her mom taught her how to make them. It’s an art; I can attest to this. Each woman in the town has their own variation on the recipe. Some put a little bit more flour and some put less. All recipes have the same basic ingredient, corn. As Doña Mago explains how you prepare the corn to make the tortillas I let my mind wander a little. This is the same corn that you need horses to help plant and cultivate. It’s also the plant Michael Pollan preaches about doing so much harm to America’s waistline. I want to push back on this. Corn seems to be the key to both lessons from Don Rey and Doña Mago—riding horses and making tortillas. Doña Mago finishes her instruction by saying, “But hopefully you’ll marry someone who can make you really good tortillas.” Unfortunately I am missing the basic metric for how good my wife’s tortillas will be—namely, how good my mom’s tortillas are. Since my mom doesn’t make tortillas my future wife might just get a free pass.
“Why corn, Don Rey? Why do you plant corn here? Couldn’t you plant flour instead?” I ask, knowing that you could plant flour. These questions seem to discomfort him the most. I imagine it might have been strange for someone to ask him to explain why he lives the way he does. If someone asked my family why we would have a minivan we’d probably respond similarly—“Because we do.” “Why don’t you drive a station wagon instead?” they might ask. Well, my family likes to drive a minivan. We all fit inside and it serves us well. Don Rey made a similar point, “we’re used to planting corn. That’s why we plant it.” My facial expression might have given away my hope for something more than just being accustomed to something. He thought and continued answering. “You see, people eat the corn, but the horses, donkeys, and hens can eat the rest of the plant.”
Finally, here was the spark I was looking for that launched me into mentally tracing the circle of everything I had learned that evening. The sum of these two lessons was much, much more than their separate parts and they represented an entire way of life. Men ride horses to plant the corn in the fields and to collect the firewood for cooking. Women use the corn and the firewood to make tortillas to feed themselves and the men. The rest of the corn stalk is ground up and fed to the horses. It’s a cycle, a reciprocal, beautifully simple, method of living that is inspired because of its self-sufficiency. No outsiders need to be involved in the process and the role of new technology is complicated in this world. Does electricity (that came to the town 3 years ago) help or hinder the processes of working, cooking, feeding, and eating? So far the lifestyle exemplified by horses and tortillas seems to be holding its own. Don Rey rides his horse past the trucks that more and more regularly go up and down the mountain. Doña Mago still makes her tortillas on top of the firewood-heated oven while her daughters use the wireless internet USB to check their Facebook profiles.
Me and Doña Mago
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