Thanks to Susan Mills, I learned that today is Alexander Von Humboldt's birthday. Von Humboldt was what we might call a Renaissance man. He didn't follow a single, narrow field like geology, but rather looked for connections across the natural world. I don't know why he isn't famous in the United States as other 19th century pioneering scientists, like Darwin, are. Maybe teachers want their students to specialize and are afraid of wakening too much curiosity! Just joking.
Anyway, here is a link to a short biography from a blog at the Library of Congress. In it, the Port of Veracruz is mistakenly located in the west, not the east of Mexico.
Today is Mexico's Independence Day so here are a few photos to show our local celebrations. They seem muted this year. Few houses had decorations, and, more noticeable, there were no cohetes -- fireworks -- last night.
The left hand photo is of the tail-end of the Independence Day parade in our Colonia. It's put on by all the schools here.It is a big parade with drums and horns and dancers. Chedraui, the supermarket, brought dancers from Ballet Folklorico de Coatepec to their lobby yesterday. The dancers were excellent, my photos not so much. Three groups performed traditional Jarocho dances. They were not only exellent, but they radiated joy and energy. I am really disappointed that I don't have more to show! A couples dance was especialy charming, but my photos are very blurry so I left it out. You have to imagine the men in fringed leather jackets and cowboy hats and jeans and the women in gorgeous, brightly colored skirts with almost off the shoulder peasant blouses, swirling and stomping and flirting a bit. The right hand photo shows one chile en nogada. This is the traditional Independence Day dish: poblano peppers stuffed with shredded meat: beef and pork and chopped fruit drenched in a creamy sauce which includes ground walnuts.It's sprinkled with pomegranate seeds and maybe some parsley. It's a sweet dish and I love it. Dessert as a main course! It is traditionally said to have been created by a group of Augustine or Clarisa nuns in Puebla to honor Agustine de Iturbide after he signed the treaty ending the Mexican Revolution giving independence to Mexico. Chiles en Nogada are only prepared in August and September not only to mark Independence but because this is the season when pomagranates are ripe.
Last Wednesday we went to the Xico city hall to pay our predial, or property tax for this year. It wasn't quite the last minute, but almost. The city hall is an old stone building. The original facade has recently been uncovered and it is now fashionably old colonial looking. I will try to remember to post some pictures. This time I am posting photos of two public service posters distributed by the Comisión Nacional de las Derechas Humanas, a federal organization. Click on them to make them big enough to read. The first one, translated into English, says:
"Do you know what you are buying? Some products which you buy have been made by people captured for the purpose of exploiting them in forced work or services. Don't be an accomplice. Behind what you buy there could be a story you don't want to be a part of."
This second image which is definitely eye-catching says, "Seduction is one of the means most used by human traffickers to capture women for the purpose of sexual exploitation. Take care! Look past appearances. Behind what you think you want may be a story you don't want to be a part of."
This final notice, stuck on the wall with masking tape, is anything but arty. But it is a nice notice. It advertises on behalf of the State of Veracruz that you can get free civil marriage for a period of time: "The general public is invited to participate in the free matrimony campaign inspired by The Day of Love and Friendship [Valentine's Day here]. Information in the office of the Civil Register from 9am to 3pm.Requirements: Birth certificate, electior credential, CURP, kids' birth certificates."
Here in Veracruz and maybe all México, the civil marriage by a civil officer is required for a legal marriage, followed by a church marriage. For poor people, both can be too costly to afford. Many people just move in together and consider themselves married for this reason. After eight years, it is considered a legal marriage. Even before, both partners are entitled to some right of marriage. But this gesture will certainly be welcomed by some couples. You can see that after a few years, they may very well have kids.
Here we often see public service notices addressing all kinds of issues like these. There are many public health messages on safe sex, taking care of yourself in pregnancy, how to avoid illness, etc. They tend to be quite direct. Also, I am also struck by how art is used, how arty, if you will, the illustrations are. I thought you might enjoy this glimpse into everydayness.
I wish we could all opérate with the knowledge that we are all very closely related under the skin. Or even in the skin. But we are also all humans and subject to human weaknesses. Fear jerks us around with practically no effort. There is an article in the New York Times about how trauma and frightening situations cause us to misremember. Leaders can stoke up fear and then feed you images that you file under "DANGEROUS". From the beginning of his campaign, Trump has done this with immigrants. He's been pounding at these awful lies about immigrants for two years and more now. There are dangerous people in every culture. Mexico itself has regiones where I wouldn't feel happy by myself. But even in countries like El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala where ordinary people are terrified by violent, lawless men, most people are not criminals, not rapists, not murderers. We have lived in Mexico for almost thirteen years. We live in MEXICO, not an American settlement in Mexico. our colonia, our village, has no other Americans. An Englishman, now a Mexican citizen, farms outside the colonia. We are as safe as in most places in the US which is to say pretty safe. In the US, I experienced personally more crime than I have here by a long shot.
We have neighbors who have gone to the US and come back here to Mexico, their home. Their stories are varied, but none of them are people to fear. Most of the people who want to enter the US had situations to fear in their Central American home countries. Some have had situations to fear in Mexico. They would not have made their incredibly difficult journeys if they didn't. Sometimes they cannot make a living at home, so they try to get to the US. It is, in a way, the fault of Americans for advertising the country as a land of plenty where anyone who makes the effort can succeed. If you wanted to feed your family and you heard that myth over and over, wouldn't you want to go to the US? And the US advertises itself as welcoming. Remember "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" This, of course is what greets us at the Statue of Liberty.
I am posting three links to articles, one by a former border agent remembering his experiences, one by that agent about a friend of his who now finds himself unable to return to his home and family in the US, and one by a Mexican angry at the unrelieved stereotypes Americans see in the media, on TV and in movies. They are all worth reading, and of course I hope you do. Please awaken to the horror that is Trump's border wall and the horrible racism he is stirring against people from south of the border. I will be happy to discuss this, to provide information, whatever. Just write comments.
The first is called "Has Any of Us Wept?" and it can be found here: http://www.nybooks.com/article
The second is called "Confessions of a Former Border Patrol Agent. It can be found here: https://www.gq.com/story/confe
The third is called Hollywood's Obsession with Cartels and it can be found here" https://nyti.ms/2H5AZT4
The first two are by Francisco Cantu, the third by Hector Tobar.
Sometimes on holidays or special days, often, actually, Jim and I go on excursions instead of going out to eat or buying each other gifts. We were, this Valentine's Day, in need of an excursion. They've become altogether too few and far between. So we got into the RAV 4 which is now seventeen years old and headed out with three of the dogs:Jocko the Afghano, Happy, the Mexican Brown Dog and Little Guy the salsiccia. We didn't quite know where we were headed at first, but by the time we got to the Crucero, the crossroads of the highway between Coatepec and Xico and the road that goes from our Colonia in one direction toTeocelo in the other we had settled on Barranca Grande which is down an escarpment about halfway between Teocelo and Cozautlan. Our whole area is lush with plant life pouring down steep slopes into narrow valleys and along rivers. Small (for the most part) towns climb hillsides, hug escarpments, roll over hillsides and nestle in basins.
This trip we followed the road to from Teocelo to Cosautlán to the Barranca Grande turn-off. The people of the area demonstrated to have it properly paved, but it still is only partly completed with sectionns (smallish) being fine, others still filled with deep potholes and still others in a rough state of incompletion so the trip which is about eighteen miles from our house takes over an hour.
On the map below, you can see our colonia as a weird red squiqqle above San Marcos de León.
The road from Teocelo (A) to Cosautlan (B) as you can see is extremely (to put it mildly) twisting.
The road to Barranca Grande splits off probably half way from Teocelo to Cosautlan. It hugs the side of a precipice and is marked with sharper, steeper turns than the road it leaves.
On the left, a view across the barranca from the top of the road next to the bus stop. On the right, capilla which stands at a sharp curve's bend.
And a cross on a rock on another curve.
El Río Pescados which flows through Barranca Grande seen on the right at a bit of a distance. This is a view of the river from the road down the escarpment.
On 9 September 2008 heavy rains caused a devastating rock and mud slide that severely damaged a large part of Barranca Grande in the state of Veracruz. Two people, including a three year old child, were killed and three were wounded. Below you can see the church, now abandoned and a school damaged by rocks and also abandoned. Five and a half years later, the town is still desolate since the government's aid entailed relocating the inhabitants to a nearby location they say is not susceptible to slides.
This house on the left is literally the only bright spot we saw. Most of the houses are small and unpainted
This is what's left of the village's health services. It's a sign urging men to use condoms not just to prevent unwanted pregnancies but to protect women's health.
You can just about see Jim on the other side of this foot bridge which crosses the river at the north end of the town. It connects with a trail in one direction and a pantheon or cemetery in another. After Jim explored a bit, we drove a bit further along the road which ended a bit further on the river and turned back. On our way back we came across a large crowd of people coming over the bridge following a celebration in the pantheon. A pickup and a station wagon were waiting to take some of them home. They were going to Barranca Nueva, the place higher up the escarpment where the government had resettled some of the victims of the landslide.
The government wanted to relocate everyone to Barranca Nueva in the community of Xixitla. It transferred 732 people, providing 203 houses for them. 149 people remained in Barranca Grande in 42 homes. There are currently no services in Barranca Grande and the town no longer exists in the minds and maps of officialdom.
The houses provided in Barranca Nueva are made of pressed cardboard, and indeed this type of construction has been used elsewhere with some success. But here people have not been happy. The cardboard gets mushy and soft in the often humid weather. Many of the people have worked with brick and mortar and are reconstructing their houses out of this sturdier material. In addition, large families were squeezed into tiny rooms. Fifteen of the relocated families ironically and unfortunately find themselves in possible danger from slides from a nearby quarry.
I don't know the status of the promised school, health clinic and Opportunidades (Progreso)buildings, but as of 2012 they didn't exist. There were some mobile classrooms.
The reason the people of Barranca Grande were encouraged to resettle seems at least as much because the previous governor contracted with the giant Brazilian dam-building company Odebrecht to build dams for electricity to be sold away from the area, including one which would flood Barranca Grande out of existence. One of the dams was to be in Jalcomulco, but as of today, the protests there led to it (hopefully) being cancelled with the company having to restore the areas it had damaged. This whole project is a probably destructive tangle which I may write about in the future.
Consulta Mitovsky does many surveys of life and attitudes in Mexico. Below I´ve translated the recent survey of attudes towards gays and lesbians. Here is the link to the PDF file of the survey. . As usual, I would like to remind you that there are various places in the country more liberal than others, but that there haven´t been any of the angry demonstrations nor angry rhetoric that you find in the US, especially now, where in the US gay marriage has once again turned into a campaign issue accompanied by the usual vitriol. I´ve translated "homosexual" as "gay or lesbian" because they are the more common terms in the US.
Yes: 26.8%
No: 70.4%
Don´t know/No opinion 2.8%
2. Are gays and lesbians born being gays and lesbians?
Strongly agree: 55%
Agree a little or not at all: 32.2%
Don´t know/no opinion
3. A gay/lesbian couple ought to have the same rights as a heterosexual copy.
Strongly/somewhat in agreement: 51.1%
A little/not at all in agreement: 39.7%
Don't know/no opinion 9.2%
Strongly or somewhat agree by age group:
18 to 29 years old: 62.0%
30 to 45 years old: 47.7%
46 and more years old: 46.1%
4. A lesbian couple should be permitted to adopt.
Strongly/somehwat in agreement: 47.6%
A little/not at all in agreement: 43.3%
Don't know/no opinion: 9.1%
5. A gay couple should be permitted to adopt,
Strongly or somewhat agree; 41.8
A little/not at all in agreement: 48.1
Don't know/no opinion: 10.1%
6. A gay couple should be permitted to get married.
Strongly or somewhat agree: 47.6%
A little or not at all in agreement: 43.3%
Don´t know/know opinion: 9.1%
Attitude by sex: Men
Very/somewhat in agreement: 42.3%
Little/not at all in agreement: 47.7%
Don´t know/no opinion: 10.0%
Attitude by sex: women
Very/somewhat in agreement: 52.3%
Little/not at all in agreement: 39.6%
Don't know/no opinion: 8.1%
Attitude by age
Very/somewhat in agreement:
18 to 29 years: 50.8%
30 to 45 years: 47.3%
46 years and over: 45.5%
7. Would you be willing to meet the partner of a gay or lesbian son or daughter?
Very/somewhat: 40.3%
Prefer not to meet the partner: 26.7%
Do not want to meet the partner: 16.7%
Here is a link to an article in Patheos discussing opposition to Girl Scout Cookies by the St. Louis Archdiocese and Franklin Graham because of the Girl Scout positions on gays.
A couple of days ago we did NOT have a great deal of fun driving around Xalapa. Xalapa has a LOT of traffic and it is often bumper-to-bumper on narrow streets which don't always go in straight lines, especially at certain hours. Some of the hours include from 2 to 4 in the afternoon. This is the still-frequently-taken lunchtime when I think people do their errands (Workers work at least eight hours a day, sometimes more. Often I don't mind the traffic because it gives me a chance to see the huge variety of tiendas and workshops that line the way. Anyway, we went in to try to buy a generic version of a medication I take and to go to Costco to see about hearing aids. Costco is probably one of the best places to buy hearing aids.
So ANYWAY, of course we hit the 2-4 traffic, and it was cold and rainy and dreary. On sunny days, Xalapa looks bright and busy and colorful. This day, though, the sky was a dirty gray which seemed to drip onto everything and everyone.
About medications here in our corner of Mexico: There are lots of generics available and reputable places tend to have good generics, but some people (like me) may not respond well to generics available here so they end up paying non-generic prices. Our wonderful doctor had found (he and we thought) a generic put out by the very company that makes the non-generic drug. Unfortunately, according to the Pfizer salesman it required a prescription although the brand-name doesn´t and other generics don´t. (Here a little explanation: most drugs here don't require prescriptions. The ones that always do are antibiotics, benzodiazapines like Xanax, and opioid pain medications like oxycodin. Antibiotics and narcotics, in other words. There may be other classifications, but I haven't come across them.) So anyway we went to one end of town to get the prescription which was limited to only twenty tabs for some reason, and then drove to the other end to find the pharmacy. Need I tell you, they said they didn´t have it at either of the two stores. These were discount pharmacies, ones who specialize in generics, with a long counter and shelves piled high with boxes of medicine. Here most medications are packaged one pill to a bubble on a card of maybe ten, not in bottles. Even prescription meds come this way so you often have to buy a bit more or a bit less than you want. So we drove (sort of) a right angle to get to Costco.where I had to make an appointment for the hearing aid evaluation. Groan. I went to Xalapa with my friend Diane a couple of weeks ago by bus. It is much, much pleasanter to go by bus, and we would have if we hadn't had to lurch such large distances in a relatively short time in the cold and rain.
I now have the hearing aids. They are the Kirkland brand and they are excellent. The young technician was proficient and friendly and we got 19.22 on the dollar which was good for us but bad for Mexico (I think, but am not sure.) The first shock I had happened when she opened the door to the littl soundproof room where hearing aid stuff is done. With a whoosh, I was greeted by all kinds of sounds I guess I haven't heard in years. Costco is NOISY! Anyway, if you folks are finding yourself cupping your hand behind your ear to hear, leaning forward, maybe enjoying how soft everything sounds, maybe, just maybe a hearing aid evaluation at Costco would help. Hearing aids have come a long way.
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The day before yesterday we took our dogs for a walk and went a bit further. It was not raining or misting, but it was chilly. We usually let the two smaller dogs run free, which they do with glee. Little Guy, the dachsund, can run as fast as Happy and as she is the alpha dog, she insists on being first. She is very cute as dachsunds are. She is tiny, with floppy ears and limpid, doe-like eyes. She has learned to make wheedling sounds, soft beseeching sounds, coy sounds even. Often we are at her mercy.
BUT in her own world which she enters as soon as she is off the leash, she is a hunter. In response to some smells she´ll roll in phantom remains, in response to others, she´ll dig frantically. In response to fowl and other low-resting birds, she´ll catch them. She takes off so fast she can´t be caught. She doesn't even acknowledge that anyone is shrieking at her to STOP while pounding after her. And it seems she inevitably catches her prey. We have been putting her on the leash long before we see a chicken, but the other day, she caught one yet again. It was dead before she even turned around with it hanging limply from her mouth.
Unfortunately, this chicken turned out to belong to friends of ours who refused to take any payment. There I was, holding it by its legs, there my friend was saying, no, no, you don't have to pay while she looked mournfully at the bird. Another friend made the suggestion that we buy her another live one. I think we're going to try to do it.
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Last post I wrote about the miraculous healing of the dent in our front fender. So then we went to meet our ahijado to take the car to the man who was going to paint it. We only remembered half the message: to meet him. We didn´t remember the other half: to meet him at the painter's workshop. So we went to his house. I´m glad we did, though, because in spite of feeling a bit foolish when Doña J asked why we were there, we got to see the baby sheep Don A had bought. The guy who works for Don A was grazing them on a rope outside their chicken pen and I have a picture for you.
I think the big one may be the mama. But none of them are big. I have to confess I thought they were goats at first. You'd think I'd know what goats looked like by now!
Last Wednesday I went to get my ears repierced. The holes had closed up some time ago, and I´d wanted them restored. About the only jewelry I like to wear is earrings, so we´d been looking for a place to do it. And besides, Jim had gotten my a lovely new pair for Christmas. Anyway, we were visiting our ahijados (godchildren) to see their lovely new baby and it turned out that the baby had had her ears pierced ALREADY, and her mom had had another pair of piercings put in her own ears. Their friend, a nurse, had done it for them. I just had to buy the right earings to do it with. Jim and I blithely went to the store that sells lovely gold jewelry in the little mall that has the Coatepec Chedraui. They no longer do piercings there, but the saleslady rummaged around and found just what I needed. SHE said, nowadays they use a pistola (you can guess what that is so it´s really fast and relatively painless. She actually gave us the earrings gratis, for free.
We went to our ahijados' house for the deed to be done. They live with our ahijado's parents in a very pretty house filled with all kinds of interesting things. Now it was filled with an audience: the ahijados, their parents, and a friend and the baby and Jim. My ahijada had said, "Nah, it doesn´t hurt." Last time I believe her! The nurse, a very pretty young woman had me sit in an armchair and then she went to work pushing the stem into my earlobe by hand. Oy!!! And all these people were watching! I want to tell you, I was brave, brave, brave and turned all the screams I really wanted to let out into funny noises that made everyone laugh. It felt like hours, but a few minutes later it was done. "Why didn´t you tell me it would hurt," I wailed. "You wouldn´t have come to have it done," my ahijada said.
So Sunday we went back so our ahijado could fix the dent in our pretty new Nissan X-Trail. NOT my fault, by the way. Just the scrape on the back door is my fault. Jim would dispute whether it should just be called a scrape or whether dent might be more accurate. ANYWAY, Jim backed up into a short post in Plaza de las Americas, the fancy shopping mall in Xalapa. Even dent is too kind for the cavern he put in the bumper. Our ahijado said he could pour hot water on it and pull it out! We were skeptical, but we thought we´d let him give it a try so Jim pulled the front end of the car into the garage. It was one of the few sunny times we´ve had lately. People were walking up and down the road with their groceries and all kinds of other stuff. Horses clip-clopped by with riders and laden with firewood. A lone chicken went over to look questioningly at the chickens in our friends' ample pen where turkeys also displayed their finery. I was nervous and not really happy watching what looked like major surgery on the car but I drifted over from time to time to watch our ahijado remove what seemed like a hundred screws and six or seven car parts. It turns out that access to the bumper wasn´t easy.
After a visit inside to see Doña J and our ahijada and the baby, I went back outside to find that the cavern had actually been eliminated! Jim always pays even though our ahijado would never ask him to. In fact, Jim and I have learned that even people we don't know won't give a price for individual work where we live. "How much?" we used to ask. "Whatever you think it's worth," or "whatever you want was usually the answer.
So anyway, a few days ago, our neighbor had a pig butchered and sold the pieces from a table outside his house. With the bad coffee harvest and the fact that here, too, or even more, it's really only the top one percent who are doing well, a lot of people are doing stuff to make themselves enough to get by on, or maybe to cover an unusual expense. So the butchered pig. The guy across the street from us has four concrete stalls which sometimes hold horses and sometimes pigs he raises to sell for butchering. When the pigs are moved, bathed, or, yes, slaughtered, they make terrrible, rending sounds which I can barely stand to listen to. I want to run out and save them. So the neighbor´s nieces came up to our house with some small ribs wrapped in a styrofoam dish for us and it was impossible to say no. It turned out neither Jim nor I could bring ourselves to eat it. The dogs got lucky!
Below are some random photos which I don´t think I've posted before.
Chedraui, our supermarket, generally has a flamboyant display of produce. We like to go to the market or one of the small vendors, but we are too much Amerkans not to sometimes yield to supermarket temptation.
This is a lot of garlic, also in Chedraui.
Here is the interior of the church in our colonia:
Clouds building outside our window.
Below are some youngsters at their primary school leaving ceremony.
How the weather has been here lately. Not like a tropical paradise!
Someone up north commented on facebook that she was envious of our weather right now. Gimme a break, I say. Her weather may be colder outside, but it isn't colder inside, I can guarantee it. I am writing this with two shirts, two sweaters and cold hands. Today the high is supposed to be 18°, two degrees warmer than yesterday, and the low 8°. Okay, okay, it's celsius. Fahrenheit: 64 and 46. And it´s damp and the sky is solid dirty gray except on the mountain Acamalín, directly across from us there is a soft pillow of fog. This has been going on for days. Remember, people don't have heat in their houses. We have a wood stove which heats our main room to tolerable and so we are lucky. We hadn´t used it until this morning, partly because the wood is all damp, even that which has been protected, so it's hard to get going.
The really disturbing news is that the coffee harvest is lousy. This is because a fungus not previously known at our altitude has made its way up to us. It's called la roya. It spreads as a fine dust,and it is wreaking havoc with coffee and with our neighbors' livelihoods.
Normally, the height of the coffee picking season should be about now. Normally,the ejido land which surrounds our colonia you could walk the paths through the coffee, and hear the voices of the pickers, often family memberss, drifting around, You could see the workers carefully pulling off the properly ripe berries, say hi to those you know. Burros and horses would be tied along the path waiting for their masters to load sacks on their backs. Dogs would run through the underbrush. At meal times, people would gather around to have tortillas and salsa and soda, hot beans and eggs, cooked on small fires. Workers who don´t have coffee of their own work for other people, and they move from place to place. Sometimes a pickup waits on the road for them to hurl their sacks of coffee into.
Our area is ideal for growing coffee de altura, coffee grown at a higher elevation. It has plenty of shade, soil mulched by years of harvest remnants and banana plants, cool weather. It is easy under normal circumstances to grow it organically, too. And it tastes delicious. I´m drinking a cup from our own beans right now. But this year, the losses are breathtaking: some people have lost all their plants to la roya. The average loss is apparently 85%. Even if the coffee hasn´t succombed to la roya, the price per kilo has fallen sharply. The coffee de altura is usually high quality coffee. Unfortunately much of both it and the cheaper and not so good and not organic coffee planted on huge numbers of flat acres across places like Vietnam are in the hands of giant food companies.
As you can see in the photo above taken from Revista Industrial de Campo, coffee is labor intensive with the berries, only the ripe ones, picked by hand.
It sounds strange to say it, but Day of the Dead is a holiday that is really fun. This is due in part today to the omnipresence of Catrinas, often life-sized dolls created by all kinds of people for display. The original Katrina was Jose Guadalupe Posada´s gift to Mexico. Posada (1852-1913) was a prolific cartoonist and illustrator who used
not just Catrina but skulls and skeletons of all sots and just about everything else in his political cartoons. Later nineteenth century Mexico, by the way, was home to quite a number of political cartoonists. Posada himself was a primary influence on Diego Rivera who hung around outside his studio in Mexico City to watch him work. Rivera included Catarina in his famous mural Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central.
In this section, you can see Diego, portraying himself as a boy, holding hands with Catrina and standing in front of Frida Kahlo.As were many of Posada´s cartoons, this mural is satirical, a lightish portrayal of social classes in Mexico.
Below are some Catrinas we snapped fotos of in Coatepec.
A Catrina in a sparkly dress in a clothing letter.
A Catrina in an antique store, with a tricycle for some reason.
A Catrina in a coffee shop.
Cut-outs in tissue paper hang all over, too:
Recently I discovered a Jewish poet named Isaac Berliner who emigrated from Poland to Mexico in 1922. He started out here in Mexico City as a street peddler selling (maybe ironically) saints’ images. He loved Mexico City and the people he lived and worked among in the crowded streets. I found Berliner in an article accompanied by some translations of his poems by Eli Rosenblatt in Tablet. Looking for some personal rather than academic insight into Jewish DF I discovered Ilan Stavans, a Mexican, now Mexican-American, Jew from DF who is a professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts and an incredibly prolific cultural critic and novelist. The book I chose to look at is Return to Centro Histórico: A Mexican Jew Looks at his Roots. This is an informal bit of autobiography (he has a more formal one called A Critic´s Journey). Its charm lies in the myriad family and local pictures which he includes and comments on. It seems to me that in the 20th century, Jews in Mexico City particularly followed a trajectory not all that different from Jews in New York City. My great grandfather who lived in Brooklyn in the first part of the 20th century sold vegetables from a pushcart. His son, my grandfather, was a printer (and a socialist), a skilled trade. He and his family (my grandmother, my dad and two sisters) started out in an apartment on St. Ann’s Avenue in the Bronx and went sort of upscale to the Grand Concourse. My grandparents lived there for the rest of their lives, and as they aged, so did their building so that it was a bit worn down and shabby even when I was a child.
My father and his sisters left the Grand Concourse though my father became a doctor with a practice in the Bronx and so took a while to move, with my mother and me, to Manhattan’s Upper West Side. My aunt Addie married a large, handsome man with black hair who could have been Mexican. He headed a firm of "interior architects." They did the big lobbies and courtyards of big businesses and big apartment stores. They moved to a fancy subdivision in West Hempstead, Long Island. My Aunt Phoebe married a dentist and moved all the way to Utica in New York State where she served for a time as mayor.
Jewish immigrants in Mexico also started as pushcart sorts of people and then became owners and managers of small businesses and factoriesand then moved to the suburbs. Stavans’s parents, as of the writing of Return to Centro stayed in DF, where they had moved, too, to a bit more upscale neighborhood. But among his relatives were an actor: his father; and an orchestra conductor: an uncle. His father did run a small factory to pay for his art. Apparently nowadays, many Jews live in the more prosperous suburbs of Mexico City which are in fact in the state of Mexico.
But I should return to Isaac Berliner. He is seen as a transitional poet. Stavans doesn’t think he is very important, but Rosenblatt has a greater appreciation, with which, based on my scant exposure, I would agree. Rosenblatt says, “The language is marked by its subversive use of allusions to the Jewish past.” He also notes Berliner’s surprising imagery. Rosenblatt says he is a “modernist Yiddish poet,” more stuff for me to look up. By the way, Berliner became good friends with Diego Rivera who illustrated his book of poems, City of Palaces.
Berliner wrote in Yiddish. I’m not at all sure how much Spanish he ever learned. My grandparents came to the U.S. speaking Yiddish and reading in Yiddish. They only learned English after they arrived. A heavy Yiddish accent marked their speech all their lives, and it was easier for them to fall back into their mother tongue than to try to explain complicated things in English. I sympathize! My grandmother wrote her first letter (or anything besides a shopping list) in English to me when I was in Uganda in the Peace Corps.
Here are some of Berliner´s poems as they appear in Rosenblatt´s translation:
Godl Treads a New Land
(Fragment From a Long Poem about Immigrant Life in Mexico)
The sea behind is already suspended in green jelly
having been cast by a front of waves checkered and fluttering
like Jonah’s whale-fish, the ship remains, still by the coastline.
Here he encounters here a sun glowing with dust and pollen
He raises his eyes up to the heavens and prayerfully deep-dreams.
His still lips manage—Praise God, may His name be sanctified!—
I have just crossed the sea and arrived here in one piece.
Foreign-tongued voices deafen like the beats
of drums.
Strange men hand off the suitcase he carries
pulling,
His valise between valises, lifted on a wagon
two dark bodies flank him like two reyshes, bent.
Two palms lift and push the wagon hard
and Godl is off through the sunburned streets and intersections
He looks around and gazes upon it all, naked children in sand
messing around.
Big houses. Small, low-slung shanties bending down in prayer.
He touches the pocket in his overcoat to check if his tefillin
are there—if he had left them on the ship—God forbid—Deprivation.
He arrives at a house. An inscription on a board: “Hotel Espana”
A man opens the door to a room for him, better to say merely, “lodgings”
He washes his hands in a basin and wastes no time.
He takes a look through the shaded window to the eastern heavens astride,
fastens his tefillin upon his forehead and wraps the straps on his left arm
Forget it! He’ll pray in solitude, because here the Jewish street does not exist.
***
Let Us Relate the Power
It burns in me—the evil sin of Adam and Eve.
My troubles are soaked through with boiling tears and blood
I have never praised the Creator, I have never prayed.
I have never allowed God one tear through my wails.
My dreams dangle bloody on every picket
of this bright prison-world—I will beg, moan
My God—I come to you now with a holy quaking and panic,
Girded with prayers, like a devout Jew on Rosh Hashanah.
Each adversarial hour is a stumbling block,
Every coming day is for me a cold cruelty
Every bloody spot is a letter of Unesanneh Tokef
The red, agonized earth—an open page in the prayer book.
There, put those letters in all the corners of the earth:
Who from hunger? – Who in winter? – Who by fire? – and Who by water?
and I will stay a fleck of dust between red flecks
until the end of generations I will scream scream scream.
***
The Punishment Should Come
It became black it is a sunburned face
a piece of black coal
the light cries with red tears
toward a desolate destiny and unto horror
The Image of God wails
What has the world deserted?
There is no synonym
for sorrow that bullies
It is every letter
of a poem
an open mouth
that screams
moans
punishment.
For all
for beginning and end
for mourning-rips in cloth
upon a world of compassion and good
for us who have been dealt what we’ve been dealt
here, besides a variety of folk
for every bloody hour.
It moans
punishment
my song
blood, for a Jew
bloody scream
from each punishment.
The heart of time
has opened up a black secret
heated up my calm mood
God does not scream
in my song’s chamber
the blood of the Jew, it screams
it screams, it screams out to
a variety of folk
and it moans my every sentence
Punishment!
Punishment!
and I
a child
from a folk among wandering folk
through generations eternally in sorrow
through distant paths
through plague
through temptation
through wind.
I wait
for the ascent of a new day.
***
Marijuana
The path so muddy
A man, on the earth on the mist
Moving along lazy-stepped
with feet, like heavy pendulums
eyes, alight like candlesticks
small flames aroused, fall upon
womanly flesh and hips,
on girlishly tender faces.
What a waste!
He can’t avert his gaze.
Why, if man could master himself
slake in his eyes
these erotic flames.
The man smokes marijuana
A narcotic.
The dream-effect places him in a harness
The earth is not muddy.
He lays upon divans
that caress his feet, treading:
He doesn’t hear the laments,
The begging
The children on grimy corners,
play quartets
Here, thousands of singers sing
A man collapses from hunger?
They extend their hands and wail?
Their skin dried out?
An Emperor
A Youth
Upon thrones
Of red and bloody luminations
Nirvana
It smokes a man, that marijuana.
Narcotic.
He’s harnessed to the divan.
upon the earth, which is filthy.