From 12 March to 17 March, eleven us --five adults and six teenagers from our San Antonio Episcopal Church traveled to Nueva Rosita, Mexico to paint their Episcopal church. Our fearless youth leader has as one of her personal missions exposing our US teenagers to other cultures in a way that breaks down barriers of prejudice about Mexico, Mexicans, and poverty.
The great Mexican state of Coahuila is largely desert, much of it stark and rugged and beautiful. It is also one of the richest states in Mexico, the seemingly empty landscape concealing a cache of minerals and the cities a growing number of industries which bring with them as many problems as solutions. Nueva Rosita sits in the middle of Coahuila's Región Carbonifera whose towns have done well with coal mining.
The drive in March from San Antonio to Nuevo Rosita, about five hours, passes from the green of South Central Texas farms and ranches through the rolling brush country and scruffy towns thrown down along the highway in Mexico. Maybe thirty or so miles this side of Nueva Rosita, you can get on a Cuota, a fancy new toll road. It cuts through uninhabited landscape so you think there's no one there, but that's not true. The free road is surprisingly close, though invisible from the cuota. If you take the free road, you see people not just in pueblitos but riding horses and burros alongside the road, waiting at bus stops, eating at outdoor tables at little restaurants for travelers, and driving all manner of vehicles. You see cattle and goats at pasture, and horses tied up in a bit of grass while their owners work. And of course you see industry, especially coal-fired electric plants with large signs out front proclaiming their devotion to protecting the environment.
Nueva Rosita is about 70 miles from the Mexico-Texas border within sight of the stark dark desert mountains. It is a fairly new town by Mexican standards. One of a cluster of towns in the región carbonifera of Coahuila, the vast number of its citizens are associated one way or another with the coal mines. It sits on a bit of a rise, so when you walk to the edge of the town you can easily look out over pueblitos in one direction and mining operations in another towards the mountains. Very quickly you can find the openness, the emptiness that is endemic to this kind of landscape which I love. In March, it was cool, cold for a Texan on one day, in fact, and for the most part, clear.
There are some pictures of the church's neighborhood in the photo album. As in many Mexican towns, the downtown is dense in the center and peters out quickly around the edges.The neighborhood the church is in is spacious and airy with houses set wide apart from each other, even the not so prosperous ones. In the pictures, you can see some, and you can see walls of richer houses and views of some of the mine works behind a church. A couple look out toward the mountains over a cluster of the smaller houses of some poorer miners. In our San Antonio papers we occasionally read about accidents in the coal mines in this area. Some people pay especially dearly for energy, and especially dearly for a livelihood somewhat better than those of many Mexicans.
The church we'd come to paint sits in the corner of a large, scruffy lot, tufts of tough grass standing between the paths worn down by baseball players and kids running and jumping on the swings and slides and tires in the playground. It's dusty. Every step kicks up small puffs of dust. The church was a mustardy yellow when we arrived, chipping around the edges and peeling in large, thin sheets. Jim and I liked the color, but we were in a minority. Anglo Episcopalians I think go in more for what they consider good taste, Anglo-style. Padre Martín chose a pleasing beige-mauve kind of color for his Texas painters to use.
This is not a rich church. Some of the windows are broken, a piece of roof is loose, molding is missing here and there on the outside. But the windows, paned with all kinds of glass, let in a soft light, and you can sit in the pews and look out at trees and sky. Out of one, you can see a huge, yellow rose hanging there, right at eye level. Inside there is a feeling of serenity: the soft light, the pale blue walls, the simplicity. We went to Mass on Sunday and sat up front, special guests. Padre Martín gave his sermon so that every few sentences, one of the Spanish speakers among our group could translate. It was a lovely sermon, about grabbing on to the joy of life and living it and sharing it though life is hard and short. Mexicans are much more willing to deal with this true nature of life than many of us USAers are. Unlike in an Episcopal church in the US, a bleeding, suffering Jesus hung on the cross above the altar. No abstract crucifix here. And of course there was a large picture of La Virgén de Guadalupe in the Narthex. The communion cup was plastic; the wine in a plain old wine bottle, the water in a plastic water bottle. A parishioner, a plump man in a plaid sports shirt, sat up front to play Mexican hymns on a boombox, and everyone sang along.
After the service, we all repaired to the parish hall, an austere, longish cinderblock building. Some of the women had prepared a lunch for us. We were all kind of shy with each other, not quite sure what to say or do. Jim and I sat on a bench with a mother, a grandmother and an incredibly beautiful little boy. It was easy to talk about him -- and to him. His picture is in the photo album. In it, he is peaking over the top of the table.
It was a good meal, with fluffy, light homemade wheat tortillas made by Nena, whom I mention further below. There were corn tortillas, too. When we were still back at the Padre's house before the service, the man who owned the tortillería delivered them to the front door and joked around a bit with Padre. Later he turned up at the service, and then of course at the lunch where he wanted to be sure we knew he'd made the corn tortillas. The men sat in a group by the front door, talking to each other and greeting us.
The parish hall is the big money-maker for the church. People rent it for wedding receptions and quinceañeras and baptisms, piñatas and loterías. Our girls slept in it, clearing out for the events. The boys and Jim and I slept in Padre's house, a largish cinder-block building which Padre Martín finds considerably bigger than he needs. He'd never had guests before. The boys and we slept in large, unfurnished bedrooms on air mattresses. At night we heard the burbling of the aerator in Padre's fish tank and thought it was raining. One night it was raining. Ferocious tormentas rolled across the night sky, the rain pounding the dust into mud and the brittle, stick like grass into the ground.
There is also a playing field that Padre Martín wants to turn into a football pitch, a basketball court and some playground equipment. I have snapshots my friend Kim took showing me coming down one of the slides. This picture is definitely not in the photo album. One of the best times I had there, though, was being a baseball- playing grandmother. I even got a single. Missed most of the catches, though.
I wish I had pictures of the center of town. It is busy and looks pretty prosperous. Unlike in US towns, the narrow sidewalks are crowded with people going and coming and pausing to talk to each other. As is our habit in towns we haven't visited before, Jim and I, along with our friend Kim and Padre Martín, checked out the supermarket, Gutierrez, just off the main street. With Padre Martín we criss-crossed the aisles picking up local cheeses and spaghetti and chorizo and ground meat and very good-looking and cheap avocadoes and fruit and brown eggs which in Mexico are not fancier than white. We scooped pinto beans out of a bin and Padre Martín talked with people he knew. There is also a local market, but it was not open the days we were there.
We bought all our supplies in a well-stocked ferraría where we got a discount because we were painting a church. We passed small-engine repair shops, dress stores, panaderías, internet cafes, farmacías, papelerías, auto parts stores, and schools. We saw a lot of veterinarias. In Mexico, veterinarians are usually associated with pet stores. Padre Martín, an animal lover, has a dalmation which was in need of some attention, so we visited his favorite veterinarian/store a couple of times. An elegent older woman sat at a desk in the midst of a jumble of supplies and feeds and medicines and baby chicks in cages and stacked up tanks glittering with swirling fish. She called the vet for Padre Martín and intermediated between the two. In the end, we didn't have enough cash to pay for the flea (bicha) medicine and the small, glittery fish Padre chose to add to his tank. La Señora said, that's fine. You can pay when you can pay. At our second visit, the vet himself, a tall, lanky cowboy-looking man listened carefully to the description of the dog's problems, prescribed medicines for skin disease and parasites and set up an appointment so Padre Martín could bring Rubí in for a physical and a spaying if she was healthy enough. When we arrived in Nueva Rosita, Rubí didn't have a name because she is deaf and Padre said she didn't need one because she couldn't hear a name if he used it to call her. I must have looked sad when I asked how he could refer to her when he talked about her if she didn't have a name. A little later he told me he'd given her the name Rubí, I think after the villainous but gorgeous namesake of a recently ended telenovela. Both Rubís are beautiful.
Women from the parish cooked us lunch every day -- a Mexican version of spaghetti and meat sauce one day, with guacomole made in a molcajete; beans and rice and meat in tortillas another; a heap of steamed fresh vegetables and mac and cheese another. All delicious We took Padre Martín out for cena in the evenings at at a variety of local restaurants. The restaurants all had specialties distinct to each. The best was a plain, brightly lit restaurant that offered a specialty of spiced, shredded, grilled beef, delicious smoothies and a very jovial and welcoming owner. We failed to eat in an outdoor one which served only charcoal-grilled meats and smelled delicious. Jim and I will definitely look it up on our next trip. Our leas satisfying meal: pizzas a la Dominos in a large, white, empty chain restaurant. The kids with us found they didn't miss pizza as much as they thought they did though it tasted just the way it did at home.
One night, the most hospitable Maria Elena, a woman of the church, invited us to her home to eat home-made tamales. She and her family, including the adorable Danyito her five-year-old grandson whose picture you can see in the photo album sitting on a swing, live in an attractive middle-class house built maybe in the seventies, in a row with similar houses. They got to sit without the grownups at the big dining room table in front of the glass-fronted cabinet filled with china collected over the years. The grownups sat in the big kitchen at the back of the house, along the counter. The walls were tiled with handpainted azulejos -- images of kitchen tools and vegetables on them. On the stove, an ever-present pot of beans simmered; on the counter, a huge, shiny steamer filled with Doña Elena's tamales sat waiting. Such tamales I have never had as Doña Elena's. Nor had any of the rest of us. Our tiny, skinny group leader ate eleven of them. Most of the rest of us came close. They were chicken, obviously seasoned with a secret recipe. Accompanying them was a green salsa using green tomatoes, not tomatillos, and a few other things. Simple. I'm sure when we try to duplicate the recipe, we will fail. And the beans of course were delicious.
Doña Maria´s daughter, also Maria Elena, but known as Nena, is an elementary school teacher who has continued her education and is now certified to teach teachers. She was at home for several months due to some surgery she had to have. Incidentally, she was the maker of the fluffy wheat tortillas we'd had at the Sunday parish lunch. Since she was off work, she wanted to take us to see one of the surface mines. She talked to us of the importance of coal to the region. Unfortunately, the ferocious storms I mentioned above flooded the open mine she wanted us to see. The whole mine was closed the only day we could go. I would like to learn a lot more about Nueva Rosita and the whole area. The Mexican Revolution gained much if not most of its strength from these vast northern areas. It also was a seedbed of strikes for workers' rights in the 1950s. And the oldest winery in Mexico is south of Nueva Rosita in an old monastery in an oasis.
Check out the Nueva Rosita album.
