From Xico

A Snow day (sort of) Our trip to Orizaba -- second stop, Chilchotla

Chilchotla (Shiuchotla)

Cofre de Perote and Pico de Orizaba loom up to the west of us here in Colonia Ursulo Galván, Cofre on the north, Pico on the south. Passing between them as we did on our trip to see snow, one moves from the dense green of cloud forest to desert and near-desert: a stark and fairly sudden contrast. In Quimixtlan we could see the dry starting to sap the landscape. Shortly after Quimixtlan we rose into the altoplano. The only green we saw was the dusty green coloring pine trees and sparse patches of grass and succulents and cactus.
Outside of Quimixtlan, we saw this very blue church. It was NOT lopsided in real life.

A very blue church just outside Quimixtlan in the Municipio of Chilchotla, at around 7122 feet

In the pueblo of Vicente Guerrera in the Municipio of Chilchotla at around 8400 feet, we found another very blue church. You can see scraps of the landscape it is set in.

Here is the notice you see posted above. It announces a Day the Seminary. It asks not just for money but for sacrifice and prayer and tells how you can help a person attend seminary. It also offers retreats for "youths and señoritas" with a yearning for the religious life.

Inside, the church was warm and richly decorated.

I am not sure what the name of this Virgen is, but I suspect it is the particular patron of the church.

This Virgen de Guadalupe is clearly indigenous. The candles are in front of and beneath her.

When I turned to leave the church, I found a very annoyed looking woman waiting for me. "Why are you taking pictures of our church," she demanded. I wanted to say because your church moves me, but I couldn’t think how, so I just said, because it is beautiful. She said, "And why do you think it is beautiful?" I said because of the love in it. So many people must have made it this way. "Are you Catholic," she wanted to know. I’m not. "What are you?" Episcopalian. "Is that one of those Protestant churches?" I was starting to get a feeling. No, I said. It is what the Catholic church became in England. And then it came to America. "So, she said," it is a kind of Catholic." Yes, I said. We walked outside. I offered money. She refused. "No. As long as you are a kind of Catholic, you can be here."

A friend of hers was outside chatting with Jim. The friend explained, "Missionaries come and take pictures of the church and then try to talk people into leaving it."
That Jim and I weren't among those missionaries relaxed everyone. At the end, we shook hands and the friend smiled and said, "If you come this way again, please, bring us copies of the pictures."

Outside of the church, there was a plaque on a concrete slab. Around the plaque was painted, “Your loving patience is reflected in the gaze of your child.” And, “A secure past, a better future.”

The plaque itself seems to commemorate the arrival of potable water in the community in 1996.

A Snow Day (sort of). Our Trip to Pico de Orizaba. First Stop, Quimixtlan

As I’ve mentioned, it’s been a warm, very dry winter for our part of Mexico, and the landscape shows it. I have, therefore, been craving snow and cold. When I arrived in Uganda one January forty years ago as a Peace Corps Volunteer, I had the same complaint: the perfect (for resorts) weather, temperatures in the low eighties, low humidity and clear skies drove me bonkers. I wrote to my mother to tell her so, and she stuck her head out into the dirty slush of a NYC winter to mail a letter begging me never to complain of such weather again. But here I am doing it. (Part of the concern, of course, is that drought isn’t so good for crops and water supplies, but that is for another post.) So Jim and I designated a day last week as our Snow Day for a trip to the base camp hut on the north side of Pico de Orizaba with the hopes that in spite of the warmth, we would at least get a glimpse of white and have to rub our hands together and jump up and down a bit to keep warm.
Jim plotted a back route for us that took us through Teocelo, towards Ixhuacán de los Reyes,then left to Patlanalan at a little lake (blog post) and then up onto the dry altoplano The other side of the mountains from where we live is desert and near-desert by nature, and at this time of year sand and dust is everywhere. I think I have mentioned that Antonio López de San Antonio (of Alamo fame for USAers, and of fame and infamy for much more in Mexico) drew up the state border between the states of Puebla and Veracruz which he was from, and did it so that the most beautiful and fertile lands were on the Veracruz side. It is almost as if he designed the landscape as well, so stark is the difference between much of Puebla and Veracruz. As we drove higher and crossed over, we came upon people plowing fields with cattle-drawn plows like this one below.

All in all, given the slopes and the dryness, it seems a much more practical approach than some giant Caterpillar tractor.

Puebla, by the way, has much better roads on the whole than we have found in Veracruz, though they are improving there, too. It’s always a bit of a shock to realize that even on smaller roads we aren’t skirting potholes and fissures and that there are lines on the road and so forth. There were, however, significant exceptions when we got to the mountain itself.
We pulled off the route to climb up into a town called Quimixtlan which dripped down the steep hills. We were at about 5000 feet. This is sheep-raising territory, and hunks of fresh borrego meat hung from hooks at outdoor butcher stands. I am shy, as you know, about taking pictures of people I don’t know when they know I’m doing it, so a butcher rack picture will have to wait. Jim always stops at churches to take his GPS readings and a photo. So our first stop was the church, which was substantial.

The front of the church

The turrets didn’t make it into the above picture, but are noteworthy: an Arab influence is evident.

The stained-glass windows lining the nave were stark.

On the entrance doors, the stained-glass images of Jesus and La Virgén de Guadalupe were apparently made by artists from Pueblo.

Next to the church was a very pretty town park.

And a chicken in the park.

Below are some signs and notices from around town.

Notice of the annual pilgrimage to Mexico City to the Shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Signs for this are up in every town we passed through.

The sign in the town park.

Jesus decal in a pickup truck window.

Office of legal proceedings for indigenous people

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Anti-drug abuse campaign poster

Finally, a shot of a small section of the wall along the road out of town.

A rose in the fog

JUst one picture. I took it this morning, the first foggy one in a long time, resting my camera on our balcony rail.

Pastorelas and Rain at La Ceiba Grafica

Jim and I sat on the veranda of La Ceiba to work on our lithographs last Wednesday. It was during the four hundred seventieth year of the hacienda’s existence. That’s an awful lot of years. A lot of USAer’s brains don’t have cells that can process that many years of history. There was history going on all over the place in the former British colonies that now are the United States of America, but I suspect most of us don’t tend to think of ourselves as coming from anything that far back. Or thinking that it matters. We’re more a cut and run kind of people. Here in our corner of Mexico, and in much of Mexico, history is part of the soul, the past all tangled up in one’s blood and bones with the present.

Las Pastorelas is a good example of this mixing. Las Pastorelas is a dramatization of the trip of the three kings, shepherds, and various others to see the newborn Jesus. Along the way, they encounter Lucifer and his disciples and the Angel Gabriel and his Angelitas who battle each other for the soul of the world, as they often do. As one would expect, evil in the form of Lucifer is ultimately defeated and the pilgrims make it to Bethlehem.

Las Pastorelas is said to be one of the products of the Catholic Church’s efforts to mix Aztec custom and Christianity to make the latter palatable. Specifically, from something like the 7th to the 26th of December, the prehispanic Aztecs celebrated the arrival of Huitzilopochtli, who was their most powerful god, a god of the sun and of war, and patron of the capital, Tenochtitlan. Incidentally, Huitzilopochtli means humming bird in Nahuatl. Here is his image as seen in Codex Telleriano-Remensis

Now this is a very unfair summary because it doesn’t go into Huitzilopochtli's journey through history. I’ll mention that he was one of the Gods that the Mexicas, and then the Aztecs made sacrifices of captive warriors to. To be sacrificed in this manner was considered a noble death, equal in nobility to death in war and death in childbirth. There are legends that those who died in these ways returned to earth as butterflies.
But back to Las Pastorelas. Another pre-Columbian tradition among the Aztecs and their predecessors was to have dramatic presentations of their historical successes. Thus, the Catholics constructed a story of the coming of their god and presented it as an historical success in the Aztec mold.

With time, Las Pastorelas took on its own local flavors and in fact the Church distanced itself from its presentation. Freed from the official oversight of the church, Las Pastorelas permuted into all kinds of local forms, often irreverent. At La Ceiba Grafica, we saw a mix invented by community folks from La Orduña and staff from La Ceiba. Unfortunately, the evening of the performance, it poured cats and dogs. The show started maybe an hour late as cast and crew frantically worked to restage it on porches and balconies and in the lobby instead of the courtyard. But in the end, a good time was had by all.

Here are some pictures of what we saw.

When it was clear there was going to be a substantial delay, people wandered around, some inside to look at the new exhibit, some actually just out in the rain. Note the raindrops caught by the camera.

This is the giant piñata, forlorn in the rain. It never got a chance to get cracked open. For some days after the performance, it hung limp and sad in front of the hacienda's entrance, but then finally someone decided it just looked too bedraggled and took it down.

On with the show! (Sort of.)

Lucifer and his Little Devils make their appearance on the central staircase of the lobby:

Angel Gabriel and his Angelitas appear on the veranda from stage left, a studio-classroom:

The Angel Gabriel was an interesting blend of metrosexual and WWF champion. Wrestling in Mexico, called Luche Libre, is sometimes said to be more popular than soccer/football.

The Fight between Good and Evil. Good looked pretty wimpy, but won anyway.

Somehow, the rest of the show dissolved into an undistinguishable mix of audience and actors. It was lots of fun. We ended up trooping upstairs to the kitchen for bunuelos and ponche.