Mexico

Writing From The Ground

Posted on by Laughingnomad

New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof (incidentally from my home state of Oregon) has written an excellent review of William T. Vollman’s book entitled “Poor People” that reflects a deep understanding of the issues underlying poverty.

From my 30 years of work with impoverished people in the US and from six years of travel in impoverished countries, what Kristof says rings true for me.

Vollman interviewed poor people in several countries and asked them questions like “do you consider yourself poor?” Or “why are poor people poor?” Or “are men and women equally poor?” Or “why are you poor?” Or “why are some people rich and some poor?”

Kristof considered Vollman’s book a kind of “tour guide of the slums.” The answers were not very illuminating without some larger context…just as I pointed out in my last blog entry on getting information and making connections between the pieces.

Referring to just one issue, health care, Kristof says that before seeing the effects of the hurricane on New Orleans, he “had thought that the obstacle for poor people—and the reason they die as a result of deficient health care —was that they couldn’t afford it. But that’s only one factor.

What we’ve seen over and over is that even if there is a free clinic, the poor family may depend on a single mother who doesn’t have a car or driver’s license and so can’t get there. Or she can’t afford the gas. Or her car doesn’t have insurance. Or she doesn’t understand how serious the symptoms are. Or she is working at a low-level job where she can’t just ask for time off to take a child to the clinic. Or she doesn’t speak English. Or she’s illegal and is worried that INS agents may look at the clinic’s records. Or she’s got three other small children and can’t leave two at home while she takes her sick child on a series of bus rides to the clinic. Or…the possibilities are endless. The point is that making medical care accessible to the poor requires much more than making it free.”

Economic-development experts promise that with the correct mix of promarket policies, poor countries will eventually prosper. But policy may not be the only problem. Geography may be a problem. Tropical, landlocked nations may never enjoy access to the markets and new technologies they need to flourish in the global economy. In Oaxaca, only government workers (who usually live in Oaxaca City) get free health care. For the poorest of the poor there are no accessible clinics at all without a 7 hour bus ride out of the mountains…even if they had the money. As a result the infant death rate in Oaxaca is twice what it is in Mexico City.

Comics…A New Way Of Thinking?

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Have been thinking that I need a new way of thinking. Like comics. Not Donald Duck or the Road Runner although those have their virtues. In Salon.com I came across an interview of Alan Moore, who the author, Scott Thrill, thinks reinvented the comic book as the cutting-edge literary medium of our (whose?) day.

Some thoughts of his: “Connection is very useful; intelligence does not depend on the amount of neurons we have in our brains, it depends on the amount of connections they can make between them. So this suggests that having a multitude of information stored somewhere in your memory is not necessarily a great deal of use; you need to be able to connect this information into some sort of usable palette…I think that complexity is one of the major issues of the 20th and 21st centuries..We have much more information, and therefore we are much more complex as individuals and as a society. And that complexity is mounting because our levels of information are mounting.”

He goes on: “Information is funny stuff. In some of the science magazines I read, I’ve found it described as an actual substance that underlies the entirety of existence, as something that is more fundamental than the four fundamental physical forces: gravity, electromagnetism and the two nuclear forces. I think they’ve referred to it as a super-weird substance. Now, obviously, information shapes and determines our lives and the way we live them, yet it is completely invisible and undetectable. It has no actual form; you can only see its effects. Information is a kind of heat. I would suggest that as our society accumulates information, from its hunter-gatherer origins to the complexities of our present day, it raises the cultural temperature…If you can find a new synthesis…you can help people find new ways of seeing, thinking and dealing with the times in which they find themselves…”

Hmmm. This need to make sense of our world…to find meaning…I think, is part of what is giving rise to the popularity of radical religious fundamentalism in the world today. Simple. Just pick up the Bible or the Koran. The “connections” are all there…or at least the ones some of us are looking for. Or we could read the comics. Or…

But this all assumes we have the the money and the “luxury” of taking time out from putting food on the table. In other words, how do we access relevent information and when do we think about it? And what if we don’t have the language and education to understand the terms. And what if you are a Trique, or Mixtec indigenous living in the mountains of Oaxaca and all you know is that your land is being taken away?

Worker’s Day May 1

Posted on by Laughingnomad

International Workers Day is traditionally a big holiday in Mexico with workers getting the day off to celebrate. Oaxaca had a huge march…thousand walking to and out of the Zocalo. The APPO contingent showed up about noon…a few speeches and songs…not a lot of interest. But observers say things are heating up.

But you know those nice pretty newly painted walls that the Governor paid for? They are now all full of graffiti again. The APPO spokesperson said the APPO has been instructed to only spray paint government buildings. The APPO apparently is assuming that many marchers are government-paid infiltrators when they graffiti private homes.

So the APPO has asked the masked young people (encapuchados) to unmask assuming that those masked would then be identified as provocateurs or government-paid infiltrators. Seems silly to me.

Today there is supposed to be highway blockades and strikes. I will definitely not be taking my car out today.

Wages

Posted on by Laughingnomad

May Day is coming up. An op-ed piece was printed in the Oaxaca Noticias daily newspaper criticizing the employment practices of WalMart and VIPS.

I and many expats here usually tip 20% to help make up for their small salaries and for all the people who don’t tip at all. I talked with a woman expat from Europe who has lived here 30 years and now makes sausage and baked goods to sell. She was trained as a nurse. The working conditions are terrible she said….nurses are expected to contribute out of their salaries to the electricity and janitorial services of the hospital…among other expenses.

In the year that I have been in my apartment I have found out that Adelina, who works for the landlord 12 hours a day (cleaning, cooking) and is supposed to clean all our apartments once a month (free cleaning the landlord said when I moved in) and does all the washing by hand, gets about $7.00 a day. (However, instead of buying a washing machine for her, the landlord has bought a gas lawn mower so he can mow the postage stamp lawn in the courtyard.) Adelina lives in a rusty tin-hut at the end of an ally on the other side of the Periferico…no water…no cooking facilities…just a room barely big enough for a double bed for her and her daughter. She walks to work and back home at 9 at night in the dark…about 2 miles.

The landlord owns several business/office spaces in my block and another apartment house on another street…at least that I know of. They are well to do by anybody’s standards. Ana, who is bilingual, found out from her regular vendor at the market that our landlord, whose son has a chilli stall and lives downstairs, is very powerful in the market. The way our landlords have made their money, the vendor says, is by lending money to the sellers in the market at 25% interest…which may be their only option…I have no way of knowing.

For my part I have told sweet cheery Adelina she doesn’t have to clean my apartment. Before she returned home to Canada, Ana, who lived next door, used to give Adelina $20 a month for a tip for apartment cleaning. When I leave I will give Adelina money for her services (answering the gate and providing security) during the year so she can send her 5 year old daughter to school next year.

Foreigners, at least those not living on the local economy, get charged more for everything, which would be ok, except that it drives up the cost of living for the locals. It’s not that I want do-good credit for this…it’s to warn other travelers what to expect who come here to live short-term. I am retired and fortunately don’t have to live on the local economy. I have no idea what it is like for foreigners who live and work here.

This Side Of The Border Problem

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Oaxaca is Mexico’s second poorest state with many mountain villages nearly empty of working age men. But over half of the poco English speaking men I have talked to have said they learned the language by working on the East Coast…sweeping a parking lot, waiting tables, dish washing, working on dairy farms in NY state. Many others refer to back-breaking work picking strawberries in California and Oregon….or better…construction in Las Vegas. A woman working as a janitor at the Toyota outlet here said her husband has been in the states for four years. “Oh, where,” I asked. She didn’t know.

My friend Mica had an aunt in Huayapam, Juvita, who sold her successful Tejate business in the market here and unbenownst to her husband, Pedro, paid huge money to an inept “coyote” to take her and two daughters across the border illegally. She died in the Arizona desert. Her daughters survived and are still in the US, leaving her husband here alone. Pedro’s sister, Carmen, is married to a man who hasn’t been back from the US for several years, leaving her here with her 4 year old daughter, Paula.

For 8 years, I mentored a teenage girl from a family of 10 from the Mixtec, in the northwestern Oaxaca mountains that have been playing both sides of the border for years…some of the children legal and some not. The parents have to return every year to work the communal land.

Many are trying to get legal status for work in the US. One young waiter in the Zocalo left his wife and two children in Los Angeles to come home to a small village in Oaxaca to file immigration papers. He is living with his parents and travels by bus one hour twice a day from Tlacalula to Oaxaca City to wait tables at a restaurant in the Zocalo…sending his wages home to his non-working wife. He has been told by immigration all he can do is wait. He has been waiting for one year.

A long-time American born friend from Oregon came to Queretaro with her new Mexican-National husband who is an auto mechanic to file papers for him. They tried once unsuccessfully. Now, in order to be with him, she is stuck in Mexico…trying again. He had been in the US for ten years, living frugally, sending every extra penny home (with Mexico ripping off up to 20% money sent home charges) to support an ill mother with the extra ($40,000) going into “savings” here. Big mistake. As often happens the two brothers entrusted with the money now say there “is no money.”

An AP article of April 27, 2007 illustrates part of the problem that leaves Mexican migrants in a catch-22:

Farm labor shortage may leave crops to rot in field
Tighter border, better paying jobs keep workers away

Black In Mexico

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Until 1650 there were more African slaves in Mexico than anywhere else in the Americas. Until 1810 there were more Africans living in Mexico than Spaniards. (From Bobby Vaughn’s dissertation “Race and Nation: A Study of Blackness in Mexico” ref Wikipedia) This was due to the fact that early on Spanish women were not sailing to Mexico and the Spanish population was slower to grow.

Spanish Mexico’s history is of slavery is overshadowed by the vast numbers of Africans sold as laborers in the Caribbean, the United States and Brazil. Although Veracruz on the east coast of Mexico is envisioned as a black state due to the legacy of slaves coming into it’s ports, few people, including most Mexicans, realize that a much larger black Mexican population lives along Mexico’s “Costa Chica” (west coast) which runs just east of Acapulco in Guerrero state down to Huatulco in the state of Oaxaca. Some call themselves Afro-Meztizo (meztizo being the term for the mix of indigenous and Spanish blood) and although they are Mexican, they are beginning to celebrate their black heritage through artistic and cultural activities.

This explains why, when I arrived in Oaxaca in June of 2006, I noticed, in just not a few people, what appeared to be African traits in skin tone and hair texture. In fact, while riding the bus one day during the teacher strike, I also noticed banners hung on the fence surrounding the University calling for more attention to Mexico’s black brothers and sisters.

Making Tejate

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Tejate is a rich frothy drink that is famous in Oaxaca. You get hooked on it. Labor intensive, it is made with criollo corn boiled in wood ash and ground and mixed with toasted and ground mamey seeds, cacao and the flowers of a tree found only in Huayapam.

The annual Tejate Fair on April 1 in Huayapam is a huge deal with thousands coming from all around Mexico to sample Tejate and partake in the dancing, music and food and crafts tables. Late one night at Mica and Bardo’s house, they asked me if I wouldn’t show up at 9am the next morning. A local TV station was going to film Mica’s mom, Ines, a well known “Tejatera,” as she and Carmen demonstrated the laborious art of making Tejate. They wanted me to film the filming for the family.

International Driving

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Don’t know if it’s just Oaxaca or maybe it’s the whole of Mexico. However, my dentist says that drivers in Oaxaca are worse than in Mexico City! But in Xalapa they were ever so polite…big fines meted out if they are not.

But you are taking your life in your hands in Oaxaca. The taxis and buses are the worst…speeding, honoring no lanes…forcing you over. No stop signs, lights, when there are lights and when they are working, are suggestions only. And then there are the “topes” or speed bumps everywhere. Never know when one is coming up unless you watch the cars ahead and hope they slow down…however, one, with drivers from Veracruz, didn’t slow down until they got to the tope. Then they stopped. Bam. Their little car could do it. My big Toyota Land Cruiser couldn’t. So I slammed right into the back of their car. Good thing no one was hurt. Good thing for insurance.

Actually I expected this…but thought I’d get side-swiped by a bus. Now I know why Mexican immigrants in the north get into so much trouble! A couple years ago in my home town in Oregon I was T-boned by an immigrant going through a red light at about 60 miles an hour…she had no insurance. No one has insurance here except the expats.

There are rules here…just not the posted ones. And heaven help you if you don’t obey them! Boils down to buses and taxis and very small cars do what they want…and that includes just about everyone. Except the gringa with the Toyota with a US license plate. Yes, I know I should have put more space between me and car in front. You get conditioned to keep close…cars, buses and taxis will try to edge into even a sliver of space forcing you over. If you leave a lot of room…say a couple car lengths you never get to where you are going because the whole city will move in front of you.

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Thailand is no better. Was rear-ended by a motorcycle there once. Today got an email from Bob who is living in Thailand: “Now if I could only learn to control my mini-rage reactions at Thai drivers,” he says.

“Earlier this week I was driving in a line of autos and a bus tried to pass the whole line of 5-6 cars. He encountered oncoming traffic and cut in front of me–not really in front more like forced me onto the shoulder.

I offered selected auditory and visual feedback. (Had to laugh because the same thing happens here in Mexico!)

But the curious cultural phenomena is that I was the heavy in that I lost my cool. But driving is very unsafe here–most trips (even to the market) produce an anxiety or at least an edge of apprehension. And the Thais cannot park. It is humerous to watch them attempt a parallel park, most often most of the car is left somewhere out on the street. And I have two significant dings being clipped me while I was parked. Oh well…..” 

I think I detect a note of Thai-speak in that syntax.

Arrazola & Zaachila

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Charly and I took the long way around to Arrazola about 10 miles south of Oaxaca City where copal wood Alebrijas are made…the most famous craft in Oaxaca. Most of the pieces are carved out of one piece of wood with crude knives…with maybe some wings or a snake or a tongue attached.
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The large ones like this cost several hundred dollars.

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My favorites were the little geckos for $6 that you can arrange crawling up and down your walls.
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On wednesday we went to Zaachila thinking it was market day. Nope…it’s thursday. That will have to wait for another time. But the tejate was great.