Carved Christ, Tequila and Sun

A crucifix with a difference

Long, leisurely mornings in a foreign country provide a good time for reading, and what better reading would there be when you’re up under a Mexican morning sun than the history of Mexico. I did some of that this morning, and now I know enough—probably—to get myself into trouble in any serious argument. 

A few gleanings from Wikipedia and similar sites seem indisputable:

• Mexico’s history has been fraught with turmoil, colonial exploitation, genocide, civil wars and near-miraculous economic achievements.
• It’s history has significant relevance for today, particularly as regards Mexico-USA relations. The uniqueness of the Mexico-USA border and the current debate about its defense can’t really be understood without reference to several hundred years of past interactions.
• Much of what is southwestern USA was Mexico until the Spanish-American war.
• The border loosened substantially during the World Wars when Mexican workers were welcomed to take work places vacated by American men serving in the military.
• Around forty-million persons living in the USA are Mexican or Mexican-American.
• Nearly a million US expats live in Mexico.

One site detailed the immigration into Mexico over the last few centuries, mentioning in passing that some enclaves of alien settlement exist as un-assimilated communities—including Mennonites. Also that in certain areas, indigenous nations have persisted as cultural, traditional communities but the vast majority of the population falls into the Mestizo category, having mixed ancestry and speaking Spanish as the first language. The website opined that the trend for a long time has been to homogenize the population, and I imagine that the obliteration of ethnicity and languages would therefor be part of that trajectory. (I was thinking Canada as I read this; I can’t verify the truth of it in Mexico’s case.)

We took the bus from Puerto Vallarta to Guadalajara and were picked up at the terminal in Zapopan, a suburb of Guadalajara. The trip takes you from the seaside and up on a winding course into the highlands of Jalisco State. The route passes through the agave-growing, red earth region around the city of Tequila, where the juice of the agave is turned into—you guessed it—tequila. (We naively thought we were passing through pineapple fields until we were straightened out on that account.) 

The hills and valleys of Jalisco are brown and lifeless right now, except for the agave fields; it’s the dry season and as we passed pastures with cattle and no sign of feeding facilities, I thought of bovines suffering through winters in Canada and on dry pastures in Mexico. 

Here Comes Tequila

Perhaps the ground-travel observations from a bus window would have to go under the category of “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” but I felt as sorry for the horses and cattle scrounging to find food through a hot, dry season as I do for animals suffering -30 days in Saskatchewan. We’ve been here a week; I said I’d like to be a TV meteorologist here because the forecast—high 30, low 15, calm and sunny—would apply daily. Not really any good reason to go to work on a regular basis; tape the forecast and show it all the time, eh?

Chapala-Ajijic (pronounced ah-hee'-heeq') has become home to many retired Canadians. We met some of them in church and they fill some restaurants in the evenings. Worship leader Dave at the Lakeside Community Fellowship moved here from Vancouver area; his wife grew up in Melfort, Saskatchewan. Filmmaker John Friesen from Manitoba has just completed a feature film focused on US/Mexican relations at the personal level—Pat y Paco; we’re having coffee this afternoon.

The influence—positive and negative—of expats and tourism on local economies and cultures has been a topic on which our daughter and son-in-law have been able to “go to school” in Panama and now in Mexico. Maybe Friesen should do another film about that.

An “expat” Canadian quipped yesterday about the traffic congestion, “Darned gringos!”

I said, “Don’t worry, Mexico is gonna build a wall; US and Canada are gonna pay for it!”