The house we’re in is just one big room like the old-fashioned houses, like the modern houses imitating the old-fashioned one-room houses. Outside there is a narrow courtyard, a passageway open to the sky, cluttered with caged birds, crates, potted plants, and a wringer washer. The bathroom must be reached through this vestibule.
It’s a terrible business staring at other people’s homes, peering into cupboards, investigating private areas, like sniffing someone’s armpits. I’m both repulsed and compelled to poke my snout everywhere and sniff.
We climb up to the azotea, the roof terrace, a space that is used for many things in Mexico, and here it houses the several little dogs who have speckled the roof with caquita, turds shaped like donuts and churros. Calixto tells me the unmarried uncle lives in the little room up here beyond the glass door; it’s he who watches over the grandparents, though I suspect not much, just as he doesn’t do very much cleaning. “Where’s your uncle?” I ask. Calixto says with disgust, “Out drinking, no doubt.
“It’s like un palomar—a dovecote,” Calixto says of the narrow tall house of his grandparents.
“To me it’s like many of the downtown houses,” I say. “Narrow as a slice of birthday cake. But if I buy this house that your grandparents so desperately want to sell, I’ll be displacing viejitos, old people.”
Calixto says, “Anywhere you buy a house in town you’ll be displacing someone’s viejitos.”
It’s a truth that hurts to hear. I am part of the gentrification.
—
Though it’s easy for me to come south, I’m told the story of a woman wishing badly to come north, and it stays and stays with me. Who tells me this story is Servando.
Servando Bustos Ybarra: an intelligent, respectful, green-eyed Mexican who is about forty but looks younger because of the baseball caps he always wears. Originally from a farming community on the outskirts of town, now he lives and works as a concierge/gardener for a boutique hotel catering to tourists from Canada and the United States. Servando is fully bilingual in Spanish and English and, as he is smart, easily picks up current slang. He’s popular among the hotel guests because he shows them deep deference, and therefore confirms in their eyes their feeling of racial and economic superiority. His Don Quixote subservience is typical of Mexican hospitality and often misunderstood by foreigners, who see it as the propriety of a servant and not the generosity and good breeding of a social equal. Servando is especially Mexican in that he often invites his guests to sunset cocktails and appetizers at his own expense, not his employer’s, though he earns only modest wages. For Mexicans like Servando, it’s important etiquette to offer his guests everything. From the halls of Montezuma, this “Mi casa es su casa” philosophy has been misinterpreted by entitled foreigners as permission to help themselves to more than what is intended.
Servando has a handsome square face like an ancient Olmec stone head, but he confesses he dislikes his Indian nose. Servando’s face is creased from working under the sun, which makes his agate eyes more pronounced, a reminder of the history of foreign intervention in the Guanajuato area, including the imposition of Archduke Maximiliano, who was put to death by firing squad in nearby Querétaro.
Servando’s grandparents spoke Otomí, but within two generations this language has been all but forgotten. From his Otomí ancestry he has inherited the sturdy body and strong limbs of the locals. Often Servando is seen climbing up and down the hilly streets about town several times a day ferrying groceries or doing errands for hotel guests, and like the worker ants who carry items five times their size, Servando is always ready to comply. This is the story Servando tells me:
We traveled by bus to the U.S. embassy in Guadalajara, two dozen of us wanting our visas. But truthfully, in my heart of hearts, it was more for la Señora, my boss, who keeps asking me to come. My visa application cost 10,000 pesos [$673].
I sat across from an old couple: humble country people you could tell by the way they dressed. He in cowboy clothes, and she a chubby shorty still wearing her kitchen apron under a pale blue sweatshirt. She was talkative and told me her name was Señora Concha and that she wanted to go to the States to visit her two sons who live outside Dallas.
We left at one in the morning and got to Guadalajara at dawn. First they took us to the Mexican consulate and we had to wait four hours till they opened, standing outside in the street, and there was already a line at 6 a.m. Five hundred people in front of us! Who knows when they got there. First you freeze, then you’re burning up when the sun comes out. Finally they take your photo, your fingerprint, and that’s it. Five or six hours and it’s over.
They put us up at a one-star hotel so ugly I slept with all my clothes on. Then to the U.S. embassy at eight in the morning. Another line of a thousand people. Three more hours of standing. Then they interview you in two seconds.
You stand behind a thick window with la cónsul on the other side talking through a mike. She asks you questions in front of everybody, because behind you more than a thousand are all listening.
—Why do you want to go to the U.S.?
—I just want to go on vacation.
She looked at my papers. —Who invited you?
—My employer, she has a house there. I want to get to know Disneyland, because I’ve read about Walt Disney.
Then she looked at her papers and said, —Por el momento no aplica. At the moment, you do not qualify.
—Gracias.
I felt [and here he makes a sound of exhaling deeply]…I felt, Okay, it doesn’t matter. On the contrary, I was relieved, because in my mind I was calculating the cost of the trip, and I can’t afford to stay but a couple of weeks.
When la Señora Concha came out of her interview, I could see on her face she hadn’t been granted a visa either.
—I so wanted to see my sons. It’s been twenty years. This is the third time I’ve tried. Sometimes we phone my grandkids over there, and they answer us in English!
—Señora, I know your children can’t come and see you because they don’t have papers, but can’t their children who were born in the States come and visit? They won’t have problems crossing. Why don’t they try to do that? You’re spending money you shouldn’t spend.
And I thought, this señora, so humble and poor, trying not to overspend too much when we were out and about. To make her feel better I told her about my uncle.
—My uncle went to visit his relatives, and he felt like he was in jail. He didn’t drive or speak the language. If they didn’t take him out, he couldn’t go out. It’s not easy over there.
—Well, maybe you’re right.
But I didn’t convince her, because she’s a mother. Her kids are her kids, and she wants to see them.
—
Mexico breaks my heart on a daily basis. The men and women who ring the bell looking for work. The man with too many teeth asking if I need a gardener. The Central American selling candy bars trying to make his way across yet another border. The honey-voiced anciana who rings my bell each Sunday needling me with small requests one after another, one at a time like rosary beads, forcing me to run up and down nineteen stairs to fetch a pair of shoes first, and then some clothes I might not want, perhaps a little food left over from lunch, any loose change, till I no longer feel generous and compassionate, I feel like strangling her, and then I feel miserable at my lack of humanity.
And the old ones downtown folded into little rag piles on the sidewalk, like bags of collapsed laundry, who bless me. May la Virgen protect you. May she look after you always. La Virgen will pay you back. May she keep you under her mantle of stars.
What must it be like to come from this town where so many of the houses are empty days, months at a time? Imagine you don’t have a house, or your house is something not worth inhabiting. What must it feel like to walk by these houses worth a million, two million, three, when one’s own home has no heat except firewood?
The wealthy Mexicans like to live in houses that resemble the futu
re. The expats who live here like to live in houses that resemble the past, or houses that are the Mexico of their imagination. Houses that allow them to feel like hacendados, hacienda owners.
Where do I fit in as a U.S. Latina who wants to live in a convent without the nuns?
—
Breakfast in the kitchen with Catalina and Calixto. The talk is about how sometimes when you go into a restaurant here in San Miguel, and they don’t want to serve you, they say the restaurant is full.
“Is this true? Has this really happened to you?”
“Sí,” Calixto insists.
It reminds me of what my friend the Mixtec poet Celerina Patricia told me about how indigenous people are treated in Mexico. How in the Zona Rosa in Mexico City, when they don’t want to serve her, they tell her the tables are all reserved.
“But how can this happen in this day and age?”
“It does,” Celerina assures me.
Catalina and Calixto both tell me about going to the cheese store Luna de Queso on an errand for me. How the salesclerk took care of all the foreigners and light-skinned Mexicans first before finally attending to Catalina and Calixto, who had been there before anyone else.
Even Calixto, as pale as Ranchero Queso, is snubbed, possibly because he dresses in T-shirts that say “That’s How I Roll” with a drawing of a roll of toilet paper. He doesn’t have the inclination or funds to buy button-down shirts. Calixto with his mestizo Euro-skin, but almond indio eyes. The shopkeeper ignores him and his mulata wife, Catalina, with her night jaguar beauty. At the Luna de Queso shop on Salida de Celaya they serve first and foremost those whose skin is as white as the waxy Brie moon.
—
On May 7, 2014, at 6:30 p.m., I take my friend Norma to a restaurant named “The Restaurant,” on Sollano Street, a high-end foodie’s delight, which I go to only when out-of-town friends make reservations. I’m just as happy, if not happier, eating at the market. I don’t need fancy. I never think of it. But it’s May, the slowest month in this town. My favorite, El Correo, is closed, as are many businesses this season.
Norma and I decide to dine at The Restaurant. I run ahead because Norma has a bad hip. I’m hoping we’ll be lucky and get a table without a reservation since we’re dining between lunch
(2 to 4 p.m.) and supper (8 p.m. or so). When I get there I’m thrilled to see the restaurant is empty.
“Buenas tardes,” I say to the hip young thing serving as hostess. “Do I need a reservation for dinner?”
“All our tables are reserved,” fashion model tells me.
“Really?”
“But you can sit at the bar,” she says.
“Oh, but can’t you try to seat us in the main courtyard?”
A waiter comes by as I make this request, and he ushers me to a table in the main courtyard, all cordiality. Finally Norma hobbles in, out of breath and in pain, and she asks the waiter if she may smoke. Only at the bar, is the reply. I’m a bit disgruntled by all this, after all the trouble I went through to get a courtyard table, but okay, fine by me.
It’s an expensive, delicious, but forgettable meal. Norma is happy, and I’m happy she’s happy, and that’s all that matters. When we exit, we walk through the main courtyard, where all the tables but two are still as empty as when we arrived.
I find the manager. I ask him if the tables are reserved, and why were we told they were reserved when there’s still no one here? He sputters something about having a talk with the hostess, but I know she’s only following management policy. I tell him I’m a writer and confess it will be an interesting story for me to write about.
It occurs to me I’ve passed as a local. I’m refused a table at The Restaurant, and now I know why. It’s filled with gringos, it’s a restaurant that caters to them, and it makes them feel like they’re in Beverly Hills when they’re really in Mexico.
Welcome to Mexico. México lindo y querido.
—
When my uncle Baby died recently his children had no idea where to spread his ashes—in Mexico City, where he was born, or in Chicago, where they lived. During the last decade of his life, when he was a widower, Uncle Baby chose to immigrate back to Mexico and live outside Guadalajara. But his children didn’t like his choice of a new life—a wife younger than any of his kids, a baby younger than his own grandkids. Pobrecito Uncle Baby. Where’s home? In his life, he lived in his shop. And now in death, his ashes are in an urn in the same Chicago shop where he worked as an upholsterer. His kids have decided to share the ashes and send half back to his “widow” in Mexico. They’re pleased with having come up with this diplomatic solution.
—
Last month I went back to the United States to close up the house I’d lived in for two decades. When I first bought the house, my father was furious. He couldn’t understand why I’d chosen a hundred-year-old house when I could’ve easily have bought a brand-new one. But I love old homes. Their duende, their soul/spirit.
Father’s first concern was that I wouldn’t be able to take care of a house by myself. One of the first things he did when he walked in was bounce on the floorboards. “Mira,” he said as he jumped. The planks squeaked and moaned as if he were hurting them. This was proof enough, he thought, to show me how foolish my choice had been. But after a few weeks, Father saw I had a team—handyman, yardman, housekeeper—attending to the needs of my elderly house. He sighed and finally admitted I’d done well.
Now, twenty years later, I am selling the house I said I’d never sell. On my last night, I wake at 3 a.m. for a 4:30 taxi pickup to the San Antonio airport. The driver arrives a half hour early, but my bags are already waiting on the front porch.
Before locking up, I look around at the empty rooms. I think about all the creative folks who have passed through this house and my life. Filmmakers and painters, designers and writers, architects and activists, politicians and poets, organizers and educators, musicians and dancers, singers and scientists, performance artists and feminist nuns. A writing workshop was born in this dining room and went on to become the Macondo Foundation. Here began los MacArturos, the caucus of Latino MacArthur fellows; here they gathered and celebrated. So many locos—local and from far away—passed through these rooms. Twenty years’ worth.
I pull the door firmly behind me, lock it for the last time, and ask myself this:
—How do you feel?
I say to myself, I feel…gratitude.
This house in San Antonio no longer brings me joy. It grew from a grande dame into a grand pain in the you-know-what, a curmudgeon constantly banging a stick on the floor for my undivided attention. “You don’t take care of me anymore,” I want to confess to my house, but I don’t want to hurt her feelings. For too long I’ve felt my solitude and concentration invaded now that the River Walk has been extended behind my back fence. Pedestrians trot on the other side at all hours, even during the night, setting my dogs into pandemonium and my heart leaping. Condominiums, under construction on the opposite bank, roar and growl and sputter into life, setting off dust storms. I don’t want to admit this, but my house makes me feel afraid.
I think about what my Mexican friends and employees said recently when I told them I was traveling north to the United States: “Aren’t you afraid?”*2
This is exactly what U.S. friends said to me when I told them I was moving to Mexico. “Aren’t you afraid?”
Soon after 9/11, on a radio talk show in Mexico, a caller gave the United States a new name. Instead of “los Estados Unidos,” the United States, he referred to it as “los Asustados Unidos,” the United States of Fear. We are living in the age of susto, fear, on both sides, on all sides, on all borders, across the globe.
Credit epl.1
The empty living room of my San Antonio house, January 2015
The paradox is this: fear unites us, fear divides us. In a post-9/11 United States, with so much vitriol allowed in the media toward people who look like me, I no longer feel at home at home. You shouldn’t feel
afraid in your own house.
Often in interviews I’m asked how it is that I identify as both Mexican and American, and I reply, “Well, you have a mother and a father, right? How is it that you can love both? Loving one doesn’t cancel out the other.”
I’ve been living in the Fatherland for a long time. Now it’s time to explore the Motherland, for what is Mexico if not a matriarchal society, even if matriarchs do sometimes create monsters. Isn’t a macho another word for a mama’s boy?*3
I peer out the cab window at the house while the driver rearranges my bags in the trunk. The porch lights shine cheerily through the punched-tin Isaac Maxwell fixtures. The magueys and cacti I planted are doing a beautiful flamenco dance in the dark; look how big they’ve grown. The pecan and the mesquite trees, the house sentinels, se despiden without sadness. I look at the house I’ve called for so long home. I am grateful.
I tell the driver, “Let’s go.”
February 16, 2015
Casa O’Leary
San Miguel de los Chichimecas
* * *
*1 A friend reminds me the town benefits from the philanthropy of its foreign guests, and this is certainly true. Expat pioneer Sterling Dickinson created the public library and fine arts center to integrate foreigners and to teach them to appreciate and respect Mexico and its citizens. But a San Miguel driver recently told me he feels these venues are exclusionary by being beyond the budget of most locals. As anthropologist Ruth Béhar said, “We try to fix injustice and inequality as best we can, but we are also complicit with the system that lets us live out our dreams while others suffer.”