Notes Toward a Cultural Anthropology (3)

Winter quarters here in southern Sonora are a small casita inside the walled grounds of a larger villa, which sounds exactly as comfortable and peaceful as it is. The back wall of the casita forms a length of the wall surrounding the property and abuts the street along the property front. In fact, all the residences along Durango are similarly walled from the street in a continuous and varied stucco and brick parapet, save for a large tract of vacant, scrubby ground immediately across the street, the holding of an old tequila factory (now a residence in its own right). The street, with its stretch of unoccupied ground, stretches about 100 meters, up to the corner where it makes an ell and continues along another outside tract of trees and cactus.

I mention all of these particulars because in Mexico such places are known as "Tailgate Heaven: An Amazing Free Party Venue." The ell at the corner, with vacant space on the outside of the bend in both directions, forms a comfortable nook for six or eight vehicles, many of them cumbered with the sound capabilities of a national soccer stadium or the Nuremburg Platz in its heyday.

The ell tends to draw a crowd after about 9:00 p.m. ("gringo midnight") on any holiday. And holidays are frequent here - the "Twelve Days of Christmas" is more than a harmless if cloying Christmas carol, it is a confirmed and pernicious custom, something to be taken literally. According to some perverse gloss on the gospel account, it took the three wise men exactly twelve days to track down the young spawn of a miscreant deity, and to offload their cargo of luxury items (which have apparently been subsequently absorbed into the Vatican treasury). As a consequence, the Nativity in Mexico stretches on for an interminable span, culminating on the twelfth day, when every good child gets to explode its gift of fireworks in the street outside my window.

The generous disbursal of holidays throughout the calendar offers an instructive lesson in the cultural relativity of time, both as a general concept and as an arena within which people conduct their daily comings and goings. Time in Mexico is not (yet) the same as money. Time is a flexible, ever-slowing and quickening stream, an arena in which the tempo changes according as the gods may pipe the dance. The clock has little say in the matter, and the calendar, as I say, is studded with the lacunae we call Navidad, the Day of the Magi, the Day of the Dead, the feast of one or other of the vast necropolis of saints, angels, Benito Juarezes and other fathers of the nation.

Winter is a slow time as I have just explained. In winter also comes the Day of the Dead, another quasi-religious celebration. (Mexico is somewhat encumbered by its religion, though blessedly little with theology.) On my first visit to Alamos, nearly a decade ago, I spent a month in a camping park that abuts the local cemetario, its own village of sarcophagi in which a bevy of tearful angels vie with Blessed Virgins of Guadelupe for majority. The resident dead, you'd expect, would be quiet sorts, and so they were until the weekends when, each Friday and Saturday night, the locals would invade the peace of the graves and roister well into the next day. The old caretaker at the trailer park, Firmin, was a regular at these Tecate-cum-tequila bouts, and would often appear at his post late the following day, looking and moving more like an honoree than a participant in the weekly Dia de las Muertes.

The stereotypical picture of a Mexican holiday used to be the lazy tourista lulled into siesta time by the strains of a gentle guitar quartet serenading below the balcony. Maybe a mariachi group strolling amongst the tables in a cantena. Not that I'd particularly look forward to that, but I can imagine the all-inclusive-resort-and-cruise crowd thinking it was quaint. Back at the ell the music and the party go on until someone calls the police, who obligingly move the revelers on. And perhaps the noise would be less objectionable if it were not car radios pumping out Mexican rap and tech-Mex pop and the dreaded ballads with a section of horns and oompah-pah tubas. 

These are merely cultural observations, you understand. I'm not really complaining, I hope. Still, I never thought I'd ever say the words, "Give me a high school band playing Sousa." I haven't said it. Yet.

Notes Toward a Cultural Anthroplogy (2)

The city of Alamos, like Belle Epoque Paris, still employs a brigade of street sweepers who deploy through the barrios each morning with brooms, dustpans on short poles, and large black trash bags. They clean up the bottles, broken glass, empty cans and gutted snack food wrappers from the night before. But mostly they are there to gather up the considerable deposits of biomass left by the city's innumerable band of street dogs.

The dog population here may or may not be domiciled - most dogs are generally free to roam at will, to skulk, bark, menace, cower, amble or in the other more tangible way to express their inner beings. Most of them by all reports are regularly and forcibly innoculated against rabies. They remain nonetheless reprobate, uncivilized, generally indifferent to people and to the hour of the day or night in which they live, move and have their being. They only incur one anothers' wrath when they wander, unwittingly or not, into an adjoining barrio and are identified by their resident fellows as interlopers.

I say they are mostly indifferent to humans, though a cyclist pedalling through the narrow streets can occasionally be surprised by the sudden noisy onrush of a heel snapper from a dusty doorway. Generally a kick will dissuade further intimacies, but they're elusive, cagey, and it can prove difficult to effect a solid human connection. 

The dogs in the countryside are more persistent and less easily distracted from their hellish intent. There is nothing in their immediate surrounds more interesting than a pair of hairy legs at eye level; there's nothing they'd rather be doing; it's basically their territory, especially if they're up the road and dozing under the occasional sparse tree; and frankly, there's nothing else, or better, in a barren landscape to talk over later. It's all in good fun.

It may be that the bicycle is distraction enough - most of the people I know who have suffered a bite have been on foot - slow-moving target with no machinery interposed. I don't mean to test this theory by any extensive research. I'd rather think it may be correct than discover for a fact that it's based on an insufficient sample or fails to fully appreciate the reptilian responses of our putative best friends.

Lowells, Cabots and Gringos

 And here's to the good town of Boston, 

The home of the bean and the cod, 

Where the Lowells speak only with Cabots, 

And the Cabots speak only with God.

There are Cabots here in Alamos, reputedly scions from the Boston stock of Cabotry. They live within a large walled estate with a Mexican family in residence on the grounds as caretakers, about a quarter-mile from Miguel's humbler bespoke villa. I do not entertain hopes of enjoying their nearer acquaintance and should probably only stammer should chance bring us together. 

The late lamented Rip Torn owned a villa in the old centro - a grubby streetside wall of peeling stucco surrounding a courtyard rubbled with chunks of cement and capsized palm fronds, still much as he loved it and left it when he departed, though his quarters within were perfectly habitable during his sojourn here. Carroll O'Connor once lived just around the corner in a fine manse at Avenida Chihuahua and El Chalaton. Further down El Chalaton is a hotel once the home of the Mexican actress Maria Felix. All departed.

Alamos, with a sizeable population of resident gringos, is itself a simulacrum of the cultural divide within the United States. It is not that the Lowells speak only with Cabots (and none, by all the available evidence, speaks with God). It is that the Republicans speak only with Republicans, so far as they can manage it, and the same is true of the Democrats, although they generally speak to Mexicans as well, and in a wider range of voices than the imperative or the diparaging. The Canadians seem above it all, having their own peculiar troubles. And the French have all stayed home.  

Cultural Divide

The population being considerably smaller and people generally remembering one another from before the days of le toxicite mauvais, everyone makes some effort to get along. No one is perfectly anonymous, as they can be in the larger gene pool to the north, and consequently there is less gratuitous hostility among the factions. But the divide has appeared and persists nonetheless. The unfolding Senate runoffs in Georgia are being tracked here as raptly as in the U.S., the Congressional post-election charade plays here, just as across the border, as shabby street theater, but mercifully muted. All the impoverishment of human character in the national capital seems distant and not very urgent.

Counting Birds

The annual Christmas Bird Count is nearly finished for the season. Miguel managed to struggle out one early morning to peer rheumy-eyed into the pre-dawn chill and pencil some candidates for posterity onto a sheaf of lists - from the social (flycatcher) to the solitary (vireo), from the greater (pewee) to the least (sandpiper), from the rough-winged (swallow) to the silky (flycatcher), plain (startthroat) to elegant (trogon), gray-ish (saltator) to mottled (owl). I could go on. A grown man can sometimes feel a bit precious when reciting the names of birds - the yellow-bellied, rose-breasted, red-naped, green-tailed, violet-crowned, or even saying a word like "kiskadee." (I note that a kiskadee has no relation to a chickadee, nor will the one acknowledge or speak to the other.) "Buzzard" seems a manly word but not every bird is a buzzard, nor for all of that, is every buzzard a bird.

Nonetheless, in this age of data management and cheap digital storage they require to be counted, so off I went with Madame de Montaigne and two other volunteers to tabulate numbers of species and little fuzzy heads. At a time when wiser heads are chary of close association, the count in Alamos this year was largely curtailed to a few local areas. I volunteered to do one of the less populous and least scenic areas on the verges of town, figuring that the nicer walks would already be spoken for and that the head counter would appreciate having an additional purlieu in his final tally.

I had engaged my small party to walk up an arroyo known locally as Las Cabras, fully knowing that no one else would choose to go there. The birding is only fair, the arroyo itself a matter of navigating rock and sand where a quarter-mile can seem like a mile, not quite the same as a walk on the beach. It is also the arroyo that runs just below the municipal waste ponds. It goes without saying that the municipal infrastructure in Mexico, much like its impoverished, Spanish-speaking neighbor directly to the north, is not all that its founding fathers could wish. The air is redolent, nearly visible with various essences, the trickles of water along the bottom of the arroyo do not invite trespass. The birds seem to like it just fine but what do they know, presumably having nothing like a glass of Domaine Romanee-Conte '47 with which to compare it.

Four hours and about two miles later we were back at the truck. The birds were gone for the day, we needed some lunch and a rest, and we were done as well. We tallied 30 different species, a modest number but not bad for the arroyo we had walked. The fellow who organized the Alamos count sent me a jubilant email that evening - 40 species and a 14-mile hike up the mountain behind Uvalama. "Young people," chuckled Dave, my fellow bird counter.