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.