July 5, 2020
Land in Mexico is like religion. You don’t trammel someone else’s acreage, and the fights over small incursions are debated with a near-theological attention to fine detail. I’ve just had first-hand experience of this.
The roadway that comes to my house divides a few yards before my entrance gates. One part continues at a lower level, seven or eight feet down from my entrance. The roadway I and another tenant here use continues past the gate, and stops a few yards further along at the gate of my neighbour, Marisa.
There is, or was, a slab of banked earth lying between the two bits of road, nourishing a tree and a bunch of shrubs whose roots held it in place. But the family that sold us this land originally, a dozen years ago, kept that piece of bank, and decided a couple of years ago to construct a small house there. Given the tiny space, and the fact that family has other land, this move was hard to explain. Then, the construction took a little of our roadway, negotiations about this broke down, and the local municipality issued a stop-construction order. The foundations of the house still sit there, with the initial walls that were built.
The un-house seen from above, with the emerging subsidence to the right.
It still sits as an unresolved issue, tied up with counter-arguments and disputes over exact boundaries.
With the intense rains each summer, and no anchoring roots to hold it, earth from our upper roadway began to wash away. Small runnels became established, leading still more storm-water right to the eroding weak point. Last year, it was obvious a chunk of our roadway was disappearing, right in front of our garage doors. Given time, it was going to become a serious problem, making access dangerous or even impossible.
The hole as it appeared two weeks ago.
Last month, before the rains began to fill up our cistern, I had to order a tanker-load of water, since we’re not on water-mains here. The truck was heavy, having all that water, and more earth around the hole subsided. The truck came close to going over the brink. The serious problem had arrived.
With my limited Spanish, I needed someone to negotiate with the owner of the odd little triangle of land out front, and that had to be Marisa. She’d had difficulties with the friend of mine who constructed the house I live in, so I had to pull out the diplomatic skills I’d needed as a magazine editor in my former life. (Attacking editors is a popular sport for some people).
Marisa, I should explain, is a local celebrity, who had a hit song called I’m Not the Same back when she was young, and she’s had a modest but steady career in the Mexican music scene ever since. That lends her a certain prestige, or maybe an image to live up to. She also has fluent English, and was gracious with me, understanding she had to intercede with the unfinished house’s owners, for both of us. I don’t know what she said, but she has powers of persuasion, and used them. Clearly, she understands the subtler ‘theological’ implications of “you’ve undermined my entrance.”
Now, to my mind the logical thing was to build a retaining wall in the rain-eroded space beside the un-house, then back-fill the space with earth that would then need to be compacted. And that’s sort of what’s happening, courtesy of the owner of the unfinished house. But the wall is being made in the manner of traditional field walls here, with heavy stones piled one on top of the other, without cement. And the soil behind it is not packed down very tightly. The structure looks makeshift.
The new wall, with my entrance gate behind it.
In Mexico, you become used to some measure of disaster always being just around the corner. You tend to become a de facto anarchist, because under-enforced laws and under-budgeted government departments can’t be counted on. You either make peace with this reality, or go home. So, while the land’s owner is paying for this effort, it might be that Marisa and I will have to cough up the cash for a more serious structure in future. When it’s land you’re dealing with, even just a few square feet, the arguments tend to continue for years.
All I can do for now is be grateful that the issue’s at least kicked down the road for a while; and continue to ponder how people here manage to make their lives work in the face of constant uncertainties. But the rains this year are just beginning, and I suspect the loose-packed earth behind the wall will start to wash away before they end.
I can see being able to spin at least a half-dozen blog posts out of this spell-binding drama in the future.
Mexed Messages 