September 17, 2020

A few days ago, my friend, who is not Mexican, was carrying a chair upstairs, and strained her back. This made me reflect on the backs of Mexicans, who will often carry what strike me as agonisingly heavy loads.

That same day my friend hurt herself, I was helping two other friends move a short distance from a small apartment in one house to a larger apartment in another. One item they were bringing was a circular washing machine. It was about 45 inches high, and half that in diameter, with the usual motor, tub and stabilising weights.

They’d recruited a neighbour to trundle it in a wheelbarrow over a rough, broken track that rose up, then descended for fifty yards. He managed to get it to the rise in the track, but then found it tended to tip or roll out of the wheelbarrow on the downslope. He could have called for us to help steady it in the barrow, but instead he decided to hoist it up on his back, and carry it the fifty yards.

How much did it weigh? Perhaps sixty or seventy pounds. It had casters, and I helped push it into the new apartment on these, but I would never have tried lifting it. If I had, I’d be laid up till November.

When my house was being built, eight years ago, I wondered as the labourers carried building materials up another, much shorter slope and piled them in a stack. Once the walls were done, and the wooden roofing formwork was in place, a gang of men hired for the day carried up full bucketloads of cement on their shoulders, and poured them onto the boards of the formwork. 

I didn’t even try to help. I just marvelled they could do it without visibly wincing.

Later, when we moved in, my neighbour Estela needed her large TV to be brought up a slope (we had no proper outside stairs yet) into her new living room. Aurelio, who was seventy-one, hoisted it on his back and carried it, his arms out like wings to stabilise it. I held my breath for nearly a minute as he force-marched himself up the muddy trackway. He needed help getting it down, but it was impressive.

Sure, there’s a macho attitude in Mexico that makes men proud to demonstrate their strength. If you can’t carry a bucket full of wet cement up a stairway, or push a truck out of a ditch, you’re not in the club. But the human body has limits, and I often wonder how labourers survive their working lives without early and serious injuries. I often see men in their early fifties carrying heavy loads, and I can only marvel at the sight.

I think similarly when I visit archeological sites. There were no horses, oxen nor elephants to move those stone blocks into place: it was done by brute human force. 

The most famous example is the Aztec Sun Stone, commissioned by the last-but-one Emperor, Moctezuma II, between 1502 and 1520.

It weighs 25 tons, and was probably moved 22 kilometres for its original installation. Since mesoAmerica never discovered the use of the wheel, that must have been a very slow, exhausting journey. But they did it, they carved it, and they set it in its proper ceremonial place. 

I can only look on in wonder, whether at the monolithic monuments or at guys who carry washing machines and TVs on their backs. Every time I see such a thing, I reflect on the arduous task of making those ancient monuments, and wonder whether there is something in Mexican spinal structures that can take punishment that would give me permanently dislocated joints and disks. But maybe there is just an insensitivity to pain that pampered gringos like me will never understand.

Whatever the explanation, I’m impressed.