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A Budding Turf War

April 17, 2023

For generations, there has been a market in the centre of Tepoztlan. The main town square, its zocalo, is occupied by a dozen taco stands, an equal number of fruit vendors, and people selling meat, fresh or barbecued chicken, fresh-squeezed juices, embroidery thread and buttons, and any number of foodstuffs and basic household goods. I shop there myself at least once a week, and just this morning had coffee with a friend at one of the two regular restaurants that sit at the sides of it.

A few hundred yards to the east, there has long been a drop-off point for bags of garbage. Two years ago, the town announced that it planned to close this site and move the market there. No doubt the people living near the place are glad to see it closed. But the people in the market don’t want to move, and a showdown is coming.

Some weeks ago, construction crews moved to the former drop-off locale, and began scraping earth and digging foundations. Ten days past, steel beams were set into concrete on the site, and the new structure’s construction began in earnest. Since the architecture is hardly ground-breaking, it could be finished later this year.

The central market in Tepoztlan on a quiet Monday afternnon.

What is it like? Judging by the illustrations that were posted in front of the town hall in 2022, it bears a resemblance to a 1950s parking garage. That is, it’s devoid of character, and generally dismal. (Sorry, but I couldn’t find a copy online). The current market is chaotic and hardly beautiful, but it is a community in which almost everyone knows everyone else. And it has structures along its sides that were selling beans and chilis back in the 1890s. The new place might replace some of that ambience in time, but it will move the main commercial core of the town further out, and lack the convenient location of the present layout, which is close to the main bus station and parking lots.

Tepoztlan, like other communities in central Mexico, has a tradition of getting the whole town out to oppose developments it doesn’t like. Presumably the market vendors can be forced to move, but I can only see it becoming ugly. People still tell the story of how, 25 years ago, the town fought the idea of developers taking over farmland to build a golf course. There was violence, and eventually, the developers backed off.

Workmen raise the steel beams for the new structure. The odd thing to the right is a cellphone tower.

Tepoztlan has changed, for sure. I recall the sleepy town I first visited in 2005, and can only compare it unfavourably to the overcrowded and overwhelmed place it now becomes on weekends. I had to take one of my dogs into the vet last Saturday, and thought if I went early enough I could avoid the traffic. But by 10.30 am the intersections were clogged with outsiders trying to get around corners and grab the available parking before going to get drunk. Articles in lifestyle magazines in other countries have promoted Tepoz, and at certain times outsiders flood in. It’s popular with German tourists in particular these days.

But while any town needs cashflow, in principle I support the market vendors, who suspect their incomes might actually go down, not up, at the new character-free site. I like the market because it is crowded and disorderly, and I don’t want something sterile and devoid of atmosphere to replace it. A lot of the vendors now know me by sight, and the new set-up will work against the informality and friendliness of what we’ve had until now.

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Aloneness

December 27, 2022

The online paper Mexico News Daily recently ran an article on why more gringos than ever are moving to this country. I was surprised at the numbers of young families coming here, but since this area has a lot of older expats, the overall trend wasn’t surprising.

Expatriates form slightly uneasy communities. Many are people who have always been relative outsiders. This can help in dealing with cultural and linguistic difficulties, since oddballs expect to be treated oddly. The famous Mexican politeness helps smooth over a lot of the tougher moments.

Sometimes though, our bigger problems are with each other, rather than with the society around us. Ardent libertarians whose ideas never took root in the US after the end of the Sixties come here for another kick at that cat, and of course clash with people who prefer the idea of large, stable governments. This area around Tepoztlan draws a lot of seekers who, under their New Age exteriors, often harbour a lot of moralistic attitudes that can sideline their best values.

The mountains of Tepoztlan, with their many legends and stories, draw seekers and would-be mystics from all over.

People who insist on extreme tolerance can be, in my experience, the least tolerant people of all. Anyone seeking capital-T Truth has trouble with the other such Truths popping up around them.

My own loose community here has faced a crisis recently when one man, someone a number of us liked for his intelligence and worldly knowledge, underwent a form of psychological break. He threatened a couple of women in my circle, and there was a protective closing of ranks against him. At one point, he got into a fight and the police were called. But the somewhat efficient local police were absorbed into the mistrusted State police a year or two back; a squad car never showed up.

Several of us felt he should go on antipsychotic meds, without having any idea how to force him. One or two thought he could be talked down from his paranoia, a method they’ve tried without success so far. He knows he’s fine, and like the New Agers, but in exaggerated form, he thinks the problem is everybody else.

The eternal question posed by people who don’t know Mexico is about how we expats deal with the cartels. The answer is, we don’t. They tend to avoid us, preferring to extort their own people except in certain high-end resorts, where there is occasional violence against tourists. Yes, we all learn certain street-smarts, particularly when we go to large cities. But being overcharged for a cab ride is the extent of the crime I’ve personally dealt with here.

But we are often dependent on each other or our Mexican neighbours when things go bad. Our disturbed friend is still somewhere around, doubtless suffering and possibly homeless. And we’re all reminded that we chose Mexico because, while government agencies are always difficult and sometimes (like the State police) pretty useless, the willingness of people here in helping others is the social safety net.

But at some point, as illness, physical or mental, arises, sometimes we look fondly at the more effectively bureaucratic societies we’ve left. I hope the young families coming here understand this.

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Everything Old is Almost New Again

October 17, 2022

A year or two ago, before the pandemic was in full spate, the Mexican federal government cut funding for maintaining monuments. This seemed – and was – absurd, since a huge amount of the nation’s income is from tourists wanting to look at old stuff. If the old stuff is shuttered, the nation’s purse contracts.

The saddest aspect to the decision was that after the earthquake of September 2017 (8.5 on the scale), many old churches in my part of the country were badly damaged, and therefore were inaccessible to visitors. Here in Tepoztlan, the Dominican Convent of the Nativity is part of a group of 16th Century monasteries that together constitute a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and to see its front towers held together by baulks of timber was simply depressing.

Serious scaffolding around the Tepoztlan Convent. Work is finally re-started.

I don’t recall reading how and when the funding decision was reversed, but one of the most gladdening things recently has been to see the repair work re-started. In the nearby city of Cuernavaca recently, I noticed two weeks ago that the clock-tower on the Palace of Cortes was finally rebuilt. The Palace is a thick-walled government building the conquistadors constructed on top of an old Aztec site used for collection of tribute, and is not very ‘palatial’ in style. It was made to be defended against the newly subjugated (it dates to the 1520s, right after the Conquest), and at one point it served as a jail. The incongruously but cheerfully pink clock tower, scarcely more than a century old, is out of place with the main architecture, but it makes the place less grim.

The palacio of Cortes in Cuernavaca, with the clock-tower rebuilt.

The really pleasing thing for me, though, is that the Tepoztlan convent is once more surrounded by scaffolding, and that on weekdays, workers in safety gear can be seen on it, cementing cracked stonework and doing whatever needs to be done to bring the church back into a usable condition. It used to be a popular location for fashionable weddings, and it made the town more than what it’s been recently on weekends, which is a hang-out for people from Mexico City who come to get drunk amid the mountains that surround us.

I don’t know how long repairs to the convent will take. Before work stopped, there had already been two years of effort put in, with little visible result. The new phase of work looks like it’s back with enough cash to get the place into shape once more, but obviously not this year.

That’s okay. It’s survived other earthquakes, annual rains and the 1910 Revolution since it was finished around 1580, so it’s a patient old thing.

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Just Another Manic Monday

February 22, 2022

This village of Amatlan has long had a fraught relationship with the parent town of Tepoztlan. Tepoz represents rules and regulations, while Amatlan is a kind of anarchist collective. Defying authority is almost a civic duty here, and when the community acts together, it can be swift and scary.

Monday, February 21, was a strange day. Our internet was out till the early afternoon, so I was cocooned for a few hours from news about the virus, or the troubles in Ukraine. I found out later during the day that a close friend’s cat died, while another friend’s husband had to be rushed to hospital. And when my cleaning lady came, she was stung by a small scorpion that had found its way into my bedroom. I have an okay relationship with scorps, and while I sometimes see them in the house, none has stung me in almost eight years. But she went into an anaphylactic state, and needed several shots of anti-venin.

A crowd beside a police vehicle argues what happened in the late afternoon sunshine.

After all that, I went for a meal in town to settle my sense of upheaval. I came home at 3.30 in the combi micro-bus, and just outside the village, another combi driver heading out stopped our van and had words with the driver. I heard something about a traffic blockage, but when we came to it, it wasn’t what I expected.

As I found out in the next hour, three town officials had come to close an illegal beer-vending operation. The warning issued, two of them got into their vehicle, and their boss, a woman called Pilar Navarrete Morales, got into hers. What she didn’t see was that a local drunk had passed out on the street just behind her car, and when she backed up, she ran right over his body. He died where he lay.

The community went nuts. Some people blocked the main exit route with their vehicles, while in another part of the village locals piled rocks on a small bridge to make it impassable. The three officials went to the local sub-mayor’s office to avoid the angry mob, and soon a half-dozen police cars arrived to prevent what the Diario de Morelos called a potential ‘lynching.’

People blocked a bridge over a ravine near my house, using the boulders that are plentiful round here.

The man who died was married to a local woman, though I was told he wasn’t from Amatlan himself. I also have to wonder how much of a provider he was if he could drink himself into a stupor on the street. This became important later in the evening, when the woman official and the widow had a public interchange in front of an angry mob at the sub-mayor’s office. Ms. Navarrete Morales promised publicly to support the woman financially as long as she lived, while a crowd yelled support for the bereaved wife, and the widow asked how long such a promise would last.

But this wasn’t the day’s only death. Around 10.00 pm, a young man reported to be the brother of one of the officials was shot close to his home by an angry relative or friend of the deceased. The village had two violent deaths in one day, and it didn’t settle down for hours.

Yes, I know – why do I stay where it isn’t safe? As I get tired of saying, it is safe here. Nobody hates me, and I drive like a nervous old lady in and around the village. The community protects its own, even us outsiders, provided we don’t ever forget who we are, and who they are. My lifestyle is based on a series of choices that have not made me part of the community, but they have made me welcome around the community. The key thing is respect for the people themselves, even the drunks. I have a relationship to Amatlan that at times is frustrating, but for which I’m still grateful. That gratitude communicates to the people here, judging by their expressed attitudes.

I’m left wondering what Ms. Navarrete Morales is feeling. What she did was negligent, but hardly criminal. Passing out on the street was never a safe occupation, though three or four men here do it regularly: the deceased was their drinking buddy. The rest of us step around them, or drive carefully past the spot near the cemetery where they hang out.

But that woman is not as poor as some local people (not all locals are poor, though) and as a Tepozteca, she can never be liked here. Village-versus-town, as noted, is an old rivalry, and these events have only fuelled that.

Still, I’m sure she never thought for a moment that a routine disciplinary visit to our village would end up in something that would end one then two lives, and change her own so drastically.

Born to be Wild, Señor

September 14, 2021

Grumbling about driving in Mexico is one of those activities that even Mexicans join in with, albeit fatalistically. You never see a car here with a sign saying something like ‘Marco’s Driving School‘ on top of it. A lot of people learn to drive on four hours’ instruction from their parents, or their elder brother, and the fine points of defensive driving are rarely discussed. While people will complain, they also laugh at the fact that Mexico will always be Mexico.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I find local drivers quite good, since they seem situationally aware enough to avoid fender-benders. But the moment someone passes me at 50 kilometres per hour on a local road, I know a city-dwelling outsider is on the way to a near-miss of a cow or horse grazing by the roadside.

A motorcyclist in Tepoztlan explains to traffic police why other drivers shouldn’t be driving where he wants to go.

A new threat emerged over the past couple of years. I’m told it was primarily Banco Azteca that promoted loans for motorbikes. Lots of people can’t afford a car, but for some people a motorbike is both sexier and cheaper. The problem comes when an increasing number of motorbikes combines with the aforementioned lack of driving expertise.

A motorcycle can slide between a car and a sidewalk, and if an accident doesn’t happen, then the rule in Mexico is that it was a safe move. Twice in the past couple of weeks I’ve seen someone on a motorbike slip past the inside of a bus, just as it stopped to let off passengers. There are many places where there’s no curb to delineate the edge of the roadway, so the manoeuvre is possible. But if you’re an elderly passenger dismounting, or a mother with a small child and an armload of shopping, the risk is real. One of the two motorcyclists even had his own wife and kid on his bike, and still tried it. It happened outside a coffee shop where I sometimes get a cappuccino, and I had to sponge off the spilled coffee after watching this dumb move nearly result in an elderly woman being knocked down.

Perhaps local peer pressure will influence the motorcyclists in time, but a lot of them are young men with testosterone to burn. The instability of the motorbikes on wet roads with potholes, such as we have everywhere in rainy season, is a better hope.

A less dangerous but still annoying driver trait is corner parking. I don’t know why, but parking at a corner is something people here do all the time. This blocks cars trying to turn, make it difficult for others to pass, and generally create congestion. It seems to be a deeply compulsive activity, some inalienable right that should be exercised in particular at local bottlenecks.

The lady in the black car stopped for five minutes, several feet out from the curb, while she tried to figure out where to go.
The white car had to move around her. I took this from a restaurant balcony overlooking a busy corner.

Earlier this year, I was driving a friend home, and he asked me to stop at one of these spots so he could buy paint at a paint store. The store was on one side of the street at the corner, so I drove on forty or fifty feet to let him off. His incredulity that I would make him walk that far, versus my insistence that I don’t believe in blocking intersections, was like advancing an obscure point of quantum physics to a nine-year-old. Or, perhaps, like a silly Canadian fixation. Anything in Mexico can be covered with a smile and a quick “Disculpe!” or so some people feel. My gringo hang-up about avoiding creating a problem in the first place seemed to him like something I needed to get over.

Most of the time, it pays to avoid trying to import outsider values here; I’ve always felt I shouldn’t try to lecture Mexicans about how to behave. But our roads were made for a couple of cars a minute, and a truck five times an hour. Now, the local traffic police actually ticket illegal parkers on Saturdays because congestion in some spots is too severe, which is a bit like police in Alabama arresting people for owning guns.

This part of Mexico is too close to the 20-million people in the capital to avoid urban sprawl, although traffic problems happen everywhere. But if you ever do visit, remember that motorcyclists see you as something to get around, not someone to stop for. And as for parking away from an intersection … just what is your problem, señor?

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Election Season

April 4, 2021

Around sixteen years ago, when I first became interested in Mexico, I looked into its politics. At that time, apart from a few small, fringe parties, there were three of them: the National Action Party (PAN), which was Conservative; the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) which was Social Democratic; and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which was more or less centrist, but very definitely the immovable object in Mexican politics.

Whatever else Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has done since be became President in 2018, he has finished that set-up. A local friend told me last night that there are now fourteen parties vying for seats in the mid-term elections due on July 1. Bizarrely, PAN, PRI and PRD have formed an alliance to oppose Lopez Obrador and his bloc in the legislature.

Two Futuro candidates for office. Futuro is one of the new parties.

Knowing exactly what each new party is about can be a head-scratching quest for anyone, even people who live here, since the party names don’t always imply which way they lean. Our village and the town of Tepoztlan are gaudy with electoral banners, showing the smiling, handsome faces of the younger candidates, and many less fetching older ones.

It isn’t just an election for the federal legislature. All the Mexican states are also involved, as are the mayoral seats of most towns. The mayor of Tepoztlan died from Covid-19 last month, so the contest to take the local job is hot, and anybody who has ever been a local activist seems to be after it.

David Barragan wants to be Mayor of Tepoztlan.

Lopez Obrador (who goes by the acronym AMLO most of the time) used to be the head of the PRD, but a few years ago he launched Morena, which is left-of-centre but also populist (a dubiously elastic term). The party name comes from Movimiento Regeneracion National, a phrase that translates into English easily. It is also a term used for a dark-skinned woman. It thus refers to indigenous people, whom AMLO claims to represent, as well as the sacred image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the matron saint of Mexico. This was very clever marketing, and AMLO, who had been thwarted in his previous presidential ambitions, has been ensconced in the capital for three years, excoriating all of his critics as conservatives or as individuals in the pay of the right wing, as he has bent parts of the Constitution to his preference, and (my own view) been remarkably ineffectual at rooting out corruption as he claimed he would.

Not that rooting out corruption has ever been easy in Mexico, nor that anyone else recently has managed it. Vicente Fox, President from 2000 to 2006, is generally reckoned, despite other failings, to have been an honest man, but Felipe Calderon, who came after him (2006 to 2012) never seemed to shine as a leader, nor did Enrique Peña Nieto (2012 to 2018) burnish the presidential seal to any noticeable extent. Calderon was the primary author of the continuing, murderous war on drug cartels, and Peña Nieto is widely viewed as clueless, and possibly in the pocket of ‘El Chapo’ (Joaquin Guzman Loero), the jailed former head of the Sinaloa Cartel.

Is Morena still ‘The hope of Mexico’ ? Ulises Pardo hopes people think so.

But AMLO is better at spending money on dubious projects than either of his two predecessors. And since polls show his candidates should do well, he isn’t about to change tack. I know people who believe he could try to become President-for-Life before his six-year term is up.

The local campaigns are different, though. I’ve always been a believer that capable local government is critical to any stable society. Big initiatives at the national or regional level get the headlines, but good local politicians and local initiatives can make a great deal of difference to people’s lives.

I don’t know if David Barragan and Miriam Barragan are related. But both want to be Mayor.

In this context, I always recall interviewing Barney Danson, who was a cabinet minister in the government of Canada’s Pierre Trudeau in the 1970s. He ran into flak as Minister of National Defence, but when he was at Urban Affairs, he launched a national program to subsidise sewage systems across the country, working flexibly with municipalities on their specific needs.

“I was so proud of that,” he told me. “It made a positive difference to the lives of tens of thousands of people, maybe hundreds of thousands, but I doubt it ever got more than a couple of inches of newspaper coverage.” And having begun my own career as a reporter on a local newspaper, I grasped his point and was happy to agree that he’d probably accomplished something truly worthwhile away from the limelight.

Felipe Ceja has the most banners up of any candidate in our village. Morena doesn’t seem short of electoral funds.

I don’t know if any of the local people whose campaign posters I’ve included here will make any significant difference if they’re elected in July. The later stages of the pandemic are a unfortunate time in which to make fresh starts, and Mexico is facing strong economic headwinds this year and probably for some years to come. But the optimism so many of them bring to their campaigns is a reminder that Mexico is a society that still believes in its own communities and its own future, and is not the basket case its less informed critics like to think it is.

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Fire Season

April 13, 2021

The late spring of 2012 offered the most memorable fire season that I can recall. That year, the various blazes in the hills around our village came right to the edge of it, and on the worst night, I kept thinking of Hieronymus Bosch’ painting of Hell in The Garden of Earthly Delights. My own photos didn’t do it justice, but my friends and I spent two hours anxiously going over our contingency plans to make a run for it with five dogs. Thankfully, we didn’t need to do this, but the flames hung around for two more days to keep us on edge and wreck our sleep.

Hieronymus’ view of the infernal fires – not a blaze-dousing chopper in sight.

This year’s fires have come early; it’s a full two months till our rains start, and there’s a fear they’ll be on the meagre side, like last year.

They’ll be enough to stop the fires, but our current problem is a water shortage. Using helicopters to put out fires on steep hillsides works brilliantly, but it needs a lot of water that we don’t have to spare. This area has been in a partial drought for several years, and if we get more fires in the rest of April and in May, we’re in trouble.

Everyone loves watching the choppers. They make enough noise, and they get close enough to the flames before dropping their loads of water and fire retardant, that they’re impressively efficient looking. And, watching them tackle the spread-out blazes above the town of Tepoztlan this afternoon, I noticed that after 40 minutes, several of the lesser fires were gone.

They’re effective, and we enjoy the sight of the pilots becoming heroes. Flying a helicopter close to a steep cliff, into the updraft of a blaze, is a lot riskier than it sounds, and you need to know this if you fly one.

A Mexican Air Force helicopter doing a water-bombing run this morning.

Mexicans accept natural disaster as a part of life, far better than other places. Communities pull together, governments reach beyond their frequent ineptitude, and those who can’t go into the hills to beat out flames at least buy water and food for the young men who do.

Yesterday, we had four separate areas ablaze, but this evening, only one is still active, and its range is declining. But it’s a part of the yearly cycle, not an exception to it, and no-one is screaming in terror. Most of us are careful not to go too close, but otherwise, we trust the smoke tomorrow will be diminished or contained.

Various things cause the fires. A few are from humans who are too stupid not to start campfires when everything around them is bone dry, or are farmers burning off last year’s crops at a time of day when the winds can spring up. Others are caused by discarded glass bottles acting as a lens for the hot sun: today, which was very sunny, we hit 31 degrees C. Spontaneous combustion, I learned today, usually happens in tightly packed, damp vegetable material, not things like the loose piles of dry leaves all over the hills, so it might not be a factor here.

Smoke rises from various locations on the hilly ridges north of Tepoztlan.

Fire has long been one of nature’s means of renewal as much as destruction, and the fires are not necessarily tragic for this reason. Some wildlife, alas, will be lost, but the vegetated areas on the hills grow back in a year, or two at most. I’m told, by old-timers, that nobody heeded the fires much in years past, though the growth of the towns and villages means there’s more of a threat today of outlying areas of housing being destroyed. As a result, fire-fighting has become a necessary skill.

Stoicism is necessary, though. As I noted, we’re a couple of months away from full-on rains, and we don’t have an alternative right now to being patient. When you choose to come and live closer to nature, you have to accept that nature doesn’t withdraw because just you’ve arrived. Rather, nature, in all its forms, is going to come closer to you.

Vaccination Day

March 18, 2021

The past year has been hard on friendships. Some of us decided early on to mask up and avoid group situations, while others became anti-vax and anti-mask evangelists, and began delivering a relentless sermon that lasted all summer, all fall, and all winter. I now know every silly, unscientific theory in existence about vaccines, viruses and mendacious governments. And, of course, all about Bill Gates and his microchips. My social circle has been judiciously pruned as a result.

Finally, just before last weekend, Tepoztlan announced that the Pfizer vaccine would be made available to people over 60 for three days starting on Tuesday, March 16, the day after Benito Juarez Day. Two locations, a school in town and a soccer field, were being used for this.

There was widespread anticipation, and I planned to go in with my friend Ixchel as soon as a long-awaited plumber had turned up to install a water filter. However, by the time he was done and had left with my cash in his pocket, she had messaged and phoned me to tell me that the lines were insanely long, everything was backed up, and she was going home.

A spontaneous protest by angry people who had waited in the sun with aging relatives closed the day’s operations, I heard. The cult of the abuela, the grandmother, is a strong one here, and protecting family matriarchs, or at least looking like you do, is a significant part of the social structure.

The line-up on the first afternoon. Cannier people brought chairs for family matriarchs (and patriarchs) to sit on.

We both considered waiting for an opportunity next month, but decided to give it a second try today, Thursday, the last of the three days. So, this morning we put ourselves in the line for the school vaccination centre, and waited. And waited.

After 20 minutes, the line had not moved. Fortunately, the staff for this operation, which was admittedly a big one for a town this size, were now on top of what was going on, and came to recommend we go down to the soccer field, where there were few people waiting. We did this, and while a couple of hundred people were already there when we arrived, people were moving on through the system. Just getting under the protective awning past the entrance gate felt like hope. We kept having to shift forward one row of seats as people moved through the system, so we finally had the sense of making progress.

Sure enough, around an hour later, we had moved to the fronts of two different lines, and the anticlimactic moment of the actual jab happened. We were asked to wait another 20 minutes to ensure we had no adverse reactions, then left after receiving a basic certificate of vaccination, and a provisional date for the second injection.

We had to play musical chairs under the awning, moving ahead to the next row of seats as others received injections.

The feeling of freedom from anxiety wasn’t what I’d expected. But finally, other than being careful and avoiding the conspiracy-theory crowd entirely, we had a realistic protection against the wretched disease. After just one jab, it’s not the whole deal, but my body now has the tool it needs to build advance resistance to the virus, assuming I’ve not already encountered and defeated it sub-clinically.

And the day just looked brighter as a result. We walked to a place for lunch, ran into a mutual friend who had also just had her jab and was feeling similarly relieved, and felt more gratitude than we had in months.

I had to go home to wait for a man to deliver a load of water, as I mentioned in my last post, so home I went after finishing my enchiladas. He came when expected, and later so did Jorge, our local blacksmith, who was coming to examine the front gate of the small house I’m fixing so I can rent it out.

Indeed, if the pump on the water truck hadn’t surged fiercely, making the hose jump so that it bent the inner security gate out of alignment, and soaking the garage area, I’d have had a perfect day. But jump it did, and Jorge has to see if he can fix that gate, too. And Rem, my canine anarchist for whom the inner gate had to be installed in the first place, tried to bite Jorge, though thankfully he only chomped on a mouthful of jeans.

So, apart from facing a combined 1,300 peso repair bill, and having to apologise for Rem’s over-protectiveness, this was a semi-perfect day. Either way, I have the jab now. If I do run into anti-vax evangelists in town, I can tell them I put my deltoid muscle where my mouth is, and I now consider myself a superior human as a result. Or at least a pandemically insulated one.

Fire Season

February 26, 2021

The rains were restrained last summer. I scarcely recall any of the massive downpours of other years that, the morning after the storm, would leave the village streets still running with water. Thankfully, the maize crop around here was abundant despite the lower rainfall, but now we’re facing a problem with the water table.

The first clear sign emerged a couple of weeks ago when, sitting on the combi into town, I noticed a high plume of what first looked like cumulus cloud on the hills behind the village. I quickly realised the column of smoke was swirling in motion, indicating a blazing fire. Local teams had it put out by the next day, though on the day after that, a baby version came back for an hour or two.

A photo I took in April 2012, when fires came to the edge of the village. The flames at this point, while
not visible in the photo, were less than 500 meters from the houses at the time.

Normally, forest fires round here are a risk in April or May, but the season has started early, presumably because of the dryness.

Today, the local town declared a partial emergency, announcing that “The City Council of Tepoztlán in coordination with the forestry civic groups, citizen brigades and environmental cultural promoters of the municipality, jointly made the decision to suspend any tourist activity in the Tepozteco Natural Protected Area.” In other words, they don’t want people hiking in the hills, for fear they will light cooking fires, discard cigarettes or drop bottles that might act as lenses for sunlight.

There’s also the problem that if a fire starts, either as a result of spontaneous combustion or from a farmer burning off his fields, hikers or simple bucolic wanderers might be cut off by rapidly advancing flames and smoke, and they’ll need a rescue. This assumes, of course, that anyone knows where they are, or even if they’re missing.

These are issues that anyone who lives here soon understands. although some farmers don’t seem to learn about burning a field with the proper safeguards. People often own fields well up into the hills, some distance from habitation, and if things get out of hand, there’s no-one around to help them. I’ve often wondered if there’s any safe way to burn fields in the dry season, but the practice continues, and most farmers never start a blaze that spreads. A key thing seems to be doing it early in the morning, when there’s a little condensation on the ground, not much wind, and the heat hasn’t built up in the atmosphere. This does mean people like myself find small bits of burned maize stalks have drifted in on the wind, and are all over the patio in the late morning. Still, a broom is a powerful tool in the hands of the determined.

There’s not a great deal we can do in advance, since this is a heavily wooded area, with a great deal of dry underbrush. And fires are one of natures tools for renewing woodlands.

Fires are, however, a fact of life here, like the occasional small earthquake. And they remind us that our ownership of land is at the mercy of nature’s whims.

Merry Christmask

December 22, 2020

Around two weeks ago, I noticed a significant shift as I went into town on the combi micro-bus. Previously, only around half of the passengers wore face-masks, and even that percentage had been dwindling since the town re-opened in the fall. But suddenly, three-quarters of the people were masking, and even some of our libertarian holdouts with their much touted bulletproof auras and invincible immune systems were wearing them. The police began to stop the unmasked, warning them of fines, and the bus drivers started requesting that people put them on as well.

Some of your author’s collection of face-masks.

As has happened anywhere, we’ve had all sorts of ups and downs, and ons and offs, with the pandemic. Once the town of Tepoztlan put up barricades at its two primary entrances, back in the spring, our village of Amatlan copied it. My friends weren’t allowed in to visit, and when I went out, I needed proof of residency to be allowed back. For once, my gringo face, which always stands out, was a benefit in avoiding repeated checks.

The village barricade was always problematic, and had at least one shooting incident. It wasn’t officially sanctioned, and even the one the town put in place was technically illegal. When first the village reten was cleared, and a week or two after the town began admitting visitors again, everyone breathed sighs of relief.

Then, of course, the pandemic continued and worsened. With 122 recorded cases in the municipality to date (we have over 40,000 people), we’re in much better shape than some nearby communities, where the infection rate has been up to four or five times as high. Why, we don’t know, but we’re dangerously smug about it.

Last week, the governor of this state of Morelos warned about a complete Christmas lockdown. Our town nearly went that route, but our exhausted mayor, who toughed it out for months but couldn’t keep telling desperate, angry people their livelihoods were cancelled, declared on the weekend that he wasn’t closing up again. Christmas visitors are coming in, so I’m trying to avoid the town as much as I can. I miss the friends who live there, but it doesn’t feel that safe with all the outsiders.

If I compare our caseload to Toronto, which as of this writing has tallied around 53,000 people infected, we’re slightly better in our numbers. With minimal hospital facilities for a pandemic, that’s something to appreciate, and it’s far from like this in Mexico taken as a whole. This nation, with three times Canada’s total population, has now reported 1.3-million cases, and 120,000 deaths. And as they are elsewhere, the indicators aren’t good. Even the denialists are suddenly asking when the vaccines will be made available.

So, I can’t put much of a positive seasonal spin on this post, beyond being grateful I’m in a place where I can at least get out and about, and the risk level has somehow stayed low. All I can do is make sure my face-masks are clean, and that my fingertips stay dry and a little cracked from all the gel and washing with soap they go through.

I hope you all continue to stay as safe. My best wishes for 2021, and thanks for reading my posts.

Edward.