Sierra Mazateca

So we went on our trip to Huautla to visit with Inez and her family. We stayed in her house and ate with her family. We traveled with Inez and her husband Juvenal to another town.

I can write about this from so many angles - the simple but delicious food, the beautiful mountains and the rivers, the lure of the famous hallucinogenic mushrooms which seem to be an icon of Huautla. But the thread running through all of our experiences was the generousness of the spirit of our hosts.

Inez, on Palm Sunday, took us to her church and performed on Dan and I a "limpia", which I wrote about in a previous post, using flowers which she touched on a statue in the church. Juvenal took us on a walk to the "Adoration Hill", a local landmark, and also performed a cleansing ritual on us so we would be successful in whatever we do.

As all Mexican families do, they paid particular attention to our kids. Mai loved hanging out with their daughters, aged 27 to 19, who lavished attention on her as if they were her big girl cousins. She did not want to leave on the trip to Matzotzongo, the remote village, because she wanted to be with the girls. They took care of Mai in ways we often don't. As for Joji, he was often taken out on errands and shown off to the town. One day he spent at the day care down the street where Begonia, the youngest of the daughters works, for the cost of 20 pesos, while we went on the excursion with Juvenal.

When we went on the trip to Matzotzongo, Juvenal warned Dan that he would start calling Dan a "compadre" so that people would think we were very close. Eventually they started calling me a "comadre" along the same vein. It turns out the two of them used to travel to Matzotzongo 6 hours one way on foot (it took about 3 hours of travel time by car, not counting waiting for a truck) to sell clothes and handicrafts. It's a small village on a steep hillside of a deep river gorge, just on the other side of the border with the state of Puebla. We stayed with a family there, who gave up 2 rooms so the kids and we stayed comfortably. They share their simple but fabulous food of hand-made tortillas, beans, eggs and a dish of chicharrones (pig skin) with a seasonal fruit, in salsa (which would be revolting in any other setting but I ate it with relish). The kids spent a lot of time chasing chicks. It so happened that they cancelled the festival that was the original reason for the trip because it coincided with Holy Week, but it was a nice visit anyway. A family across the street from where we stayed invited us to breakfast, and we had fabulous mole with chicken, bean tamales and coffee. This was a coffee-growing village, and all the trees were fragrantly in bloom.

During this trip, the kid-centered way of life became clear as Inez commented on the different way we treated our kids. In Mexico, they adore their children but people don't build their lives around kids the way we do in the States. Kids are molded into adult lives. Early on they learn to walk with their parents long distances. They stay up late if their parents are out doing something. They sleep on errands if they get tired. They play when they can, if they are not bothering adults. I think we could improve our lives a bit by taking some cues from them.

My opinion now is that it's better to vacation as a guest to a doting Mexican family than go to some exotic location where you know no one. We invited their middle daughter, who is single and does not have conflicting work obligations, to come with us to our beach vacation next week. We met her boyfriend as we were leaving, and I have a feeling she will decline. As Inez returns weekly to our neighborhood market to sell her embroidered tablecloths and napkins, I think we'll be seeing more of her, and that would be good.

The coda to all this is that Inez is a curandera, a healer who can provide hallucinogenic mushrooms to people interested in such experiences. She never advertised this fact, and I didn't realize it until she lent me a book in Japanese, a travelogue written by 2 people who have visited her and had hallucinogenic mushroom experiences. It is very tempting to try this, but it will take all night and does not seem conducive when you have young kids in tow. We will see.