Three Winter Trips Away From Here

by Rudolfo Carrillo

One of the things I'd do in the eighties and nineties was to make sure not to be around Burque during the last week of the year. Places I went in the winter to avoid La Natividad in town included exotic locations in the United Kingdom and the Caribbean. But I had the best time in Mexico and made use of a variety of land routes and methods to check the place out. Sometimes I would drive and go as far as I could get, on a quest for an authentic holiday experience. Back then, that vaguely translated into looking for a party. The outcomes of all those trips varied from rousing to precarious. You can try going there if you like. After I got sick eating a cut of Argentinian beef in a seaside restaurant in Puerto Vallarta during the summer of 2001, I gave the country up for good. I heard it got dangerous after that, but has calmed down some these days. 

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I took a short flight to Juarez on Boxing Day. Phil Collins was piping through all the headphones and it was one of those older jets, like a 727 or something. I grabbed my bags and walked over to the train station. I ended up on a commuter train to Chihuahua and stayed at a rundown hotel near downtown. The cabbie whistled and laughed when he dropped me off.

The next morning some dude was standing in the alley boiling ears of corn to sell later and I bought a hotdog wrapped in bacon from a street vendor. I found out from standing around the train station minding my own business that there was a train to the coast. It went through the mountains, and supposedly was an engineering wonder. It was cool alright, with a old fashioned observation car, but the electricity onboard was fucked up, so there was no hot food or lighted toilets for 12 hours.

On the other side of the mountains was a jagged and lush jungle with fruit trees and birds that were brightly festooned. The town of Los Mochis wasn't really memorable but there was a town further out where Chinese merchant ships docked and the sailors wandered drunkenly through town with red stars on their hats and hookers on their arms. I lost my glasses in the surf out by Topolobampo, but they mysteriously drifted back up and into my hands when the tide came back. I stayed at a hotel called the Santa Ana and ate scrambled eggs and corn tortillas in the restaurant next door.

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Another time I drove a smashed up Datsun B210 down to the Sea of Cortes. I started out on Stanford Street and Lead Avenue. I took the freeway down to Las Cruces and crossed over in El Paso, headed straight for the mountains. This was back when you got a sticker for your front window when you made the border. About half an hour into the ride west I came to the conclusion that the sticker was a probably a good idea. The two lane road was twisty and the trucks coming the other way were constant. The sticky tag would probably survive a cascading trip down the mountain side, hooked to some window or its remnants.

Along the way there was a mining town all painted and lit up for Christmas with big colorful electric lights while the copper smelter down the road fumed and roared along though the night as we passed. A military patrol stopped the car in a town with a peculiar English name, but other than a brief and cautiously friendly question and answer session with ten heavily armed individuals on a dark road in a foreign country, and suicidal truckers pouring through the gates of hell and headed in the opposite direction I was driving, the ride was uneventful.

I checked into the Holiday Inn Hermosillo about one in the morning. They had a decent breakfast buffet with atole and everything, so I hung for a while and then headed for San Carlos. There was a Pemex station about half way.  After that the sea crept up and met the desert. I thought about how that scene might be what Mars looked like a million years ago, except without the half finished and long ago abandoned condos and occasional oyster shacks that dotted the horizon. Somehow I got sunburned on that trip and had to eat lobster, too.

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Near the end of 1998 I rented a blue Dodge Neon in Chula Vista and decided to drive as far down the Pacific coast as a week would permit. Tijuana felt chaotic so I blew the place off after stopping at a pharmacy to pick up something to calm my gut. The pharmacist was friendly but kept wagging his tongue around a gap he had between his two front teeth. I stopped in Ensenda and got a stamp for my passport. There was a cruise ship parked in the harbor with lots of big sea birds swooping around the fancy boat. Passengers in white cotton disembarked and I put the car into second and zoomed south.

That night I stayed at a little ranch by the sea. It was off the main road, a crowded dusty thing crowded with wooden shacks and cinderblock businesses. They had been set up for continuous business; they were on the only way in and out of the peninsula. I got the name of the place from a Lonely Planet guide on Baja California. There were little huts made from stone and a lagoon with a couple of seals floating around in it.

Mostly the beaches on the west side were empty. I found a small dead whale walking around one day. There were a couple of hotels on the beach but they were empty. I wondered though one that was painted yellow and orange with buildings meant to resemble aztec temples. I finally ran into a bellhop. He had a thin mustache and was balding but just smiled and reached out to shake my hand when I asked about accommodations. I finally decided to stay at another hotel a few hundred meters further along the coast. The rooms were dark, cavernous, and air conditioned. The owners had a pet pig that walked around at night. Everything was painted pink and blue. There was a restaurant with decent enchiladas and a band that played tourist favorites like Jesusita en Chihuahua.

When the road got bad after a couple of days, I turned back. I stayed at a ridiculously baroque hotel in downtown Ensenada, but got another hankering for salt water and decided to cross the peninsula. There was a party town called San Felipe on the other side of the peninsula and I got there just in time for New Year's eve. I sat around in a bar looking at all the other humansm, ate flautas and washed them down with Tecate. The sea was really still, just ripples crossing its width, some boat shadows too. The moon was nearly full and was in the middle of the sky when 1999 was announced over the loudspeakers.

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Speaking with Tongues

by Rudolfo Carrillo

Listen folks, I will tell you in the stilted but ultimately American phrasing used by the online identity I assume for situations just like these, that New Mexico is a weird place and misunderstood, too.

We are still on the fringe of things. Even amidst a diverse collection of Latin American cultures all around (less so the farther en el norte one ventures, I hear tell). I sometimes feel that we all have more in common with Mars, than with Mexico, Califas, Tejas or the aforementioned mysteriously mountainous and cold world that begins above Raton.

Certainly New Mexican culture is not easily accounted for or well understood outside the boundaries of our state. As an example of the poor vagaries that predominate media coverage of New Mexico, I offer the following.

The Californio who produces Ask a Mexican, Gustavo Arellano, wrote this past week that New Mexican food is unique because "it dates back to the days of the Spanish Conquistadors" and specifically that, "... You're not going to find much chile and yellow cheese in New Mexico ..."

So either that comida I've been counting on for so long is really old or I am totally missing something. Wasn't all Latino food in the US ultimately influenced by "the days of the Spanish Conquistadors"?

Gustavo, dude, I see your point when I think about quilites or torta de huevo, but when I stared down my enchilada plate tonight, I am damn sure it said something about Mexico, something about corn tortillas; the tamales were muttering something too, and I think it was in the ceremonial version of Nahuatl.

I'm not even going to get into the chile and cheese component of Arellano's memorable proclamations. Let's just say that the elusive substance called New Mexican food is really a combination of several diverse regional and historical food preparation processes, not some unchanged (and by implication, rare and exotic) past form. But I digress.

Anyway, the fact that I am writing to you tonight in English is one mighty proof of the oddity of New Mexico. That I have learnt to work magic by that same process is more an anomaly than part of a pattern, but it does reflect a vast and ultimately icky cultural tendency that was acted out by my parents' generation and is occasionally invoked by some Gen Xers.

My family is from here. My father's first language was Spanish, though he was proficient in English by age 6. My mother's family spoke Spanish too, but some of them spoke German. Both of them were college educated and came from families where education, books and the arts were important expressions of culture and self.

There was a rich tapestry of other languages and cultures at our disposal. To complicate matters, my father took a job on the Navajo Reservation in the late 1960s and had to learn the rudiments of the language in order to do his job. My mother drove us into town, to the library, frequently. We borrowed every sort of book, but my favorites were the dictionaries, the books that had diagrams of different human alphabets contained as a matter of course.

But my parents were overly concerned with fitting in, with assuming the mantle of the bourgeois, with being recognized as Americans. And so they were good at hiding things. They spoke English in public and in most social situations. And mostly they passed. When they did not, people at meetings and parties would end up asking my mother and father where they were from, because the way they talked made it seem like they could be from anywhere at all.

My mother often joked about that. She told folks who asked after their fluctuating identity that the Carrillo family was from Siberia. At home, my mother and father spoke to each other in an exasperating mix of the languages mentioned above, but mostly in a passionate and idiosyncratic form of Spanglish that was both comical and poignant to the ear.

They made no overt efforts to teach us any other language than English and they demanded that we excel in its use. They never said that we should not learn or use the languages of our ancestors and advised us to respect those who did. I believe they had faith that multilingualism would come to us after they passed, as a reward for embracing America.

So, I gotta tell you I think all of this stuff about Whole Foods Market is rubbish, by my accounting. A fear of other languages or cultures that results from some corporate vision of American exceptionalism is no less loathsome than the self-denial foisted off on my parents' generation as a necessity of assimilation.

Such policies come from a place that does not value New Mexican culture and probably has no intention of valuing it in the future. Much like the folks who wanted to sell Native American-themed underwear or who write to tell America of our arcane and Oriental linkage to Spanish Conquistadors, they just don't get it. 

I didn't learn to speak and write Spanish until after college, when I traveled to South America. My Spanish will always be mediocre. My knowledge of German, much like my knowledge of my mother's cultural identity, remains inchoate. Sometimes I stay up late at night and listen to the Navajo Nation radio station through the interwebz and sort of understand every third sentence.

But, I'm trying Ringo, I'm trying real hard ...

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