Who Made this Grave

A few days before the actual Day of the Dead, I picked up my son from his Montessori school and we strolled together down Morelia’s Calzada, a ficus-lined cobblestone pedestrian avenue that stretches from the colonial city’s pink stone aqueduct to San Nicolás, the university where more than two centuries ago Mexico’s revolutionary priest, Father Hidalgo, was teacher to the city’s namesake, José María Morales. As we left his less famous school and strolled towards the aqueduct, my son and I noticed that a crowd was gathering, and to the best of our collective ability, we hurried to find out what Morelia had in store for us this day.

In the months we had roamed our temporary city together, me pregnant and waddling, my son only two and toddling, we had happened upon the sorts of spectacles that made living in Michoacán’s capital just a little bit magical. Since Michoacán was stewing in the heat of Mexico’s escalating drug, this magic helped. A few weeks earlier, we’d watched a crew filming a telenovela, while off-camera cast members dressed as revolutionary soldiers hoisted passing children onto their half-sleeping horses and women in petticoats sat on the old stone benches sending texts. And once, for reasons we never quite discerned, we came upon the Calzada to find it had been carpeted end to end in a mural made entirely of flower petals, grains, dried leaves, and pine needles. Now, on this late October day, we joined the milling crowd and found that the attraction was the girls from the Catholic high school standing still as statues in little sets they had made to represent an old family portrait, or a garden party, a wake or a wedding. The girls in their tableaux were dressed in gowns and veiled hats or cross-dressed in suits, but their faces were painted black and white and ash gray, and on bare arms were painted bones. They were “elegant skeletons”—calaveras de la Catrina, or simply “Catrinas”—like the delicate ceramic figurines of skeletons in media res made in the campo outside Morelia. They were the living, living dead of Mexico.

In time for the Day of the Dead festivities for which Michoacán is famous, my son happened to be just entering the incessant-question stage of toddlerhood

“Who made this?” he asked three hundred times a day.

“Who made this book?”

“Dr. Seuss.”

“Who made this food?”

“Your daddy made your omelet from eggs that a chicken made and calabacitas that a farmer grew in a field from a seed.”

But so far, in situations like this one in which I now found myself, I’d been lucky: 1) who made this was the extent of his interrogative repertoire, and 2) he had not yet learned to ask why.

My son had no idea what a skeleton was. He didn’t even know the word “dead” pertained to anything beyond the grasshoppers he’d left locked in the driver’s seats of toy cars on the roof of our apartment or the desiccated scorpion we’d saved to show him. Death was not yet a bewilderment: it was an all-but blank space in his conception of the world.

This isn’t to say that I minced words when I explained to him the finite mortality of grasshoppers and other victims of his rooftop play.

“He’s dead, honey,” I told my son when he tried to goad his latest, legless victim back into action. Or, when he was served roasted chapulines in lime and chile in a restaurant: “That’s a grasshopper, like the grasshopper you play with on the roof.” And, as he examined the scorpion carcass, “This alacrán is dead. Your daddy squashed it with a shoe so it cannot pinch you with those pincers or sting you with its tail. But remember what it looks like, and if you ever see another one, back away, call a grown-up.”

I would not lie and say they were sleeping, I would not disappear a corpse, and I would not get metaphysical. But the pedagogy of bugs only went so far in Mexico.

***

Read the rest of this essay (and view slideshow) at its source: http://velamag.com/who-made-this-grave/

The Culture Shock of Coming Home

From Old Mexico to New.

If I got in my car this too-hot afternoon, I could be in Juarez in time for dinner.

When we drive across the Rio Grande for Sunday lunch with his grandparents, I tell my son that if we built a raft we could ride the river all the way back to Mexico.

Twice I have slipped across the border linguistically: once with a birthday girl who gave my son a party favor bag when we extricated him, sobbing, from the princess piñata party he was attempting to crash, and once with the pizza delivery man.

And every night, when my husband dials in from Mexico for his bedtime story duty via Skype, I see our old tile-and-arch house, a little piñata still hanging in the window. He ran into A’s teacher, Anita. Pati, the secretary next door gave him a hard time for leaving his gueritos on the other side, as people say. Raúl has been giving him pointers on how to sell our VW Pointer at Morelia’s Sunday car market.

There are still stray threads bridging the rift, but the tearing is done. I am here, in New Mexico instead of Old. And the divide feels insurmountable.

*

Self-portrait in a VW Pointer.

Three weeks ago I was riding shotgun in that old Pointer, my hair blowing wild out the window, past volcanoes and hillsides covered with cactus. Now I’m an urban mom fresh from my air-conditioned Subaru getting slightly annoyed at Whole Foods for being out of size 3 diapers. Now, after nearly a year of being forced to forsake deadlines for holidays, I get a casual, pre-holiday weekend email from my editors who want all changes for paperback release Tuesday-by-the-latest; without missing a beat, my internal egg-timer begins to tick.

It isn’t distance; it’s differences. And it isn’t Old v. New Mexico: it’s me. Crossing that border, I became a different person: I am the hostess, not the guest. I am running the show, not blithely observing. I am responsible for what happens, not merely responsive to it. I am an American in America. Nobody, everybody, myself.

*

“I want Albuquerque to be in Mexico and Mexico to be in Albuquerque,” my three-year-old tells me.

He likes it here with the dog and the yard and the sandbox (a redundancy in New Mexico), and our too-late-for-hope garden. But he misses “my friend the doctor” (our landlord and the boogie man we invoked whenever crayons were applied to walls or furniture), and Alice his babysitter, and Juan Fe his best friend.

I like the dog and yard and garden too. But I feel unable to miss anyone. The people we left behind already feel like characters in a book I read, characters in a life I inhabited only through imagination. I realize that I was always in Albuquerque in Mexico (and I know there are plenty of people who are in Mexico in Albuquerque).

It takes an abstracted person to wholly inhabit the place in which they are at any given moment. And on this side of the border, it is almost impossible to just be.

*

Mexico's art of ambiguity.

In light of my failure to cross over without canceling out what came between, I seek proof: the pretty Capula red-clay platter, the hammered copper vase from Santa Clara de Cobre, the bag of dulces de leche that I escape into to fight the sadness of change, the Spanish words my son accesses first—“Look mama, ¡uvas!”

Everyone says coming home is the hardest part, that the steps of culture shock are more tedious in reverse. There are even those who insist “going home” is impossible. My problem seems to be hanging on to the part of myself that went away in the first place, keeping the sense of a single, on-going journey in spite of the thick, bookending gravity of return.

But I know that most of the residue of my Mexico self will wash off in the slip of days. When my husband returns in a few weeks he will spring my diamond ring from the safe deposit box. I will cut my too-long hair. The baby will learn to eat foods other than avocados.

The woman I am behind the wheel of my sleek white Subaru is not the girl—girl!—I was three weeks ago kicking the bumper of that Pointer back into place. The woman I am in Whole Foods is not just 1,200 miles removed from the man making plans for the Sunday car market.

The me that was in Mexico has become vestigial. In spite of how little actual time or space has come between us.

And I cannot wait to go away again.

©2011

All rights reserved.

Mexico’s March for Peace with Justice and Dignity

                  

In March, the son of Mexico’s prize-winning poet, Javier Sicilia, was found murdered. The poet’s response was two-fold: one final poem and two feet on the ground. Sicilia has led several marches now, from his home in Cuernavaca to President Calderón’s door in Mexico City. The poet’s followers chant ¡Hasta la madre!–enough already.

Sicilia is currently leading a march called La Caravana Nacional Ciudadana por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad, or The National Citizens’ Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity. It began on the 4th of June in Sicilia’s home city of Cuernavaca and then set forth upon “la Ruta del Terror”: Cuernavaca to Mexico City to Toluca, Morelia, Guadalajara, León, San Luis Potosí, Zacatecas, Durango, Saltillo, Monterrey, Torreón, Camargo, Chihuahua, and ending on June 10th in the city called “most visible face of the national destruction” of Mexico, Ciudad Juarez.

Saturday night, La Caravana por Paz came through Morelia. The photographs below are images of the march to the city center, followed by speeches in front of Michoacán’s seat of government.

Many of the speeches voiced solidarity with the indigenous community of Cherán, which is facing off with the criminal organization that has disappeared members of the community and murdered others (see my earlier post on Grassroots Resistance Movements). A representative from Cherán was welcomed to the podium by the chant “No estan solos”–you are not alone.

But the hero of the night was the grief-stricken poet Sicilia.

Welcome Caravan for Peace with Dignity and Justice, Here We Are Also Hasta la Madre!

"We want to see justice"

"For a Culture that Respects Human Rights"

"Juan Jesús Ortiz Chávez, disappeared in Acapulco on September 30, 2010"

No more (blood)!

"We demand the truth: 2 Michoacanos are still missing"

There were political parties represented in the march (and pamphlets being passed around), although the movement, while opposing the government strategy, claims to be non-partisan

In Cherán, the pueblo shall overcome

Cherán is present, demands security, peace, and justice

Javier Sicilia (applauding)

Javier Sicilia in Morelia

ÚLTIMO POEMA

Javier Sicilia

El mundo ya no es digno de la palabra

Nos la ahogaron adentro

Como te (asfixiaron),

Como te desgarraron a ti los pulmones

Y el dolor no se me aparta sólo queda un mundo

Por el silencio de los justos

Sólo por tu silencio y por mi silencio, Juanelo

~

LAST POEM 

Javier Sicilia

The world today is not worthy of the word

That they drowned within us

As they did you (asphyxiated)

As they tore from you your lungs

And the pain does not leave me

A world is silenced

By the silence of the just

By your silence and by my silence, Juanelo

(translation mine, with all apologies to the poet)

Adiós to Mexico

My keyboard looks like a pirate’s maw, gaping holes that were once keys, stains on others, and my hard drive is jammed full of photographs: pyramids, pink stone, parades, fireworks behind cathedral spires, and hundreds of hotel rooms I could never afford on a hotel reviewer’s income. My clothes are ragged (who knew clothing in Mexico was so expensive?!), and so is this body that still shows of pregnancy and has not been for a jog, ridden a bike, or seen the inside of a yoga studio in so many months. My son picks up the phone and says ¿bueno?, calls tanker trucks pipas, and prefers chongos over all other flavors of ice cream. My husband is pulling out his eyebrow hairs, one by one, frustrated that the product of his fieldwork looks so different from the proposal that won him so many fancy grants a year ago. And the baby, fat and giggly and so eager to be cooed over and pinched by señoras in the streets, at last has all of the paperwork he’ll need to enter the U.S., his newborn eyes crossed in the picture in his crisp, blue American passport.

Which is all to say that, it is time to leave Mexico. To go home, I’d say, but “home” doesn’t really exist anymore for academics under forty. Mexico is one of four countries we’ve lived in since my husband and I aligned our itineraries: if getting tenure means we have to outsource ourselves to universities in Dubai or Tel Aviv or São Paolo, we will. Next up: I’ve been granted a one-year writer-in-residency at a university in the northeast. I’ll write a book and teach. My husband will write his dissertation. My kids will learn to live with cows and snow.

Goodbye loveinmexico, hello love(ideally)inthelandofperpetualgrayness.

We are fortunate for this future, but it is hard to remember this because what is to come can’t actually be known. What is more poignant is the gratitude I feel for the recent past.

If I were a better poet, I would write an ode, but since I’m not, I can only say goodbye to Mexico. Goodbye to the workers building the hotel across the street—painting it a rich brick orange and then butter-cream and then orange again, and laughing off the owner’s fickleness as the opportunity for more work. Goodbye to the smiling baker rolling dough all day in the panaderia. Goodbye to the trash man ringing his bell and asking, for the third time this week, if my children are still growing, reminding me that we still falta la niña, lack the girl. Goodbye to Juan, who teaches me about fruit, and his boss, Don Pepe, who throws in a free cucumber or jicama para el niño. Goodbye to the grumpy man who sells the long loafs of yeasty bread in the market and never lets my husband buy the wrong kind. Goodbye to the old woman who runs the restaurant on my street where no one ever eats, myself included, and goodbye to the family who run the almost identical restaurant across the street where everyone eats. Goodbye to the writer’s widow who invites us over and explains to us the why of things. Goodbye to the roof dogs, the long-faced hound on one side, the two humping Great Danes on the other. Goodbye to the night stench that wafts in on the breeze. Goodbye to the kinglets who live in the bougainvillea in our garden. Goodbye to hanging laundry on the roof. Goodbye to the quinceañera girls posing in the park and the exchange student selling ice cream. Goodbye to the secretary in the doctor’s office next door who approves (or doesn’t) my infant’s outfit before I leave home. Goodbye to combis and Gas de Lago trucks. Goodbye to Victoria beer, chiles peron, and blue corn tortillas. Goodbye to mangos and limes. Goodbye to pay de queso and sweet hibiscus water. Goodbye to our bumper-dragging VW Pointer. Goodbye butterflies and hummingbirds. Goodbye to Alice’s smiling face at my door, and goodbye to Alfredo’s sorrows. Goodbye to so many holidays, to parades, to balloons and bubbles in the plazas. And goodbye to the teachers at my son’s Montessori whose holistic approach does not stop at the child when his parents are so clearly inept. Goodbye to Dr. O. who delivered my too-soon baby and looked a bit like a matador doing it. Goodbye to that baby’s birthplace. Goodbye to Spanish in my mouth like a handful of marbles. Goodbye to the soldiers and goodbye to their guns. Goodbye to the musicians who sing in the taqueria, and goodbye to the viejitos who dance by the cathedral, and goodbye to the fairy mime, my son’s first love…

Today, I will prepare a despedida for my son at his little school: ice cream and crepes. On Tuesday, his grandmother will fete him welcome: belated birthday cake and a new bike. Transitions are important, I think. And I know there will be sadness between these celebrations. Every day this week my son has packed a box with toys and books and his red shoes.

He’s only three yet he knows how leaving works. But I don’t think he knows that the best of this life we can’t take with us.

Hasta la madre: Grassroots Resistance in Mexico

I am trying to write this from my temporary home in Morelia, Michoacán, one of the places red alerted for travelers, to sum up Mexico’s War on Drugs so I can write about some of the things (extra)ordinary people are doing about it, but it is Sunday night, and while nearly 35,000 people have died in the U.S. and Mexico’s war, the number that everyone is interested in is 3. Yes, Morelia’s Monarcas just crushed Mexico City’s Cruz Azul (3-0) and the noise—car horns, whistles, whoops, bottles breaking—has been at top volume on for almost an hour. This is the disconnect that has baffled me ever since I arrived in Mexico ten months ago, that has made it impossible for me to reconcile what I read–35,000–with what I see and hear around me–¡Viva Morelia!

But there are three events—all of them grassroots, two of them all but spontaneous—in my inbox this week that make more sense of this conflict and this country for me. Or at least they appeal to the idealist in me that stubbornly believes that the power of the people’s will is ultimately unmatchable.

Resistance Blockades in Indigenous Community

The first is local, and it’s a bit of a David-and-Goliath situation. I heard about it through a letter calling for people to take notice of events in the indigenous Purhépechan community of Cherán, here in Michoacán, and desseminating an Amnesty International Urgent Alert. Apparently, because of collusion between criminal organizations (a.k.a. “cartels,” a misnomer, or narcotraficantes, a reductive term that doesn’t quite get at the scope of these organizations) and local authorities–yes, Cherán’s own municipal police, the community forests around Cherán have been logged illegally. The logging is the last straw, but it is not the only abuse the community has suffered. More than a dozen of this community’s 16,000 citizens have been killed or disappeared in events linked to Michoacán’s currently unnamed organization. (La Familia disbanded–or splintered, or who-knows-what–in Deceber.)

As the story has come out, the community’s patience snapped about a month ago when townspeople began throwing rocks at logging trucks. Then the community blockaded the road and captured five of the loggers (later turning them over to federal authorities). There has been violence—two members of the community have been killed in confrontations between narcos (accompanied by local police, rumor would have it). Cherán will no longer stand to have its forests or its community plundered.

Oh, and they’d like some justice, please.

more info:

http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/estados/80308.html

http://amnistia.org.mx/nuevo/2011/05/06/mexico-ataques-contra-miembros-de-una-comunidad-indigena-en-mexico/

Paso a Paso Hacia la Paz: Human Rights Demonstration and Father Solalinde

The second event is international, and it has yet to take place. It is an invitation to participate in a peace march/freedom ride that promises to be monumental, whatever numbers actually turn out. To my great frustration (do you know what it costs to change plane tickets these days?!), but I’m trying to convince my workaholic husband that his research can spare a few days to march for what organizers are calling the civil rights struggle of our time.

Paso a Paso Hacia la Paz is tracing the deadly route that migrants travel to get to el otro lado, the other side, a few states at a time. In January, the first Paso a Paso crossed Chiapas through to Ixtepec, Oaxaca. This summer, Paso a Paso will begin in Ixtepec on June 20^th and travel to Orizaba by train and by bus, arriving June 24^th. Family members of disappeared migrants presumed to be among the dead recently uncovered in Tamaulipas state will be among the demonstrators (this group will actually be making the entire journey from their homes in Central America, to a rendezvous in Guatemala, and then joining Paso a Paso before completing the journey to the U.S. border.

Leading the march will be Father Alejandro Solalinde, a priest whose name is known throughout Mexico and, gradually, internationally as well for his work for human rights. I’m a little starstruck, but it is my opinion that Father Solalinde is the Dr. King, the Archbishop Romero, fighting for the oppressed in Mexico.

 The Paso a Paso movement is gaining momentum, albeit not in time for so many migrants whose travels have subjected them to extortion, rape, kidnapping, even execution. But if you are in Mexico, or are inclined to be in Mexico this June, try to be a part of this. (Find Casa Migrante Ixtepec on Facebook to get hooked up.)

A Poet for Peace

            In March, seven university students were killed in Cuernavaca. One of them was a young man named Juan Francisco, who just happened to be the son of Javier Sicilia, one of Mexico’s most prestigious contemporary poets. Sicilia promptly put down his pen—making his son’s death essentially a double murder—and took to the street and people followed, rallying to the line “hasta la madre,” the rough equivalent of “we’ve had it up to here.” Even President Calderón, who clearly sees the threat in an angry poet, keeps tweeting his solidarity with the people who march with Sicilia, and, according to the poet, the president has even conceded that there are flaws in his combative approach.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/14/world/americas/14sicilia.html

 *

Peace demonstrations that I’ve seen here in Morelia do not privilege one side over the other–the government or the criminal organizations–in the ostensible War on Drugs. Peace demonstrations simply call for peace, and neither side—the criminal organizations that claim to bring security to the region and even provide some services (see William Finnegan’s 2010 “Silver or Lead” in the New Yorker), or the U.S. funded federal forces that patrol the streets in pickup trucks with machine guns manned by masked troops. Most of Mexico seems to feel caught in the crossfire and futility. To hear people talk about it, the current strategy of taking out kingpins is a little like bowling: knock some down and the system coolly re-racks.

And these events—Cherán’s spontaneous resistance which now has the roads in and out of the community blockaded while the community awaits backup from anyone, anywhere, who will help them escape the exploitation and abuses of their current subjugation, Sicilia’s grief-powered marches, and Paso a Paso’s sweeping gesture of solidarity with another subjugated people—these events are grassroots resistance movements. Rather than machine guns, these movements apply the force of pride, patriotism, and connected sense of community—like that of this city that is honking so wildly tonight—against the status quo of abject violence and political posturing.

I know it is limp idealism that thinks that much can come from gestures. But I grew up on the legend of “We Shall Overcome”–so much so that Pete Seeger wrote the preface of my first book–and I still believe that when enough people say “ya, basta,” enough already, peace is possible.

Now we wait for the call for peace to cross the border, both ways, as the violence crosses, as the drugs and guns cross, as the migrants cross, coming and going.

Roots and Wings and the Story (for Mother’s Day)

I grew up on a farm in your quintessential middle-of-nowhere. While my dad cursed his cows and tractors and broken down trucks—“peckerhead” should have been my first word, my mom nursed a vast  vegetable garden, a flock of Thanksgiving turkeys that were notoriously too large for anyone’s oven, and us three kids.

It was an idyll and it wasn’t. My memories are steeped in the scent of boiling maple sap, river mint, and new hay. But anyone who knows anything about dairy farming in the 1980s knows how low we kept our heads during tax season when my father did his books. And anyone who knows anything about how one gets a dairy farmer’s attention can guess at the volume of two things: my mother’s tractor whistle, and the way she could slam a front door. On those latter nights I remember nesting down with my sister and brother in the chaff pile below the loft ladder, drifting off to the constant sound of chewing and the tsk-tsk of a milking machine.

But my mother let me know her in ways that made those stranded nights make sense. People didn’t speak about transparency in government then the way they do now, but my mother practiced it as a parent.

I knew she worked hard—chopping, shoveling, hoeing, canning, freezing, slaughtering, mothering. And I knew she was lonely living on the outskirts—and I don’t mean merely geographical—of a very small town. She made sure I knew, as an elementary school feminist-in-training, that undervaluing a homemaker was nothing short of sinful. When my father forgot himself, she took herself out to the movies. Forty miles away. Alone.

And it wasn’t just current events that my mother let me in on; she isn’t much for surprises or secrets. Like me, she errs on the side of too much information. So I knew her old flames by name and how each fizzled out, and I knew what it was she buried in the parking lot of the Bombay airport when she left India for the last time.

Indeed, my mother wasn’t raised on a farm herself; her childhood memories take place at the country club. And I don’t mean that figuratively. Weekends and summers, her mother dropped her off in the morning and picked her up in the evenings. Swimming lessons. Tennis lessons. Lunch at the clubhouse. Her childhood housekeeper still sends us all Christmas cookies.

My mother was just home from wandering around India and Afghanistan, looking for that great alternative her generation once sought, when she met my father. She says that near the end of her traveling days overpasses made her sad: below her she saw the headlights of people who were headed home, who would get there in time for dinner, who were not passing through. When she met a man applying a sweeping intellect to working a ramshackle farm, she exited the highway. It was the 1970s, late for some trends and early for others, when they went back-to-the-land, local, organic, free-range.

Farming was not an inheritance for either of my parents, but a lifestyle choice. It was idealistic, unrealistic, romantic, but my parents don’t fail at things they set out to do. Although they do sometimes switch-out the end goal. Cows gave way to crops and now they sell garden-fresh prepared food at farmers’ markets.

But this was their path. We kids were charged with finding our own. I know my way around a Ball Blue Book and a John Deere and I’m not half bad with a hammer and nails. But my mother didn’t raise me to be a farmer or even a farmer’s wife. Rather, she raised me to adapt to my circumstances. Hungry? Buy ten pounds each of potatoes, carrots, and onions: you won’t starve. Stuck in a blizzard? Shelter yourself in snow. At the Plaza? Order tea.

My mother expected us to run wild, to experiment, to take chances. We were allowed to do almost anything but “hang out.” Still, I admit, I resisted. When I was sixteen, my mother enrolled me in summer school in Madrid, Spain. I fought to stay home, hoping to ride some horses, help my dad with the haying. But I lost. Round two, she remained unfazed when I tossed my high school diploma in a box and went to work on a farm. My mother knows that some seeds planted have to winter over. After a year of farm work, I went to Italy for my first college semester and, once my travels gained momentum, I hardly looked back.

My siblings’ stories are different, but we are all facets of our mother writ large. My sister is a corporate climber, a little like a chainsaw in high heels. She can play polo, shoot up beer cans, and throw a smitten man out on his ass. My brother, a ship without a compass but blessed with favorable winds, longs to go to Africa, to do hard work in hard places, but keeps getting waylaid because he is too practical not to know that he accomplishes more engineering the Bigger Picture for government agencies and international organizations. Of us three, I am both the dreamer and the one who most knows what I want, a writer and a wanderer and a mother myself. Most of this is only possible because my mother sees my will-o-wisp path as viable.

“Do what you love, the money will follow,” she says, and sends me a check—not for material things, or even to get me by, she expects me to manage that, potatoes-carrots-and-onions style—but so I can do something decadent with my passport. So far, not much money follows, but my mother’s faith is unflagging.

Together, my siblings and I tootle around on bicycles in the Dutch countryside, eat steak on Capitol Hill, pickle ourselves in gin while we can dill beans, hitchhike through South America, sidestep rattlesnakes and bear in the backcountry. Together, we rake hay, throw it up in the loft, stack it tight, cut-end up. The way our parents want it.

From my perspective, it all comes down to this: my mother teaches me to write my own story, and to make it a doozy. This is something one does forward, making plans and choices, buying the ticket, as well as backwards, seeing the meaning in experiences had, however fleeting. Frankly, I hardly remember my mother’s oversized turkeys, and I never met her ex-flames, but the stories have stuck and I read in it a life that is well-lived. These days I write my own life in this vein. I know that my days are like anyone’s, dirty dishes and mundane frustrations—whether we curse cows or sip  tea at the Plaza—but if my story is going to be anywhere near as resonant to my children as my mother’s is to me, I must drive my life hard, mine deep, and tell it well.

FYI: Dia de la Madre is observed on May 10th in Mexico, so this is NOT late (really, Mom!).

Dia del Niño

“When we see a pretty flower, we stop to look at it and smell it, right?”

My son keeps his face hidden. He gets shy when strangers gush at him.

“And seeing that flower makes us happy, right?”

He nods into my chest.

“Well, people in Mexico feel that way about children. When they see you, they want to touch you and look at you. And it makes them happy. Children make people happy.”

My son peeks up.

“Why?” he asks for the three-hundred-and-forty-third time that morning.

There is no Easter bunny in Mexico. Pascua is a holy affair (see my Good Friday post A Child Meets Jesus). But don’t feel sorry for the children of Mexico because they don’t get a basket full of jelly beans, chewy fowl, and chocolate eggs. The stores still display mountains of chocolate (and bicycles and dollies and games of every sort) each April. American kids get the Easter bunny, but in Mexico, the springtime celebration of all things adorable gets right to the point: April 30^th is Dia del Niño.

In 1954, the United Nations called for a Universal Day of the Child. But Latin America was ahead of the game, Mexico in particular, where official celebrations of Dia del Niño began in 1916. And the celebrations keep getting more elaborate, or so say my friends who compare their memories of childhood with the expectations of their children.

Morelia certainly went all out this year.

Every plaza and park had city-run activities, with volunteers overseeing ring games and art projects or painting faces, city workers giving kids rides in cherry pickers, city gardeners helping kids transplant seedlings. And, as usual, the whole city was out for the festivities.

In the evening, things took a more somber turn with a procession honoring the Santo Niño de la Salud. Children dressed like angels rode a flatbed truck. Nuns sang over a squeaky sound system mounted on the roof of a truck. Prayers were read. A marching band played. In the crowd, children were dressed like the Santo Niño, in white with red velvet robes.

El Santo Niño de la Salud

But in Morelia’s Centro Histórico, there was more revelry. The usual Saturday night guitarists were replaced by a singing comedy routine in superhero costumes, and on the other side of the Catedrál, a kids’ quiz show was taking place under a huge tent (where free popcorn was being doled out). Clowns rode by on unicycles and the fairy mime that my son loves to the point of sadness was commanding a steady flow of coins in her tin bucket.

“Every day is Children’s Day,” my mother used to say when we celebrated Mother’s or Father’s Day. She says it again when we talked in the afternoon between events.

But is it?

I mean, I know parents feel like they go all out all the time. But as a culture—if so large a country as the U.S. can be accused of having one—so very few of us stop to smell the babies, as it were. Even us parents can forget to enjoy our children.

I hope that when I leave Mexico, I remember.

One more thing: I know that Easter bunny deliveries are a way that we instill a sense of magic in our children, but I’m not sure the fiction is worth it. There was plenty of magic on the streets of Morelia last Saturday—the magic that is beauty and the bonds of love and community—and no imaginary rabbit stole credit for any of it.

Good Friday: A Child Meets Jesus in Mexico

 

“Who is that man?” my son asks as soon as we arrive.

The man playing Jesus is wearing a white tunic. There is fake blood on his face.

I take a deep breath and leap.

“Do you remember at Christmastime when we talked about a special baby?”

My son beheaded one ceramic Baby Jesus out of a Christmas party nativity scene and there were consequences, so he does remember.

“This man is pretending to be that special baby after he grew up.”

Other men dressed as soldiers begin whipping Jesus. My son’s blue eyes go large.

“Why are they hitting?” he asks.

The events around us are happening in Spanish, but the biggest challenge will be translating Good Friday into toddler.

Morelia, like most of Mexico, takes Semana Santa very seriously. This was suggested to me by the full two weeks that schools are closed in honor of this one holy week. Stepping out for the Good Friday parade we encountered not the usual line up of fire trucks and charros in big hats riding very nice horses indeed, but a reenactment of Christ’s passion.

For the length of one avenue, with a priest narrating at intervals representing each station of the cross, a crowd walked with Jesus. In some senses, it was a normal parade: ice cream vendors sold lemon ices, church members held out hats for donations, people snapped pictures. But whips cracked and wood dragged over stone. The air smelled like incense and sweat.

Okay, confession time. We don’t go to church. If we were to go to church, I don’t even know what denominational door we would darken (I went to a few Quaker meetings as a child, Unitarianism was the bulk of my slim religious education, and even that was mostly in how to play the hand bells, yet my sister insists we’re Episcopalian, whatever that is). Most of my knowledge of the Bible I came to through Milton.

But we’re parents now and we don’t intend to indoctrinate our children in any particular way of thinking, not even in our own ambivalence. We know that our children will have questions. We know that we won’t have answers. But while my husband and I run short on faith in divinity, we have abundant awe for the power of story.

Before us in the street where my son goes go school, we are witnessing, however bad the acting and squeaky the microphones, one of the keystone stories of our culture. And so it becomes a special day for us as a family. Building on foundations laid back in December (the special baby grew up to be an important teacher), and aided by those of us around us who are so clearly not ambivalent, we initiate our son to the greatest story ever told.

 

My son is afraid of the soldiers. He wants to know why there is smoke. He looks for Jesus’s mama, played by a woman in a black headscarf who looks genuinely sad.

I tell him that the king is jealous because people listen to Jesus and not to him. I tell him that Jesus will not fight the men who hit him because he believes in peace and kindness. I tell him that Jesus is never mean.

But I leave a lot out. Above all, I leave out God. For now, Jesus is enough.

Oh, and when the ambulatory show reaches the plaza where a cross has been erected on a stage, we slip away from the crowd and cross the street to the park.

Tips for Traveling with Children

Travel shouldn’t be torture, but it can feel that way when you have children with you. Like everything else that the parenting life throws at you, however, the more you do it, the easier it gets.

Because of jobs and hopelessly disperse families, we cover a lot of miles and cross a few borders; and we bring our children with us. Here are some of the tricks we’ve picked up along the way, and I have a powerful hope that the commentariat will pitch in a few more in the comment section below.

ON FLYING

I admit, I broke down and cried the first time I flew alone with a baby. Okay, I cried, threw a fit, and had to be escorted onto a plane. The socially acceptable hazing of parents on airplanes is cruel and unusual. (Unusual in the sense that other cultures don’t shun families the way that public transportation-averse Americans do.)

But then I got better at it.

“He’s just getting warmed up for the in-flight show,” I now joke with other people in line to board as my baby fusses. “I think he’s probably the headliner today.”

And walking down the aisle, I entertain myself by making eye contact with people sitting next to empty seats (especially if they’re male and wearing suits). I cock an eyebrow, smile wryly, and then, as I pass them by, I wink and whisper, “gotcha!”

Which is to say that, along with everything else, bring your sense of humor. It doesn’t matter if no one else thinks you’re funny. After all, your responsibility is to your kids, and that’s work enough. If the people around you need a mother to make them comfortable at every moment of every day, they should have brought their own.

Another tactic I’ve picked up is pleasantly passive aggressive. Children aren’t allowed to pre-board on many airlines anymore because first-classers won’t feel special if they have to share their privilege with the snot-nosed set (or the handicapped, for that matter). This leaves the obvious alternative—board last. In addition to spending as little time on the plane as necessary, it also ticks off the airline (they can’t push back until you’re ready) instead of the people behind you in line trying to get to their seats before their arms fall off under all those carry-ons.

Now I know to ask for what I need. Sure, I can get frustrated because my car seat weighs a ton and gets stuck between each row of seats and no one offers to help even though I’m clearly very pregnant and my toddler is running away. Or I can check in with the stewards at the front of the plane, or even back at the gate, and tell them I’ll need a hand. Once—but not before I asked politely—the pilot himself carried my car seat up the 95-odd steps from tarmac to the terminal while I carried baby and everything else.

(Yes, I use car seats on planes; don’t get me started.)

On big planes, I’ve found, there is usually someone who specializes in children. And flight attendants will almost always let you in on a secret: babies aren’t the most annoying travelers, not by a long shot. Ask the flight attendant to hold your baby while you go to the bathroom, or while you get your seat arranged. It’s part of their job to help, and they’re usually happy to do it. But don’t expect them to read your mind. And don’t try to be a hero—parenting was never a one-woman job, and it’s often a stretch even when there’s two of you.

WHERE TO STAY

The rule of preemptive asking works for hotels as well. Here in Mexico, I make sure every hotel I stay in knows ahead of time that I’m bringing a toddler and a baby. Searching for a place to stay in Guadalajara recently I sent an inquiry to one hotel that replied with a personal note explaining that, while they certainly weren’t in a position to turn away business and the choice to come was mine, they were a hotel designed for adults: there is breakable folk art on display and there are poisonous plants growing in the garden, the owner explained. (I owe them a shout-out for this: La Casa de los Flores is an honest hotel for adults).

I continued my research and discovered another hotel in the same neighborhood that recommended a particular room in which they could add a twin bed for my toddler, and while they are at it, they’re putting in a play pen for the baby. In the past, hotels have made other provisions—a lollypop on the kid’s bed, a carton of milk in the refrigerator, a plastic drinking cup alongside the glass, and, once, a teething ring in the freezer.

Had I booked online, an option most hotels offer even in developing countries these days, I would not have been allowing the hotels to do their best to accommodate me (or other guests).

Don’t limit yourself to places designed for families (these resorts are usually self-contained and don’t allow for real cultural engagement), but do choose a place where you’ll enjoy hanging out (it has a pool or nice outdoor spaces), even if it consumes a bigger chunk of your budget than you once designated for lodging; your hotel is no longer just crash-pad, it’s a major part of the destination.

WHAT TO DO WHILE YOU’RE THERE

The final challenge is the trip itself. Obviously, you won’t have the typical tourist experience. I had been to Mexico City’s Papalote Museo del Niño (the children’s museum) twice before I got to the magnificent Museo Nacional de Antropología (and even then I spent more time checking out the turtles in the reflection pool than the exhibits themselves). And at the ruins of Teotihuacán, rather than climb pyramids with the rest of the tourist hordes, we explored the nooks and crannies at ground level. (What is it with travelers climbing everything anyway?)

Just think how hard some travelers work to avoid the “beaten path.” With kids, you’re already in largely unchartered territory.

And what you need to do is not extraordinary to what you do at home. Pack plenty of snacks (and butter up the guard if he tries to make you leave them at the gate). Always carry Matchbox cars, or whatever your kids’ favorite pocket-sized toy happens to be (bring extras to share when they make friends). And never overdo it—for your sake, or your kids’.

There are a few rules of engagement that we’ve developed for traveling with small children.

Know where your exits are, otherwise known as, plan your escape route ahead of time. When things fall apart and your kid goes boneless or your frustration gets the better of you, break for lunch, get an ice cream, or hop in a taxi and call it a day. Room service or taking carry-out back to a hotel room is often the solution to kids’ overstimulation and parents’ exhaustion. Most restaurants are happy to pack up a meal, so you’re not even missing out on local cuisine. Sometimes, having dinner in the room actually allows you to dine leisurely and allows the kids to strip naked or crawl around on the floor or commit whatever kamikaze acts would have made a restaurant dinner catastrophic.

Avoid forced marches. No guided tours (unless the guide is working just for you—in which case come prepared to tip big). No loop trails (you want to know that the fastest way home is to turn around, not press on). Just keep telling yourself that cliche that it’s the journey that counts, not the destination. If you don’t get to the top to see the view, or all the way through the exhibit, or even to that wonderful place you were heading to see, shrug it off.

Also, strive to counterbalance control with freedom. After keeping your kids’ behavior on a short leash (in restaurants, shops, or museums), set them free in open spaces, preferably green ones. Free play is easy to forget to schedule when you’re away from home, but an afternoon at a park or playground may turn out to be a charming cultural experience. Often we encounter these spaces where we don’t expect them: an olive grove outside an old church becomes the focus of our visit to one village; after visiting a ruins complex for all of eight minutes, we spend two hours lounging in the shade by the front gate because our kid is obsessed with collecting strips of eucalyptus bark off the ground.

PLAYING IT SAFE

Comfort zones are often compromised when traveling. You’re worried about the water. There are no seatbelts in the taxis. You don’t know the fastest route to the closest hospital if something goes wrong. And this is before you run up against surprises: a scorpion on the sidewalk; jellyfish on the beach.

On this front, your best bet is to be informed. A pre-departure visit to a travel clinic—even if your kids don’t need any vaccinations—is a never a bad idea. These clinics will help you know what the real dangers are at your destination (opposed to what a worried imagination might cook up to nag you), how to preempt these dangers, and what to do on the off-chance you face them. The State Department website also has good destination-specific information.

Keep in mind that, just like at home, your partner and you may feel differently about the risks: compromising on your sense of your child’s safety isn’t something anyone should be pressured into, especially if you’re on vacation and trying to relax. Which is to say that in a safety situation the worried parent holds the trump card. Make a safe word, or some other way to signal that you aren’t okay with x or y.

This brings me to my final suggestion. Of all the little rules we have developed to help us travel with our kids, there is only one law that my partner and I have pledged to uphold: if one of us gets creeped out, and it doesn’t have to be for a good reason, we go home.

*

In any case, this is my playbook. But I’m just starting out. I know lots of you have your own carpetbags full of tricks, and I can use all the tips I can get. So, what works for you?

 

Travel With Your Children

Tarascan Ruins at Tzintzuntzan, Mexico

Yes, it’s difficult; but what isn’t? Yes, it’s not what it used to be; but what else is new since you became a parent? Yes, you have to pack half your house; but do it anyway. Travel with your children. Travel while they’re small and programmed to explore and discover. Travel far and wide and for a long time. Even travel to hard places (i.e. beyond Epcot Center and the in-laws’ house for the holidays, even beyond your borders). Travel for your kids, for the profound experiences that come with travel, for the memories (even pre-memories), for a taste of the sheer breadth of difference that coexists upon this planet. And travel for yourself, for the pleasure, for the challenge, for the rare delight of seeing the world vicariously through a child’s eyes.

My argument is not so far off the argument for taking children to restaurants. You had a kid and suddenly white table cloths were out of the question, in part because you knew said kid would tie-dye that tablecloth with marinara, but your main reason was that you didn’t think you’d have time to finish—let alone savor—that bottle of wine. Particularly with that table next to you glowering at you because they left their kids home with a sitter. But this doesn’t mean that you have to always leave your kids behind.

With time, you adapt. You find places that work—even places without slides and inflatable jumpers—places you can enjoy with your kids: the hip wood-oven pizza place that’s noisy anyway, the cafe where you used to waste away entire weekend mornings reading the paper happens to have an array of windows overlooking a steady flow of entertainment for your vehicle-obsessed toddler. Sure, you have to leave a super-big tip because of the state of the floor afterwards, but this is an investment: with practice, your kids learn how to eat in restaurants, learn how to order and stay in their chairs and use the napkin correctly. And not just because you say so, but because they see everyone around them. This is an investment in being able to enjoy eating out: again, for you; for the first time, for your kids.

The same goes for travel. Only better, because your child can actually enhance the experience, instilling it with a sense of wonder and creating real moments of human contact across so-often impenetrable cultural lines.

Catrinas, Day of the Dead, Mexico

I suppose it goes without saying that travel with kids is inherently an adventure, whether or not your trip qualifies as “adventure travel.” It requires stamina and creativity and supreme flexibility. But there is a pay-off to the extra work hauling all that extra baggage. Not only do your children experience a literal widening of their horizons as they experience places and encounter people different from those to which they are accustomed, but you have the benefit of seeing new places through a child’s eyes, a perspective that will shift, if not widen, your horizon too.

Monarch butterflies at Cerro Pelon, Mexico

Of course, travel with kids takes you to different places than pre-kid travel, or forces you to experience the old places in new ways. Forget sitting in a Paris café all the live-long day; your kid simply won’t tolerate that. Or six hours in the Louvre either. And forget climbing those narrow stairs into the duomo of Saint Peter’s. No, you have to go to where the little boats are sailing, to where the pigeons are begging for bread, to where the children of that place come out to play. For all the things you might have done before that aren’t so feasible with a child or two in tow (salsa dancing all night, or lying delirious in soft sand), there are as many new ways to experience place, and culture, and landscape.

In many places, children can be your ticket into a deeper experience. Compare strolling through a broad plaza admiring fountains and a baroque cathedral and all that local color to watching as your child blows bubbles with other children, joins an old man feeding pigeons, drops a coin in a beggar’s cup, falls in love with the fairy who freezes until a coin falls in her tin bowl and wakes her for a dance. Granted, you are the observer in either case, but children aren’t ever observers. Children live in the moment, wherever they are in the world. And they can bring you with them.

If you bring them along. Which, I admit, isn’t easy. But they aren’t the only ones who get better with practice. You will too. And the reward—a return to freedom, not from parenting, but as a family—is the world itself.

Plaza de Armas, Morelia, Mexico

While I’m being didactic, next up will be: “TIPS FOR TRAVELING WITH CHILDREN.”