Flu and the Mexican Rural Community

Small rural communities in Mexico are getting world attention as the press points to La Gloria in Veracruz as a possible origin for the new strain of swine flu.  The NY Times today had an article and there’s a more informative one in El Universal.   Here’s the translated version.

Since I’m getting letters and comments about Mexican poverty and rural life I thought I’d post about what life in one of these communities is like.  Last week, by sheer chance, I went back to a “rancho” as such communities are frequently called that I have been visiting regularly for a dozen years.  It has somewhere between 3000 and 5000 people and schools through middle school.

This rancho is only about 8 miles from Guanajuato and has very regular bus service so people can get work apart from tending their small farms.  This makes me think it would be about the same level economically as La Gloria, where people have had work in the pig farm.  (Places in the mountains or in the south of the country or too far from towns for paid work would be much worse off).

I’m visiting María (not her real name) who worked for me for four or five years before unexpectedly getting pregnant with her fifth child.  I drive along the half mile now mostly paved road into the rancho from the main road.  Like many such the buildings are clustered around the crumbling walls of the old hacienda and the hacienda chapel is still the church.

When the haciendas were broken up, the former peons (workers) got pieces of land both near the hacienda and further away for farming.  I park on the street.  There’s still room though unlike when I first went lots of families now have pick up trucks, also making it much easier to get work.

I go in through the gate in the wall.  I called earlier to make sure the family were home.  Everyone now has a cell phone whereas when María was working for me they were unheard of.  So María’s four girls are waiting and accompany me past four family houses on the family lot, to María’s at the back.  It sits on half an acre of land, dry and dusty now at the end of the dry season, though the canna lilies inside the gate make a bright red splash.

María is waiting on the concrete patio three steps up.  We go into the living room, a spacious room perhaps 11 by 20 feet.  María and I sit on the sofa which is covered with a cloth, perhaps an old sheet, because it was almost certainly bought second hand.  The girls bring metal and plastic chairs from the dining room and perch on them, all eyes.  It’s an unusually large family for modern Mexico.

María offers me a glass of aguamiel (literally honey water), the sweet juice of the maguey, which is now boiled down to the fashionable agave nectar, but formerly was turned into pulque.  María’s mother who collected the agua miel from the maguey on her land in my honor no longer makes pulque but you can still buy it in the rancho.

As we catch up, I look around.  The floor is tiled.  The walls are whitewashed and framed photos of her girls and her husband are hung at intervals high on the walls. The room also has an armchair, a large dining table with an embroidered tablecloth, and a stand with the television, the boom box, neatly arranged CDS, and a display of toys and trophies.

Behind the living room are two bedrooms, though I’ve never been invited to look at those. To the right is the shower room.  The village has a well that pumps water a few hours a day.

To the left is the modern kitchen about 12 by 12 with a gas stove, an older refrigerator that means tortillas keep fresh for four or five days, a built in concrete counter top, though no cabinets.  In front of this is the room where the family usually eats with the metal and plastic table, about the same size.

Out back, though we don’t go there today,  is the black kitchen, the kitchen with the traditional wood fired bench stove for making tortillas on the comal, since gas stoves are nothing like as good for this. This is also a place where the maize cobs are stored.

The fourteen-year old, fashionably dressed in jeans and a more modest top than my English niece sports,  tells me she has a scholarship to go to Guanajuato one afternoon a week for a computer class, but she is way ahead because she earlier learned to use our computer.  The next who has long had problems with allergies and eye infections, has just been fitted (by the equivalent of social security in the clinic in the next rancho) for new glasses that help a lot, though she still has to apply her medicines.  The third, always the life and soul of the party, is as full of jokes as ever.  And the littlest, now eight, has been chosen to compete in the state mathematics contests for the last two years, and expects to see the friends she has made again this year.

María’s husband comes in.  He’s out of work at the moment, work for bricklayers, the standard non-farm job for rural laborers, is never steady.  He went to the States for a year but was desperately homesick and made no money so has no thoughts of going again.  María works one day a week.  So money is not abundant.  I’d guess he averages US$100 a week, perhaps a bit more, María $20, state scholarships for girls who all get good grades say another $20 plus some basic groceries.

They used to grow all their own maize but the horse died.  They had no money for another.  And besides un-irrigated maize here fails two years out of seven on average.  They also used to keep a pig, chickens for eggs, and a few ewes and lambs but these have also gone and I don’t have the chance to find out why.

María’s husband has built this house, making the bricks himself up his land. He takes me upstairs to see his current project.  One great thing about brick and concrete houses is you can always go up.  He’s adding two bedrooms and a bath on the roof.  The walls and the roof are done, what remains are the windows, painting, wiring, and plumbing.  The view is great over the rancho and the dam (low at this time of year) to the hills opposite.

So this is not misery, it’s not even poverty on a global scale.  Nor is it a life cut off from the rest of the world: ten years’ schooling, trucks, cell phones, televisions, medical care.   This in a place where there are still illiterate grandparents who spent all day toiling over the grindstone, where the parents had only primary education.  Rural Mexico going in to the second decade of the twentieth century is a very different place from even a decade ago.

If only the economic fall out of the flu does not bring this change to a halt.

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