¡Vive el presidente!

President Bush is in Mexico, but he’s hundreds of miles away from the capital, in the very safe, very pretty resort town of Merida. Still, by the show of force here you’d think he was planning to lead a parade down Paseo de la Reforma in the heart of Mexico City.

The U.S. Embassy is ringed by 10-foot high fences and protected by a constant contingent of well-armed police. Today, their numbers multiplied many times over. There were several hundred police in riot gear standing in literal Revolutionary War-style columns on the streets around the embassy, carrying heavy-duty firepower.

I tried not to laugh as I walked by. The greatest threat I could see came yesterday, when people attached anti-Bush posters to the fences. (They were all Iraq-related, and a typical one read, “Bush is the terrorist president of the world.” I would have taken a picture, but there are numerous signs around the embassy saying, in numerous languages, "Photography Prohibited." Much as I love this blog, it wasn`t quite worth a night in a Mexican jail.)

By last night, the posters were wilting and the ink was running from all the rain. For most people, it seemed the soldiers and the posters were a source of amusement. Sure, the war isn’t popular here. But it’s not popular back home either, and no one’s storming the White House.

In between all the rain, I managed to find time for a bike ride on Sunday. After renting a rusty and ridiculously small (for me) bicycle, I pedaled over to the Bosque de Chapultepec, a huge park filled with museums, lakes and gardens. There was also a wonderful exhibit of black-and-white photographs of Mayan temples, palaces and stadiums, shot by Arturo Chapa.

I got lost a few times (I didn’t bring a map because I was trying to pack lightly) and taxi drivers seemed to enjoy brushing up against me, but with Voxtrot and Beulah on the iPod, there was no ruining my blissful state. I managed to return the bike just as the rain began. (It has rained for five straight days. To paraphrase Ryan Adams, it rains here like the way I spend money.)

Later, I found a bookstore with a small table of English-language titles. Most of the books fell into one of two categories: books I had read in high school or college (The Catcher in the Rye, Lolita, Mrs. Dalloway, The Great Gatsby) and more modern fiction I’ve read recently (Disgrace, Saturday, The Virgin Suicides). Eventually, I decided to correct an inexplicable oversight in my reading history. I bought Fahrenheit 451.

As I read it, this passage stood out (along with many others), a quote from Montag to his wife:

“We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”

Anyway, tomorrow I’m off to see the butterflies in Morelia.

Mexico unplugged

Clay says not to worry about me because I seem to be spending most of my time in Internet cafes. I wanted to tell him this was an unfair allegation. I have a laptop computer, so I’m actually spending most of my time at sidewalk cafes.

I went to a great one yesterday, Caffe Toscano, on the southern edge of Parque Mexico. From a small table on the sidewalk, I looked out onto the tall trees, bushes and leisurely traffic of students, musicians and dog-walkers. To my right, a group of young men played dominoes. To my left, people sat reading the paper. And it helped that the orange juice was so fresh there was actually a seed in my glass.

It felt about as close to a perfect moment as I’ve had since I arrived here two weeks ago. (This is Spalding Gray’s influence on me: While I don’t dedicate my life to the pursuit of perfect moments, as he did, I try to recognize them and hold onto them when they come.)

After sitting a couple of hours at the café (between interviews), reading Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, I took a walk through the park. I still have not gotten over the sheer abundance of dogs here; there were dozens of them in the park, on- and off-leash, running, playing, splashing and lying in the shade.

Later, after my afternoon interview, it poured rain as I walked back to my hotel. I felt violated somehow. This does not happen in Mexico! Certainly not on my day of perfect moments! I was soaked to the skin, and my backpack, containing my laptop, was drenched.

The contents inside seemed dry enough, but now whenever I try to connect to the Internet, using Wifi, my computer crashes. There is no Apple store here, so I called the Apple support line, where I found Rob. He told me I had not purchased Apple’s extended warranty, so it would cost me $49 to get phone help. While I pondered this, I described the problem to him and he said the shut-down screen I was getting was a “kernel panic,” for which there could be many reasons. Meanwhile, the idea of my computer panicking is deeply unsettling to me. For this relationship to work, one of us must remain calm.

Anyway, it seemed unlikely Rob would be able to help me. His best, free advice was to take the laptop to the Apple store in Baltimore when I return. Some kind of total overhaul, involving re-install discs I don’t have with me, is probably in order.

Sigh. This all means Clay may turn out to be right after all. It also means e-mail and blogging will be much more difficult and expensive. But just think of the fun we’ve had.

And this one?

What are those little bushes with orange flowers? Thanks!

Help!

Can anyone tell me what kind of flower this is? I will send you an empanada.

Tommy and me

Whenever I interview someone on the street, I draw a crowd. The smaller the town, the bigger the crowd.

Usually, it’s harmless curiosity. I show the children how my digital camera works. I chat with the adults about politics and the weather. I tell them my background. They tell me theirs.

But two events over the last few days ended differently. On Sunday, I went to the town of Belisario Dominguez to talk to women whose husbands and sons have left for the United States. On weekends, the town’s main street becomes a busy, crowded marketplace where people from the nearby communities sell their goods.

After an afternoon of interviews, my translator and I were walking back to our car when I saw a woman I had begun to talk to earlier. Our conversation had been interrupted by a phone call. Assuming the call had been from the United States, I stopped to talk to her again. She had a stand at the side of the road, where she sold mangoes, oranges, watermelon and corn tossed with chili.

A crowd quickly gathered, and I did my best to ignore them and focus on the woman. But then a man demanded to know of my translator what we were doing there. Another man got in my face. His speech was slurred and I couldn’t make out a single word of what he was saying, but I knew it wasn’t chit-chat about politics or the weather.

I stood up and the man grabbed my upper arm. He held on and kept talking nonsense to me. I shook him off, said “Vamos!” to my translator and started walking away. We were followed briefly, and we didn’t linger in that town.

Before I left Tapachula yesterday, I returned to a shelter for migrants where I had spent some time last week, talking to the people who run it and the migrants who stop for a few days’ rest before continuing north. In the afternoons, the shelter is closed, so the men gather outside, just sitting around really, barely even talking.

When I got there yesterday afternoon, a man in a Tommy Hilfiger hat immediately approached me. I explained who I was and that I just wanted to take a few pictures. He said loudly that no one there wanted their picture taken. He said he was from Honduras, and people there don’t like it when you take their picture.

“There are no cameras in Honduras?” I asked. I figured the best way to defuse the situation was to keep talking to this guy until he calmed down. Besides, the shelter was on the edge of town, and unless a cab came by, there wasn’t anywhere for me to go.

Next, this man, let’s call him Tommy, walked toward a group of migrants sitting on some rocks and said to them, sweeping his arm across the crowd, “You don’t want your picture taken, do you?”

No response.

I tried to ask Tommy why he didn’t want his picture taken, but he seemed unable to explain himself. If he wasn’t drunk, he was barely literate. Then he asked me for money. I refused.

“You just told all these people not to let me take their picture,” I said to him. “You made my job harder. I’m not giving you money.”

He then asked me to follow him around to the side of the shelter, to see some people doing laundry. Again, I refused. By this point, the dozen or so migrants there were paying close attention. I wanted to hold my ground against him. But I also could tell that nothing would come from sticking around. There would be no interviews or photographs as long as Tommy was there.

A few minutes earlier, I had noticed a taxi with a couple people inside drive by. I figured the cab would have to come back soon, and that it would be empty. It did, and it was. I flagged the cab down and got in, Tommy following me into the street and closing the door behind me.

A common language

I suppose it’s inevitable that after a week in a country where you don’t exactly speak the language, you begin to think about how we communicate as people. Several experiences this weekend made me think about our innate desire and need to connect with others.

On Saturday, after a few hours of interviews, my translator, Laura, invited me to her home for comida with her family. I met her two teenage sons, her husband, her mother and her sister, and for much of the afternoon we sat on her patio and ate, drank and talked. She made tortillas with mole and other delicious fillings, and we drank Coronas and Sauza tequila. But mostly, we learned how much we have in common, how the things that we want for ourselves and our families are the same.

The challenge of communication was not insignificant. I tried to speak in Spanish almost exclusively, getting help from Laura’s sons when I struggled for a word or couldn’t understand a question. To do this for three hours was exhausting, but also rewarding in ways I hadn’t expected. It was a feeling of having climbed a linguistic and cultural barrier to discover the wall was only in my imagination.

When I left, they gave me an ataulfo, a type of mango that originated in Chiapas. It’s green now, but they said after a few days it will be yellow, and delicious. Maybe it was the tequila that afternoon, but I left with a warm feeling inside.

(The photo above is of Elvia Garcia Hernandez and her parents. Elvia has two sons in the U.S., and every few weeks she comes to this building in the remote pueblo of Belisario Dominguez to speak to them by telephone. The calls are expensive, and the lines at this telephone station are long, but for Elvia, to speak to the sons she has not seen in two years, it is worth it.)

Dogs!

Toy Dobermans love me.

What I've learned (part 1)

A few lessons from an exhausting, stimulating first week:

1. When traveling in a foreign country, one should never dispose of English-language reading material, no matter how heavy one’s backpack. Before leaving Mexico City and coming here to Tapachula, I thought I would lighten my load by tossing out an issue of the Economist. This left me with only one magazine. Admittedly, it is the New Yorker, and the double anniversary issue at that, but even so, I am nearly finished.

2. We can land a man on the moon, cure polio and run a 4-minute mile, but we have not yet figured out how to consistently mass produce a decent pillow. Though I have come to expect it by now, I am still amazed at how many absolutely awful pillows are found in so many hotel rooms, no matter their price or location. My room here has two pillows, one with about as much give as my hardcover high school chemistry textbook, the other an odd mass of coils that resembles a nest of snakes. I went with the snakes, but put a towel over the pillow in case one of them tries to bite me in the night.

3. American music has a farther reach than other export, cultural or otherwise. In Ciudad Hidalgo yesterday, a dusty jumble of a town on the Suchiate River, bordering Guatemala, I stopped in a convenience store for a bottle of water. What I heard was James Blount’s “You’re Beautiful,” a song so ubiquitous it cannot be escaped even in the deepest corner of Mexico. And earlier this week, on the subway in Mexico City, a man boarded the train carrying a small stereo playing a cover of the Lucksmiths’ song “I Started a Joke.” (For those who would point out that James Blount is British and the Lucksmiths Australian, I would only say: Get over yourselves. You know what I mean.)

4. Crossing into Mexico is easier done than said. I took my passport along for my trip to Ciudad Hidalgo and Talisman, so that if I wanted to cross into Guatemala, I would be allowed back into Mexico. I thought about also bringing my FM3, a work permit I got from the Mexican embassy. Instead, as the photo above shows, you don’t need so much as an Eddie’s Sandwich Club card to enter either country. The woman above is jumping off a raft onto Mexican soil. She paid the operator of the raft 10 pesos (1 cent) to pull her across the shallow, narrow river. A few well-armed Mexican soldiers watched as hundreds like her entered all day long. No papers needed.

5. The universe has a way of righting itself. I might have learned this from Lost, but anyway: Early for an appointment at El Colegio de Mexico this week, I sat on a boulder outside the school, positioning myself so my laptop would get a good signal from the college’s free Wifi. Feeling vaguely guilty about stealing Internet access, I was about to close up my computer when I heard a splat! and saw, covering the Y and U keys, a pile of black-and-white bird poo. I wiped it up with a tissue, but some slipped between the cracks and I think my U key is permanently stained.

This was not as bad, however, as the time I was in Oakland, walking to an interview, and felt a wet, warm glop on the back of my neck. Bird poo again, and it slid down my neck onto my shirt collar. After glancing around to make sure no one had noticed my humiliation, I rushed back to the hotel for a shower and change of clothes. This laptop, though, will have to hold out for a few more weeks.