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Aside from being Columbus Day, October 12 is also one of the most important days on Guadalajara’s calendar. On this day La Generala (the little General), also known as Our Lady of Expectation or the Virgin of Zapopan makes her annual pilgrimage from the cathedral in the heart of Guadalajara to her own basilica out in Zapopan (a city long swallowed by the sprawl of Guadalajara, and one of the wealthiest in Mexico).
Millions of people attend the procession every year, shutting the city down and suffocating the streets. This particular virgin is one of the most beloved in Mexico, with a swathe of miraculous interventions attributed to her. Festivities commence on the night of the 11th and continue right throughout the following day (although longtime Guadalajara residents murmur that the event is not as elaborate or as well attended as it once was).
I banded together with other couchsurfers and we brewed thick Oaxacan coffee and wrapped ourselves in layers, steeling ourselves for the long night ahead. A jolt of caffeine and some long sleeves weren’t going to be nearly enough though. The serious revellers, most from the outlying barrios of Guadalajara, had swarmed into the city centre taking over the parks and plazas and patios, turning the city into an enormous slumber party. This was how you prepared for the procession; by staking your place, laying out the blankets, and sleeping through the cold hours of the mid-night, until the virgin finally stepped forth from the cathedral, beginning her journey home.
Even aside from the thousands of inert forms packed under the arcades and around the monuments and into the flowerbeds, this was a very strange celebration. When the coffee proved ineffectual we bundled into one of the street cafes, switching to beer. We were virtually the only people drinking. Beer generally requires no pretext, but here was the biggest pretext on the Guadalajara calendar, and yet… the diminutive virgin must be truly loved, or feared, or both. Under the stern, benevolent gaze of their lady the revellers were proving that you don’t need alcohol to have fun; you can have just as much fun with multiple stages playing hokey Christian rock.
As the hours until the emergence of the virgin slunk by, more and more traditional groups converged on the cathedral. They had danced for hours and they would dance for hours more, waiting for their lady to emerge so they can shepherd her and be shepherded by her as they pilgrimaged the streets.
These dance groups were a mash of cultures. Headdressed injuns with bison on their shields stomped down the main streets. Ranks of cowled and masked men clamoured before the cathedral in their demented beat-iron tap shoes. Aztecs beat furious drums and dervished around each other. Solitary whip-crackers prowled between the groups and looked certain to put someone’s eye out with those things. Every groups had their protector ghouls, garbed in vampire-inquisitor robes and sporting the most obscenely fantastic face masks. They kept no time as they stomped among the dancers, but kept the crowd in order and posed for photos.
A steady torrent of people surged through the cathedral to pay their respects to their lady. Whole dance groups crashed through, still playing their music and drowning out the robed men at the front who were trying to raise a hymn. I have no idea how the dancers kept it up. As the caffeine exhausted itself the virgin still looked firmly ensconced in her church; she would not be moving for hours. Rather than join the slumber party we retired to rather more discreet beds and abodes. People were still trickling into the centre as they left. They were all sobre. She really is just that powerful.
Just because the rodeo was taking place on the fringes of Guadalajara, far away from the hip locales, didn’t mean this was going to be some kind of hick, bring-yer-own-cousin affair. The cars ranking up outside were as big and shiny as the hummers and SUVs that rank up every morning outside my very fresa school. The people filling the bleachers were groomed and preened to their sunday best. They were shoveled into tight jeans and they photographed one another on their iphones. Some of them wore big, leather boots.
You have to have money to have horses and cattle, and traditional,hand-stitched cowboy garb, and a big hat, and boots worthy of being buried in, and a big truck to transport all this prestigious stuff. Cowboys have a long and proud history in Mexico, but I wonder whether the kids who twist lassos and ride horses bareback on weekends get bullied by all the kids of computer programmers and bankers on schooldays. I wonder if it’s still cool to dress like this.
I can laugh at the swagger and the chaps and the displays of spinning round on horseback, but when proceedings really got under way, with the cowboys lassoing the legs out from under charging horses and wrangling cows to the ground by their tails, I had to admit that this was all pretty impressive.
Riding moderately bucking cows and horses, jumping from the back of one cantering horse to the other, jumping through your own spinning lasso; all the kinds of skills that may never have a practical purpose in modern day, tech-savy Guadalajara, but none the less the kind of tricks that make you sit up and pay attention and wish you had your own wide-brimmed hat and hand-stitched shirt and pony.
Probably not so much fun for the critters though. The cows charged out of the gates, and were grappled with by cowboys who wound their legs around bovine tails, dragging the confused beasties to the ground. They righted themselves, shook their heads, and were herded back into the corral, ready to be pushed out of the gates and yanked to the ground again. Every time a cowboy succeeded he ended up with a handful of tail-hair. The cows lamented their denuded tails and the cruelty of a sport that allowed them no opportunities for revenge.
One of the horses steadfastly refused to be lassoed, breaking out of the cordons of riders, breathing hard, and retreating to the far side of the arena to look wistfully out into the bleachers, hoping to spy his retreating dignity. All he found though were the disapproving faces of the crowd, gorging on hot dogs and cucumber-with-hot-sauce and eagerly awaiting another successful roping.
The animals all survived the day though (a few cowboys may have lost their reputations) and were herded out into waiting trucks which I assume were headed to friendly pastures where nerves could be calmed and few lassos snaked underfoot.
And then? There’s only so many times a horse can be roped or a cow floored. And then? The leather for the boots, the meat for the hot dogs have to come from somewhere. Best not to get too attached to your critters.
Chatting to a guy in a bar in downtown Guadalajara, he asked me what I was doing here, and I said I was a teacher at a very fresa school. To be polite I asked him what he did and he said guess and I without pausing said that he worked for HP (as in the maker of computers, not the makers of sauce). He said that he did work for HP, and asked how I knew that. I said that everyone in Guadalajara works for HP.
In six weeks I have seen quite a lot of Guadalajara, but much of that has been seen from the back seat of a car. It is in part a testament to the friendliness of the people here; that there is always something happening somewhere and that you (as a gringo) are always welcome to pile into whoever’s car is idling in the street, and to join them at their cousin’s or their friend’s cousin’s or their housemate’s friend’s cousin’s party.
Spending so much time being chauffeured around is disorienting. I recognise a lot of bars and neighbourhoods, but don’t know how i did or would arrive at them. Inside the bars are all the same. They are big, they are rimmed around by tables where groups keep to themselves and order liquor by the bottle. At 10pm the cover bands start. People dance in the aisles because there is no dancefloor because dancefloors earn little whereas tables suggest sharing a bottle of whisky with your posse.
The girls of Guadalajara are known as beauties of the country. I have long suspected that the more conservative cultures produce more beautiful girls, because for them that’s what girls are for. Equality will make all of us plain (but equally so). I was proudly informed at a party that Guadalajara’s women are superior to Mexico City’s (etc…) because there is less indigenous presence here. Guadalajara doesn’t exist because of history or government or culture or religion; it exists because of business and industry. The same expounder on the qualities of women asked me about Bolivian girls. He had heard that they are not attractive. This was the limit of our conversation about Bolivia.
In this city of HP employees I am impressed by how many people speak other languages fluently. Everyone speaks English; most people seem to be moving on to something more challenging like French or German or occasionally Mandarin (the students at my fresa school get one Mandarin lesson per week too). I am impressed by how many people have lived abroad, and not just in semester-long exchange programs; people that have spent their entire undergraduate degree in Korea, people that have lived in more cities in the US than most USAmericans, people that live in one continent, got their undergrad degree in a different one and their masters in a third. The question of ‘where do you call home?’ is fraught with complications and ‘that depends’.
This is a city of four million people but it doesn’t feel that big. The same cityscape repeats frequently, every major intersection fringed with McDonalds, Starbucks and a hundred other franchises that we do not yet have in Australia. The historic centre is small and quickly gives way to sprawl. From the back seat of a near-stranger/new friend’s car it looks a lot like the US, especially the expansive midwest, where space is not an issue and blocks and lots are built big. From a lookout about the city this morning we could look out across a spectacularly flat city, only the occasional thumb of an apartment block or highrise breaking the low undulations of concrete. Below the lookout was a new precinct combining mall and church. This is more a city of malls than of churches, although it does have some beautiful churches, among all the Walmarts.
So many conveniences, so many rides. This is, above all things, an easy city to live in. As I am frequently told, it has few of the problems of Mexico City, or at least doesn’t have them as badly. There always has to be that comparison though; little brother syndrome. A very easy place to live; I’m not sure yet whether easy is good enough, though.
Once I had decided on Mexico as my next destination, once I had a job to go to in Guadalajara, I began to pay attention to mention of these names in the press (‘the press’ was at the time CNN; my house in Bolivia had cable but the only channels it could pick up were the coalition of northern acronyms – CNN, MTV, ESPN). There was little there to inspire confidence in my future home.
Through the early months of ‘09 a popular destination for journalists was any of the US-Mexican border towns, where they could don helmets and flak jackets and crawl under cars and report that no they weren’t in downtown Baghdad, but in fact were in Mexico, former spring break destination of choice turned failed state. The frequent reports came with grotesque statistics, over 5000 drug trade related executions in 2008, the number for 2009 growing sharply and sure to surpass that of the previous year.
Then came the swine flu epidemic, and the journalists donned face masks and went in search of the pig farm at the epicentre of the promising pandemic, and it was suggested that Mexico was on the verge of collapse. Hilary Clinton promised to help.
Maybe this was why it was so easy to find work in Mexico. Maybe it would have been better to stay in Bolivia, where the pausity of international flights has kept swine flu at bay, and where state failures do not mean that the state has failed. Evo had even stifled the war on drugs (and let’s face it, it is the war on drugs and not the drug trade itself which produces high murder rates). It was too late though; I needed cash, and so I prepared myself for life in the failed Mexican state.
There were more face masks and heat detectors and other swine flu paranoia paraphenalia in Sydney airport and in Santiago airport than there were in LAX or Guadalajara.
During my first jetlagged week in Guadalajara the country could have collapsed completely, obliterated by swine flu or drug war or whatever; I wouldn’t have noticed. When the lag finally receded I found myself in a city that looked suspiciously unpostapocalyptic. It didn’t even look preapocalyptic. It actually looked quite… peaceful.
This is the grim reality of Guadalajara; a sprawling, middle class city. A city of suburbs and SUVs. The weather is always mild; the ‘wet season’ consists of nightly storms that pass within an hour but which fill the sky with lightning before they go. Every major intersection is clustered about with American franchises and shopping malls. Taco stalls bloom in the parking lots.
This is not to say Guadalajara doesn’t have its dangers; these are just a little less glamorous than CNN and its failed state stories suggested. These dangers come in many insidious forms; the unpotable drinking water, the tantalising re-heated street food, the prevalence of whisky-by-the-bottle, the drunks protesting their lucidity as they slide into driver’s seats, the ‘just one more shot’ hospitality, the pork fat hidden within seemingly innocuous refried beans, the multitude of double entendres in Mexican parlance, the pre-sunrise school start time.
These dangers ensure that while life in Guadalajara is very very easy, it is never without its pitfalls. Talk among new teachers quickly turns to the state of one’s bowels, or of one’s nerves if one has a car and drives in the city. If CNN says the nation is on the verge of collapse then this must be true, but if this is what collapse looks like then perhaps it is time we had more failed states, especially if these involve extra swine flu school closures. Because we really do have to get up very early and that isn’t fun.
Two short pieces about Mexico’s precarious position on the verge of collapse…
http://www.thetruthaboutmexico.com/2009/04/mexico-as-failed-state-media-narrative/
I hadn’t seen my very-new housemate for two days. I’d blinked my way through long jetlagged afternoons, I’d made hesitant attempts to bond with the house cat, I had almost nothing to show for my first week in Mexico, and then my housemate arrived home to declare that we were going to the football.
Chivas vs. Tigres, goats vs. tigers, Guadalajara vs Monterrey. Chivas is arguably Mexico’s most prestigious team, and on game day half the city turns out in red and white stripes.
I almost didn’t make it into the game. A cursory frisking at entry revealed that I was wearing a belt. My beloved belt has a metal buckle and metal eyelets around its holes. It is apparently a deadly weapon at football matches. The security señor sheepishly informed me that I couldn’t enter with such an instrument of death wrapped around my waist. When I did enter it was beltless and with jeans slowly sliding off my hips.
A second line of security behind the first dispensed mandatory globs of hand sanitiser into the palms of every entrant. Swine flu isn’t causing havoc in the streets (unlike belt-wielding hooligans..) but cursory measures are still in place to maintain the calm. Ladies with sanitiser pump-packs ambushed anyone emerging from the bathrooms.
Chivas has won more Mexican championships than any other team, and are one of the most popular teams in Mexico. They maintain a policy of only fielding Mexican players; no foreign ring-ins, just patriotic pride. They were the easy favourites in this encounter. Their fanatics occupied one end of the ground and cheered and jeered emphatically until five minutes into the game when their team slipped behind. The tiny band of Tigres fans, wedged into a corner of the stadium, were exuberant, waving blue and yellow balloons.
The bane of Chivas was one man, Tigres’ Brazilian striker Itamar. Fast, strong and deft, he isolated defenders and left them foundering and floundering. He scored Tigres’ second goal.
At half time a slapstick relay course was laid out, with teams competing to climb over giant beer bottles, escape hooded wrestlers, and finally score a penalty goal. The whole stadium – the many goats and the few tigers – howled in laughter.
Itamar is also black. Early in the game desperate fans shouted at the Chivas defense to follow the black one, to keep up with the black one. Not very PC, but not exactly malicious either. After Itamar scored his second though the crowd became frustrated. Every time the Tigres keeper kicked the ball he was greeted with a stadium-wide shout of ‘whore’ (although this is pretty common anyway). When Itamar ran at the defense Chivas supporters bellowed ‘negro negro negro’. Of their own team some Chivas fans joked that they weren’t hungry enough because they weren’t from Africa (never mind that Itamar is from Brazil; black people apparently only come from Africa).
The final score was Chivas 1, Tigres 1, Africa 2, but since Tigres will field non-Mexican players they had the support of ‘Africa’ and so had a surprise victory. The stadium emptied fast, the streets clogged with traffic, I hitched my pants up and slipped back into my belt, and at taco stands throughout the evening disconsolate Chivas fans muttered together and laughed off the heartbreak of defeat.
