The Reader Travels

In searching for a good place to watch the Texas Longhorn football games, we found a new tex-mex restaurant called 7 Salsas close to Dallas Cowboys headquarters. There’s a pretty bartender and a football-loving manager who cheers along with us. After trying out a number of supremely obnoxious sports bars, we sat down at the bar and suddenly felt at home.

Last week we arrived after half time because the first place we went to was such a dud. But this week, we arrived for kick-off and stayed until the Red Raider fans rushed the field for the second time, when the game was actually over.

Apparently they do most of their business at the lunch hour, so the crowd was pretty slim for Saturday night.  The intimate bar area was full, kinda like having a party at home, where I cleaned the whole house, but everyone is congregating in the warmth of the kitchen.

So, in talking to the manager about his travels and his daughter studying to be an architect in Chicago, I asked him where he was from. He was born in the US, but was raised in Mexico. I asked him what state. He misunderstood my question and said it was Texas. After I clarified, he said he was raised in Coahuila, so today I went to my trusty map of the Mexican states to see where that was in relation to Sonora and Chihuahua and Nuevo Leon, the three border states I could see in my head at the time, and it was right there in the middle.

I can’t count the number of times I have visited this map. I just love to scroll over the states to see them light up and show their names. I can adventure here any time I want, even if I’ve only ever stepped foot in the state of Quintana Roo, which is as far from the Texas border as I could get and still be in Mexico.

My sixth and final review for the The Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge takes us to the jungles of Paraguay. Lily Tuck brings us The News from Paraguay, during the late 1800s in a time of war and turmoil for this land-locked country in South America.

I always find it nice to have a map when I’m journeying in a foreign land. The adventure takes us from Paris, across the Atlantic Ocean to enter the South American continent at Buenos Ayres. We can track our course along the map as we travel up the Paraguay River in Argentina to reach the river’s namesake country, enjoying the lush foliage, colorful birds and chirping monkeys, all the while fearing the crocodiles and swatting the mosquitoes.

This historical novel gives us a look at the tragic reign of Francisco “Franco” Lopez. Inspired by the French, Franco sees himself as an emperor trying to conquer the Brazilians and their allied forces from Argentina and Banda Orientale (now Uruguay). The story follows his paramour as she travels with him from Paris into the jungles and bears him many sons. Though she is rejected by his family, Franco builds her a beautiful mansion, showers her with gifts and adores their sons.

The story is written in short segments as though emulating news briefs, shifting quickly from one character to the next, a collection of narratives, diary entries, letters and excerpts from official documents. It was a little hard to follow at first as we jumped from one point of view to another, and Tuck writes a lot of sentences that interrupt themselves with parenthetical interjections.

Because of this news clip style, the story lacks any in-depth character development, but overall, it was well researched and masterfully written, a good read, entertaining and educational.

Oh my gosh. There’s babies poppin’ out everywhere!

I slip back to northern Mexico with The Hummingbird’s Daughter where Teresita Urrea was a mid-wife and a healer. The book starts with Teresita’s own birth, and we see so many babies born through her eyes and her gentle, but strong hands. She brought life wherever she went, and even defeated death in her own miracle resurrection.

For each of the past two Sundays there is a new baby boy. Alex came on Father’s Day, an American boy born to Chinese parents. His grandparents are here from China to care for him and connect him back to his roots, but his is a whole new world.

Isaac came this morning, three weeks early. His father is part Mexican, part viking, a powerful combination, and his mother is warm and thoughtful, energetic and funny. He was turned upside down, so they had to cut him from his mother’s belly, but he is healthy and strong as a viking should be.

May they both be blessed by the grace and wonder of Santa Teresita.

When we left our travels, we were in Northern Mexico, skirting the border to the US. We travel now to New Mexico, where the people live north of the border, but share a culture with their family to the south.

We’ve been here before with Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima. Like Teresa Urrea in The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Ultima is a curandera. She knows plants, and she knows the spirits around her. She knows healing.

Life is hard, but for some it is unbearable. There is pain and sadness in every family, but most of us hold it together by sharing the burden with those we love. One peripheral character I remember from Bless Me, Ultima was cousin Lupe, who went to the war and came back with “war disease.” After the gruesome bloodshed of war, he would never be the same again. I have a picture of him in my mind, running wild through the arroya, the men in his family chasing behind to keep him from hurting himself.

I see this kind of war disease in some of my beloved friends and family members. For most it is not a literal war, but some gruesome life experiences they can’t seem to recover from. May they all find peace and balance in their lives.

Okay, so Gary Jennings’s Aztec doesn’t qualify as magical realism, but I thought since we were here in Northern Mexico that we might talk about the Chichimeca.

So you know how anyone can post on Wikipedia, and you don’t know if what you’re getting is completely accurate? Well, try searching “chichimeca” on Yahoo! You should come up with a Spanish Wikipedia article on the Chichimeca, and Yahoo! offers a cute little service to translate the article into English. Imagine how many inaccuracies you end up with using that little trick.

Regardless, I thought this was interesting. From what I gathered, the name Chichimeca started out a derogatory term, much like the word “barbarian,” making fun of the incomprehensible language of these dirty desert dog people. When I think of the Barbars, I picture these two cocky Roman soldiers with their helmets and their armor, laughing and making fun of their backward foes. One Roman says to the other Roman, “Bar bar bar bar, hee hee, bar,” and the other Roman says, “Yeah I know, right? Bar bar friggin bar.”

But even more interesting than how they got their name were the tales Gary Jennings told of the Chichimeca and their peyote. The medicine men at the top of the social ladder got to actually eat the peyote and then trip their balls off. Then the next rung down could drink the urine of the medicine men, and they could trip too. Then the next rung down and so on and so on. The people at the bottom of the ladder hardly trip at all. I guess because they’re already sitting on the ground (and they’re drinking pure pee).

Aztecs rule!

Another story that takes place in Northern Mexico is Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. It’s a tale of being enslaved by tradition, and the quiet and not-so-quiet rebellions against the chains that bind.

It’s Cinco de Mayo weekend, with lots of festivities happening around town. It’s not a huge tradition in Mexico, but here in the US, we love any excuse to party. Believe it or not, Cinco de Mayo is not the Mexican independence day. You have to wait until September for that one.

Regardless of what Cinco de Mayo is all about, it represents fighting for what you believe, like Esquivel’s Tita quietly fights for the man she loves, like her sister Gertrudis fights in the Mexican Revolution. For Tita and her family, let’s eat a burrito and drink a few margaritas. Viva Mexico!

_________

*Cake, Prolonging the Magic, “Mexico”

In The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Luis Alberto Urrea takes us on a journey more than a thousand miles north of Colombia. We start in the state of Sinaloa in Mexico with the Urrea family and The People. From there we travel north again to Sonora, follow holy men into Chihuahua and even venture beyond the Rio Grande into Texas and Arizona.

There is magic in this family history, with miracles and visions, births, deaths and resurrections. But there is also truth. Luis Alberto Urrea researched the story of his ancestor Teresa Urrea in fine detail, seeking texts, interviewing family members and modern day curanderos for secrets of the healing powers and truths about Mexican history.

I loved that this was based on a true story. And the magic made it that much more real.

My brother visited Colombia several years ago, and his journey was almost as exciting to me as my father’s trip to Peru in the late sixties. As a sheltered American, it’s hard for me to step out of my comfort zone to explore places of such wildness and danger. And though I may never visit these beautiful countries myself, I want to know more about them.

Since my brother was in the US Air Force at the time, and his visit to Colombia was work-related, he went with the safety and structure of a well-planned government venture. Of course, being US military, he could easily be a target, but he was well prepared before he ever stepped onto the plane bound for South America.

This type of traveling reminds me of Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist, the story of a man who writes guides for business travelers. His whole philosophy is that if you surround yourself with order, structure and routine, then you can handle the uncertainty and chaos of life and world travel.

The one thing that stands out in my memory of my brother’s trip to Colombia are his photos of the stations of the cross along a hillside, leading to a cross at the top of the hill. With my Catholic upbringing, this is the one thing that connected me to Colombia, this image of a shared spiritual history, and the safety and structure of repeated ritual.

I asked my man what images came to mind when he thought about Colombia. He said, “Marijuana, cocaine, drug lords, guerrilla warfare. Isn’t that what everyone thinks of?” He went on to say, “Unless you’re a real nerd. And then you might think about coffee.”

But I don’t like that image. It’s a stereotype in the same vein of conjuring boots and cowboy hats when you think of Texas. But it’s worse than that. Our stereotype of Colombia is all greed and violence. It’s all so negative. I want a happier image of Colombia. And if that means I’m dreaming about Juan Valdez, then so be it.

What if we were to think instead of treasure maps and verdant adventures, of romance, warmth and beauty? Let us all have the Colombia of Romancing the Stone, where the villains are only as dangerous as Danny DeVito. If we’re going to have our illusions, they might as well be happy ones.

(Don’t think I’m deluding myself. I know all about the drug lords. I’m just sayin’…)

From Chile, we travel north along the Pacific coast of South America to Colombia with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. From the first line of the book, we know that this will be an incredible adventure. “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

We have an image of isolation, one man alone at the end of his life, facing death. This image is paired with another, that as a child he lived in such an isolated place that he had never before seen ice. But in this sentence that speaks of isolation, we also see the word “father” and know that despite the solitude, there is family.

Marquez is a master of magical realism, and he magically creates this town of Macondo, deep in the belly of Colombia. Technology and spirituality meet to make magic in this isolated village.

The Spaniards first introduced the mystery of a world beyond the shores of South America and even shared their own spiritual mysteries, the magic of their Christ. Armed with a belief in miracles, the people in the isolated depths of the continent would enjoy centuries of mystery repeated as the outside world trickled in.