Week 6 Domingo

I go on strike, and refuse to go to church on Sunday morning, after spending all night worrying about Daisy. She is manifestly fine, and whatever was troubling her has passed completely, but I spend a happy morning reading Bernal Diaz’s account of the conquest of Mexico while she sleeps in my arms.

The book is amazing. It’s an account of how Cortes and his gang arrived in Mexico, and what they did, written by a man who was actually there. The style is fantastic reportage, without the Renaissance flourishes you would expect, and full of bloodthirstiness.

The Mexica (as the Aztecs called themselves) were a bizarre bunch of people who particularly enjoyed human sacrifice, and the book is full of stories of sacrificial victims with their hearts ripped out and their heads being thrown down steps.

After Paul returns from church, we finally take our trip to the graveyard, which is more like an outing to the local theme park. The whole place is filled with Mexicans buying ice creams, tending graves, and playing music. Apparently it is like this every Sunday.


I have never seen an ice-cream man in a graveyard before, but nor have I seen graves of quite such complexity and colour. Most are built like little houses, so that the family can go in and contemplate photos of the dead along with flowers and children’s toys.


Because it was Day of the Dead earlier in the week, many of the graves are still covered in half eaten snacks and empty beer bottles. It appears to have been quite a party. I can’t work out whether it is healthy respect of the dead or an unhealthy obsession. Maybe it’s all part of their Aztec heritage.

Week 6 Sabado

In Mexico, things never turn out quite the way you expect, so our plan to take a trip to the graveyard today to see the flowers doesn’t actually happen.

Instead, we spend the whole day with Mariet, Conche and the rest of the extended family, while I cook dinner in their kitchen.


We turn up with ingredients for spaghetti Bolognese and apple and blackberry crumble, and all eyes are on me as I attempt to cook with the bizarre assortment of utensils I can find in their home. Mexicans eat lunch very late, but most of them would baulk at finally sitting down at 5pm to eat a midday meal. The day, however, just seems to get longer and longer.


The spaghetti gets plenty of time to simmer, while various members of the extended family wander in and out. I can’t work out who I am cooking for, Mariet is trying to make a cake for 100 people at the same time, and Itamar keeps wanting me to go out and play with some balloons.


I run into slight trouble for cooking with wine – but explain quickly that the alcohol burns off and it is “just for the taste”, but then I am horribly tempted to add the rest of the wine at the end and see what happens. When we finally sit down to eat, Conche scoops up spaghetti and sauce in a tortilla, whilst munching on some chicken bones at the same time. Some of the rest of the family look bemused, and others want second helpings. All in all, I think it is a success, but it is so late to eat that I’m no longer hungry.


Daisy does not help the situation by having a bad day. She throws up, screams and then throws up some more. She then continues to be slightly sick all afternoon whilst grinning away at everyone inbetween times. Despite the fact that she’s obviously happy, her paranoid mother is still glad to take her home at the end of the evening.

Week 6 Viernes

Day of the Dead continues – oh yes, the dead really know how to party here. We visit the market in the morning to buy the stuff to make our own altar. Our purchases include a big bag of pine needles, some flower petals, a sugar skull and a particularly natty sugar coffin with a pop-up body inside. Nice.

Back home, we set about making an altar to remember Paul’s Dad, filling it with things that he liked. First we spread pine needles on the floor, and then we make a cross with the marigold petals. We add a picture of Peter, together with a bottle of wine, some butter, a map, a book and some hiking boots. We also add the customary Bread of the Dead and some candles.


It’s actually a surprisingly cathartic thing to do. Making the altar forces you to remember the good things about a person, and the happy times. We even manage to lure the cat in to pose beside the altar for a bowl of milk. Peter would have been impressed, he loved to feed cats.

When Mariet and Enrique observe our altar, they make just one comment. Apparently we should have left the top off the wine. Paul retorts that his Dad would never have been defeated by a simple cork.

In the evening, we go out to the Zocalo and watch the beginning of a particularly gruesome costume competition. The whole city is out in force, and there are people wearing giant skulls dancing down the street. Daisy, again, seems to find the whole thing curiously soporific. Strange child.

Week 6 Jueves

We celebrate the first of the Days of the Dead by taking a trip to the Guatemalan border with Enrique and Mariet. It’s a curiously English experience. For a start, we’re nearly two hours late setting off and laden down with unnecessary stuff. We’ve also brought a picnic which we don’t eat.


Daisy slumbers in her sling in the car, and when we stop in Comitan for pigskin quesadillas (less English, this bit), and then we arrive at our destination, in the Tierra Caliente or hot lands. Sadly, of course, it’s not actually that hot – so we end up dipping ourselves shiveringly in the water. Daisy takes to paddling like a professional English girl, but Pablo (Junior, not Senior) screeches away because the water is too cold.


Even when Itamar’s teeth are chattering, we struggle to pull her out of the water to go into Comitan for a look around. We buy her a tortoise made of balloons and coke bottle lids, which goes someway to cheering her up. However, it pops on the way home and she gets terribly upset (and blames Paul).


They are collecting clothes and supplies in Comitan for those left homeless by the flooding in Tabasco and Chiapas, which makes me feel a little guilty for minding that the weather in San Cristobal hasn’t been that sunny. At least we’re living high up!

Image from Villahermosa, Tabasco

We stop on the way home to buy Elote, or toasted corn on the cob with chile, in a town called Teopisca, and we’re all knackered by the time we get home at sevenish. Daisy goes out like a light despite the loud marimba music and fireworks from the local church.

Week 5 Miercoles

Day of the Dead preparations begin in earnest, while children in costume parade through the streets to celebrate Halloween. Mexicans like to talk about death, while British people try to avoid it, so some of the whole celebration is quite hard to stomach.

Trick-or-Treating children run round the houses singing a special song about being “angelitos” or little angels who have fallen from the sky. However, this is also the world for children who die young, which makes me a little uncomfortable about the whole thing, especially since some of them seem determined to become angelitos rather quickly by trick or treating on the highway.

Little altars are appearing all over the city, with pine needles, yellow flowers and candles. Mexicans believe that the dead return on the nights of the first and second of November to celebrate with the living – and even if most people don’t really believe that truly any more, they build altars to remember their dead.

The altars use pine needles as a carpet, with yellow marigold petals trailed to provide a strong smell to attract the dead through the house. They also have candles to light the way and food and other things that the dead person enjoyed in life.

Local schoolchildren are having an “altar competition’ in the Zocalo, dressed in traditional costume and heaping flowerpetals on their installations. I particularly like the Che Guevara altar, with beret, guns, and a knife sharing the space with the traditional bread of the dead.


However much fun the children are having mocking up their altars, most will have built one at home in earnest. Celebrating the dead is a serious business as well as a big party.

We visit Casa De Luna Maya – which is a birth and children’s centre – to sign Daisy up for baby massage classes. They have an altar for their own ‘angelitos’, children who have died in childbirth and early infancy. Each has a cake with their name on it on an altar with candles. It makes me want to cry. Paul finds it sad too, once he realises it is in fact an altar, rather than a bake sale. We are both relieved that he doesn’t ask how much the cakes cost.

Week 5 Martes

My first real trip out without Paul is to a “Women’s Meeting’ (Reunión de Damas) in the local church, which makes me feel like I have stepped back at least twenty years.


The subject is the discipline of children, and the principles somewhat scary. I mainly understand what is going on, and when the woman who is speaking brings out a stick her meaning is clear. However, with my beginner’s Spanish, it is hard to make my feelings on the matter quite so plain.

I ask Mariet, who is next to me, whether the stick is for hitting children. However, I use a word for ‘to hit’, which Paul says basically means “beat the living daylights out of”. Mariet replies that no, the stick is just for beating them slightly. She has a stick that she calls the “stick of love” which she uses to discipline Itamar. I explain haltingly that in England it is not our custom to “beat the living daylights out of our children”. Once again this has me down as a negligent parent!

One of the women at the meeting takes centre stage explaining how we shouldn’t force our menfolk to work in the house, because we are created “equal but different”, Again, I don’t have the Spanish to make my feelings on this plain. Probably just as well.

Then we have biblically based games and a recipe demonstration – some cake involving dunking biscuits in a mixture of cream and raw egg. I eat it with caution, feeling like I have joined the WI. I win a lollipop for repeating the memory verse (in English, and since none of them speak it I might just as well have said ‘marmelade, Earl Grey tea, the Queen’. I can see that some of the very competitive Damas think this very unjust).

Daisy stays at home with Paul and Enrique, who is looking after baby Pablo… for the first time in his five month life, it emerges. Mariet says that men in Mexico are different. I try not to snort.

Week 5 Lunes

A friend who we’ve recently met tells me about his upbringing. He’s one of ten children from a ranch outside Ocosingo, a town not far from here scarcely known for its intellectual achievements. Ocosingoites are known as quesos (‘cheeses’) by the rest of Chiapas, because it is a town famed for its cheese-making.

It is also famous as the bloodiest site of the Zapatista uprising on New Year’s Day 1994. I ask him about how the Zapatistas affected his parents’ lives since they were still living there. Like many people, he says, his parents were woken in the middle of the night by men with masks who asked them to leave their ranch. His mother and father (who was 88 and lame) were forced to walk from their ranch to the town in the darkness.


He says that when the Zapatistas took Ocosingo, there was so much fighting in the streets that journalists were not allowed in for three days while the soldiers cleaned up the blood. While the international news concentrated on the siege in San Cristobal, nervous trigger-happy soldiers and armed Zapatistas waged war in Ocosingo’s streets.

His father, he says, died of a heart attack because he was no longer able to work the ranch he loved. I ask him what he thinks of the Zapatistas – whose campaigning for indigenous land rights often involves seizing land from mestizo families who have owned it for a long time, expecting a tirade of complaint.

However, he says it is complicated, and it is impossible to say who is right. However, he believes that the injustice of land taken by mestizos from the indigenous hundreds of years ago cannot be solved by forced land seizure. He says he teaches students who are young and who idolise Subcomandante Marcos, but that they don’t understand what is really going on.

His comments make the popularity of little toy Zapatistas and tourist “Zapatista cafes” seem even more bizarre. I wonder how much the young tourists who come here to hang out with Zapatistas know about what really happened?