Mama Antonia

     Luis and I work together at our restaurant - he's a line cook and I bake bread.  He arrives about an hour after I start work and passes through the pasty department on his way to the line. Usually he's upbeat, generously sharing wise-cracks in English and Spanish as he passes by - one of his favorites is to excuse himself in badly-accented Gringo English as he squeezes by with a grin on his face, because he knows that the bakers prefer that he go around the other way.
    "Atras, atras. Con permisso. Graasias." Do I sound that bad when I try to speak Spanish?, I wonder.
    One day he arrived at work looking a little more pensive than usual - sleepy, with a serious expression.  "I had a strange dream last night," he said.
    It isn't unusual for Luis to share dreams with us, but this time it felt a little different, he seemed troubled.
     "I dreamed about my Mama Antonia - my grandmother - in Mexico.  She's 96 years old and not in good health.  In my dream, she was talking to me.  She was kind of angry and was scolding me. In the dream, she found out that I was visiting her small town but hadn't come to see her. 'You've been here for three days already, but you haven't come to visit me! Why not?'"
     A few weeks went by and Luis watched a video that his family had recorded while visiting with Mama Antonia.  Luis is the oldest of 12 children and one of three who have moved to the US.  He has been here since he was nineteen and has since learned English, married an American woman, started a family, and earned his American citizenship.  Luis was amused by the video because his grandmother asked about him but couldn't remember "What's his name" - his brother Memo who also lives in the US. He was saddened, though, to see how much she had aged - how small and wrinkled she looked.  He wondered if he would ever see her again.
     Luis hadn't been to Mexico for four years. Taking his whole family would be too expensive.  His wife, Lisa, had heard about the dream and seen his reaction to the video.  "You've got to go," she said.
     Luis knew about my love of traveling, my curiosity about his family, my efforts to learn Spanish.  He asked me if I wanted to go with him.
    I thought he was joking at first - then I wondered if it would be okay with his wife and children if I went and they didn't or if his grandmother was seriously ill and it would be awkward for me to be there. He assured me that he wasn't joking, his grandmother's health was relatively good, and then Lisa said that she was happy for Luis to have company.  So I jumped at the chance to see "the real Mexico" and spend time with his family.
    It turned out to be a trip to remember.
    On our third day in Mexico, we made the three-hour drive to Santa Maria to visit Mama Antonia (her husband had been called Papa Antonio). She was thrilled to see Luis and didn't scold him for being away for so long, although she did comment that he was larger - "healthier" - than he was the last time she saw him. Luis and his brother spent a long time patiently talking with her, sitting with her, trimming the lemon tree whose branches made a huge racket on the tin roof when the wind blew, and fetched medicine from the local pharmacy for her sore stomach. Late in the day, when it was time to leave, they said their farewells. She asked us all to return - even me - and when Luis asked about her stomach, she said that she had forgotten all about the stomach ache.
     When Luis had first told me about the dream, I laughed, thinking it was a funny story. Then, sometime during the trip, a thought came to me.  "Luis, did you take that dream seriously?  Do you think that Mama Antonia was asking you to come visit her?"
     "What do you think?" he asked.  "We're here, aren't we?"

Making a Living

     We were driving across Jalisco and I asked my friend Luis, who had grown up in nearby Guadalajara, a question.
     "This may be a stupid question, but I'm wondering - are there still people in Mexico who dress in the traditional white clothing, with a serape and a sombrero?"
     "Yes," he answered, "But not like they always show, with a lazy guy sleeping under a cactus."
     There was an edge, a defensiveness to his usually easygoing manner.  "You see how hard these people work - look at them here, trying to sell things on the street."
      And that's what we saw.  All along the road you would pass little stands where tacos were being made or fruit sold.  At a railroad crossing, a woman with a baby bundled to her chest would offer to sell you flowers as you stopped.  At one stop light in the city, a full array of products and services were offered, from window washing to bottled water and cell phone plans.
     Nowhere was this drive to eek out a living in whatever way available more evident, though, than when we were back at the home of Luis's parents in Guadalajara.
    All day and into the night you would hear a distinctive horn, a recorded jingle, or a tune from a passing car, truck, or bicycle. The residents had them memorized and knew without looking outside if it was the propane delivery truck, the ice cream man, taco vendors, or the guy who collects empty bottles. Some of the purveyors looked like organized, official businesses - the propane people would stop their truck, remove a ladder and scamper to the roof to change a tank, or wheel it through the front door and exchange the new one for the old one. Others were much more informal - the recycling man had three homemade metal cylindrical holders on the back of his motorcycle, each designed to hold one five-gallon plastic bucket, containing exactly 20 beer bottles. Once, there was a knock on the door and two young men asked if they could trim the tree in front of the house. They had just completed work on a tree next door, neatly shaping the branches into a cube and then loading the trimmings into the front basket of a three-wheeled cargo bicycle. Luis's sisters politely declined, saying that their dad would be disappointed if he couldn't do the work himself. The tree trimmers laughed and agreed that it would be best to let dad handle the job.
    That was typical of the interactions that I observed time and time again between those offering unofficial services and their potential customers. Never was there a sense of overbearing high-pressure salesmanship nor a rude rebuke from the customer. Even the persistent squeegie men at red lights could usually be dissuaded with a shaking of the head and a waggling of the fingers.
     What was unsaid, but obvious, was that these people were hustling, in the best sense of the word, were working hard to make a living in whatever way they could.
     No one sleeping under a cactus here.