Our Lady of Guadeloupe, Carburetors and Telephone Cards   by Anne Quinn

I’m having a love affair with Mexico.  I’m in love with the butterscotch countryside, colors of bronze and gold dripping like frosting over a light chocolate cake.  I’m in love with the people who are often golden themselves, small, sweet and sensuous. I’m in love with the food…the beans and tortillas, guava and mangoes, fresh lime juice, avocados stuffed with tuna fish and sliced cactus which passes for French green beans.  I’m in love with the funk factor.  Shocking pink and deep turquoise blue houses, each with a cur dog or two on the property.  Occasionally, there is a couch placed squarely on the front lawn. (one that I saw had a rooster sitting on it.)  There are large grandmothers squatting on stoops, with their grandchildren burrowing into them like prairie dogs, both so familiar with one another that they look like small appendages.  I adore watching the men, sauntering under huge cowboy hats clicking their boots when they walk…the last of the real cowboys.  A Mexican man I know named Luis is a cowboy for sure…he used to ride the bulls in the rodeos.  It’s a way to earn extra money.  But, this year, he says he’s older and will rope the cows instead.  Even cowboys and rodeo riders eventually reach middle age. 

As we made our way out of the Guadalajara airport, bound for the Primavera Mountains, we headed west on the only highway out of the city.  We were right in the middle of rush hour.  While in New York City you see people selling newspapers, single stemmed roses and men jumping out to wash your windows (usually leaving them dirtier than they were before), at the traffic lights in Mexico you see people with dried pineapple in plastic bags, nuts, sliced guava in plastic cups or road side shacks selling tortillas with small pieces of meat, either pork or chicken, called caritas…small meats.  But what really jumped out and wrapped its arms around me was an autobody shop populated mostly with flat back and pick up trucks, with a shrine to Our Lady of Guadeloupe on the roof complete with a white bucket of roses at her feet.  Now, how many body shops have you personally seen with a full-scale shrine on the roof?  Our Lady of carburetors, fan belts transmissions and mufflers.  Perhaps Midas should look into this.  I would feel much more secure having my Toyota serviced at a shop with a shrine to the Blessed Mother on the roof.  I would feel as though she had her eye on the operation making sure that single moms who know little about cars and have small amounts of money will get a fair deal.

Our Lady of Guadeloupe is everywhere in Mexico and her feast day on Dec. twelfth is celebrated with festivities, parades, hundreds of Aztec dancers and floats throughout the cities and the outlying villages.  It sort of gives you the feeling that mom is in charge of the country and everyone in it and she’s the kind of mom you can tell anything to…she’s always there to listen and to offer comfort.  And while Mexican men swagger and sway, gathering in groups on the street corners to talk and joke, it is clear to all who spend a little time in Mexico that it’s mama who runs the entire operation.  I was buying some silver jewelry from the Huchol Indians, an ancient and indigenous people who still live the way they have for centuries in the Sierra Madres.  They come to town to sell their jewelry and yarn paintings and magnificent beadwork.  Then they buy their seeds and other provisions and return home.  A shaman from their tribe was beading with his wife and sons.  He was wearing a magnificent hat covered with dove feathers.  Obviously an adornment only he is allowed to wear.  I desperately wanted to photograph these people in their colorful, hand made cotton clothing, but I did not want to in any way offend them or be intrusive.  Since they speak a form of Aztec and almost no Spanish, I asked my new friend Steve who is a serious collector of their art, to see if this would be OK.  As he asked, all the male eyes went directly to Mama.  She nodded her head once, which meant it was a go.  Had she said no, that would have been the end of it.  Papa may be the shaman, but mama made the call.  Steve told me that once a Huchol man asked him how many Huchols he had in his camera.  “None,” Steve replied.  “None.”  Steve is now in the process of putting together a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to showcase the art of the Huchols and he is also starting a not for profit organization to benefit their tribes. 

But, returning to the funk factor.  Not being a Westchester manicured lawn type myself, I so much enjoyed the horses meandering all over Rio Caliente where we were staying, munching and grazing alongside the guests.  The walking trails were pounded into existence by herds of cows wandering over the federal lands amid century cactus and fields of sage and arnica.  On one such hike our guide Lalo ( a nickname for Eduardo) pointed to a catholic church off in the distance.  It was in the shape of a tee-pee.  “Lalo,” I asked.  “What’s the name of that church?”  Lalo replied, “the tee-pee church.”  “Can we go there, Lalo?,”  I asked.  It was a Sunday and I could see lots of people in the distance gathering outside.  “Jyes,” Lalo said.  “We go there.” “”Thank-you, Lalo,”I said.  As our little group of Gringos wound its way across the dusty, dry grass carefully avoiding the  barbed wire, the tee-pee church came into close range.  Services had ended and everyone appeared to be having refreshments at an outside pavilion.  The parishioners were curious to see who we were.  In Spanish, Lalo asked if we could go in.  We could.  Once inside the tee-pee church, whose middle is all glass offering a panoramic view of Mount Tequila and the Primavera Mountain range, there was a young Mexican woman sitting in a lotus position in front of the alter, chanting.  In her sweet voice, in that moment, heaven and earth met and for one split second time stood still.  It is one moment I will remember forever. 

I will leave a piece of my heart in Mexico when we head back on the same highway to go to the Guadalajara airport past the body shop where I will bid good-bye to Our Lady.  On a day trip to Talaquepage, the old artist’s section of Guadalajara (something like our Woodstock but much older and more rustic) I bought a ceramic statue of Our Lady to take home, to take her place among the angels, a four leafed clover, a picture of me riding horses with Luis, and other various and assorted treasures.  This was a comforting feeling for me, placing Our Lady in my carry on luggage, knowing that she would be flying the hopefully friendly skies with us. I thought about the Mexican people, desperate to leave their country to enter ours. Driven like cattle to escape one kind of  poverty only to discover another kind.  They weren’t flying in a plane, eating peanuts and drinking bottled water.  There was no one waiting at the end of the trip with open arms.  They are met by border police and guard dogs.  I asked, silently, for Our Lady to direct them, to put her hands over them, to make safe their way.  There is physical poverty and there is spiritual poverty.  I agree with the late Mother Theresa. I believe the latter is by far the worst. I thought about the Huchol Indians making art amid three generations, laughing and talking among blooming flowers and the warm Mexican sun and I had to wonder who is really ahead in this game? Let these gentle people be met with gentleness, I thought.  Guide their way and turn them back around if that is the right thing for them to do. Be in their carry on bags.

While I was in Mexico, I felt the need to call home every several days with my international phone card, as the idea of cell reception nearly 5,200 feet up in the mountains was, delightfully, not a possibility. Even though both my daughters are now married with families of their own, I can never quite settle in until I call home and check in on them.  Old habits die hard.  Will Erin remember to water my plants?  I cringe remembering my return from a trip to Cape Cod, only to find my garden in the midst of a near death experience from lack of water.  I must reach Aidan for his eleventh birthday I thought and I need to find how Kimberly is making out with the baseball league. As I pull out my phone card from the back pocket of my jeans, there she is, smiling back at me.  Lovely Lady Dressed in Blue, as Aaron Neville, a devout catholic himself, sings about her on his CD ”To Make Me Who I Am.” As I smile back at her sweet face on my phone card, I can almost hear her saying “You’ll feel better if you call, Anne.  Then you can really relax and enjoy yourself completely.  Something my own mother, God rest her soul, would have said to me.  “Thank you, Blessed Mother, “I said silently to myself.  Our Lady of telephone cards, and orange houses and palm trees and cowboys and papaya juice and Mt. Tequila.  Our Lady, the mother, of Mexico.

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