Mexico Diaries, Day 12: Tequila!

At the beginning of my trip to Mexico, a few members of our group visited the town of Tequila. Oh yes, it's a real place. I had considered bringing home a bottle of tequila as a gift for my boyfriend, and Ann (the organizer of our trip) advised me that organic tequila was available at the airport. Organic tequila? Wow! More on tequila below...

Since Guadalajara is located a mere 40 miles from the town of Tequila, I feel that any discussion of agriculture in the state of Jalisco must include tequila. In fact, by Mexican law, only Jalisco and a certain areas of few other states (Guanajuato, Michoacán, Nayarit, and Tamaulipas) are even allowed to grow agave for tequila.

Long before Europeans "discovered" America, the Aztecs made an alcoholic beverage from the blue agave plant. When the Spanish Conquistadors arrived and ran out of their own booze, they distilled blue agave as well. However, tequila didn't hit the big time until centuries later when a few men you might have heard of - Jose Cuervo and Don Cenobio Sauza - came along. Cuervo was the first to make tequila in 1795, and Sauza (municipal president of Tequila) first exported it to the U.S.

To make tequila, first the leaves of the blue agave plant are cut away, leaving a center that looks an awful lot like an oversized pineapple. It's this part of the plant that is incredibly sweet. The juice is extracted from it and fermented. Once fermented, it is distilled twice to become tequila. Then, it is aged. There are various categories of aging, but the one I was advised to buy is "añejo," which means the tequila spent between one and three years aging in oak barrels. And skip on the gold colored tequilas, unless you like food coloring (or caramel color).

In the late 1990's, disease and weather led to a shortage of blue agave. According to one source, the price growers received for blue agave increased more than tenfold between 1999 and 2000. This led to a frenzy of planting, followed by a drop in the price as the agave matured and oversaturated the market. Some farmers chose to abandon their agave instead of harvesting it because the low price made it not worth the effort. Some predict another agave shortage, since ethanol has made corn suddenly more profitable for Mexican farmers, leading them to plant more corn and less agave.

While I was in Jalisco, I saw an awful lot of blue agave growing, destined for tequila. My friends who visited tequila were told that today there are very few Mexican-owned distilleries. Many are owned by multinational corporations. No surprise there. However, there are absolutely zillions of brands of tequila. For example, a tequileria in San Diego, CA has 600 different tequilas on the menu.

So how about that organic tequila? When I first heard about it, it took me by surprise. Given the rather unregulated state of pesticides in Mexico, I suppose buying organic tequila is a really, really good idea. In the end, particularly when I realized it cost about $30-$40 a bottle, I decided against it. And, as it turns out, maybe they aren't so organic. Baluarte advertises itself as "natural" (a word that means NOTHING) and says that no chemicals are used in processing the tequila. That's nice but it doesn't make it organic. The Herradura website says nothing about the Hacienda del Cristero or Herradura Blanco 46 tequilas being organic. There is one organic tequila out there - 4 Copas. Moral of the story: Ask for 4 Copas and don't rely on the clerks in the tequila store at the Guadajalara airport to help you find organic tequila.


Baluarte tequila, which markets itself as "natural"


Herradura tequilas - not organic

Mexico Diaries, Day 11: Pesticides

This diary series covers my trip to the Mexican state of Jalisco to study the effects of NAFTA and the Green Revolution on subsistence farmers in rural areas. The trip began with a few days in Guadalajara, the largest city in the state. Then we headed to the rural town of Cuquio, about an hour and a half away, for the remainder of the trip. On the 11th day, we drove back to Guadalajara to spend our last day there. At breakfast, we discussed heading to one of the many agrochemical stores in Cuquio to check out the pesticides on our way out of town.

Should we go check out the pesticides? I was at breakfast, across the table from Ann, when one of the members of our group suggested it. A few folks wanted to go see what was in those stores we kept passing, day after day. Which pesticides were there? Were they ones that are illegal or restricted in the U.S.? Ann said she didn't mind making the stop, but she wasn't going in the store. Then she told us why.

When she was researching her book, The Farmworkers' Journey, she took inventories of which pesticides were stocked in Cuquio's various agrochemical stores. Every single time she did so, she and any research assistant she was with got sick. The bottles in the stores were closed, but the fumes made her sick all the same. Here's an excerpt from her book:

Many agrochemical stores are poorly ventilated. I found that spending time in them while taking inventories, even among unopened containers, produced physical symptoms ranging from nausea to trembling. When my research assistant and I left Dow Agrosciences' Veterinaria Partido in Tecalitlan, Jalisco, we were both shaking, felt naseous, and had bad headaches. The young woman tending the store informed us that her brother inadvertently dropped some 2,4-D on his hand and subsequently fainted. He was taken to a hospital and treated for agrochemical poisoning. The day after taking the agrochemical inventory at Veterinaria Partido, I became very ill and required medical treatment. - p. 227

So, did we want to go check out the pesticides? I decided my answer was no. I already suffer from migraines, a neurological problem, and I need no more headaches or other neurological (or other) symptoms. I'm willing to do an awful lot for the sake of investigative journalism, but putting my long term health on the line is not one of them. (I'm occasionally willing to go see a movie or go to a presentation with a Powerpoint, knowing that will give me a migraine for the next several days. Pesticides, on the other hand, can result in chronic effects that last much longer than the immediate symptoms one experiences. Headaches can be caused for neurological reasons, and trembling is typically a neurological symptom as well. That implies that these chemicals affect the brain - certainly not something worth risking. Ann also lists various cancers in her book that farmworkers exposed to pesticides suffer from at higher rates than the rest of the Latino population.)

Although we didn't hit up the pesticide retailer, we saw plenty, and I read more in Ann's book. Here's an excerpt about pesticide use in a society with poor education and literacy from my Alternet article:

Campesinos say they had few problems with pests prior to the adoption of agrochemicals. Today, many talk of of plagas, pest infestations, affecting their crops. In this environment of minimal education and lax regulation, the pesticides sold to defeat the pests present a severe human health and safety hazard. Ann Lopez reports that pesticides that are banned or designated as Restricted Use Pesticides in the United States are sold freely in Mexico. Paraquat, an herbicide so toxic that one teaspoonful can be fatal, is among the most widely used agrochemicals in this part of Mexico. The carcinogenic herbicide 2,4-D is also sold in Mexico, often in combination with 2,4,5-T. Together, a 50:50 mixture of the two chemicals constitutes Agent Orange.

The chemicals are so toxic a woman told Lopez her daughter became sterile just by working in an agrochemical retail shop among the fumes from closed bottles of chemicals. Yet, campesinos often apply the chemicals with backpacks and handheld pumps, wearing sandals and no protective clothing whatsoever. Some believe myths like "agrochemicals are only poisonous if the farmer is smoking cigarettes or drinking while applying them" or "insecticides are harmful but herbicides are safe." Warning labels on the bottles are of limited help as some people are in this part of Mexico are illiterate. The local doctor in Cuquio says that two of every 10 patients who visit him during the rainy season months of June through October each year are poisoned by agrochemicals. Three or four die each year.

On some of Ann's trips, she's arrived to find the town buzzing about someone who died from pesticide poisoning. Thankfully, this trip was not one of those occasions. We heard an awful lot about paraquat and Roundup use from the farmers we visited with. On one occasion, we visited a rich man's land and looked at his various pesticides and animal drugs. Among them was a cattle drug I wasn't able to identify, a fertilizer, and Ridomil, a fungicide. On another occasion, a woman told us her teenage sons applied pesticides without any protective clothing and then burned the containers. Occasionally, the sons would leave the containers around the yard and her younger children would find them and play with them. We found one container in the yard, unlabeled, that still had a liquid in it.

Needless to say, as harmful as pesticides can be in a first-world country with enforced regulations and a literate society, they are many times more directly harmful to human health in a place where those using them aren't educated and sometimes aren't even literate.

Mexico Diaries: Day 10, Part 2 - Microlending

This diary series covers my trip to the Mexican state of Jalisco to study the effects of NAFTA and the Green Revolution on subsistence farmers in rural areas. The trip began with a few days in Guadalajara, the largest city in the state. Then we headed to the rural town of Cuquio, about an hour and a half away, for the remainder of the trip. This diary is about our talk with a local microlending cooperative.

If reading about the people I've visited inspires you to help, you can donate to the Center for Farmworker Families. Every penny given goes directly to these families for clothes, shoes, food, school supplies, and more.

Microlending, if you aren't familiar with it, is an amazing way to lift people out of poverty. Normally, I am a strong supporter of microlending. I was blown away by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus' book Banker to the Poor which details his founding of the Grameen Bank, a microlending network in Bangladesh. If you go to his website, you can read an excerpt from the book about his first microloan.

Yunus met a 21-year-old woman named Sufiya who was making a bamboo stool. She bought the bamboo for five taka, about $.22. To get the five taka, she borrowed it from middlemen. At the end of each day, she sold her bamboo stools back to them for five taka and fifty poysha, giving her a profit of fifty poysha, or two cents. Another option she had - a worse option - was to borrow from a moneylender to buy her bamboo. The moneylender charged 10 percent per week or more.

Yunus followed up by finding out how many others in that town were in Sufiya's situation. He found 42 people borrowing a total of 856 taka - less than $27. He says in his book, "My God, my God. All this misery in all these families all for of the lack of twenty-seven dollars!" Instantly, he handed out the loans amounting to $27, telling the people to repay him whenever they could, with no interest. He says:

Usually when my head touches the pillow, I fall asleep within seconds, but that night sleep would not come. I lay in bed feeling ashamed that I was part of a society that could not provide twenty-seven dollars to forty-two skilled persons to make a living for themselves. It struck me that what I had done was drastically insufficient. If others needed capital, they could hardly chase down the head of an economics department. My response had been ad hoc and emotional. Now I needed to create an institutional answer that these people could rely on. What was required was an institution that would lend to those who had nothing. I decided to approach the local bank manager and request that his bank lend money to the poor. It seemed so simple, so straightforward. I fell asleep.

And, thus, microlending was born. Yunus founded the now-famous Grameen bank, making loans to people who would not even be able to read the forms one must fill out to get a loan from a bank, let alone qualify for those loans.

With the story of Muhammad Yunus in mind, I was ecstatic when Ann announced we would be meeting with a local microlending collective. And yet, when we met them, I was almost immediately disappointed.

Most of Cuquio's microloans are for agricultural purposes. Some are for cattle, most are for corn. A small percent who don't take out microloans for agriculture typically start small businesses. We visited one such small business, a tiny store selling painted ceramics. I believe the store belonged to one of the women we met with, a woman who told us that if it weren't for the microlending cooperative, she would not have been able to send her son to college. He is now in Guadalajara studying to become a lawyer.

Most of our conversation was about the nuts and bolts of the lending program. Where the collateral comes from, how a loan is restructured if someone cannot pay it back due to a bad harvest, etc. Much less was devoted to inspirational success stories of Mexicans starting thriving businesses, lifting themselves out of poverty via microloans.

What I did gather is this. Typically, when a small farmer takes out a microloan for agriculture, he or she (a significant percentage of loan recipients are women, which is especially wonderful given that women's lib has not reached rural Mexico yet) uses the money to purchase hybrid or genetically engineered seeds and the requisite agrochemicals to go with them. We didn't cover the specifics but I'd guess some might rent tractors as well.

One of the microlending representatives who met with us echoed what Juan Alba told us before, that yields for maiz criollo are low because the cornstalks grow tall and the wind knocks them over. He assured us that so-called improved seeds and agrochemicals were the best way to secure an increased yield. Then, I assume, a farmer would set aside what he or she needs to feed his or her family for the year and sell the rest at low prices (thank you, NAFTA!) to cover the cost of the loan.

If your crop fails and you cannot pay back the loan, you would restructure your loan, essentially taking out an even larger loan to pay back for the next year. (The example they gave is if you took out $2000 last year and your crop failed, you would take out an additional $1000 for next year, and now you will owe the interest on the $2000 for both years, interest on $1000 for this year, and the principle for all $3000 after next year's harvest.)

Here's the problem with this. First of all, consider that Juan Alba has found that maiz criollo, compost, and a small amount of chemical fertilizer can produce yields of seven to ten metric tons per hectare (up from a mere 2 tons/hectare using maiz criollo and no compost or fertilizer). This is competitive with anything one can produce using hybrid seeds. Planting trees and windbreaks and adding lime to raise the soil pH might help increase the yield further. Furthermore, if, after using Juan's methods, you cannot afford more compost or other inputs, your soil organisms are still alive and healthy, and you won't take suffer losses for no longer purchasing soil inputs. More likely, your soil will be healthier than it was before, more able to absorb water than it was before, and thus better adapted to help your crops survive droughts and floods.

On the other hand, the industrial inputs peddled by multinational agribusiness corporations are the equivalent of a drug that addicts your land. Once you switch to their seeds and the chemicals required to go with those seeds, you kill your soil. Next year, you must find a way to afford those chemicals once again because you'll suffer a greatly reduced output if you do not. For the subsistence farmers we met, that would mean starvation.

These industrial methods lead to the environmental problems we observed in Jalisco - namely heavy erosion and pesticide contamination. It's not just the frogs that die from the pesticides in Jalisco, because the poorly educated campesinos suffer from them too. Deaths are reported each year, and many don't die but suffer in other ways. We met one woman whose daughter became sterile from the fumes she inhaled while working in an agrochemical retail store.

At some point, this will come to a head. As land becomes more and more degraded, it requires more and more chemicals to keep producing corn. With the price of corn decided by the global "free" market, in which Mexican campesinos compete with Iowan farmers who are subsidized by the U.S. government, corn will always be cheap. When the cost of the chemicals outweighs the price of the harvested corn, even the best microloan won't save you. In India, farmers sometimes deal with this by drinking pesticides to commit suicide. When I inquired, I was told that suicide wasn't a problem in Jalisco. Probably because farmers know they have the option of going to the United States instead.

I was sad to find out that the microlending program in Jalisco wasn't going to be the salvation that it was in Bangladesh, at least not for those who use it to buy Green Revolution technologies. I think this shows that sometimes microlending needs an accompanying education program to make it work. There are successful agroecology training programs helping subsistence farmers all over the world, but not in this little corner of Jalisco. At least, not yet.

Mexico Diaries: Day 10, Part 1 - A Village With Enough to Eat

This diary series covers my trip to the Mexican state of Jalisco to study the effects of NAFTA and the Green Revolution on subsistence farmers in rural areas. The trip began with a few days in Guadalajara, the largest city in the state. Then we headed to the rural town of Cuquio, about an hour and a half away, for the remainder of the trip. On the 10th day, we visited our last village to deliver aid.

If reading about the people I've visited inspires you to help, you can donate to the Center for Farmworker Families. Every penny given goes directly to these families for clothes, shoes, food, school supplies, and more.

A few days into our stay in Cuquio, we became friendly with one of the girls who worked at our hotel. I'll call her Maria. She was adorable and sweet and when she spoke, the words came out of her mouth like laughter. We told her what we were doing and where we were going. When we told her which rancho we were visiting on our last day, she said, "That's my rancho!" We chipped in to pay her what she would have earned at work that day so she could take the day off and come with us.


All ready to go for our last rancho visit

In every other village, Ann had longstanding relationships with the families we were visiting. Here, it didn't seem that way. We rolled into the rancho and stopped in front of the tiny convenience store. Maria, who told us that about half of the homes in town were either empty or full of only women with children because the men had gone to the U.S., went around and collected all of the kids, telling them there was a pinata and cake for them.

She directed us to a nearby volleyball court, and pretty soon the adults in the town assembled a number a beautiful, handmade chairs for us to sit in while we waited for the children to come. It didn't take long once news got around that there was a pinata in town. One of the adults asked me what we were doing here, but I don't think the kids wondered why there were a bunch of strange gringos here with a pinata. Why look a gift horse in the mouth?


Kids eagerly waiting for the pinata


Ann Lopez meeting one of the children


A sign for one of the three Mexican political parties painted on a brick wall next to the volleyball court. We saw signs like this one everywhere, mostly for PRI, but some for PAN and PRD too.


One of the gorgeous handmade chairs

While we were waiting, I walked into an area full of chickens to begin taking stock of the local food resources. Something here was wrong. There were rows and rows of handmade wooden cages with one rooster in each cage. It looked like rooster jail. They had too many roosters. You need about one rooster per 8-12 hens. In these towns, where food is precious, raising extra roosters was a waste of grain. This had to be a cockfighting operation.

The cops confirmed my hunch, and said that cockfighting was illegal here. However, they didn't charge anyone with cockfighting as long as they were discreet about it. The cops took no action here. Later a woman in town verified that these roosters were indeed for cockfighting. They were absolutely gorgeous roosters, but many were missing their combs.

One of the men from the village found a rope and helped hang the pinata. We arranged the kids in a line according to height, letting the smallest ones have the first crack at the pinata. The very smallest children weren't sure what to do, so one of the Mexicans in our group explained the process to the kids. Then we let them go at it. Like the pinata from the day before, this one was very well-made and difficult for the kids to break open. Every kid got at least one turn, and most got two before the pinata was destroyed.


The kids in line, waiting for their turns


Gus explaining how to hit the pinata


This little guy gets it.

The shortest child in line was too shy to hit the pinata. He ran away from it and sat down next to me. Once the goodies began to rain down, he didn't run after them like the others. "Va! Va!" I encouraged him. When he didn't, I ran out and grabbed him a lollipop, unwrapped it for him, and gave it to him. After the pinata, the chickens came out to see if there was anything they could help clean up. One packet of marshmallows had broken open and they were all too happy to eat them.


Chicken cleanup duty after the pinata

One thing I noticed in every town was that the kids never threw their trash away. In almost every case, the kids just tossed all of their wrappers, napkins, and plastic forks right on the ground. The ranchos didn't seem to have any trash service, and only one of them had prominent large garbage cans staggered around for people to toss their trash into. In one rancho, a child stashed her plastic fork and napkin from the cake in fireplace. In another rancho, the adults gathered the trash and burned it.

My next job was handing out the toys to the kids. Typically, we would line the kids up and let them take turns picking out a few toys each until the toys were all gone. My Spanish wasn't good enough to give the kids instructions and to then enforce them. I got a Spanish speaker in our group to tell the kids to form a line and then said "Escoge tres" ("Choose three") to the first few kids. The toy selection quickly devolved into a free-for-all, with all of the kids gathered around the toys, picking what they wanted, all at once. Oh well, no harm done.


A little guy with his new toys. He's holding a whistle in one of his hands, and he spent the rest of the day blowing it. My apologies to his parents. Notice the Pepsi chair.

We gave out the rest of our stuff - cake, watermelon, stuffed animals, toothbrushes, school supplies, clothes, shoes, etc - and our group prepared to go on a hike. I decided to hang back and skip the hike because I was wearing sandals and a skirt. I took a seat at the local store and before long, wound up in conversation with the store owner and, later, his wife.


A Pepsi truck rolls through town


A view of the rancho


The creek everyone hiked near. Notice the color of the water, full of silt from eroded soil

I began by asking the store owner about the milpa (cornfield) next to the store. It was planted with a black variety of maiz criollo. I excitedly told him that I also planted black Mexican corn at home in my garden. Then I began asking him about food production resources in the town.


The milpa next to the store


Another view of the milpa

The store owner told me about a number of animals and fruit trees in the town. For fruit trees, they had avocados, lemons, orange, sapote, and peaches. There were cows for milk (to keep) and for beef (to sell). There were three pigs, at least one horse and one mule (maybe more, and perhaps some donkeys). When I asked if they were his, he almost invariably always told me they belonged to a brother. The cockfighting brother had about 100 chickens in all. Later, the store owner showed me some ducks and his wife mentioned rabbits.


Ducks


Probably a mule


Probably a donkey


Cows

Additionally, when it wasn't camote season (the wild tuber gathered throughout the fall, winter, and spring), the store owner liked to go fishing. He told me it took him two hours to take a donkey to the river, and he brought back fish. However, he later told another member of our group that he didn't like the taste of the fish so he gave them away to others who did.

I asked to see the pigs, and we set off on a short hike through a few cornfields (which also belonged to his brother) to see them. We passed a small pond, and I asked if there were frogs. Ann tried to check in each rancho if the frogs had been killed off by agrochemicals. Typically, she told the kids she would give a dollar to anyone who could bring her a frog or a toad and then release it in the same place they found it. In the pond, the store owner found two frogs to show me.


The pigs

As we came back from seeing the pigs, we passed cornstalks with beans growing up them. I asked if they had quelites, beneficial weeds, in their milpas and the store owner said yes. During the year, campesinos can eat edible weeds that are allowed to grow in the milpas in times of need. Then we came to a few women shelling red corn for posole. They also had some cacti for nopales, a very healthy food commonly eaten in this region.


A great example of beans growing up a cornstalk


Another cornstalk with beans growing up it


Red corn mazorcas (ears of dried corn) for posole


Shelling the corn


Nopales

We then walked back to the volleyball court, where the furniture making cockfighting guy was working on a new chair. By this time, the group had returned from their hike. Another member of our group and I began asking about the family of these brothers. They told us that there were five brothers and two sisters in the family. Maria, who worked at our hotel, was their cousin.


The owner of the roosters, who also happened to be the furniture maker, making a new chair

Their mother, four brothers, and one sister lived in the rancho. One sister lived in Cuquio and one brother had been in California for a long time. The store owner had gone to California seven times to work in construction for many years, sending money back to build his store. He hadn't seen his brother in the U.S. for about four years and couldn't because none of the brothers had paper to go back and forth across the border. They spoke on the phone once or twice a month. The family members who lived in the rancho all shared their food resources, so everyone got eggs, milk, and occasionally, meat. I assume they had enough corn to eat too, if they had enough to spare to feed to all of their extra roosters.

The only downside of this rancho's prosperity was the amount of junk they were able to afford. The store offered a few healthy and necessary items like eggs, cooking oil, and toilet paper, but mostly, it sold junk. This is a common phenomenon in the ranchos we visited: campesinos produce and sell healthy, whole foods in order to afford processed junk from local stores like this one.













A few other noteworthy things took place while I chatted with the store owner and his wife. At one point, we spoke about and lamented the amount of racism in the U.S. against Mexican immigrants. He spoke knowingly about the wealth and excess in the U.S., telling me about movie stars' multimillion dollar mansions in Beverly Hills. Then, after clearly denouncing racism, he told me that black people were lazy. I told him that I didn't think so. He said they were. No, I said, not the ones I know. "Would they work in the fields?" he asked. "Yes," I told him - but not if they were being exploited. Americans would be willing to do that work if they were paid fairly and given fair working conditions.

Shortly before we left, the store owner's wife came outside to chat. She had three small children, she told us, and did not want any more. Then she said something that I didn't quite pick up, but I think she was saying that she would have more kids if God gave her more. Birth control is nonexistent in these little ranchos.

Last, I inquired about the town's water supply. Half the town used wells. Her half had a manmade lake that they used to collect water and then pump it to their homes. They used this water for bathing, irrigation, and everything. That was the first I had heard of any rancho using water for irrigation. Typically, the people we met grew one corn crop per year during the rainy season. Sometimes campesinos grow a crop of garbanzos after their corn harvest, a crop that requires less water. Then their land is dry and they allow cattle to graze on their crop residue while waiting for the rains to come in the next year.

She told us that she adds calcium carbonate to the water before drinking it to disinfect it, but for the past several years she had bought her drinking water in 5 gallon bottles from Cuquio. (I don't think adding calcium carbonate will help disinfect the water, although it would likely be less harmful to drink than bleach, used in another rancho we visited to disinfect water. Calcium carbonate, referred to as "cal" in Mexico, is the main cause of what we call "hard water" and it's a common calcium supplement, although it can be toxic in large doses.)

Some families had received composting toilets, given out for free by the municipal government. She wanted one but did not get one. When she asked the city for one, they told her they were done distributing them. Her family had to go to the bathroom outside.

With that, it was time for us to go. We hopped in the back of our pickup truck, grateful that it was no longer raining (as it was on the drive out), and headed back to the hotel.

Mexico Diaries: Day 8, Part 3 - Trip to the Edge of the World

This diary series covers my trip to the Mexican state of Jalisco to study the effects of NAFTA and the Green Revolution on subsistence farmers in rural areas. The trip began with a few days in Guadalajara, the largest city in the state. Then we headed to the rural town of Cuquio, about an hour and a half away, for the remainder of the trip. This is my third post about our 8th day, when we visited an incredibly remote village tucked into the side of a mountain, overlooking a gorgeous valley.


The view from the rancho

If reading about the people I've visited inspires you to help, you can donate to the Center for Farmworker Families. Every penny given goes directly to these families for clothes, shoes, food, school supplies, and more.

Mexico is organized into municipalities, which each include a central town or city as well as the outlying rural areas. We visited five "ranchos" (tiny villages) within the municipality of Cuquio, which you can see on the map here:


Map of Cuquio's municipality. Out of all of these zillions of ranchos, we only helped five. How many other people are in need, just in this one municipality?

On the map, you can hopefully see the various highlighted areas. The large highlighted spot in the middle is Cuquio itself. Each of the other highlighted areas are the ranchos. On the 8th day of the trip, we visited the northernmost rancho. Unlike the other ranchos, which were each about 30-40 minutes away, the road to this one took an hour and a half, almost entirely on dirt roads. Actually, on that particular day, they were mud roads. We made the drive in the back of two pickup trucks in the rain.


Piling into the truck for our trip. Notice the pirate pinata.


A view of Cuquio from just outside of town

After a long drive and a few moments when I thought our truck wouldn't make it, the truck stopped. Normally, we stopped in front of a house where a crowd of kids were anxiously awaiting us, but not this time. We parked in the middle of nowhere on a mountain. The rancho was only accessible on foot, and we had parked at the trailhead. Ann had warned us to wear pants and closed-toed shoes and this was why. Now she instructed us to follow the path all the way to the bottom. With the various suitcases, pinatas, and watermelons we were carrying, we were all grateful that the hike was down and not up.


A first view of the rancho, looking down on the roofs of the homes

About halfway along the trail, the kids found us and started eagerly hiking along with us and showing us where to go. A young boy noticed the soccer ball I was carrying, which I had bought at the tianguis (flea market) the day before to give away. "Futbol!" he said excitedly. I gave it to him. "Para ti," I said ("For you"). He didn't say much to me, and the ball disappeared soon after I gave it to him, but he hung around me all day with a smile wider than Texas. A member of our group noticed and said, "I think you've got a boyfriend."


The home of our hosts in the rancho


The side of the home and the bathroom, a composting toilet distributed by the municipality


Like each of the two homes we visited before, this house sported a plaque announcing that it had received a cement floor from the federal government recently. Before that it had a dirt floor.

Before long, we began our usual routine. First, we let the kids put our ailing pirate pinata out of its misery. Then cake, shoes, clothes, school supplies, etc, etc. My job this time around was handing out toothbrushes and toothpaste. First the kids, then the adults. I hit one difficult moment when I was handing the toothbrushes out to the adults and the next person in the row was an elderly lady with nearly no teeth. Does she need a toothbrush or is it too little too late? I didn't want to insult her, so I gave her one.

This time, our party included a new element: pictures! As you can imagine, the people we were visiting don't take too many pictures. Often, the kids didn't even get the concept. We'd tell them to smile and count to three, and they'd look at us like we were aliens. Ann had visited this rancho and taken pictures before, so this time she brought a set of 4x6 prints to give out. The pictures were a huge hit. I wouldn't be surprised if these are the only pictures of themselves and their children the people in the rancho have.

When I wasn't handing out toothbrushes and soccer balls, I was scoping out the corn. As usual, I observed intercropped corn, beans, and squash. This time, I noticed something that looked like salt next to each of the plants. Urea fertilizer. The good news, however, is that this rancho still plants exclusively maiz criollo, instead of the hybrid, Green Revolution seeds. Ann Lopez, who hopes that this village will continue to plant maiz criollo, brought along corn expert Juan Alba for this trip and he spent a while chatting with our hosts about corn and agronomy.


Corn with beans


Urea fertilizer


The cornfield in front of the home we visited. Notice the slight slope.

The home next door to the one we visited was located on a steep hillside, entirely surrounded by its cornfield. There was no way you could get a tractor on that slope. They likely did all of their farm labor by hand.


Home with cornfield on a slope

We took a quick hike down the mountain a bit to see where the families got their water from. They built a water collection tank where water accumulated, and then pumped that water to several homes. I don't think they had running water per se (and certainly no water heater and hot water coming out of the tap), but at least with the pump they didn't have to hike up and down the mountain every time they needed water.


The water supply

In addition to their cornfield, they also had a cow for milk, a donkey, and about eight hens and a rooster. I asked if they had any fruit trees and they gave me a long list: apple, peach (both yellow and white), mango, pomegranate, banana, capulin (related to cherries), lime, lemon, guava, mandarin, bitter orange, grapefruit, guamuchil, sapote, pitaya, tuna, and plums. Additionally, they had mesquite, nopales (prickly pear cactus, commonly eaten in Mexico), calabash gourds, and "fungus but not mushrooms" (I assume they were talking about huitlacoche, a corn fungus eaten in Mexico, which I would best describe as an acquired taste).


Chicken


More chickens

While I was taking my inventory of fruit trees, the rest of our group left for a hike. Our hosts had made us quite a bit of food, which we did not eat (I assume this executive decision was made by our group leaders due to fears of food poisoning), so when they wanted to take everyone on a hike, our group couldn't say no. We'd already offended them once.

When I peeked out from behind the house, there were no gringos left. "Everyone went home," my host told me. I panicked and began to run up the path, collecting my belongings as I went. Surely, they would count to make sure everyone was in the truck before they left, I thought. Then I stopped and turned around. "The police are still here!" I exclaimed. The police were our ride. No one went anywhere if they were still standing around. Everyone had a good laugh at my expense.

Speaking of the police, it was about this point in the trip that people began talking to the police and to others in town to get the scoop about local drug cartel action. Apparently, Cuquio is an oasis in between other municipalities that have experienced quite a bit of violence. I saw signs in Cuquio advocating staying drug free, and I even saw D.A.R.E. shirts. If I remember correctly, Ann told us that there was only one narco in the area that she knew of, and he was tolerated because he did things like pay for surgeries and other expensive medical care for those in need.

At any rate, there I was, stuck on a dramatically beautiful mountainside in rural Mexico, which really did seem like the edge of the world, alone with a few Mexican cops, some of the locals, and Juan Alba the corn expert. The man who had been telling me about his fruit trees spoke Spanish in a way that was more or less unintelligible to me and Juan (bless him) was translating his words into more understandable Spanish, well enough that we could all carry on a conversation.

We talked a lot about the benefits of growing food without chemicals and not contaminating the environment (a major concern among the Mexicans I spoke to who didn't use any pesticides). He ran over to his peach tree and eagerly brought back a handful of ripe peaches. "Here! Try it! A clean peach!" I did not want to try it. I love peaches and I was hungry, but did I really want to risk food poisoning for a peach?

There was no way out. No polite way out. I ate it. He gave me a second one, and then ran to get some more. I insisted that his peaches were delicious but I was full. I told him I would put the peaches in my purse to share with a friend, so the other Americans could try his delicious, clean peaches. I'm not sure if he bought it, but sooner or later, he dropped the subject and I stashed the peaches in my purse. (And fortunately, the peaches didn't make me sick.)

I continued to stand there until the group got back from the hike. The breathtaking scenery never got old. I can't imagine living there, on this untouched, gorgeous side of a mountain. The residents of the rancho know how beautiful their home is, as many of them asked me what I thought of it. One decided to play a joke on me, and when I replied "Muy bello," she answered, "Muy FEO???" ("Very UGLY??"). Nobody in their right mind could call this place ugly.




One more look at that beautiful view

At last, when our group returned from their hike, it was time to go. Our hosts guided us up a steep path that served as a shortcut to our trucks. When we reached the top of the path, we had one last item of business. Ann had arranged to have a minivan donated to the town because the children had no way to get to school otherwise. Through her efforts, now the town's children were able to have a chance at education and perhaps, hopefully, a better life. Before leaving, we needed to get a picture of the kids in front of their van, to send to the donor as a thank you.

What a day. We said our goodbyes, piled into our trucks, and made the cold, wet trip home.