Primeros sabores

Mexico #1: Arriving in Mexico

I had searched online for a route to San Cristobal de las Casas, a little concerned as Tuxtla Gutiérrez airport was in the middle of nowhere (far from the capital of Chiapas state, whose name it bears). We landed in the late afternoon heat with a bunch of turbulence and a rough landing that earned the pilot a round of applause. My bank cards were playing up, as they would at various times over the next weeks, but I'd got pesos in my pocket at least now. In fact, while I'd struggled to check in beforehand from overseas (in spite of a warning from the domestic airline that I should), things were a lot smoother on my first day in Mexico than I'd expected. Smiling chicos in Xmas jerseys checked all my stuff in easily, and somebody had thought to organize regular colectivos from the airport even though I couldn't find any evidence of this online beforehand: a large, well organized and reasonably priced minibus taxi service. I began to relax as the sun dipped and we climbed into the mountains.

Here in Chiapas, there were a bunch of checkpoints on the highway apparently run by different groups of police or armed forces. At first I thought this was a relic of the truce between government bodies and the Zapatistas, of which I would hear much more. But in fact officials were apparently more concerned about immigrants from central America, ostensibly involved in 'narco-traffic'. None of this was to affect my stay in the sweet pueblo I was landing in, but it was part of the bigger picture of the region I was getting to know.

Also on the way up the highway, while the temperature dropped more to a Capetonian winter feel, there was what appeared to be a Greek Olympic relay race happening, with young men and women racing with burning torches. It turned out I was arriving in 'San Cris' in the run-up to the feast day of Guadalupe: Mexico's most important saint. After the basilica named for her in northern Mexico City (where the millions who gather each year rival the numbers at India’s kumbh mela), the church of Guadalupe in San Cristobal was apparently one of the most important pilgrimage sites in the country. Mexico is "the most religious Catholic nation in the world". Or is it? This was one of many questions I was delving into in getting to grips with a culture that felt familiar in some ways and very foreign in others. I took a regular taxi to my accommodation, and my driver found a way around the gridlocked streets.

Señora Meli (Amelia) was to be my hostess for the coming week, a small but mighty grandmother with a flock that varied from grandchildren heading off to school, a nephew coming to help a daughter with her driving lessons (and needing feeding, as was the custom for any family member popping in!), a husband returning late from the workshop, and sometimes other children and their families. When I left, things were about to get way more intense in the family block, which extended around a central courtyard: other siblings and families were about to descend from elsewhere in the state, for the busy run-up to Christmas. But my room was a quiet refuge, and most of my interactions were around the dining table, a perfect opportunity to build up my confidence with the Spanish language, which was a major reason for this solo trip.

Over the course of the week I got to sample the delights of Mexican home cooking, which is of course based around the corn-based tortilla, though with far greater variety than mielies or pap back home in South Africa. This part of the world is after all where mielies come from: the four classic colours of the native American four directions (white, yellow, black, red) represent the basic colours of corn, though it comes in even more varieties than that. The tastiest tortillas to my tongue were the black ones, tortillas negras, but all the food was a revelation, used as I am to South Africa's version of Tex-Mex (Spur's own Zaf-Mex, or perhaps that should be Zef-Max?) - nachos and lots of melted cheddar-type cheese were invented in the north of Mexico for the US market and aren't a big part of local cuisine.

Along the way I had numerous embarrassingly obvious light bulb moments with my Spanish. Quesadillas are... Tortillas with queso, cheese. Guau. Another: there's usually a pretty healthy drink with a meal, an agua fresca. Basically a little juice diluted with lots of water, sometimes sugared (that global scourge) but often not, especially in Meli's kitchen. Favourite agua frescas I was given included maracuyá (what we'd call granadilla, or passion fruit), limonada (mildly sweetened lemon juice and water basically) and delicious horchata, made from rice water with cinnamon. But a fourth was made with "ga-my-ica"... hibiscus flowers. In Spanish "j" always sounds like Afrikaans "g"/ Scottish "ch"... So that's written... jamaica. Apparently the island is where Mexico's first hibiscus (or sorrel as it's also known) came from. Later in my trip I also tried a delicious horchata with tuna, which sounds horrible until you realise that tuna is the Mexican word for what we call prickly pear.

Being pescatarian, I got a lot of frijoles of course: black beans, and in Mexico I didn't get any of those delicious and probably lethal refried frijoles from our restaurants. The third of the vital "three sisters" that grow well together and feed the people (after corn and beans) is squash, and I had plenty of different kinds of calabazas too. There were definitely times on my trip when I craved veg and salad, while eating on the road, but I got lots of both in that first week. I also got soups and stews: made with salsa on the side and tasty spices inside. Mexico has loads of mushroom varieties I hadn't tasted before and one of the most delicious is huitlacoche, a fungus that grows on corn. And sure, there is cheese, but Mexican queso is usually white, coming in healthier varieties than more processed stuff. Quesillo is particularly stretchy, and although the state of Oaxaca claims it, I first ate it in Chiapas at Meli's table.

While my room was comfortable, the first few nights were frankly noisy and not for the last time I needed earplugs to sleep. All those relay runners with torches were heading to the church of Guadalupe, on a hill a few blocks away. In Mexico few excuses are needed to let fireworks off: noisy 'cohetes' were being set off till late, and then again from about 4 in the morning (sometimes accompanied by more tasteful church bells), even during the day when they could only be heard, not seen. When the enormous fiesta for Guadalupe was finally over, it was the turn of San Lorenzo in the parish next door to have a feast day, so the cohetes just moved a little further off later in the week! In the evenings I braved the crowds on the Real de Guadalupe, the street leading to her hill, tried some familiar-looking churros (literally, "squirts"), and some fruit preserved in syrup whose identity I'm not sure of and my stomach wasn't sure of either, and watched as groups paraded, in traditional Mayan costume, or with special headgear or musical accompaniment or whatever their community had decided as a unifying element. Finally at the end of the week I headed up to the church myself in the relative quiet, to take a look.

I found it quite an emotional sight. Never have I seen so many flowers in a church: reminiscent of the most exuberant Indian shrines. Guadalupe herself was covered in them. The story goes that the local term for mother earth, Madre Tierra, Pachamama, is the goddess Tonantzin (who has other indigenous names too). This goddess appeared to a Mexican in the early sixteenth century and performed miracles, which was the standard Catholic proof needed to be acceptable in the Catholic canon. And so she 'became' the Virgin Guadalupe, a particular version of the energy of the feminine which the Virgin Mary represents in Catholic Christianity. Traditionally Guadalupe was represented in quite a limited form, a baroque saint with an approved image for painters to copy, as the church tried to contain this traditional belief (and certainly succeeded to some extent), her cloak almost as blue as more traditional Marys. But that's not what I saw in her church in San Cristobal. I saw an indigenous goddess, her face brown, her mantle bright green, covered in swathes of flowers. Whatever the oppression of beliefs over the centuries, and the somewhat bizarre photo of Papa Francisco near the entrance, there was another kind of energy at play here, and certainly another kind of exuberant love available in the noisy streets.

This was not the only religious event I was close to during the week. At the Spanish language school I took classes at, my first teacher discussed the witch (or more likely traditional healer) at the local cemetery. People make offerings to her grave to receive cures; and he had rather an elaborate story of being drunk as a young man, drinking the tipple someone had left for her, then later replacing it when he realized it probably wasn't a great move. Having related this story to me, he had a minor moped accident which kept him off work for a few days, though I’m sure the two incidents are unrelated. The more general point was about the importance of visits to the cemetery, in local culture; communing with the ancestors with regularity, not necessarily aligned to the modern 7-day notion of the week (eight seemed interestingly common).

I wasn't in the country for the Day of the Dead celebrations, which have altered a little over time. Rather like nachos (originally broken tacos - deep fried tortillas for gringos), or the opportunistic changing of time zones: Mexico basically has two (western states are an hour behind most of the country). But Quintana Roo in the eastern Yucatán peninsula uses the same time zone as New York and the eastern US from where many of its tourists come: and Baja California Norte in the far west has lined up with the 'Pacific Time' of the state over the border, for much the same reasons. My rough take is that Mexicans have a really strong culture, one which includes knowing easy ways to make money out of culturally lazier types to their north. The Dia de los Muertos has definitely been important for a long time, but the carnival parade in Mexico City only started after a 2015 scene from a James Bond movie. Plenty of other elements have similar pedigrees; much of Mexican culture is inspired, highly creative, and at times appropriately opportunistic.

But death and its place in the cycle of life is genuinely taken on by the culture. Later in the week there were, sadly, two deaths in Meli's world: a neighbour passed from cancer, and an old neighbour also passed, from near the house she grew up in on the other side of town. Both of these had funerals she felt obliged to be part of. Our street was closed off to traffic by community members so that a crowd could gather there under a hastily erected marquee, eat and drink and celebrate and commiserate. From there would be a long march to the panteón, the cemetery, with a mariachi band leading the way. The street closure was common but not strictly legal, but in Chiapas the relations between communities and branches of government seemed to always be a bit of a compromise.

The streets of this small city are old and colourful: many walls decorated with wonderful murals. Of course we have fabulous murals in Cape Town (especially Muizenberg!) too, but Mexico has a serious history of them and it spills onto San Cristobal’s roads and alleyways. Many other walls are left painted in their approved colour, making the whole centre of the city reminiscent of Bo Kaap in central Cape Town; and everywhere there are old streets, largely cobbled or paved, with old pavements, sometimes much too thin or slippery (as a guy I met from San Francisco could attest - he was spending extra weeks in town after damaging his ankle on one of these hazards!) I was beginning to have a vague sense of history and political culture, but first there was music.

The colours and flavours continued for me with sound. I'd brought my trombone with me in case of finding opportunities to jam. One reason I got going on this track to learn more español and visit Latin America is that back in the 2000s I was part of Salsa Candela, our respectable 10-piece Cape Town salsa band, trying to play "authentic Afro-Cuban salsa" without actually knowing any Spanish or, in my case, much of the history: I just loved the music. We played and sang (from a sheet) using the original lyrics, and several times were approached afterwards by Spanish-speakers who erupted at us in excitement, completely incomprehensibly. I well remember the bass player making the cheesiest joke in the book to the audience, that we were playing Celia Cruz's "Soy Antillana" because we couldn't afford the meat version. Thankfully there were no Spanish speakers around that night. As one of the horn players at the time I was mostly interested in following the notes, learning the melodies and the riffs, and hopefully providing a little gees when I got my chance to wail. But the basis of Afro-Cuban music is rhythm, based off various 5-note clave forms. So getting the style absolutely right was key for our percussionists, one of whom went on a fact-finding trip to Cuba: the sweet pulse of the conga player, the arresting cracks of the timbales, and the fresh flavours of the bongos. Then the pianist added those double-octave montuno vamps, and the bassist the tumbão groove. I'd played 'latin jazz' for years in big bands and smaller outfits: Dizzy Gillespie's 'Manteca' a personal favourite of mine even as a teenager ('manteca' means 'fat' as in lard, referring to the tasty grooves, which I could definitely appreciate metaphorically without eating the real stuff myself).

Of course, mariachi is the cliché of Mexican music, but the island of Cuba is close and 'salsa' has been around in the country for a really long time. Indeed while there are many origin myths for the name 'salsa' (sauce) being applied to the mix of styles the music represents, some of which take place in Cuba, some in New York, at least one talks of an Afro-Cuban bandleader in Mexico City asking the players to add more "salsa" to their playing, just like Mexicans add spicy sauce to their food. The key fundamental to what we now call salsa is the style known as son, and son cubano in particular. Mexico has its own version: Veracruz on the east coast is the oldest colonial city, in many ways the equivalent of Cape Town to South Africa, the place the Spanish first landed and set up a mainland base. As such, as with Cape Town, its demography is a bit different to the rest of the country. There is a sizable group of people there of African origin, whose ancestors were brought there as slaves and had connections in the Caribbean. Son veracruz is its own style, with marimbas an important part of the African musical heritage in that part of Mexico. I didn't make it to Veracruz but it's definitely on my list of places to visit if I get to return to the country.

The reason I mention all this is that I got my wish to play salsa with some serious musicians in San Cristobal. Santy, a beautiful conga player and the brother of the boss of my language school, invited me to join them for a first gig at a mezcal bar one night, and for the evening we were a 5-piece, including an incredibly soulful flautist, Charly. San Cris is not short of salsa dance classes and of course people got up and tried: another thing I love about this music; it has complexity, challenge and interest for the musicians, but it's also a high-energy jol for the audience that you kind of have to move to. Charly couldn't make the second gig that week, which was at a rooftop bar, and I had to improvise some of the melodies I wasn't familiar with, but some others were classics I'd played years before in the Cape, like Son De La Loma (son from the hill). It was gratifying to get closer to the source particularly with such warm and generous locals that dedicated much of their lives to creating this kind of vibe. My instinct is to fly free with musical performance, but learning the original frameworks and forms is like the scaffolding that allows that freedom to stay grounded. Mind you, at the end of this second evening, an audience member offered me a puff or two of that Mary Juana medicinal stuff with which to fly off further. I politely declined, particularly given that I had to find my way home on foot in an unfamiliar town and I had a Spanish class at 8 the next morning!

These are just a few of the flavours of my arrival in Mexico, a country twice the size of South Africa, which I had by now barely scratched the surface of. There was still so much to learn, about the country, about Chiapas, and about San Cristobal de las Casas. But I had landed, close to the hills. Next chapter