Old Mexico

We arrived in Toluca de Guadalupe, a small town in the state of Tlaxcala, on Sunday evening. Toluca is possibly the most stereotypical Old Mexico type place I have seen. It is a town of two thousand or so that was formed some seventy years ago, and is built around a classic small plaza across the street from the Cathedral, which looks much older than its seventy five years. Besides the area in the center of town around the plaza, much of the town is dirt roads that wander over the hills. At anytime of day it isn’t uncommon to see an old campesino man and his son herding their cattle or sheep down the middle of the street, at a pace that is telling of mood of the town.
Members of the town describe it as tranquil, with a hint of pride in doing so. Many of them no doubt treasure this aspect of Toluca because of their first-hand knowledge of the megalopolis three hours to their west. It was explained to me that a large portion of the men in the town, perhaps a quarter or more, work in DF, making the drive early on Monday morning, and then sleeping at the job site every night until Friday, when they return for a short weekend with their families.
A hard part of staying in a place like Toluca is seeing a classic way of life, simple farming and commerce, and a strong family unit, that still can’t function under the modern capitalist sytem. The people are hard working, innovative, and honest, and yet there is no recourse for the men of the town but to spend almost three quarters of the year away from their families.
Our reception was at the local offices of the Congreso Nacional Urbano de Campesinos. This is a group with offices all over the state of Tlaxcala, a small state to the East of Mexico City. They are considered one of the most well-organized social movements of the region. While they are primarily a campesino rights organization, they also serve as a leftist umbrella group for such causes as the Bracero movement (a group of old men that were guest workers in the US in the sixties now demanding their pensions) to a sex worker group that formed to resist police repression.
I was welcomed by a sixty two year old grandmother named Piedad. She was the mother of eight and grandmother of twenty four. She seemed to be the matriarch of the town. Every time we walked down the road, any kid that passed by would come up and kiss her hand, after which she would explain in what circuitous way they were related.
The week passed quickly. Every day was full of different academic classes and workshops. One of the workshops was a talk in a crowded meeting room, where we heard testimony from twenty or so Braceros. The Braceros (from the Spansih word brazo, meaning arm) were guest workers in the US from 1942 until 1962. Not only did the guest workers receive horrible treatment from their employers, and often made less money than their illegal counterparts, they returned to Mexico only to find that their own government defrauded them. Ten percent of every paycheck was automatically deducted and put into a pension account that was handled by the Mexican government. When the time came to collect that pension, the Mexican government simply ignored them. Now there are thousands of Braceros across the country that have organized to demand their pensions. Judging by the looks of the group at the meeting, hopefully it will be resolved soon. Most Braceros are well into their seventies, and have endured a lifetime of brutal manual labor.
The next day we met with a group of sex workers in the nearby town of Apizaco. The sex workers had recently joined CNUC, after a long and heated debate among the CNUC members as to whether or not they should align themselves with prostitutes. Prostitution is legal in Mexico, but that does little to protect sex workers from police repression. The sex workers told us of their fight to retain dignity, their recent meeting with Subcomandante Marcos during the Other Campaign, and laughed outloud when one of the women of our group said that they didn't charge money for sex.
On the second to last day we went to the city of Tlaxcala, the state capitol. We broke up into small groups wandering the city and talking with random people. Our designated meeting place was the central plaza at noon. A friend and I were walking up to the plaza when we noticed a noisy procession coming down the street, complete with a beat up old truck with a loud speaker in the bed. As it got closer, we heard the popular chants of “Zapata vive, la lucha sigue!” (Zapata lives, the struggle continues) and “El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido!” (the people united will never be defeated). It took some time of walking around and listening to the speeches to realize that it was a protest against the incarcelation of an environmental activist. It seems the state had had a plan to privatize a public lake that had strong significance to the local people, and had arrested on frivolous charges the man who had started a group challenging the action. It took us some more time to realize that we, as very noticeable gringos (we are both about six foot six), were in the middle of a very charged protest, and that probably wasn’t a good thing for us. We walked across the street and found Tom, the professor, nervously walking around trying to find the group and direct them down the street to the van. It made him no less nervous to be their with his wife, who he described as “one of the first people they would throw in jail if they decided to start locking up Zapatista sympathizers again.” When we got back to the van, several students confirmed that there had been a government agent diligently photographing our group. Tom himself was photographed at least twice. Without talking about the day, he drove eighty all the way back to Toluca.