Debbie Nathan
Under the Volcano
Migrant child's drawing of her illegal crossing
I just made another work trip to Mexico, starting with the bracing metropolitan capital then heading to aching little villages in the South. The US State Department has a travel advisory out for Mexico, mainly because of drug-trafficking related violence on the border. But Americans are avoiding the interior as well. One still sees German, French and English tourists, but hardly any gringos. Apparently, if they’re not afraid of getting shot, they’re afraid of spending money. Or being knocked off balance by frantic thoughts and slow tears.
Abandoned bedroom, southern Mexico, of a boy who immigrated North
The Mexican term for “recession,” “depression,” or whatever the hell we dare call it, is “La Crisis.” It’s affecting everyone. The great taxi driver listening- and talking-post informed me that in the popular neighborhoods, little grocery and clothing stores are closing for lack of clientele. “They used to buy three rolls of toilet paper, now they buy one … to last the same amount of time.” And the taxistas themselves — this one is a former accountant, that one a philosophy prof who lost his job. They cluck and sigh and hunch the steering wheel like passive aggressive boyfriends. I kept waiting for road rage.
Paqueteria in Mexico taking orders for Upstate New York
The paqueterías are really suffering. These are the mom-and-pop hustles where a guy with a green card and an old van shleps all over some place up North, let’s say the Bronx, picking up gifts of clothing and electronics and $20 bills, driving them all down once a month for delivery to mothers and wives and sisters and children — then trucking the villagers’ gifts in reverse.
I watched one night late while a paquetero’s wife jammed innumerable plastic bags into her husband’s van. The two would be leaving at 5 a.m., importing their community’s shipment of love to the North: roasted pumpkin seeds, seasonal de-winged and fried grasshoppers, cow and goat cheese, penicillin, peanuts in their shells, homemade meat jerky, festive bread hatched with red icing and crucifixes, Viagra. 
He and she would drive for three days, eating at KFC, snoozing at rest stops, conversing bitterly and easily according to their long years of matrimony, piling on sweaters and socks past the Carolinas as the air grows bitter with English-language December. “There are paqueterias everywhere in the US,” she said. ” We are all competing, but lately we’ve lost more than half our business.” The people are leaving, she said: going home to Mexico, which will have nothing for them when they get back: no jobs, no food, no hope. Or the people are staying but moving around. “Where to?” I asked, and her leaden specificity amazed me. “Ohio. Philadelphia. Passaic.” “Passaic??” “Yes. They say there’s a meat factory there.”
She left before I had a chance to spirit her to an Internet cafe so she could watch this video (click here). Other Mexicans who saw it fell down laughing, slapping their knees.
Every day fat dailies in Mexico City, and skeletal ones in the provinces, talked of Obama, the American stock market, a huge program of public works, Hugo Chavez. December 12 approached and for days before, the villages unleashed explosions louder than narco attacks: medieval gunpower volleys in high honor of the Virgin of Guadalupe. 
Women cooked cinnamon-laced gruels, and they wrapped tamales to feed those who would march in the daily romerias. Makeshift parades of the old, young, halt, lame, able-bodied, female and whatever males were left, wound down main street, their votive candles glowing in the falling night like babies’ eyes. Grandfathers in wheelchairs played adagios on battered drums and tubas. 
The Mexicans marched sacredly, stolidly. At the self same hour up past the Carolinas, their kin busted noisy, profane ass in America’s agrobusiness fields, commercial kitchens, chicken factories, MacMansions and — as some newsclips got it slightly and delightfully wrong — the “Republic of Doors and Windows.” Back south, I watched the moneyless, Dark-Age processions and loved and hated them, as deeply as I love and hate the Enlightenment cash rituals and the bloody stigmata of my republic’s body politic.
