Zacatecas, Mexican Morning, Chinese Restaurant, Letter from Amy

A Trip to Zacatecas
We had been to Zacatecas before for short trips but never had the feeling that we really got to know the place. It’s often said that the next time you come to visit Zacatecas you should stay longer. It was a first time visit for Phil and Jan Contreras, but for Carole and me, we decided to return to see more of this fabled town. Zacatecas, which is the capital of the state by the same name, is 195 miles north of Guanajuato. Like Guanajuato the discovery of silver and gold was her beginning. We drove north through the City of Aguascalientes, which looked sparkling clean and had a number of modern industrial plants including a Nissan auto assembly plant that appeared larger than the General Motors plant near Guanajuato. On entering Zacatecas we passed a plant that we mistook for the Kahlua factory, which produces the famous coffee flavored liqueur. The Kahlua factory is somewhere in Zacatecas, and although we had planned on visiting it on our return trip we never found it.

I have since done some research on Kahlua and found a list of recipes you can make from this liquor. One site on the internet offered 737 recipes for this sweet coffee flavored drink. Some of the names of these concoctions are wildly colorful but cannot be printed in a family blog. One that can is a drink called “After Eighteen” and consists of:

2 ounces of Kahlua
2 ounces of White Crème de Menthe
Fill glass with chocolate milk
(This drink sounds like it should be named “Under eighteen,” or maybe, “Five to Nine Crowd.”)

“Baby Eskimo”
2 ounces Kahlua
8 Ounces Milk
2 scoops of Ice-cream
Leave ice-cream out for about 10 minutes. Add ingredients in order, stir with a chopstick Consume immediately and often. Nice and light, great for following a heavy meal. (If you are going to make this using a chopstick, I think they should rename it “Japanese Baby Eskimo.”)

Zacatecas, like Aquascalientes is spick and span clean, free of trash and litter. The city has a large crew of women dressed in orange tunics who hand sweep the streets. The cleaners are called hormigas, which in Spanish means ants. They are all over the place, like, well, ants.

Zacatecas has some first class museums. The Coronel Art Museum and the Coronel Mask Museum are two of these. Extensive museum collections were given to the city by the two Coronel brothers and are described in a previous newsletter. On this trip we went to the Museo del Pueblo, the City Museum, which emphasizes the history of the local indigenous people. The Indians who lived in the area and extending all the way to the Pacific coast, where the Huichol Indians still live, practice their shamanic rituals using peyote, a hallucinogenic cactus. The shamans are the ones who conduct the peyote sessions, and it is said that one fourth of the adult males in the Huichol tribe are shamans. That’s quite an endorsement for peyote, don’t you think? The museum displayed all sorts of masks, bowls, and other items covered with tiny colored beads showing peyote buds and other magical objects. We’ve been told that the masks and other brightly decorated items are made while the maker is using the peyote so you can imagine the fantastic designs resulting.

One of the icons displayed in tourist brochures featuring Zacatecas, is a cable car that spans the center of town and traverses Zacatecas from one high hill to another. We didn’t use this example of modern Swiss technology on this trip even though it is probably quite safe except for the tendency of the operators to overload the cab. I suppose you can’t have everything.


We did go to one of these hills, called La Buffa, that is the site of a former monastery part of which has been made into a museum dedicated to the great battle of Zacatecas where Pancho Villa defeated the government forces. I had recently completed reading a biography on Pancho Villa that was just short of one thousand pages long. In as much as I had read the book, Carole or Jan asked if I would mind explaining Pancho Villa. Needless to say, Francisco Villa was a complex and interesting man. As a small boy, I remembered a movie about him starring Wallace Beery, where I recall Villa depicted as a fat, slovenly and sometimes cruel but at times a beguiling leader. Wallace Beery was fat and slovenly looking in the movie but from pictures in the book I read Villa was a fairly trim and neat looking general. One thing that caught my attention from the biography was that Villa, whose army made great use of trains, included hospital cars to take care of his wounded soldiers, something that even the government forces didn’t provide. In the book, it mentioned when the Wallace Beery movie was shown in Austria at a time when that country was under some type of suppressive rule that at the end of the movie the audience stood up and cheered for Villa. The fact that he was able to elude U.S. General Black Jack Pershing in an American incursion into Mexico to capture the “bandit,” made him a hero to many Mexicans, probably like Osama Ben Laden is regarded by many from the middle east.

The museum located in what was the most strategic point of the battle is interesting and includes dioramas showing the disbursement of army troops from both sides. Next to three large equestrian statues showing Villa and his two top generals we encountered an enterprising Mexican who provided “props” so that you can have your picture taken as revolutionaries.

General Felipe Contreras on Right, Capítan Carlos Montemayor on Left, and Two Soldadas from the Taliban in Center

Oh What a Beautiful Morning!

There is something glorious about the Mexican morning here in the highlands of central Mexico. As many years as we have lived here, I continue to enjoy these special minutes of awakening and thinking, “Ah, another perfect day.” My side of the bed faces a set of sliding glass doors that open on to a small balcony overlooking a small patio. The patio is enclosed on three sides by the walls of our house and contains potted flowers and plants. On awakening, my first view is our patio backdropped by the early morning blue sky, that distinctive blue of a desert climate. The air is cool and crisp and even in the warm season, April and May, we sleep under a light down comforter. Carole generally gets up before I do, and even if I am awake, I like to luxuriate under the com-forter. We live a pretty simple life here, and one of our little pleasures is to make freshly ground coffee, blended coffee beans from Chiapas or Veracruz with some decaffeinated beans from America, and just a touch of hazelnut. The rich aroma of this fresh coffee wafting through our house first thing in the morning is something not to die for, but to live for. The Mexicans have a wonderful song, Las Mañanitas, always sung at birthday parties. It’s a prettier song than our “Happy Birthday.” The opening line of this song is: Estas son las Mañanitas que cantaban el Rey David…which, I think, translates as, “These are the mornings which King David sang about…” Next time you wake up to a perfectly gorgeous morning, try singing that phrase. If it is good enough for King David, it’s probably good enough for you and me.

Chinese Restaurant Arrives in Guanajuato
Somewhere I once read that in the world of gastronomy there are considered to be three great and distinctive cuisines in the world: French, Chinese and Mexican. I think it was Julia Childs who said that in Vietnam the great cuisine of France joined the foods of China to produce a new, distinctive, epicurean delight: Vietnamese cooking. Sort of along these lines, it was my hope that when the great cuisines of China were joined with the best of Mexican cooking that something truly distinctive, original, and never-seen-before would stem forth.
So, anxiously, I invited our friend Jan Contreras to join Carole and me to the first real Chinese restaurant in Guanajuato so that we could witness this blending of Chinese cooking with the cuisine of Meso-America. Let me tell you folks, it didn’t quite make it.

El Dragon, which sounds better when it is said in Spanish, El Drahgon, is a little hole in the wall across from the plaza that contains the bronze statues of Don Quixote and his sidekick, Sancho Panza. The restaurant unfortunately is housed in a building that lacks any windows whatsoever. To compensate for this omission, the front door to this dark little establishment is left wide open. With two large fans, one pointing into the restaurant and the other out of the restaurant like two ships passing at night, the place was ventilated. By entering the restaurant sideways one can avoid being caught in the blades of the two opposing fans. Should this have given us a clue as to what we were in for?

Carole and I ordered the special meal for two, at $150 pesos that had everything, basically: shrimp, chicken, beef, and pork. I would tell you what the actual dishes were except it was a Spanish rendering of various Chinese entries. Jan had Mandarin Chicken, a battered deep fried chicken. All the batter-fried dishes were soggy, but the fried rice that included little morsels of shrimp, beef, chicken, and pork, was excellent.

Back in Madison our friends Jenny Lin and John Pie who co-own and run the Yen Ching Restaurant would be dismayed at what we encountered. Somehow the blending of Chinese and Mexican cuisines as produced by El Dragon have not emerged into the Chin-Mex comida we were hoping for.

Letter from Amy
Received this letter from Amy the daughter of old family friends Jim and Betty Peacock, of Reston, Virginia. Now if you are not a Montemayor family member or an old family friend that knew my brother George, you may not want to read this next part because it has nothing to do with living in Mexico.


Dear Charlie,

Enclosed you will find a photo that was a collaboration between my Dad, Chris and myself. Dad found the picture and came up with the idea, Chris did the PhotoShop work and I got it framed.

We hope that you like it. It is a bit of a larger picture taken when you guys were all in a chorus together (Dad is a couple of rows behind you). How handsome you both were! I am sending it along with a request. I was hoping that you could tell me a bit about George. I have memories of a very sweet man who was always sweet to me, and who I didn’t know well enough before he died. My Dad has such happy memories of you guys growing up and the love and respect he has for both of you is evident every time he talks about you.

If you are inclined, and have the time, I’d love to know more about George. I hope this isn’t a difficult or inappropriate request. I guess hitting my 40’s has me wondering about the past a bit. We have a picture of George on the mantle and Henry asked me the other day who he was. I just wanted to give him a better answer.

I hope that this finds you all happy and healthy. I get to read your newsletters every once in a while…it sounds like you’re having lots of fun.

Take care and best wishes for the New Year.

Amy


Dear Amy,
I am really sorry I have not responded sooner to your interesting gift. The picture of George and me that is now hanging in my estudio brings a smile whenever I look at it.

Growing up in Janesville, Wisconsin was good. We all had a happy childhood. George was next older to me by two years and I looked up to him as my big brother. He and I would go downtown and he would place his thumb and big finger around the back of my neck and would steer me. If we came to a corner he would apply pressure to the left or the right so that I would make the correct turn. People would think, isn’t that nice, George and his little pal brother going into town. Of course I resented the close direction but I knew that he was right in his pointing me as to which way to go.

I have told my wife, Carole, that as kids we never fought in our family. Years ago, while my Mother was still living Carole checked this out by asking her if this were true. My Mother responded that this was not true, that we had our quarrels. The interesting thing is that even though I remember a lot about my childhood I don’t recall any of these incidences. We were six kids in our family and the older children took care of the younger ones.

George excelled in whatever he tried. He would make beautiful model airplanes. These are not the plastic models that snap together with a little glue these days. The planes he made were of balsa wood with ailerons and struts you cut out of balsa wood with a razor blade and with tissue paper that you carefully covered the fuselage and wings with and then sprayed with a fine mist of water from an atomizer that would cause the paper to tighten up and make a smooth skin. I tried making planes like his but I can remember the wings warping up when I sprayed the water.

George was a close friend of your Dad. He and some other guys his age did things that didn’t include me. They called George, “Dagger”. Why Dagger? Well, they said it was because he was so sharp. I remember one day, your Dad and some other friends were at our house and they were teasing me, “Come on Charlie, tell us your brother’s middle name.” Apparently, George would never reveal to anyone his middle name. What a chance this was for me to get back at my brother. I said his middle name was Humbert, and I guess I was lucky to remain alive.

George played the trumpet and with some high school friends formed a Dixieland band. I can remember him practicing “The Jazz Me Blues” over and over again for his band. I don’t know if he was good or if it was simply my awe at anything that George did but I thought he was terrific. George excelled in school and actually graduated first in his class. But it seems to me that this is when he started to become the recipient of some degrees of bad luck. This was 1944 and because he was expected to enter military service and the scholarship to the University would go unused if it went to him, they declared a girl who was actually second in scholastic ranking to be the valedictorian, an early example of reverse gender discrimination. He never said anything about it but I learned of it later from my sister.

Before graduating from high school George was accepted in the Naval Reserve Officers Training Program. There were two hitches however in his getting in. Although five of the six children in our family were born in the United States, my brother George was born in Mexico while my parents were visiting in that country. I suspect they were trying to see about property they owned or may have lost in the revolution. The other hitch is that he had not been circumcised. My father enlisted the help of the most important people in town to gain his citizenship in a hurry and support his entry into Naval ROTC. With appeals to our US Senator, the matter was taken care of. As for the other matter, George had to take care of this himself and he ended up taking a lot of schoolboy kidding. When the war ended the navy decided it didn’t need more naval officers and so it closed down the program and sent the naval cadets to sea duty with the regular navy. So that was a piece of bad luck but it was followed by his being discharged from the navy only a few weeks before completing a full year which later turned out to be a bit of more bad luck. Some think that he may have been one of those hapless sailors who were made to witness the hydrogen bomb explosions in the Pacific. I know he never talked about it but his later leukemia causes one to wonder. George entered the University of Wisconsin and completed a degree in mechanical engineering with top grades.

He then went on to law school and became editor of the Law Review and was made a member of Coif that is the honorary law society. About the time of his graduation George was approached by a Vice President of the University who was as I understand it, an employee or consultant to the CIA. He asked George to go to work for the Central Intelligence Agency. I believe this was a time when it was said the CIA recruited the best and the brightest. A while after he became employed in the CIA I received a stern letter from my brother for an indiscretion on my part. I had mentioned to a dorm mate at the University that my brother was in the CIA. My friend who dearly wanted to enter the CIA drove to Washington and looked up my brother to seek information on how he could get hired. The letter from George said that I had no business telling anybody about his employment, that I shouldn’t even know about it, and that there was no need to respond or offer any explanations, just don’t let it happen again. I could feel the fingers on my neck again. I don’t know what he did for the CIA but keeping secrets would have been down his alley.

I may have the chronology a little bit mixed up but I think this was the time in his career when the Korean war broke out and Uncle Sam said, too bad George, but you are lacking a few weeks of a year’s military duty so back into the service you go. George was commissioned an officer in the Air Force Judge Advocate General’s Office and sent to Korea. He defended military criminals some of them pretty despicable persons but I don’t think his heart was in it. When he returned he jokingly showed me his certification to practice before the Korean Supreme Court.

When he got out of the service he went to work for the Parker Pen Company as a patent attorney. He once laughingly told me that he probably was the world’s greatest authority on patent law regarding writing instruments.

You asked me to tell you a bit about George and I have gone on at some length and haven’t even covered his marriage to Libby and the birth of his three daughters, Jane, Muffy, and Sara Sue. There were some good years there, but this later part is a bit difficult for me even now. In September 1968 I received a call from his wife Libby to come to the University Hospital in Madison, that George was in the hospital. I left work and wanted to know what’s up? George told me he had leukemia and that there was some hope that he could go into remission with the treatment they were giving him. I have never cared for the world of hospitals, illness, disease, and treatments, and all that goes with that milieu, finding them morbid. I didn’t even know what the word remission meant. George said, look I’m OK, but the one thing I can’t stand is sympathy. It is all quite foggy to me but I remember he visited our house and played with our Jennifer who was a baby. Illness was not mentioned and our visit was quite pleasant. He lived for a few weeks longer and died October 9, 1968.
I believe my brother had a happy life. He was one of the most intelligent persons I have known and was re-garded by both men and women as a real gentleman.

Thanks to you Chris, and your Dad for the picture, copying it from the original and taking the time to frame it.

Did you say you were forty? I remember you as a little girl.

Charlie

Dinosaurs, "It's The Culture", Poverty

The Dinosaurs of Acambaro
In the last issue of Letter from Mexico I told a tall tail about discovering a group of monks typing stories of pathos and great feeling on their computers in a remote area not far from Guanajuato. This story was meant to be a joke and I didn’t expect that anyone would actually believe it but apparently some people were taken in by this tall story and believed it was true. I mention this now because the article you are about to read is even more incredible, but unlike the story of the monks, is really true.

In the southeast corner of the state, about 95 miles from Guanajuato, is the city of Acambaro. I would guess it has a population of perhaps 30,000 inhabitants. It’s a neat town on a flat site with not a lot to distinguish it except for something that is almost too incredible to publish in a reliable journal such as Letter from Mexico. In 1945 a German man living in Acambaro, who had an interest in archeology, found an Indian who brought him some clay figurines. The figurines were of various animals and people but among them were a number of clay representations that looked like dinosaurs. The Indian had dug these out of the ground.

I learned of this on the web and I pass on the name of the site so you can see for yourself: it’s worth looking at.
http://www.bible.ca/tracks/tracks-acambaro.htm

Here is an excerpt from this site:
In 1945, Waldemar Julsrud, a German immigrant and knowledgeable archeologist, discovered clay figurines buried at the foot of El Toro Mountain on the outskirts of Acambaro, Guanajuato, Mexico. Eventually over 33,000 ceramic figurines were found near El Toro as well as Chivo Mountain on the other side of town. Similar artifacts found in the area are identified with the Preclassical Chupicuaro Culture (800 BC to 200 AD).

The authenticity of Julsrud’s find was challenged because the huge collection included dinosaurs. Many archeologists believe dinosaurs have been extinct for the past 65 million years and man’s knowledge of them has been limited to the past 200 years. If this is true, man could not possibly have seen and modeled them 2,500 years ago.

During the years 1945 to 1946,Carlos Perea was Director of Archeology, Acambaro zone, for the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. In a recorded interview he described Julsrud’s excavations as unauthorized, as were many similar discoveries made by local farmers, but he had no doubt that the finds were authentic. He acknowledged that he examined the figurines, including dinosaurs, from many different sites. He was present when official excavations were conducted by the National Museum and the American Museum of Natural History. They found many figurines, including dinosaurs, which he described in detail.

In 1954 the Mexican government sent four wellknown archeologists to investigate. A different but nearby site was selected and a meticulous excavation was begun. Six feet down they found numerous examples of similar figurines and concluded that the Julsrud find was authentic. However, three weeks later their report declared the collection to be a fraud because of the fantastic representation of man and dinosaur together.

In 1955 Charles Hapgood, respected Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Hampshire, conducted an elaborate investigation including extensive radiometric dating. Erle Stanley Gardner, former District Attorney of the city of Los Angeles, California and the creator of Perry Mason accompanied him. They falsified the claim that Julsrud manufactured the figurines, by excavating under the house of the Chief of Police, which was built 25 years before Julsrud arrived in Mexico. Fortythree more examples of the same type were found. Isotopes Incorporated of New Jersey performed three radio-carbon tests resulting in dates of 1640 BC, 4530 BC and 1110 BC. Eighteen samples were subjected to thermo luminescent testing by the University of Pennsylvania, all of which gave dates of approximately 2500 BC. These results were subse-quently withdrawn when it was learned that some of the samples were from dinosaurs.

Obviously, this find was great news for creationists. All of the pictures of the figurines have “bible” included and the site was published by what I believe is a creationist group. The idea that dinosaurs and humans coexisted offers “proof,” they believe, that all were created at the same time. Of course, that leaves the question of how fossil records could show that the dinosaurs existed 65 million years ago and that humans existed only thousands of years ago?

I couldn’t get these dinosaur figures out of my mind. With the town of Acambaro less than 100 miles away, we could go and see for ourselves if this was some kind of hoax. I spoke with some friends of ours and everyone said let’s go. Jim and June Jackson, and Phil Contreras, plus Carole and I loaded into Jim’s car and off we went. I had also found on the Internet that the City of Acambaro hosted an anthropology museum, although they didn’t mention anything about dinosaurs.

Acambaro is famous for the special bread they bake there, and all up and down the main street of the town, we saw bakeries. We later bought some of these round loaves of this bread that was almost cake-like in texture and I think is especially delicious when eaten with a hot cup of Mexican chocolate that is a favorite of mine. We located the museum, which turned out to be in a handsome old colonial building, with very well executed exhibits, but no sign of dinosaur figurines. We asked the curator, “Say, what about those dinosaurs?” or words to that effect. She answered that these were very controversial and that yes, the Acambaro area was the site of the finding of these figurines but that the museum didn’t recognize them. She added that a local professor was putting together a separate museum to display these figures. We were disappointed that we could not see the dinosaurs but at least we received confirmation that the figurines existed.

We then found a very large and nice restaurant on the edge of town and had a fine meal. The manager came over to chat with us and I asked, “Say, what about those dinosaurs?” or words to that effect. He said yes, there was going to be a separate museum to display the dinosaur figurines of Acambaro. He gave us the name and telephone number of the director, who was not in when we called. It was explained that the figurines were on tour in Europe.

We all agreed that we want to return to see these incredible figurines. Stay tuned for more on this.


It’s the Culture
Back in the days when I was City Planner in Green Bay, Wisconsin they used to jibe us with, “What’s the difference between Green Bay and yogurt?” Answer: “Yogurt has culture.” Well, according to anthropologists, everyone and every place has some kind of culture. I don’t have a quarrel with this but I don’t think that tagging every behavior as being, “It’s because of the culture,” is right. All too often, when someone uses the expression, “It’s the culture,” it is a put-down made by a person who just knows that his or her culture is superior and that the people being described have an inferior culture.

My point is that ascribing certain behavior as being a cultural trait and the implied criticism, is far too easy. To me, using that term is useless and is like saying, “That’s the way it is.” If you are going to tag some behavior to culture, I want to see what evidence there is that establishes this as a fact. After all, if you are going to accuse a city, a region, a whole country, or the whole Third World of some cultural defect, you ought to offer some proof that is a little more than an anecdote.

Here in Mexico, among those that come to this country, much is made of cultural differences, and of course it is a different culture from what we have in America. That’s part of what makes living here interesting. But let’s leave it at that. It’s just different and probably not all that fixed, or why would Dominoes Pizza, rock and roll, boys wearing their hats backward, so quickly and easily become popular here?

A few months ago I finally got fed up with the conditions of the bathrooms in the Comercíal Méxicana, Guanajuato’s only supermarket. Comercíal Méxicana is part of a large corporation that owns 160 stores and forty restaurants throughout Mexico and does close to US $1 billion in sales each year. They have the latest technology with fiber optic links that connect each cash register/computer in each store with the home office in Mexico City. I have visited their store in nearby Irapuato and the restrooms are modern, the urinals flush in response to a photoelectric cell, and the place is immaculate. There is a chart on the wall that the cleaning people must sign each hour indicating that they cleaned all aspects of these facilities. The johns in the Guanajuato store, on the other hand, are dreadful. Some of them were without toilet seats, often no paper, and not all of the urinals flushed, so you can imagine what it was like. By my reckoning, the Guanajuato store has to be a very profitable operation inasmuch as there is no competing supermarket in town. The store is always crowded.

Being disgusted with the condition of the toilets, one day I spoke with one of the assistant managers about this problem with their bathrooms. He assured me that they had a program and that they would soon be remodeling the bathrooms. Months went by and nothing happened. At the store checkouts, the clerks always politely ask you if you found everything you were looking for and if you can’t find something they give you a form to fill out so that you can note any item you didn’t find. For several weeks I would write in that I hadn’t found any clean bathrooms. Weeks went by and nothing happened. I was so disgusted that getting the Comercíal to fix up its bathrooms became my cause. One day I asked to see the manager, the number one guy. He was a neat looking, well dressed man, wearing those fashionable little wire rim glasses you see these days. I told him in the best Spanish that I could muster that the bathrooms in his store were very dirty, really a disgrace, and that the fixtures didn’t work and there was no paper. I went on to tell him that the newly elected mayor of Guanajuato had initiated an intensive program to keep the streets of Guanajuato free of litter and dirt, and that the mayor had personally started the campaign by manning a broom and a shovel with his top municipal staff joining him. Additional street sweepers were hired; hundreds of new trash containers were deployed. They even included in the cleanup some of the streets outside the central historic zone. I urged the manager to do something like that in his store. I was amazed that the manager said he really couldn’t do anything, that people came in off the street, used the toilets, and stole the paper. I was dumbfounded when he said it’s part of the culture of Guanajuato. I said that the facilities in the Comercíal Méxicana in Irapuato, just forty miles away, were in perfect condition and spotless. He said, “Well, they have a different culture there. Here, we have a lot of University students and street people who come in to use the facilities, but don’t buy anything.” This attitude has convinced me that blaming it on the culture just doesn’t wash. This is an excuse and if there is any cultural reason for these dirty bathrooms, it is a culture of management that is to blame.

In writing this little piece I decided to look up Comercíal Méxicana on the Internet. That’s where I got the figures on their sales volume. One of the sites I found provided a form for filing suggestions and complaints to headquarters. Here is a translation of what I sent:

Sr. Presidente,
I am an American living in Guanajuato. I shop a lot in your store. The bathrooms in your store in Guanajuato are filthy-dirty. It is a disgrace that there is a store like this in lovely Guanajuato. There is no toilet paper, the fixtures are broken and don’t work. I spoke with your store manager and he said that it was the culture of Guanajuato. I spoke later to some officials from your headquarters that were visiting and inspecting the store and they assured me that they were going to have the situation corrected but nothing has happened. Por favor, attende a este problema pronto.

Then I sent the message to the home office in Mexico City. Thirty minutes later, and still on the Internet, my telephone rang and a man speaking very, very polite Spanish started to talk to me, a little fast, so I found it difficult to understand him. He gave me his name and phone number; it was the local store manager. I think what he was telling me is that they were going to fix the toilets pronto.

Somewhat surprising to me, and to my dismay, an article appeared in the local newspaper a week later. The article said that there had been a complaint about the toilets in the Commercial Mexicana. An agent from the health department and a photographer from the newspaper went to inspect the bathrooms. The photograph showed four closed stalls with four pairs of feet and dropped trousers, visible. It went on to say that the bathroom was not in a dirty condition but they couldn’t actually check the toilet stalls because they were all occupied. As you can see we get our laughs in ways you can’t imagine.

I have waited some months for the toilets to get refurbished and one day I saw that they had closed the bathrooms for repairs. Later I saw that they had installed shiny new floors. No progress on the fixtures yet, but I’ll wait to see if we changed some culture around here.

A Possible Solution to Poverty in Mexico and the Third World

In previous articles I have mentioned the work that Phil and Jan Contreras are doing to help the people of Nueve Valle de Moreno. See my web site: http://www.geocities.com/chasm1928/moreno1/morenohomepage.html
The town is only 16 miles away as the crow flies from where we live, but takes two hours to reach by car. While accompanying him on these visits to the village, Phil loads me up with data about poverty in Mexico. Sixty percent of the people in the country live in poverty, Phil tells me. Perhaps because I live in the City of Guanajuato, I see poverty but I don’t see anything that looks like 60 %. I got curious about this figure and looked up the data in a United Nations Report on Human Devel-opment. Mexico shows 14.9% of the population with an income of $1 per day and that 34% of the population is below the national poverty line. This might not be 60% but is still pitifully high. Phil says that Nueve Valle de Moreno, which is an isolated town whose young men have all left, mostly to work in the United States, and is typical of many such places, is a dying town and that in twenty years it will be a ghost town. If this is true, it strikes me that this is a double tragedy, first because of the human dimensions, but in addition, because the town possesses a considerable stock of housing, paved streets. cobblestone, but paved nevertheless, a public water supply, a sewer collection system, and three public schools, as well as a fine church. With housing so short in a developing country such as Mexico, it seems a terrible waste that these assets should be abandoned if that is their fate.

To me, the greatest problem facing the world is the disparity of incomes, not just in Mexico, but everywhere. Figures from the UN report I mentioned show a striking disparity. The real GDP per capita of the poorest 20% of the people in Mexico is $1,437 per year and of the richest 20%, is $19,383. The rich seem to get richer and the poor get poorer. I have often wondered why capitalism, which is so effective as an economic system in the US, doesn’t seem to be able to do very much good for the poor in other countries. I wondered about this until I came across a book, which is one of the best things I have ever read. The book is The Mystery of Capitalism, subtitled, Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West, and Fails Eve-rywhere Else. Written by Hernando de Soto, a Peruvian economist, the book has been proclaimed a gem by many economic writers throughout the world. The Economist magazine says that de Soto’s think tank in Peru is the second most important think tank in the world. Everyone from Margaret Thatcher to Bill Bradley has raved about this little volume. De Soto has consulted with Vicente Fox, Vladimir Putin, and national leaders in many countries.

De Soto started out by calculating the value of the real estate holdings of the poor in the countries of the Third World. The little houses and tiny stores owned by the poor may each have a small worth, but taken all together represent an enormous value. De Soto estimates that throughout the Third World, there is a total of 9.3 trillion dollars in these assets held by the poor, but not legally owned. This is nearly as much as the total value of all the companies listed on the main stock exchanges of the world’s twenty most developed countries. De Soto’s research team went neighborhood-to-neighborhood, and door-to-door, in cities throughout the world to gather “missing information.” Some of the data is astounding. In Peru, 53 percent of the city dwellers and 81 percent of the people living in the country, live in extralegal dwellings. But these people living “outside of the law” are not just doing nothing. They are scrambling with entrepreneurial creativity to put together shantytowns and their own extralegal market exchanges. In fact, the poor have created wealth on a vast scale, assets that far exceed the holdings of government, the local stock exchanges, and foreign direct investment; they are many times greater than all the aid from advanced nations and all the loans extended by the World Bank. The trouble is that all this value is “dead capital”; it cannot be put to work. The reason it is “dead capital” is that the proof of ownership is not properly documented. No bank will lend money on equity with such a hazy ownership. In the First World, countries like the US, Canada, western Europe, and Japan, ownership in property is generally certain. De Soto points out that this was not always the case. Every developed nation in the world at one time or other went through the transformation from informal, extralegal ownership to a formal, unified legal property system, but in the West we’ve forgotten that creating that system is what allowed people to leverage property into wealth. At one time the United States was like a Third World country with a chaotic property ownership system. Legalizing billions in property in the developing world is a daunting task. The biggest precedent for this is the US of a century ago, where homesteading pioneers moved so fast that Congress was reduced to ratifying claims. In 1946, the Japanese in 10,100 different hamlets organized legalized ownership of the land, and reported this information to the next level up, which recorded it and reported it to the next level, and so forth. De Soto points up the institutional changes that need to be made in the Third World and former communist countries, to unleash this capital and let poor people partake in capi-talism.

Of course, that old question of culture crops up. We in the First World start talking about the Protestant work ethic, blah, blah, blah. My own observation is that people here in Mexico are at least as hard working as Americans, or even more so, oftentimes holding down several jobs, and working for low wages. De Soto shows how cultural reasons cited why the Third World can’t hack it are generally anecdotal and offers evidence that culture is not a problem.

In order to effect the kind of changes to include the poor into this capitalistic system, the government is going to have to change laws and recognize the informal ownerships that have developed here. I recall when I was county planner in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, that within the county was a village called St. Nazianz. It was unusual because it had started out as a religious colony. I don’t remember the name of the Brothers who still had a monastery there but I do recall that within the village, property was held in common and while there were fences that demarked and separated the individual houses and their lots, the individual properties were not recorded. The opportunity came up to get a Federal grant to help pay for a sewer and water system, with the property owners paying for the balance based on their front footage. Under Wisconsin law, and I suppose other states have similar arrangements, there is a provision for what is called a surveyors plat. It has occurred to me that Mexico needs something like this. In the case of St. Nazianz, the surveyor did his best to determine who occupied which land, he then staked the parcels and recorded the ownership. I’m sure there were arguments, but the occupants ended up with something legal, recognized by the State. That made possible sewer and water service and the ability to sell the property because the buyer could obtain a mortgage. I’m not sure, but I believe that the surveyor had the authority to prepare the plat as he saw fit, with the condition that a majority of the new owners approved his work.

The work that Phil and Jan are doing keeps hope up and makes life a little better for places like Valle de Moreno. But it is going to take a concerted effort of government at all levels to foster making all these little properties of the poor people fungible. Fungible. I love that word.