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