MEXICO CITY

Una Grande Cuidad Y Una Cuidad Grande

By Kent Terry

The phase “una cuidad grande and una grande cuidad,” is a play-on-words that I used in the Spanish class I took this summer in preparation for my trip and it means, “Mexico City, a large city and a great city.”

Learning the Spanish language, at least as best I could, was one of the reasons that my trip to Mexico City at the end of September was a life-changing experience. Now this phrase is definitely over used, but you can’t learn a language without in part being affected by that culture. And looking at Mexican-American relations from inside-out instead of from the outside-in is a whole different experience. For example, I will never use the term illegial alien again. The undocumented immigrants are not aliens; aliens come from another planet. The Mexican people are Americans, just like Canadians and just like us. Immigration, the assimilation of language, NAFTA and the issue of the drug war are all issues where my positions have changed, sometimes 180 degrees, as a result of my trip.

I have been active in the Northern Illinois Synod World Hunger program for over 10 years. I am very proud of the hunger programs supported by the Lutheran Church and have attended hunger gatherings in such diverse locations as Denver, Baltimore, Iowa, Ohio and Winnepig Canada. Seeing pictures and hearing speeches however is far different than actually walking the streets of a third-world country, and streets is a term that loosely fits dirt roads that literally bounced our bus from side to side. In the United States, as you move up the mountain you generally move into the “high-rent” district and the nicest homes. In Mexico City, the opposite is true. Mexico City is in a basin surrounded by mountains – which causes part of the pollution problem – and the communities surrounding it become poorer as you go up. It makes sense; these people are walking up the mountain so you want to be as close to the valley as you can be. Each succeeding community tends to be more improvrished and we visited Lomas, a community that haunted me in my dreams for well over a week following my trip.

I struggled with how to describe the poverty in human terms and surprisingly got the answer as I woke up one morning at three o’clock early Sunday morning to go to the bathroom; not an uncommon occurrence for us middle-aged men. In Lomas you would be waking up not to a 60-degree house, but to whatever temperature it is outside and even this far south in Mexico in the winter temperatures at night drop into the high 40s. You would put your feet down, not on carpet, but on a dirt floor and you would need to step over people on the way out. The average number of people per room – not house mind you – is six and one half in Mexico. You would pull aside the plastic, metal, sheet or whatever since most of the homes that I saw in Lomas had only three masoniary walls and go outside to a trench. Probably less than a third of the 30 million people in Mexico City have adequate sanitation which is one of the reasons it is almost impossible not to get sick when you go there, as it did, although luckily after I got back.

When you come back in, do you wash your hands? It is not an easy question: the water barrel on the top of your roof is a precious comodity that you bought with the average 55 pesos a day you make. That’s about three dollars and 50 cents by the way. Now this particular Sunday morning my wife Ann had a turkey in the oven, but Sunday is a tough day in Lomas. You see, more than half of Mexico City residents wake-up in the morning without a job and they have to scramble to make a living. You stop at corner and you will be offered everything from balloons to candy, or have your car window cleaned. People even offer to wait in line for you at the bank. Street vendors are everywhere and selling things that you would ordinarily expect to see only in stores, keys for example. There aren’t as many people out on Sunday, how are those six people in my home going to eat?  Life is tough in Lomas.

For the week in Mexico City, 30 other hunger leaders from all over the United States and the leadership team from the ELCA World Hunger program I stayed at the Lutheran Center in the heart of the city. I told my wife Ann that just once in my life I would like to again be around people of such integrity and faith, people who truly put their time and efforts where there heart was. Our group was more than half pastors and you only had to sit with any one there a short time to learn about wonderful things that they were doing in their home communities to address the issues of hunger, both locally and globally. I met folks for example who had given up high paying business jobs to run a local food panty. These people truly “walked the walk,” and I consider it one of the great honors in my life to be included with them. My airline made sure that I got to experience one of the issues of poverty by losing my luggage somewhere between Chicago, Charlotte and Mexico City. I hope my luggage is having a good trip because I haven’t seen it yet. I kept waiting for it to come, putting off buying new clothes until midweek. Then everyone, and I mean everyone was coming up to me saying how nice I looked to which I responded, “You too can have your clothes noticed if you wear the same thing four days in a row!”

The goal of the program at the Lutheran Center is to immerse you for a week into the culture of Mexico City, both by visits such as the one we made to Lomas, and by listening to outstanding speakers who presented issues that I had previously only looked at from a totally different perspective. A good example is NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. I had always supported this agreement, as have both Democratic and Republican Presidents. “A rising tide lifts all ships,” goes the saying and free trade between Mexico, the US and Canada makes sense. That is until ADM, a stock that I unfortunately have made a ton of money on by the way, dumped cheap grain into Mexico. What is wrong with that? Thousands of campesino farmers couldn’t compete with the low price grain and left their land to go with their families, guess where? Mexico City with the other estimated 30 million people.  Do I still believe in free trade? My answer would be a qualified yes, but any policy that makes a nation less able to feed itself certainly needs to be looked at carefully.

There is another issue that you might not of thought of about importing corn. In Mexico there is a famous saying, “Sin maiz no hay paiz.” Or “Without corn there is no country.” Corn is essential to not only the Mexican meal staple, tortillas but to the economy, and in respect the spirit of the country. Now the traditional Mexican corn is becoming mixed with American corn. A higher yield to be sure, but this comes with a price.

Mexico City is a beautiful city, but right behind the beauty are some improvrished living conditions and incredible pollution. We were lucky both in the temperature we experienced which was mid 70s every day, but also by the frequent rains which usually came at night. This kept the air fairly clean and breathing at the altitude of 7500 feet much easier. We had one two day stretch without rain however and by the second day you could clearly tell that it was becoming harder to breathe and the afternoon haze was clearly visible. During the dry season the city, which lies in a mountain basin with no way to let fresh air in or out, has to be miserable. Air quality is just one of the ecological issues facing Mexico City. Probably less than a third of the residents have adequate sanitation and the city is rapidly running out of water and a good third of the water there is horribly polluted, often by human filth. Perhaps my saddest moment of the trip was looking down at a stream that was absolutely grey with sewage. After coming back, I woke up one morning absolutely soaked with sweat because in my dream every time I came near water it turned to sewage. It was like Moses turning the rivers into blood, but the result would be the same, death. 

The problems of Mexico City have become so big that there seems to be no one in charge actually that has the cities best interest as a whole. There certainly isn’t the funding to keep the city going and to rebuild its crumbling infrastructure. Remember that more than half the residents are working outside of the economy, basically scrambling and the rich know how to get out of paying taxes. This leaves only a beleagured and very limited middle class to foot the bill. We were on the way back to the airport and I was looking at some of the new buildings on the way and said in surprise to our driver, “No estan ocupada!” or in English, they’re empty.  The problems related to our current recession are worldwide.

If I were to try and even tell you a fraction of what I learned and experienced, we would be here all afternoon. The reason that we were in Mexico City was not only to see the problems, but also to see how programs supported by the Lutheran Churches World Hunger program are working.  We took several road trips to see these programs including of course the trip to Lomas where we saw how Amexta helps the Mexican people help themselves and to Cuernavaca where our groups saw a compost center, an organization called A.L.E.M. where adult physically handicapped individuals make specialized wheelchairs and bicycles, a womans health cooperative and an opportunity for some of our members to be involved in the actual making of tortillas, the old fashioned way.

I am just going to touch on two of these. Amextra was fascinating in that they go into the poorest of the poor areas. Our speaker from there said when they first go in the people put their hands out, like “what are you going to give us?”  He said however, we are not like that. We work with the community to find their strengths and then try and build on these. In Lomas we saw how they had provided rabbits to one family, which then went to another and then another and so on. We also heard how they made their own masks for the swine flu pandemic and using these and education, kept the Lomas community from having undue illness. The best idea however, to me at least, was the Solidarity loan. Now the word solidarity means a whole lot more to me than it did before my trip. I will stand beside you as we face problems together. The Solidarity loans by Amextra work like this. You apply for a loan and have five friends apply with you. If you can’t pay, they do; but the payback rate on Solidarity loans is an incredible 98 plus percent and hundreds of small businesses have been started that otherwise never could have been funded. Very cool.

I studied Spanish hard before my trip. After being selected in March I began listening to Spanish tapes on my commute to my job in Kewanee, I borrowed textbooks that I studied on my own and I took a class at IVCC in early summer. This paid incredible dividends for me on my trip as I could usually tell what more stores were selling by the signs outside of them and I could communicate with many people that I otherwise could not have. I usually started my conversations with, “Aprendi espanol for este viaje,” which means, I learned Spanish for this trip, and the Spanish-speaking listeners were more than kind as they worked with me. I never could use the phone however, or drop into a Spanish conversation because they spoke way too fast. For this reason, I give more than a little slack to our Hispanic residents who struggle with English. Usually they have few of the benefits that I did and if we are going to expect them to learn English, we had better provide them classes because I can tell you, it is not that easy to pick up a language, especially past the age of 60.

I told my wife Ann however that I would make one friend that I couldn’t otherwise by learning Spanish and this occurred during my visit to A.L.E.M.  The clients were all dolled up in bright pink shirts for our visit and I was by a young man named Uriel who was cutting metal strips for the steering part of the wheelchair. All in Spanish mind you, I told him about how I used to do this for my father at the Repair and Farm Supply he and his twin brother owned, how I usually messed up anything mechanical and after I cut a piece, how his looked a lot better than mine. We were laughing together and you can see that the young man behind in the picture was major jealous of the fun we were having. Uriel asked later that I take a picture of he and his girlfriend (Alexandra I believe) which of course I was glad to comply with. As my son Michael would say, “Sweet,” or in Spanish, “dulce.”

My time in Mexico City was from Sunday to Saturday and our visit to the Basicila of our Lady of Guadalupe was on Tuesday, but in a way I am saving the best for last, because for me my day here was the best. Mexico is over 90% Catholic and if there is a Lutheran Church there, we never saw it. It is hard to describe how important the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe is to the Mexican people and their faith. One writer noted that to be truly Mexican one must believe in the Virgin of Guadalupe. The only comparison that I could make would be how could we be Lutheran without Luther, but even this pales by comparison. The story is that in 1531 an Indian farmer named Juan Diego was walking around Tepayac hill when an apparation of the Virgin Mary appeared to him and told him to build a church on that very spot. Juan Diego went to the Bishop who of course wouldn’t see a simple farmer so he returned to the hill. This time the Virgin of Guadalupe told him to gather roses, a miracle in itself since this was December and roses weren’t indigienous to the area and go see the Bishop again. Juan Diego did so and this time the Bishop agreed to see him and when Juan Diego opened his cloak the roses fell out and on his breast was the image of the virgin. The first church was built there in 1709 and several others have been built since, including the current beautiful basilica that was completed in 1976 and was visited by Pope Paul. I hope God will forgive me, but I took communion in the basilica because even with my meager Spanish I recognized what was going on. As I wandered the various chapels, the exquisite plaza behind the basilica and especially the wonderful gardens on the hillside behind, the beauty of the place overcame me. Although I wasn’t supposed to leave the plaza, I did walk down to the open air shops adjoining the plaza and bought everything in sight using my newly learned Spanish including a hat, t-shirt, statuette, plaque, necklaces for Ann and my daughter Sara and probably some other things I haven’t even found yet.

Solidarity has a whole new meaning for me now. I have a new understanding of the issues that are faced by the Mexican people. I was so affected by the poverty and pollution there that it was over a week before I could sleep without dreaming about it, often in Spanish. Mexico is right beside us and the United States has more than a vested interest in its welfare. It is a democracy, but a fragile democracy since the people are largely uneducated and the military build-up, as a result of the war against drugs, makes it even more fragile. Keep Mexico in your prayers, and as our government looks at developing policies for Latin America, remember things may look a lot different looking north than they might looking south.

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