La malaguena

The Huasteca music is not common where we travel, yet the yelling part is lively and it is my favorite. Here are the lyrics to a familar Huasteca song, from a different region in Mexico. I have heard it plenty, and reportedly it is in the Huapango style, dating back to 1820’s. I’m still looking for the words to the new corrido about Jimena that our ten year old host sang for us in the Sierras.

Que bonitos ojos tienes
Debajo de esas dos cejas
Debajo de esas dos cejas
Que bonitos ojos tienes

Ellos me quieren mirar
Pero si tú no los dejas
Pero si tú no los dejas
Ni siquiera parpadear

Malagueña salerosa
Besar tus labios quisiera
Besar tus
Labios quisieraMalagueña salerosa
Y decirte niña hermosa
Que eres linda y hechicera
Que eres linda y hechicera
Como el candor de una rosa

con tus ojos me anunciabas
que me amabas tiernamente
que me amabas tiernamente
con tus ojos me anunciabas
ingrata me traicionabas
cuando de ti estaba ausente
cuando de ti estaba ausente
de mi pasion te burlabas

Malagueña salerosa
Besar tus labios quisiera
Besar tus Labios quisiera
Y decirte niña hermosa
Que eres linda y hechicera
Que eres linda y hechicera
Como el candor de una rosa
Como el candor de una rosa

Si por pobre me desprecias
Yo te concedo razón
Yo te concedo razón
Si por pobre me desprecias
Yo no te ofrezco riquezas
Te ofrezco mi corazón
Te ofrezco mi corazón

where there is water ( Mexico)

It is not easy to explain my utter fascination with all things in the desert. Part of the charm is the access to clean fresh water in a drought prone land with less than 9 inches of rainfall annually. The Baja Peninsula itself is one of the longest in the world; a rocky place isolated by sea water and and often abandoned because of the limiting factor of arable land.

The joy of it all is that I get to swim in the noonday sun !! I get to hear the chorus of the spring peepers at nightfall, and I gleefully fill my canteen from a little straw sticking out of a crack in a wall on the sunnyside of the canyon below some wildly impressive pre-hispanic art.

Water is the essence of life and roaming the canyons, on hand-crafted paths, will always lead you to or away from a water source. You encounter pilas, posadas, tinajas, epresas, oases and functional acequias or canals built for the pleasure (or pain) of the Jesuits during a 70 year period of occupation. In many places today miles of mangera lead the way to the next huerta. They are black tubes transporting water to the corrals: an example of one of the many systems that still supports life in a place many call hostile and rugged.

Read what was written in 1866, by explorer J. Ross Browne, after the last of the missionaries gave up on the land and the people.

"All the vegetation visible to the eye seems to conspire against the intrusion of man. Every shrub is armed with thorns; the cactus, in all its varieties, solitary and erect, or in twisted masses, or snake-like undulations, tortures the traveler with piercing needles and remorseless fangs. Burrs with barbed thorns cover the ground; the very grass, wherever it grows, resents the touch with wasp-like stings that fester in the flesh; and poisonous weeds tempt the hungry animals with their verdure, producing craziness and death. Add to this the innumerable varieties of virulent reptiles and insects that infest those desolate regions in summer; the rattlesnakes, vipers, scorpions, tarantulas, centipedes, and sand-flies; the rabid polecats that creep around the campfire at night, producing hydrophobia by their bite; the scorching heat of the sun, and the utter absence of water, and you have a combination of horrors that might well justify the belief of the old Spaniards that the country was accursed by God."

Nubian Texas

It is big in Texas but there is no place named Nubian. On my way to the annual ARARA (American Rock Art Research Association) conference in Del Rio I toured the west in a yellow beetle. I visited the Alamo in San Antonio with brother Jay and family and I attended a Nubian vault-building workshop with Adobe Alliance in the Big Bend country of West Texas. This was vault building with the most basic materials. You can create an earthen roof without the use of any type of form. No nails, no wood, no metal parts at all. Of course the walls were already finished when I arrived making the job of creating a vaulted ceiling in a week easier.

The vault, a series of mud-brick catenary arches, literally goes up in mid air. We spent time chipping away at the adobe bricks and placing them upright. Always looking up created this fill in the sky feeling. Each day we created more roof, more shade, more miracles. The bricks stuck together upside down. What a trick!!

The patch of blue became smaller by day. After lifting and placing and chipping for hours at a time it was clear something was just not sitting well. By the last day we were forced to knock it all down. There was a budge on the outside and that created a wave. The look was lovely,but the structure wasn't. Some in the group simply hated the whole idea and to say the least there was not a smile on Simone's face at all when she realized her detached attachment technique for this stage of the project ( She already has masterminded a house and a dome guestroom) was not working. I found pleasure in the destruction. I was attached to the learning process as opposed to the product and the act of taking it apart was as systematic as putting it up was. Attempts were made to save each 50 cent block of adobe, and well, I had fun.

If you'd like some big Texas sky and a earthy project, this would be the place to go. Simone Swan studied with Hassan Fathy who is no longer alive but some say she is the authority on adobe dome and vault construction in the USA. For more info about efforts in the past to shelter the masses you should read this Hassan Fathy’s “Architecture for the Poor”.

Gracias, Si ! (Mexico)

Just a word about being in baja california. This is a place serious about coffee time. It goes beyond the actual drink into a realm meaning time to have coffee, la hora de café. You shouldn’t miss it if you are invited and invited we were. It is what you do in the sierras.

If you are on a horse, in a truck or on foot, and if you pass a ranch you had better check to see if anyone is home because they might want to have coffee with you. It means come in, sit in the shade, or stand around the open fire stove. It means dump a load of sugar in the hot cup and eat the tortillas and queso fresco hidden under a brightly embodied panuela. It means talk, chat, laugh a little and listen in the background to the radio airwaves broadcasting little bits of news across the repitadoras from one arroyo to the next. It means how are you and it can happen any time of day.

I had a hard time refusing the coffee call. Real hard to say no and not totally polite to refuse but when that coffee comes around with the New Year’s day buenulo, you’d be smart to say “gracias, si”.

The other great coffee tradition is café de chiva, or cowboy coffee. We had ours prepared on the side of cliffs or on rocky porteros by the one and only Chente, the masterful trailblazer, mulero, sportsman, singing cowboy with hands the size of a grizzly. He can bang out coffee faster than starbucks. It’s the purest, thickest mountain mud I’ve ever had. In the end you do spend time spitting out the loose grounds, but who would have guessed the seriousness fashioned to this man of the mountains when it comes to coffee time.


“Café?…Gracias, si!”

A look at San Borjitas Rock Art

To see the real thing, in true color, you should visit the site near Mulege, called San Borjitas, off of Highway one. Short of that just click on the image to see it larger.