Travels

RETURN TO MEXICO: A TALE OF THREE MEXICOS

LaVail and I returned to Mexico last month for an adventure I call “A Tale of Three Mexicos.” In the first, we spent a week at a beautiful small resort on the Caribbean Sea at Tulum. We watched people drinking and sunbathing on the beach. We walked to the archaeological site at Tulum and enjoyed the tourist market, alive with brilliant colored clothing and souvenirs. I worked on my new novel, a sequel to Human Sacrifice that takes Claire to a retirement community in central Florida where her father is involved in a local murder.

We loved our week at Tulum, but it was enough. We were anxious to return to Merida where much of Human Sacrifice took place. The best part of our trips to Merida is our side-trip to the village where we lived forty-five years ago. We rode to Yaxbe (pseudonym) with our old friend, Hernan, and his son, Henry, who had borrowed a car from his brother-in-law. It was a 45-minute drive, only because Hernan insisted on taking the back route, away from the new highway, so we could see the changes in the villages that we passed through. But, instead of differences, most of the villages looked similar, with more vehicles, newer styled houses… no more thatch. The changes we encountered lay between the villages. In place of the henequen that once dominated the landscape, new gated subdivisions were springing up, with American styled houses purchased by Americans and other foreigners.

Hernan was twenty when we met him. He and his wife, Silvia, now have three grandchildren, the same as we do. He and Silvia live in the same house where Hernan’s parents lived, and their two children live in the same village. Henry is an architect and Priscilla, his sister, designs and sells clothing and purses. One of their granddaughters attends college, with aspirations to become a lawyer. So what, you think?

When we lived in Yaxbe, most adults had less than a 6th grade education. Most young men had an 8th grade education, and girls were fortunate to have made it through the 4th grade, because their parents needed them, the boys and girls, to help in agriculture or in the home. There were a few professionals in the village−a nurse and a teacher−but these were exceptions. During and since our year there, there has been a growing trend, because of the demise of the mono-crop henequen industry, for young men to learn English and find jobs on the Caribbean coast (Cancun, Cozumel, and Playa Del Carmen). Boys and girls are more likely to complete high school and even college.
(At La Chaya, Claire and Madge’s favorite restaurant in Human Sacrifice!)

We are blessed to have friends of more than 40 years in this distant place. When we return to the village, we visit homes and see generations of families living in the same compound or close-by. The older people shout our names as we wander through the village and for many, we struggle to remember their names, though we can remember their younger faces, now creased with age, as are ours.