Making amends

Many years later, I was invited to join Novica.

The work was absorbing, intense. There was so much to learn. But on Fridays, the entire team had lunch together. It was a time to get acquainted, for bonding, laughter and camaraderie.

One Friday, Julio Ortiz – from the Huichol tribes in Jalisco and Nayarit – happened by at lunchtime. The receptionist went out to meet him and brought him to the dining room door.

"Hola, Don Julio," the director said with a smile. "Come sit down and have a bite to eat with us." He scooted over to make room next to him at the table. Julio was shy, but the invitation was warm and sincere. Little by little, he lost his shyness. We drew him into the conversation and coaxed him to talk about his work and its symbolism.

He joined us often after that, and came to feel at home with us. We talked about life, about our families, our children and our own dreams for them. What a privilege!

And what changes!

Imagine, the Mexico director for an international company sitting beside an indigenous gentleman, sharing a meal and so much more.

And so today I play a tiny part in the changes I yearned for as a student. I witness how yesterday's social injustice is giving way to respect and understanding; we all work together as a worldwide family.

United in this mission, our circle of influence reaches across culture and language. Novica is helping to replace prejudice with dignity, hope and empowerment.

Unfair

In college, I spent a lot of time in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas. It was indigenous Mexico, as captured in Frank Cancian's 1974 book Another place; photographs of a Maya community.

My Spanish was a halting classroom idiom learned from Iberian teachers. Although I had dutifully digested the required bibliography and could discuss it (in English) in scholarly circles, I was an outsider in a market center for the marginalized. There, itinerant farmers from outlying villages brought crops and handicrafts to sell in order to take industrialized goods back home.

In those days, prices were rarely fixed and shoppers bargained for the best rates. There were three tiers of prices. The lowest were for the local people. Tourists paid a higher price. But it was the Maya people – who had the least – who paid the most.

When they passed the rest of us in the street, they were expected to step into the gutter and leave the sidewalks to people with lighter complexions. They did.

Barefoot women carried babies tied to their chests in rebozos while tumplines around their foreheads helped distribute the weight of firewood on their backs. The men fared only slightly better. They usually wore huaraches to navigate the frosty roads, and a few had burros to carry their loads. But men and women alike relied on brute strength. They routinely walked miles with heavy burdens. Prejudice was a further encumbrance. Perhaps a greater one.

While anthropologists from all over the world were drawn to San Cristobal for its indigenous population, these people were the most despised. Cancian tells how a generation before his fieldwork, Indians were jailed for being in town after dark.

It was monstrous! It was unfair! Burning with feminist sensitivity, I wanted to make amends. To raise their consciousness. To lead the way for justice.

Of course, I could not.

Our circle of influence is limited.

Photos copyright Frank Cancian, Another Place, Photographs of a Maya Community, Scrimshaw Press: 1974. Click on pics for large view.

Familiar landscapes

Of all media, I find watercolor paintings the most challenging. Their marvelous clarity escapes me as, time after time, I create puddles of muddy color.

Ana Rosa Navarro also struggled with the medium, and now dominates it with absolute authority.

Her subjects are familiar landscapes in west central Mexico where we both live. Tapalpa's pine forests. Puerto Vallarta's plazas and palm trees. Adobe homes, stone bridges and terracotta pots in flower-filled patios.

She captures the soul of this land and its people.

Anticipation

My training in art and writing was traditional. We first mastered figure drawing, foreshortening and perspective before being permitted to paint abstractions. Painting was a craft, not child's play.

Perhaps that's why I tend to collect abstract paintings. I envy their fluidity, their spontaneity. They capture my imagination. Or perhaps, as T. S. Eliot said, "…human kind cannot bear very much reality."*

(Click on pic for large view)
The pre-Hispanic icons in Alberto Ramos' work convey primal messages. I love the luminosity he brings to his paintings. Revelation is imminent; omens are everywhere. He creates a sense of anticipation in every work.

*T. S. Eliot in Burnt Norton I from Four Quartets, 1944

Rocking chairs

The daughter of German immigrants, Grandmother was born in the Midwest in 1890.   She was a thinker, a mystic, a suffragette, a poetess.   An amazing woman, she marched to her own drummer.   Science, literature, organic gardening, theology… she was curious about everything.

She believed that the universe is ruled by rhythms.   Day that fades to night and reawakens to light.   The rotating seasons.   High tide and low tide and ocean waves washing to shore.   Our beating hearts, our breath.   The rhythmic ecstasy of making love.

I remember her in a rocking chair as she told us stories.   Her silver crochet hook flashed in and out, in and out, as the chair moved quietly in unison.

Years later in Yucatan, I loved sleeping in a hammock, swaying to the sound of the Caribbean.   Moonlight on the deck of a sailboat creaking back and forth at anchor.   Rocking my babies, damp and sleepy and smelling of shampoo.

A vital piece of furniture, the rocking chair's rhythmic movements are deeply familiar.   A rocking chair brings comfort and peace.   It invites reverie.   It feels like home.

So wrong

When I was expecting our first child, I bought some beautiful handloomed rugs from Oaxaca.

"The baby can crawl here, and play with her toys," I reasoned.   "I can send them out to clean. Besides, they're absolutely beautiful."

I'd been looking for an excuse for years.

I began searching in shops and markets for just the right choice.   Then voila!   One Sunday in Ajijic, I met Gregorio Ruiz from Teotitlan del Valle, selling rugs on the street.   His family carries on the weaving tradition, shearing their own sheep, spinning the yarn and dying it with natural colors.   Each piece is superbly woven.   And I prefer buying from the artisan rather than stores.

Armed with two new Zapotec area rugs, I awaited my "daughter's" birth.

I was so wrong.

My first child, David, is not a girl.

And he did not crawl neatly on the rugs, but struck out swiftly for cold tile floors and soon made the patio part of his crawling track.

Oh well.   Live and learn.

Cold floors

Wall-to-wall carpets are delightful for padding barefoot through the house on a cold evening.   But I really prefer something I can pick up and clean beneath.

The solution?   Area rugs.


For years I used handwoven Mexican wool rugs from Queretaro and Michoacan.   As I grew older, my choices became more classic ones.   Currently, a copy of a Persian carpet in deep, rich blue takes pride of place.

There's a world of beautiful area rugs at Novica, from Indian dhurries to Brazilian sisal to rattan and banana bark.   Something for every space I could ever create.   What fun!