Installment 1

Introduction
Mary, Mary, quite contrary. How does your garden grow?
Mother Goose

In late 2006, my husband and I sold practically everything we owned in the States and moved to a little fishing village just north of Puerto Vallarta on the Pacific Coast of Mexico. It was a decision made in a moment of either inspiration or sheer madness. We haven’t regretted it for one moment.

Our new home is in a rural area, though visions of a glitzy “Riviera Nayarit” dance in the heads of the governor and of local movers and shakers. It hasn’t happened yet in our town. Perhaps with the current economic meltdown, paradise may be safe for a while longer. Life is good here. We’ve put down roots.

For me, like thousands of other gringos, Mexico these days represents a new beginning. It is definitely “virgin territory” in that sense. But our new beginnings are planted in the dust of ancient civilizations. Vestiges of those who have been here before remain in various forms and practices. Most notable of all is Our Lady of Guadalupe, “Goddess of the Americas.” She is an indigenous icon with origins that stretch back thousands of years, and her presence and influence continue to grow stronger both north and south of Mexico’s borders. Clothed with the sun, heavy with child, she graces more dashboards, notebook covers, and shopping bags than she does altars in churches. Though appropriated by the Catholic Church, she transcends any religious denomination. For me she is a symbol of all that makes Mexico a haven for women in particular, because Mexico is feminine in so many ways.

First, let me describe the soil from which I was transplanted. I grew up on the plains of West Texas. It’s hard to imagine a part of the world, except maybe most of the Middle East, where masculinity seems to permeate even the geography of the place. Maybe it’s the flat horizon with razor straight rows of cotton that surrounds Lubbock, or the implacable grid of section line roads turned into urban commerce zones with houses lined up straight and orderly on the alphabetical avenues and numerical streets in between. Windmills, silos, oil derricks, drilling rigs, and fence posts—a veritable forest of phallic symbols—mark the rural terrain. When the Spanish explorer Coronado crossed this area, he found the total lack of landmarks confounding. His expedition took to driving stakes in the ground to mark where they’d been. Hence the name “Llano Estacado,” or staked plain. When Larry and I owned a landscape nursery in Midland, more often than not, we had to hire a drilling rig to bore a hole through solid rock just so we could plant a tree. Most trees stand as upright as all the manmade landscape features; no interesting bends or quirks allowed. Older homes in Odessa bear the trademark of an earlier landscape artist: two Italian Cypress sentinels, one anchoring each side of the front door. Further out in the country, the cypress may stand like a string of exclamation points, a barrier against the wind. “Thus far, and no farther!” Their mute warning is clear against a cloudless sky. In West Texas, you always know where people stand, as well. “Fer us or agin us.” That stripe down the middle of the very straight road is yeller, like the stripe down a coward’s back.

In contrast, the landscape in Mexico undulates. It rises and falls with intriguing swells and bulges, and someone is always growing something in it. Drop a seed, and in a month’s time, there’s a tree. Within a year there’s fruit. It’s a land to get lost in, with roads that dip in and out of valleys and tuck around curves to disappear, then reappear again, offering a totally different view. There is an unconfined amplitude to life here. Houses are constantly being expanded, ready to accommodate new family members, and long-time family members who have wandered are readily forgiven and welcomed home again. Opinions are rarely voiced, and voices rarely raised, except in prayer. When people pray it is usually to the Virgin, not to Jesus, that the prayers are directed.

Protestant Christianity, in general, has not dealt well with the Virgin Mary. It’s sort of been, “Thanks for the baby, Lady. Now go get lost.” Many Protestants look on her with downright suspicion, like adoptive parents fearful of the claims of a teenaged birth mother. But in Mexico the Virgin, La Madrecita, is honored as no other place on earth.

Each year on the evening of December 11, pilgrims converge on the second-most visited Catholic site in the world, the Shrine of Guadalupe. The number grows each year. This past year there were over five million. They come to “watch” with her on the day traditionally celebrated as the anniversary of her appearance to Juan Diego on the hillside of Tepeyac outside of present day Mexico City. Smaller crowds, no less fervent, gather in other parts of the Americas from Anchorage to Tierra del Fuego. Where I live now, this event is celebrated in tiny, makeshift shrines in the dirt streets of La Colonia and La Penita—and it is celebrated exuberantly in Technicolor and surround sound. Evidently Guadalupe loves fireworks.

“We’re looking for Christmas lights,” my Canadian neighbor says, speaking in the clipped, exact tones of her native South Africa. “White ones that don’t flash.”

We’ve met in the tianguis, the Thursday market in La Peñita. It also happens to be the American Thanksgiving Day. “Tupperware Alley” is what gringos call the extension of the market that stretches away from the Indian handwork and colorful displays in the main plaza. Here vendors spread the more mundane items that are needed on a daily basis—plastic dishes, clothespins, pirated DVDs, patent leather sandals, some of the most formidable padded bras I’ve ever seen, and now, at the end of November, Christmas decorations. There is not a white light to be found. When it comes to decking halls in Mexico, one fact can’t be denied: Guadalupe likes color, and preferably color that flashes. Very shortly after we moved to Mexico, both my parents had major health crises. My mother sent my sisters and me notes she’d made for obituaries, both hers and Dad’s. My father’s ran on for pages. Hers was no more than a paragraph. No more than a paragraph devoted to Mom, who had been the biggest presence in our little lives! Dad may have been physically present with us (though not often), but he always seemed mentally preoccupied with something other than the child before him. Much of that was just the nature of fathering in the 1950s, and much of it had to do with the realization of all those achievements that took up so many pages.

I received Mom’s notes when I opened my email the morning after I’d spent the night at a velada for Guadalupe. Velada comes from the Spanish word for candle, vela, and this was an all-night vigil in honor of the Virgin done in the company of friends and loved ones. As I scrolled through the PDF attachment written in my mother’s still strong and legible hand, I felt vindicated for our move to Mexico. Here I was in a country that honored La Madre, that told and retold a woman’s story, celebrated her appearance each year with hot chocolate and tamales, followed by fireworks at two o’clock in the morning—sharp. Mothers matter in Mexico, and Guadalupe is the archetype.

© 2010 by Susan J. Cobb. All rights reserved.

Editors Note:  We plan to publish an  instalment of Virgin Territory periodically for the next year and a half.  If you cannot wait that long you can always buy the book from Susan’s web site here.