From 2001 to 2006 I lived with my family in Tequisquiapan in central Mexico.  I continued to write on the global economic picture but also wrote, in a quite different style, a weekly article which explored Mexican society from the bottom up. Some of these articles are — I hope — amusing but their profound aim was serious: to seek to understand Mexican society.  I have put a few of the articles here.

 

Inside Mexico: Small town election

By IAN CAMPBELL, UPI Chief Economics Correspondent   |   June 27, 2003 at 10:05 PM

Route 120 heads north through fields from Tequisquipan, the town that is geographically in Mexico’s centre, towards the beautiful mountain range of the Sierra Gorda. Some miles short of the Sierra it enters an untidy-looking town where barns with Forraje (animal forage) and Pollos en pie (live chickens) and signs for Ferretaría (Hardware) and Abarrotes (groceries) crowd around it. The town is Ezequiel Montes in the state of Queretaro.

The town is no beauty. Almost its most prominent feature, right in its centre, are four giant silver grain silos (with six smaller ones behind.) These are of a company called Nutrisow which sells food for animals.

Food for animals, drugs for animals, shelter for animals, trucks in which to transport animals, animals themselves: these are what Ezequiel Montes is about. The town lies in a fertile plain at the foot of the mountains. People come to it for agricultural supplies and groceries and to buy animals or sell them or slaughter them. That is the source of the town’s workmanlike prosperity. “There is money there,” more than one person has said to me, “some of the cattle-men and merchants are very rich.”

To the visitor the untidy town shows little of its wealth. It is full of acrid smells which assault the nostrils. And now, in late June, it swarmed with two things: election posters and flies. July 6 this town, like all other towns in Mexico, will hold an election for municipal president. Elections will also be held at state level for the powerful position of governor.

The elections are not something new; the doubt about who will win is. Until six years ago the dedazo (fingering) ruled. The Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) candidate for state governor would have chosen his men for the municipal presidencies before the formality of an election was held. All would go according to plan. Corruption prospered. Mexico didn’t. Now, as part of Mexico’s belated transition, something new called democracy prevails.

And so the choice was on. Who can take the town and the area forward?

I looked for the campaign office of the PRI, which won back the municipal presidency from the upstart Partido Acción Nacional three years ago, where I had an appointment with Argelio Vega, the PRI candidate. “It’s there, where the trash is,” a woman said to me innocently, pointing along the street.

Inside the office I was asked to sit while a woman telephoned Vega, who had not yet appeared. Everywhere in the office, in the curtains, on the walls, there were flies, for which the woman apologized. The candidate would come in soon, she said, and we agreed I should return in an hour. I noticed a sign on the wall which said, “To win an election is the work of many people and to lose it requires one mishandled moment.” This was no doubt an inspirational message for the campaign team. “Moment” was written in red letters. I came back in an hour but the candidate had gone “direct to the campaign,” the woman told me, and therefore did not have a moment for me.

Carlos Montes, the stocky candidate of the PAN, the party of Mexico’s President, Vicente Fox, was, by contrast, keen to talk, though he looked exhausted and at least ten years older than the broadly-smiling face on posters everywhere in the town. First among his priorities was “security.” This seemed surprising. The area is a very safe one by national standards. But Montes said there had been murders and rapes. His plan was to improve policing, with more instruction of officers.

Another priority for him was health. The Health Centre in the town was too small, and he wanted to make it bigger. There were no specialist doctors there, and he wanted at least two, a paediatrician and a gynaecologist, and he planned to have more ambulances. (Later a doctor told me that the district did have some ambulances but some were out-of-repair and there weren’t always drivers.)

Education was another priority. He wanted the University of Queretaro to have a branch in the town. At present, there was one in the nearby town of Cadereyta.

Outside, in the town, it was the sense of industry that took my attention — and the flies again. On every wet patch of ground, as in a farmyard, hundreds of them were gathered. Young women selling nuts and dried fruits from wheelbarrows waved pieces of cardboard over their wares. “Are there always so many flies?” I asked a woman, selling food. “No, it’s a plague,” she said.

I spoke to Manuel Trejo, the head of the Cattle Ranchers’ Association and, forty years ago, a municipal president. He knew the reason for the plague. “It’s the animal excrement,” he said, “especially the chickens. It attracts flies. And the feathers of the chickens give off a very fine dust, which can cause asthma”

I spoke to a doctor in the town. Were the flies not a big problem? The doctor said they were. They get into workmen’s wounds and cause infections and they land on food and cause diarrhea. Many children in the town and its 22 surrounding sub-delegations — some of them extremely poor communities in the plain or in the mountains, and all part of the municipal president’s responsibilities — are malnourished, the doctor said, making them more vulnerable to diarrhea and dehydration. Lack of hygiene compounded the problems, the doctor said. People do not know they should wash their hands before eating.

Ignorance: schooling does not have a long history here. In Ezequiel the high school, educating children beyond the age of fifteen, had opened only a handful of years ago. And Ezequiel, by the standards of its district, is the capital of educated sophistication. In the villages there are only primary schools, sometimes not even that.

Montes, the PAN candidate, spoke of trying to move the animals out of the town. Trejo of the cattle ranchers association agrees this should be done and said he had proposed the cattle men should do it many years ago by buying some land that was then available. But making that change, moving the cows and chickens and pigs out of the town, would be a huge co-operative task between the local government and private businessmen and land-owners, and there is no history of good government here. There is a long tradition of corruption.

The task of lifting the poorer communities of Ezequiel Montes out of poverty, ending malnutrition, providing work, bringing water and electricity to remote villages, improving education, dragging the community forward: that was still greater. Where were the resources going to come from? Even if there is wealth in the town, tax collection is low and it was not on local money that candidate Montes was counting, but on funds from the cash-strapped state and federal governments.

Huge problems; not much money; few educated people to implement policies: so much to battle against.

Out in the street again, there were the election posters on every bill-board, wall and lamp-post, with their smiling promises. Outnumbering them a hundred thousand times were the flies.

 

Inside Mexico: The rural poor

March 22, 2002
My questions had made Isabel, who cleans for us, aware of my interest in her home and her village. But she is young, shy and reticent. Often her only reply to a question is to giggle, and an “I don’t know” with her hand held over her mouth. Never was I more surprised, then, when she said firmly one day that I would always be welcome to visit.
That was months ago. But this week, impelled partly by the U.N. conference now taking place in Monterrey, which has focused on rural poverty, I went to her village.At 1 o’clock, when Isabel usually catches the bus, we drove out of town together.
For most of the trip the road is good, passing through the burned yellow landscape studded with cactus and small bare trees. At a pass it climbs steeply into bare hills, twisting and turning, and then it slowly descends miles. From time to time, we see by the roadside women gathering fallen wood into pieces of cloth that they tie on their backs. Leaning forward to balance the load, the women trudge towards their villages.The wood will be for cooking, not for heating. Winter, which was brief, intermittent and tame, with only the nights cold and the days almost always warm, is over now, and for two weeks the weather has been hot.
To reach Isabel’s village we turn left off the main road on to the cobbles that are the usual, unforgiving surface here. She walks this stretch each morning and afternoon, to and from the bus. It turns out to be about 2 miles.The village is a collection of houses, most of them on a hillside, and some nestled below. A strange decoration stands in the village center. It is an arch made of metal with flat surfaces to which yellow leaves are attached. It looks indigenous.I remember what a doctor in town had told me, that this village is pure Otomí, a predominant tribe in this area, which has its own language but is well-integrated into modern Mexican society.The village does not figure into the 12 percent of the population classified as indigenous, generally marginalized and very poor. The decoration, which I suppose is connected to the approach of Easter, seems to have its roots in a pre-Christian culture.

We park and pass through a wooden gate, stepping downhill into the property of Isabel’s family.

There are several buildings. The main building is made of concrete and has steps leading up to the rooms. A slanting roof gives shades for a table. There is an older building at right angles to it, which appears to be the kitchen. Another small building might be a toilet or bathroom.

A little way off, closer to the gate, is an old building and next to it, another arch with yellow folded leaves as decoration. I ask Isabel what it is and she says, to my surprise, the church.

“People come here for mass?” I ask,

“No, it just belongs to the house,” Isabel replies.

I look inside. There is an altar with a cross, a doll in a cabinet, other ornaments and fresh flowers. Paper streamers and glitter decorate the little room.

Isabel goes to fetch her father from his work, and he insists that I sit at the shaded table. As I talk to him, he whispers to Isabel that she should fetch me a drink.

He is a short man of about 60, solidly built, with a peaked cap. His wife is not there. She went to La Presa, a town about 7 miles away, and will come back at about 5, when the sun is less strong.

Isabel had told me that she was one of five children — three boys and two girls — and that her two oldest brothers were working in the United States. She did not know in which state.

Her father does know that they work in North Carolina. One of the boys has been there a year, the other more than three years, he says. He approves, though it is difficult for them, he says. There is not always work and the rent and food are expensive.

“Do they write?” I ask.

“No. They telephone us every week or so,” Isabel’s father says.

I am a little surprised that there is a phone in the house.

I learn more of what Isabel calls the jamilpa, some land miles away where her father and mother grow crops. The land is ejidal: that is to say, communally owned by the village ejido, a legacy of the Mexican revolution of the 1920s.

Isabel’s parents grow corn and beans there. They do not sell the produce but store it and eat it themselves. The father points to the many sacks of corn stored to the side, under the slanting roof. Also stored there are sacks of cement.

“We are building a new church,” Isabel’s father says, “because that one is falling down.”

There is a small school in the village. Isabel left it five years ago, when she was 13. So did her younger sister, Julia, who has come two or three times to our house in the town.

I ask Isabel’s father more about the school. It had been there for a while, he says, but it was not there when he was a boy. He had never gone to school.

“When had electricity and telephones come?” I ask.

“A while,” he says, “Perhaps 20 years.”

Isabel, and presumably all her siblings, left the village school at about thirteen. Their education has been far from good, yet they are all far ahead of their father. Isabel and her younger sister are terribly thin but, that aside, they look healthy.

Isabel, with her black eyes and hair and oval face, is pretty, and she is nice: honest, discreet and very gentle with children. She is also, for all her shyness, proud and dignified.

When I leave, a car drives up, playing music from a big loudspeaker strapped to its hood. The music is no different to that of the ice cream vans that I ran to in London 30 years ago. Here the ice cream, or whatever else it is, lies in a cool box sitting in the open trunk of the car.

Is this poverty? It is not the poverty of which the United Nations and others were speaking in Monterrey. Isabel’s family is not living on less than $1 a day. They have money to spend on cement and building blocks for their own little chapel.

Money comes in from Isabel and, probably, from the two boys who have made their way across the U.S. border. Both parents work the community-owned land and get corn and beans from it– the staples of the Mexican diet.

Firewood can be gathered. Buy some ham, some cheese, some milk, some fruit and you will eat healthily enough. But the key to the family’s survival is that it needs to buy little. Subsistence agriculture still prevails here, and does provide.

There are poorer areas of Mexico and poorer people. We see some of them in town.

These are people who live in the poorest villages in the Sierra, who go bare-footed, whose clothing and hair is unkempt.

In Isabel’s village the poverty is not grinding. It is perhaps not so far away from the lives of my grandparents in Scotland, and modern medicine and electricity have brought improvements.

Yet for most in the West, this rural Mexican life would constitute extreme poverty. Isabel and her family have little.

What does Monterrey mean to do here? What would improve their lives?

What the area needs is paying work. That requires investment. But the communal ownership that provides a safety net for rural Mexico is also an obstacle to investment and development.

In a village like this you can see the difficulty President Vicente Fox has trying to sell to Mexico the idea of capitalist development. Imagine telling Isabel’s parents that the land owned by the ejido would be more productive if a large farmer were to buy it and work it?

Nothing is going to change quickly here, yet change and improvement are going to come. Perhaps one thing more than any other would help. Isabel’s children need a better education than hers.

On the drive back to town, the mountains seem to rise like an impenetrable barrier. The road finds a way through them.

Inside Mexico: Nahuatl by the pool

July 21, 2003
Children: four. Baby: one. Towels, hats, swimming costumes and tee-shirts: six. Goggles: two pairs. Nappies: regular and for swimming. Drinks: five; I’ll buy myself a coke. Sandwiches, crisps, chopped sausage, chopped apple. Don’t forget the sunscreen; no more sunburn. And none of the children should drown or the trip will definitely go down as a failure.
Day to day my wife takes it all in her stride. Today I had to put my best stride forward, juggling children and all the things they need or seem to need.
It is a beautiful place. Thermal water gushes out of the ground and streams into two kids’ pools and a huge adult one. Grass and space. The backdrop is a shapely mountain, green after the recent rain. Closer by are fields. Maize is growing in one, dense and ten feet high, like a truncated forest.
Yes, that forest of maize and the mountain behind it might be a view from a millennium ago. It is the crop the Aztecs grew, the crop they lived on, just as many Mexicans live on it today.No time to admire. I plant us down at the end of the main pool, under a little wooden “palapa” that gives some shade, close by the wire fence and the field of maize.
There is a kind of explosion of undressing, dressing, suncream, and tee-shirt application, which I attempt to orchestrate. Sophie has been grizzling but between the maize and the fence a horse is tethered and it catches her eye.
The Aztecs didn’t have horses and were terrified when they first saw them. The people who had landed on their shores were to them what the Greeks had called centaurs but the Aztecs knew nothing of Greeks or centaurs either. But Sophie likes horses. “Orsy,” she says and cheers up, thank God.
I walk to the shallow kids’ pool. Girls and women beam. I am accustomed to this — whenever I am with blue-eyed four-year old Laura and 21-month-old olive-eyed Sophie; both blonde. Mexicans like children and these two are exotic beauties here.The pool is just shallow enough for them to stand but I have to keep right by them. Thomas and his friend, Max, splash some people at the side of the pool and I give them a tongue-lashing. But overall it’s going well. Everything under control. No one crying. Whoops! Sophie goes under. Grab her!An hour later we are back near the palapa having lunch. Sophie had started crying because she was cold. A sandwich and a drink and the sun’s warmth cheer her up. My hat shields her like an umbrella. She has the warmth without the burn.Three lads appear carrying little racks of crude bracelets for sale. At first I say no thanks but Laura’s eye is taken by baskets one of them is carrying. She wants one, and I indulge her, largely because I like to give some business to boys like these, hawking goods round. It costs 20 pesos, a bit less than $2.I ask the boy where he is from. I expect him to say from a village nearby, but he doesn’t. He is from Taxco, Guerrero, about two hundred miles away. Taxco is a town of silversmiths and artisans. All three of the boys have a silver ring in their right ear. But Guerrero is one of the most indigenous and poorest of Mexico’s states. Two of the boys, I notice, have prominent top teeth and round heads that remind me a little of photos of Amazonian indians.

The boy selling us the basket cannot be five feet tall and is slight. I ask him some questions and though his answers incline towards brevity the picture begins to emerge. He is travelling with the two other boys. They are paying 200 pesos (about $19) each to stay in a room in town let out by a senora for a month. No adults are with them. They are only twelve years old.

Sophie lets out a shriek and begins crying bitterly. It seems as though a bee, attracted by the sweet drink she has been spilling on her dress, has stung her. I pick her up. The boys from Taxco and other people show concern. A lifeguard offers some ointment but I can’t see where she has been stung. She wails and wails and I plant her on my shoulder, point out the horse and pat her back, all in vain. Laura says she wants to go to the toilet. It is one of those moments familiar in all young families, and it lingers. I begin to think Sophie is never going to stop crying. But she does, dropping asleep on my shoulder, as I had hoped.

She sleeps for well over an hour. The boy who sold the basket to us appears again and looks with approval on the sleeping form on the grass. I ask him more questions. Does he speak another language? Yes, Nahuatl. The “l” is almost unpronounced, just an inflexion at the end of the word.

The previous day I had read about Nahuatl. “The Mexican empire had the benefit of a remarkable lingua franca. This was Nahuatl.”

The emperors should not be called the Aztecs, but the Mexica, Hugh Thomas writes in “The Conquest of Mexico.” Mexica was what this tribe that settled in the valley of Mexico in about 1250 called themselves and now the whole vast country was named after them. By 1500 they had built Tenochtitlan in the middle of a lake, “a colossal city, bigger than any in Europe with the possible exception of Naples and Constantinople.” Theirs was the empire the little band of Spaniards overthrew.

Even the lake has gone now. Drained, filled in, it has had one of the world’s most populous, polluted and violent towns planted on it. The three boys would have traveled via the city to get here.

I asked the boy bracelet seller to say some words to me in Nahuatl. He does. It sounds alien and curious but I can hear the link with Mexican place names: Tlalpan, Popocatepetl. The old empire survives in them.

He and his friends did not live in Taxco but about half an hour away in a little pueblo. “Twenty houses,” he says. I can imagine the sort of place: houses of a room or two, probably no running water or electricity. I asked him to spell out the name but he looked uncertain. “Do you go to school?” I asked. “Yes.” “Can you read?” “Yes.” “Can you write.” “Hardly.”

In an odd way there was tradition behind that. “Nahuatl was an oral language,” Thomas writes. The boy’s ancestors had not written down their tongue. He was not writing the new tongue, that of the conquerors.

He liked it here. It was “nicer than Taxco.” He liked the swimming pools. His friends had undressed and were playing in the water now. They had paid to come in, combining business with pleasure. One of them borrows Thomas’s goggles.

All this time Anna, Thomas and Max are playing in the water. I glance towards them now and then. Laura amuses herself nearby me very well. Then Sophie wakes up and I have to attend to her.

A couple of men appear beyond the fence and then disappear into the forest of maize to cut the odd strand and emerge with them.

It is a remarkable crop. The cobs are already big and can be roasted or boiled and eaten but the bulk of the crop will be left for some months to ripen further. The corn will then be dry and easily separated from the husk. Ground and made into tortillas it will be the staple food, just as it has been for centuries.

Packing up time. Children: four. Baby: one. Towels: six. Goggles: two pairs. Hats, swimming costumes, tee-shirts, sunscreen, cool-box, nappy bag. Only slight sunburn. Successful trip. Head for the car and the dinner my wife will have prepared. All is well.

The boys from Guerrero are out of the pool and I give them a wave. They are descendants of the Mexica, eating their ancestral food, though probably not enough of it, speaking the ancient language of the defeated empire, surviving precariously in the margins of the victorious one.

Inside Mexico: A peasant’s life

By IAN CAMPBELL   June 23, 2003

Early one hot afternoon I found myself outside the front door of the house and talking to one of the gardeners, a seventy-year-old man who finds odd jobs to do in the gated community where I live.

I know him fairly well. He has never quite been the same since he fell from a tree eighteen months ago. When he had failed to appear for some weeks I learned about his accident and got directions to his home. I found him shuffling about, not the strong and healthy man he had been previously, despite his good age. After a number of visits he agreed to come to see my doctor. But it was late to go. His broken forearm had set itself badly. And as for his injured back, an injection and pain-killers from the doctor helped but he refused to go for the X-rays the doctor recommended even though I offered to take him to the hospital and pay.

Ever since then, ask him how he is and he tends to rub his back and mention some pains but say with a broad smile “Ay vamos!”, which might be translated as “Now I’m OK.” He is on his feet, able to work. “You have to expect something in life,” he says. At least from his “something” he has survived. That he can work is all that matters to him. He can put up with a little pain.

On the hot afternoon I offered him a drink and he came inside and we began to talk.

I asked him when he had begun to work and he said when he was about eight years old. He worked with his step-father in the fields. He had no memory of his own father, who had died. With neither the step-father nor step-brothers were his relations good. Now, though the step-brothers live nearby, he has no contact with them. “Bad people,” he says.

When he was growing up the family had no home. They were “acasillados.” This meant that their temporary “casa” was provided by the farm-owner for whom they were working. It would be a single room, with no windows, just a door that had perhaps some kind of cloth or leather hanging across it.

In March, work would begin with the plough, preparing the land for sowing. The family would take up lodging with the land-owner. They might work for five months until the crop was planted, had grown and had been harvested. When the work was over, the family would move on, hoping to find another land-owner who needed work done and who would give them lodging.

In return for their work the family received no money payment. Their payment was what the gardener called “the 40 percent” — 40 percent of the eventual crop. Meanwhile, I asked, what did they live on? Every Saturday, the gardener said, the land-owner would give them twelve containers of maize and one of beans. But all of these would be noted down, he said, with a hint of bitterness, making a scribbling gesture, and deducted from the final 40 percent.

What about water and other things? I asked. They would collect rain water, he said, and, “on the belly, we would drink from dams.” It was an image which brought to mind John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” and the itinerant worker, hot, thirsty, throwing himself down onto his stomach to drink from “the green pool.” That book was published in 1937, a few years before the time the gardener was describing, his boyhood sixty years ago.

What about ejidal land, I asked: the communal land ownership created by the Mexican revolution and still a feature of the economy today? Did his parents not have access to it? No, the gardener said. His parents “were scared to get involved in that.” What he meant, he explained, in response to further questions, was that they did not press for land-rights because they were afraid of reprisals from land-owners.

“What if there was no work?” I asked, “You then had nowhere to live.”

We would live in the countryside, he said, by making a temporary shelter.

This life was very hard, I said.

“It was pure slavery,” the gardener replied.

It was in the 1960s, the gardener’s thirties, that his life began to change. For the first time he received a regular wage, working in the town. After some years he had saved enough money to buy a small plot of land in a spot on a road between two towns, where his simple house still stands now. To this day the house does not have electricity, running water nor drainage yet he and his wife have brought up three daughters there.

The daughters are now in their forties. None of them went to school and the two of them who continue to live at home are illiterate; the sister who has left home and has worked in town may also be illiterate, too. For some reason none of the girls has married. How they will get by when the gardener eventually dies is unclear.

The poverty of the gardener’s childhood is perhaps not so different to that of the workmen described in Steinbeck’s fiction — though even then Mexico was a more backward country. Steinbeck was drawn to the idea of revolution in the United States and admired Mexico’s revolutionaries. In 1952 he wrote a screenplay for a film on Emiliano Zapata, one of the main revolutionary leaders.

But the gardener’s poverty, and that of Mexico, has persisted. His children are as uneducated as he was. In the country of revolution the ordinary worker has fared badly. He has remained unskilled, uneducated, poorly paid, vulnerable to sickness and accident.

The revolution was supposed to change these things. In the United States rampant capitalism has done more to change them, even if there is inequality and some people are left behind.

In Mexico neither the politicians nor the ideology have served. Seventy years of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the institutional revolutionary party, defeated in an election only in 2000, seem to have kept the country locked in a past of ignorance and inequality. Progress has been shunned. The gardener will die as he has lived: a poor man.

 

Inside Mexico: The Cornish miners’ legacy

By IAN CAMPBELL  Aug. 4, 2003
PACHUCA, Mexico, Aug. 4 (UPI) — Pachuca in the state of Hidalgo is the highest state capital in Mexico. At 2,400 meters, driving through, it seems a bare place, stretched across pale yellow mountain-sides. But leaving it and heading north east, the road climbs higher still, twisting and turning, with sheer drops to one side, until, just a few miles on, a right turn to Mineral del Monte offers an alternative.

My wife and I took the right turn and were immediately in a different landscape and a small town. The hills close by the town and all around it and even through it, in its steep streets, appeared smaller and more intimate than those of Pachuca and were not bare and yellow but blanketed with verdant trees and shrubs.

They might have been the irregular and unpredictable wooded hills of parts of the south-west of England had not the occasional tall bare trunk and spread-eagled leaves of a palm given the game away. Perhaps to the people who had come there from Cornwall in England almost two centuries before, after the thousands of miles of ocean and the steamy heat of the port of Veracruz, that landscape was comforting.

In 1824, a group of miners from Cornwall in England went to London to form the Company of Gentlemen Adventurers in the Mines of Real del Monte. Soon after, they traveled on to central Mexico. Real del Monte is the name normally given to the town they went to, the highest in Mexico.

“The two or three habitations which are thought the best are scarcely habitable,” a miner wrote in his diary after arriving in the town. “We may, therefore, bid good-bye to comforts. The cause of this decay is obvious enough. This district has no resources when the mines are not worked.”

The local people of the impoverished town were equally clear sighted about their plight. They rang the Church bells to greet the Cornish miners and prayed for their success.

Mineral del Monte had been a town in decline. It and Pachuca had in the sixteenth century been the world’s biggest producers of silver.

The work began. With pumps and other equipment that had taken a year to bring across the ocean and the mountains of Veracruz and Hidalgo the Cornish hoped to clear the water from the deepest mine shafts. Meanwhile, half a kilometer above those shafts, the town they had entered began to be revitalized and transformed.

The transformers now lie, most of them, in the Pantheon Ingles (the English cemetery), that is on a hill high in the town. We go to it when the heavy rain, another phenomenon which must have made the Cornish feel at home, lets up. The cemetery is locked when we arrive but the old man living in the adjacent house opens the padlock for us. The graves lie on the hillside beneath tall pines. Again, it is a landscape not unlike one in Britain, but betrayed by a palm here or a bank of bougainvillea there.

Something surprises me: Frau Wilhemine Stempel adorns a grave-stone, and then Ludwig Stempel und kinder. The German names are followed by a Dutch one: N. Zurhaar, born The Hague, Holland, 1881. The Dutch woman’s grave-stone is written in English, a sign, no doubt, that she had become part of Real del Monte’s English-speaking community. “She was a nurse,” it says on her stone, “She loved people and people loved her.”

The cemetery tells part of the story of the town. Real del Monte became a cosmopolitan place, one where miners from many European countries came to earn a living thousands of miles from their home.

My wife is struck by a multitude of small graves at the feet of the pines, marked, most of them, only by ovals of stone. We ask the old man and he says these graves are of children killed in a cholera epidemic in 1877-78. “Rest now, dear,” says a stone on one of them, touchingly.

The hazards the miners faced were enormous. In Veracruz yellow fever struck down some of them. And work in the mine, as we were to learn the next day in the museum of the Acosta mine, was as hard and dangerous as mining normally is: the water dripping from the ceilings, the collapses, the flies that fed on the miners’ faeces, the worms that entered their bodies through their bare feet, the gases that might asphyxiate or explode. Some of the men were buried in their workplace, not on the hill.

And so what was left of the gentlemen adventurers and their adventure?

The technical problems proved great and the investment failed. In 1849 the British investors sold out their shares at a big loss to Mexican ones. Many of the miners stayed on.

“Are there any people here still speaking English?” I ask the old man. “No,” he replies, “not any more.”

Our Mexico guide book promises people with Cornish features in the town. But, on our rainy afternoon and morning in the mountain town, I see no one that strikes me as being in any way Cornish-looking; they are all gone, absorbed by the earth or into the local population.

And yet there are legacies. Mining in the town was resurrected, with four mines working at one point, though now only one, the La Rica mine, remains open.

There are traces of Cornish architecture in the town whose roofs were made by the resourceful miners out of the containers for the cyanide used in the mine.

And then the restaurants and cafes of the town boast of another Cornish legacy: “pastes,” better known in their native country as Cornish pasties. Pasties, to my mind, contain meat, potato, carrots and herbs that give a little spiciness in a light pastry. The Real del Monte version has the meat and potato and pastry but a distinctly Mexican spiciness that I doubt the original Cornish would have recognized.

The pastes are a local legacy. But there is a much bigger, national one: Mexico’s passion. The Cornishmen brought football to Mexico, just as some of their compatriots, railway men for the most part, took it to Argentina and Brazil. Football was first played in Mexico in Real del Monte, before spreading down the hill to Pachuca and on to the rest of the country.

And so what should we make of that investment of 1824? It was a bad one–wasn’t it?–that condemned men to a hazardous journey, unfamiliar illnesses, work in bad conditions and then the uncertainty that must have followed when financially the investment failed.

Yet much came out of it: the resurrection of the town, which is a pretty place to visit now; the “pastes” consumed by tourists who are attracted by the town’s location and colorful history; and Mexico’s national sport.

You cannot leave Real del Monte without a sense of admiration for the risk-takers: the financial ones and, even more so, the working men who tried to make a success of things in another country and invested their lives in it. They could never have guessed what they would bring to the country that was wise enough to welcome them.

Inside Mexico: Telcel territory

By IAN CAMPBELL         May 8, 2003

QUERETARO, Mexico, May 8 (UPI) — Some challenges in life are big. Success we cannot be sure of, we can only try our best. So can I do it, I asked myself, as I readied myself for another assault — on the cell phone office.

I ought to be a desirable customer. I am not rich but I do have a reasonable developed-country income, many times higher, therefore, than that of the vast majority of Mexicans. Yet, on my second offensive to land a cell phone from Telcel, which operates the biggest network of mobile phones in Mexico, things were not going well.

Why not try someone other than Telcel? Well, here where I live, near Querétaro, there is no viable competitor. No other company has Telcel’s national coverage, an asset Telcel vaunts itself on in a really very attractive advertisement — someone’s doing their job well — in which a big, multi-colored hot air balloon is seen floating across one wonderful Mexican landscape or another — a rocky coastline; a parched desert — and the legend appears, All Mexico is “territorio Telcel.”

Telcel territory. That is what I’m in. Along with 100 million other people. Big territory. An empire really, for the offshoot of the former state-run telephone company.

I like the woman in the local Telcel office. She is very friendly, very helpful and she loves my youngest children, with their blonde hair, and especially Laura’s blue eyes. Indeed, I am reprimanded now if I come to the office without them. That’s a nice thing about Mexico. You get time to strike up a relationship with people. But, corrupted by my origin in an Anglo-Saxon country, even if I am more of a Celt, I could not allow to slip from my mind the hope that this should prove a productive relationship and my fear that it would not.

My first offensive had simply died. I had gone over the top with a hopeful heart — and some encouraging words from the woman in the office, who said I would have the phone in a few days, ready for the summit in Baja California — and had then been mown down mercilessly by a barrage of bureaucratic requirements. It was a sad and bloody end.

On my second offensive, many months later, I was on about my sixth visit to the office. It was a war of attrition, as most are in Mexico. I had already taken along a copy of my credit card, front and back, a copy of my passport, a copy of a utility bill, which is…in my landlord’s name. Now there was a problem. In fact, almost everything was a problem. The credit card was foreign, I didn’t have my own name on the utility bill, and a passport — well, it isn’t a Mexican identity card, is it? I left the office less than hopefully.

Surprisingly, however, one morning, some time later, I received a phone call. It was from a Telcel person in a central office somewhere. I was asked a number of questions that I had already completed previously in a form in the Telcel office. Where did I live? What was my passport number, my credit card number etc, etc. But there were also some new questions. “What are the color of your eyes and your hair. What is the color of the façade of your house?” (Yellow, as it happens, and much nicer than it sounds.) “And the color of the door?”

I remember now that on a visit to the office I had been required not just to give my address but to draw a little map of the location of the house.

Now, of course, I can guess the profound reason for this. There are towns and villages in Mexico where some of the streets don’t have names and the houses don’t have numbers. But my house, the house I rent, has both. We receive mail quite efficiently.

But the evident aim was that, should I owe Telcel money, their debt collectors would, with Sherlock Holmes-like skill, pursue me, find my house and, armed with “hair color brown” and “eye color blue,” identify and trap their prey. (Though quite how the identification system would work for the vast majority of Telcel’s customers, “hair color black,” “eye color black,” it’s hard to say.)

In sum, however, this phone call seemed a promising development. I had advanced some yards and I cherished hopes that I might have the telephone before going on a trip to Texas in late April. But no. I was still dangerously poised in No Man’s Land. The application was still not complete, the nice lady in the office told me when I dropped by yet again.

I went again having returned from Texas. To my amazement victory seemed near. But I would not be able to pay with the credit card. I would have to go to the bank each month. And I needed proof on the rent.

I went home and sought a receipt from the rental agent and took it to the office immediately. The nice woman looked doubtful. “It’s not signed by the landlord,” she says.

“No, it’s signed by the agent, I replied. “I give the money to the agent.”

With a doubtful smile she faxed the page to the central office and then spoke with them on the phone. She put down the receiver and shook her head dolefully with a commiserating smile. I did a dance of despair around the office. My two little children, 1 and 3 years old, were complaining that they wanted to leave.

“Can I speak to them?” I asked — the officials not the children.

“Of course,” she said.

“I was put through on the phone to the local office. I explained that I paid my rent to the landlord’s agent. That the landlord’s name was on the letter, which goes as follows, “I received from Mr. Campbell, on the part of Señor X, the sum of…”

“Look,” I said to the man, “don’t you want to have a customer? I’m going to pay you money.”

“But my superiors have very strict requirements,” he replied.

A call back was promised. Would I break through enemy lines? I could see the battle was going to be decided here.

The phone rang. The nice woman took it. Again she shook her head and smiled.

“No?” I asked.

“No,” she replied, “They want more. But I’m going to give you the phone. Just make sure you come back tomorrow morning with the credential of the estate agent. And the deposit.”

“The deposit?”

“Yes, there’s a deposit.”

The deposit was of about $100 — two weeks’ wages for ordinary workers here.

So Telcel wasn’t running any financial risk at all. It has my deposit and it can cut my service in a moment if I don’t pay the bill. So why all the….

But never mind that. I had won! I had made it! The enemy was overcome!

And the prices for cell phone calls? They are obscene. Many times higher than in the United States. But who cares when you’ve achieved victory! And you’ve got to pay for service like that.