Mexican Gothic
Last week was the first week that I missed my Sunday post.
Honesty, I just forgot: my sister arrived on Saturday for a week-long visit and in the excitement and business of preparing things and picking her up, it got pushed out of the part of my mind that remembers someone-routine things.
What followed was a weird, weird trip.
She’d had COVID the week before and still wasn’t feeling great, so most of the plans we’d made for the week were postponed for the next trip. But we weren’t fazed: we were determined to make the most of it.
Truthfully, we’d hang out with each other in Hell if that were the only option.
And that’s pretty much what we did.
On Sunday, we went to visit a friend from the States who lives outside of Perote, a high-elevation and cold desert-like area not too far from here. How striking it is that two wildly-different ecosystems can exist in such close proximity!
My friend had invited us to a barbecue, which I thought would be at her house. Instead, we went to a hacienda she’d been wanting to see and had finally gained access to after a lot of trying, with plans to have a barbecue in the middle of the wilderness instead — a surprise to me given that all of our previous outings had been, in their majority, fairly bourgeoise affairs.
I was a bit worried for my sister’s comfort, but in the spirit of adventure and an almost dog-like desire to please those around us, we both tend to go along in most cases without protest.
The hacienda, it turns out, was in the middle of nowhere: we drove 20 minutes without passing a single man-made structure in order to get there.
When we arrived, we were greeted by a jovial-seeming 50-something year-old man and a young girl, who at first I thought was his daughter who might have had some kind of mental incapacity: she didn’t speak or look anyone in the eye, but followed us around during our visit.
My sister described the hacienda as “Mexican Gothic,” the name of a novel she’d read. I thought it looked eerily like the set of ¡Viva Mexico!, and I felt as uneasy as if I’d been stuck in the reality of that dark movie myself.
There was an array of exotic animals in cages, and several horses. The vast central courtyard was empty, and the sun beat down on us without a single cloud to block its rays. It was cold.
The rooms of the hacienda seemed to have been mostly left as-is, with their original furniture and disturbing murals of brown people working the land, though there was evidence on the ground-floor of an amateur taxidermist and computer purchases made in the 90s. There were elements of Arab design, reminding us that the Spanish hadn’t been the only newcomers to Mexico.
My friend’s husband, who is from the area, was as polite, quiet, and impeccably gracious as always: he struck gold with my friend, and he knows it. She struck gold with him, too.
His ancestors had both built and worked on the hacienda as slaves, and there are rumors that underground secret tunnels run between the various haciendas in the area and the church. Much of the property, I was told, had been returned to “the people,” but I’m a little fuzzy on the details of who exactly got what. The owners of this particular place apparently wanted to keep owning it, but not live there or visit it.
It was decided that we’d have the barbecue there, and tables and supplies were off-loaded from the pick-up truck and prepared while my sister, my friend and I wandered around the property’s vast rooms.
The caretaker and the girl lived in an area of the horse stables.
About the girl: my friend soon told me that she was not his daughter, but his wife. She could not have been more than 14, and my sister and I were horrified, shocked into silence in her presence and unsure of what to do. Pretending like everything was normal felt like complicity.
My friend and my partner, who both have better social graces in those types of situations that we do, tried to make friendly conversation with her, definitely the preferable behavior to having a dumb little internal storm about it. My uncle does have that gift, but it must be a recessive gene.
She would smile in response and wait for her husband to confirm with her that she could do something we’d invited her to do (like sit down).
She told my friend that she was 17, a lie none of us believed. She said she had never been to school. She was from a neighboring town, where she’d met the caretaker. When my friend asked her if she really liked being married, she seemed to tear up. She said she had a cold.
While my sister was ready to call the Mexican equivalent of CPS right then and there, the rest of us knew that it would be of no use. There is no such thing as “anonymous tipping” in cases like these; we’d have to go to the police and essentially file a complaint against the man. You also need full names, addresses, paperwork; “the two people living at that one hacienda” isn’t going to cut it.
And as a result of doing so, he may or may not be investigated, and everyone would know exactly where the complaint had come from. I explained to my sister the reason that most people simply look away: there’s a taste for revenge here that’s much more alive than what we’re used to up north, and very little likelihood that you’d be protected from it. Going to the police can make you a target, meaning the only real possibility we had of getting this girl away from this man was staging an elaborate kidnapping, which, I don’t think I need to point out, is not our speciality.
So we had barbecue together, pretending we were not hanging out and making small talk with a tacitly legitimized pedophile and his victim.
The sun started going down, and it got colder. We left.
Earlier in the day when I urgently whispered to my partner about the girl and proposed devising a rescue plan that I would never actually work up the nerve to carry out, he asked, “Did she ask for our help?”
That response instantly made me aware of one of the greater cultural divides between where I grew up and where I am now: my own sensibilities tell me that she doesn’t need to ask for help: it’s wrong because it’s wrong, because she’s a minor, because she’s a victim, because she has no agency.
But she never had any agency. Her parents willingly “gave” her to this man. She was not sent to school, perhaps out of poverty, or apathy, or both. People here know instinctively that some people’s lives are just going to suck, and they also know that there’s not much they can do about it, especially if they don’t seem particularly and actively motivated to escape.
It seems wrong to accept something like that when you’ve been brought up with a very American “can-do” attitude, but perhaps the trick is something we should all learn: focusing on offering the human kindness that we can.
That said, I can’t let go of the feeling that we saw someone in Hell, and then just left them there. What are we supposed to do, as outsiders, in the face of something like this? What can we do? I’m still thinking on it, and I’ll let you know when I come with an answer.
The ride back was a physical extension of my uneasy emotional feelings: I became severely carsick (the elevation change and alcohol I’d had surely hadn’t helped, though I swear I was not drunk), and threw up the entire way home. The toll road that gets us back to Xalapa in under an hour was closed, and so we took the regular one, which was stuffed with cars that had been turned around as well as from a Christmas tree event nearby. It took us four hours, and by the time we finally arrived home I’d spent four hours feeling like I was dying but without the actual release of death.
It’s been a week, and I’m still feeling slightly queasy, with other weird symptoms having popped up during the week as well. The hacienda haunts me.
Living in Delhi India in the early to mid-eighties, it was common for many Indian middle-class households to hire children--mostly young girls-- as young as 11 or 12 to act as live-in servants. Usually, they were low caste and often from the nearby mountains, as mountain people were considered more honest and docile. Surely their parents sent them.
The Ahujas, my landlords who lived downstairs, always had one. I would see the unkempt child mopping the driveway or washing clothes. Mrs. Ahuja, a loud Sardarni, would regularly scream at the hapless child.
Like you, if I had "reported" it, nobody would have done anything about it because it was a socially accepted behavior at the time--and in any event technical violations were easily addressed with a bribe.
Maybe I'm rationalizing to myself, but all I would have accomplished is getting us evicted from the upstairs of the Ahuja's house. I also wonder what kind of life she left.
I saw lots of really inhumane stuff in India--much, much worse than in any country I have lived in or spent significant time in. Though I worked for my then sister-in-law (who did labor organizing for poor women with SEWA), when it came to individual instances, all I did was watch.
The world is full of people beyond our help. So, we help those we can.