La Ciudad Fantasma

For an excursion with my migration class we travelled to an old mining town. I kept hearing my teacher refer to it as a ciudad fantasma (ghost town). Had it been crowned this name for being haunted, abandoned or both? This is what I would find out on my excursion. 

During the revolution San Luis Potosi was rich in  silver and mined heavily. Now it is a ghost town, home to a few hotels, mineral based jewelry shops, and abandoned buildings. What would it be like to live here? My professor quipped as we were leaving Potosi. "Solo" I answered. Very alone. It is mostly abandoned save for Chicimeca Indians and a few people running shops and giving tours. What is does have is the remnants of silver mines, where one can follow a rope downward into moist and murky holes. 30 pesos, for under three dollars a tour guide will go down and explain what this place used to be. 

I have been called to step up my machismo several times. Most of the time I have stepped up to the challenge. The first was when I was pressured to digest a very hot mysterious veiny pepper. My mouth was on fire, the candle did not go out for three minutes, after I had shed tears and was red in the face. As 7 girls scurried down the steepest part of the mine ahead of me, I heard their shouts from below. Zaaaaach eres un hombre (are you a man?). I am a man, I thought, a man who enjoys life above the ground where there is ample sunlight and less things that crawl and bite. 

Something stirred inside of me and I grabbed the rope, stuck my feet upon the rock holds, and propelled downwards. Perhaps it was that cave diving book I read last winter that inspired my curiosity. Maybe it was just my child like proclivity for swinging down into the unknown. After the next corner the sunlight was gone, and all that was left to illuminate the rigid textures were some flashlights strapped to the rope. We continued downwards fifty metres through three main descents and then hit water. El fondo. The end. 

A young looking and anxious tour guide/ local met us there to brief us on the history. I could not listen. The rocky barriers of this forsaken hole were starting to close in. I grabbed the rope and was the first to ascend. What took about 20 minutes to descend could not have taken more than 2 to ascend. Kicking my feet off the wall, bracing myself for the next hold, I pulled myself upwards, mumbling to myself, quiero ver el sol!!! 

I want to see the sun. 

Circo Atayde Hermanos

Circo Atayde Hermanos. The Atayde brothers circus.

I was walking through Leon last week when I heard a blur of Spanish adjectives projected in the air, coming wildly towards me. Syllables danced for my attention. My ears perked to comprehend the wild and sporadic burst of Spanish. I looked up and saw something difficult to comprehend. It was a small pickup, a pale yellow and beat up truck with a loudspeaker perched on the roof. This explained the muffled slur of Spanish imperatives. Being pulled behind that truck was a trailer and a cage, and inside that cage a live, pacing tiger. The tiger was laying down casually on the cold metal and looking around as the city of Leon whizzed by.

Three days later, my inmerso compañera Pamela invited me to go to the Atayde brothers circus with her
friend and her friends adorable infant. I was morally conflicted at the advertising stragety: wild animals imprisoned and pulled throughout town like condemned criminals. But I decided to go. If anything I could capture the inhumanity into an 8 by 11 print. Something I could post on forums to raise awareness of the criminal ways of these Atayde brothers. The sadistic treatment of animals. Somehow I doubted a photo could do that much. Admittedly I was just plain curious about what a Mexican circus had to offer.

My friend Efi and I walked the three blocks from campus to the circus grounds. I saw lights, red and yellow tents crowding out the horizon, and more parked trailer cages. My stomach twisted upon itself as I realized it was not just one tiger on display.

Before entering the main auditorium tent one walks past a series of about nine trailers. Bears, panthers, tigers and monkeys had been plucked from their biospheres and crammed into cage after cage, no larger than the average kitchen. This area was free to the public and there was no space between the animal on display and human onlooker. The only thing keeping one from reaching through the bars and stroking wild fur was a ribbon rapping around the bars. It was red and had the word peligro printed repeatedly. Danger.

Below is an image of the tents and my friends walking tentatively into the swirling, thrilling wild show of the Atayde circus. Sponsored by Coca Cola.





















I happily left this area to the main tent. I could not look at these animals pacing in their packed in lifes, lying down as if dying, or simply staring out blankly into a world very different from their own. The circus began with a large suede wearing man that had a voice like dracula. The tent was hardly full. For every five onlookers there was a vendor selling 'cacahuates' 'and 'palomitas,' things that glowed and things that sprung. It was overwhelmingly red on the inside with a yellow striped tarp marking the arena where the action happened.

The next hour brought strange and alarming contradictions. Red haired Argentinian clowns squeaked out commands at children volunteers. Scantily clad and busty Latina woman hung from tarps bolted to the ceiling. One woman walked up and down on a shoddy metal latter, balancing various things in her teeth, ranging from a Menorah to a Katana. Horses followed by mini horses pranced around, dressed in vibrant red and yellow silks, colors and patterns that reminded me of Chicago's China town. In the second act a cage was set up to keep in 8 or 9 tigers. The tamed beasts followed the commands of a red suited animal trainer with a leather whip. They obeyed him to a cue, jumping through fire, pausing on platforms, and swiping and growling as the he strutted by with machismo.

I don't like clowns. When they returned in the second act I had had enough. I left the Atayde Hermanos circus about fifteen minutes before the finale.


Before I departed I captured the picture you see below. For 80 pesos you can come see the wild, captured and branded, pacing the small confines of their traveling prisons.

Solo León

Today was my first day alone in Leon. I navigated the bus by myself. Picture the el in rush hour, packed with uncomfortably hot strangers way too close to one other. Add a door that sweeps inward instead of out and tries to eat you if you're not quick.

But my efforts were rewarded with some very cool sights.

The sky was scattered with cumulous clouds in stark relief to a ripe blueberry palette.

A spontaneous break dance 90's b boy style erupted in the square (la plaza fundadores)

A troubador swagged out in pink stripes and black pants sang of amores perdidas. 

Ramona, the four week old puppy, enjoyed a ride on my hermano de hospedaje, Luis, and his escoba. 

I am especially proud of capturing this moment. I want to title it 'cuando encontraron dos forasteros' 

or 'when two strangers meet' 

What a day. My camera, and it's quickly spitting shutter, and I need rest. Tomorrow my summer 'ends'. 

A Town With Sugar in It's Veins

A piñata split open and spilled candy down the hill. Or so appeared the vibrant town of Guanajuato, in Guanajuato Mexico. An M.C. Escher drawing with winding and impossibly shaped streets, winding roads and dizzying heights. Yet Escher drawings, if one thinks of the hand that sketches itself, or the staircases leading up and down and up again, one will remember them to be in black and white, and Guanajuato is anything but that.

The night the architect spilled his paint of pastel blues, reds and yellows and let them blanket the geometric houses, Guanajuato was born. We, another 'intercambio' and I, took a taxi into the heart thriving biology of the town, and found ourselves climbing a baroque style stone staircase, fifty feet into the air. Breathless at the top, we stared in awe at our first true vista; haciendas, tiendas and iglesias popped from the verdantly wooded peaks. Moments later, we were stumbling down back into the labyrinth of streets searching for a university office.

Rights, lefts, ups, overs and arounds. A spinning assortment of directions that would eventually lead us to the place where we might attain student visas. Yet distraction came in every open aired entrance that concealed a view of rigid lines zig zagging up the hills. I clicked my camera madly trying to capture it in pixels. People hurried dazedly under the trance the city superimposed on its residents. To look down was to look across, to stare upwards was to feel a sweet vertigo. I digested the candy colored houses until my stomach ached with the sticky sweetness of the town. Guanajuato has sugar running in its veins. Pixie sticks sprawled over the hills, a Wonka factory spitting out square shaped villas, high fructose corn syrup bubbling up through the cobble stones. I know I will go back and digest this town until I am sick.

A man stands on the rooftop against the rare absence of color of a white wall in Guanajuato, top to bottom. 

Guanajuato encantado

The Immersed Perspective

This is written on my first full day in León, Mexico. I am a student of Spanish and education at Depaul University on an exchange to study at the Universidad de Guanajuato/ León. I am here to learn Spanish, explore a culture and discover the benefits of complete immersion to language learning. This is my first time abroad.

My first lesson is that there are barriers to be broken. They are many. After twenty-one years in one country, flying into another one is a truly bizarre and at times irrational experience. That said, there is something truly magnetic about this town and this country. I am positive that what I know about it now is incomparable to what I will know in five months. So let me introduce you to León as I know it now, on my first full day immersed in this culture.

León was the recent host to pope Benedict XVI. In several months, on the 16th of November the sky here will be filled with an explosion of colors, in the international festival of hot air balloons. I hope to go up there. From the home of my host family I look over a small hill side covered in beige adobe houses. It looks like an intricate and beautiful ant hill.  At night the houses sparkle in a collage of glow worms among the canvas of sky.

With beauty comes sacrifice and adjustment. The adjustment of a brisk and awake shower to start the day. Adjustment in an awkward door mechanism on the local bus that curiously smacks in the side if you are too close when it closes. Moreover a university clerk that looks at me and my fellow students with a confused and slightly hilarious look when we introduce as the exchange students.

This is just my first impression. This is the rambling of an overwhelmed mind the first time abroad. A bizarrely intoxicating experience that will surely define many years to come. More to come.

Esperando lo mejor,
Zach

Siento como ese niño. Con un nuevo mundo a la vuelta de cada esquina.