Juarez, Mexico: The Market

At the large market, I remember I snuck outside to smoke a cigarette, away from my wandering family and how the men glared hard and their eyes were like green and brown flint in the sun, sustained by their own sheen and penetrating clarity...pinned squinted eyes in the deep tan skin, wind blown and dry black hair and dusty clothes, thin flannels and jeans that reminded me of the work clothes of the farmers back in Maryland.  My father's own land working clothes.  I remember the abode buildings.  

I felt more one of them then than of the white American tourists families, some of whom were even decked out in the traditional garb of tourist Floridian style floral shirts, with fanny packs and cameras and jugs of water to keep them safe from the poor Mexican sewage and sanitation system.  The Mexican women wore no shoes.  The families selling goods wanted only my money it seemed...not conversation or connection, but I hardly minded.  I just wanted to mesh into the sea of them and their Virgin Mary Voodoo lore and pottery and dusty floors, their brightly painted wooden animals, the horizon decked with shacks made of everything from cardboard to aluminum siding scraps and strong reeds, bound together with plastic construction and baling twine, sealed with the mud from the Mexican soil, so rich with red and white clay.  

The people of Juarez seemed made of the clay itself, the wind of the horizon sustaining the spirit-fire that wove through their blood and shone and their eyes.  I had been working outside all summer, so by that time I was so tan I barely recognized my reflection as that of white woman, but still I could not have been mistaken as one of them.  I thought briefly that there had been a mistake, this land was my homeland.  I too had been raised and molded from the soil here, my skin nourished by the deep heat of the sun and dried like leather by the air, but somewhere there had been a fluke, I'd inherited some rare deformity that seemed to cause them to mistake my true origins.  I wanted to take my shoes off too, trample and pace and run along the dry dirt alleys and race the children until we were all flying.  Some of them wore traditional Mexican dresses, which my Grandmother told me was to please the tourists and enchant them, but I didn't believe her, though it was true that most of them wore American clothing, old and tattered, with Nike logos and icons like Madonna and Metallica or some long gone lost boy band of the states.  They looked at me like I was an alien, or maybe just a walking purse they might conjole into buying a handmade crucifix for a dollar or two.  

Love though, was what I saw and felt there.  My soul raw and exposed and erected as a community, a culture, a city of mystery, mystic Catholicism married to a native connection to the ancient animal and spirit world.  I would have died for the people of Mexico that day.  I would have passed out hunks of my body like bread for their dry rough tongues and hands, crumbs of my flesh sprinkling deep into the creases of their palms, moistened by their hunger.