The Guadalajara Reporter

Rainy season begins with a number of of surprises: A woman opens the first furrows of her corn field with drama

“In this part of Jalisco” — meaning the ample area around Guadalajara/Lake Chapala — “las aguas begin on the day of San Antonio.” That what everyone said when my wife and I arrived in Ajijic in 1963. Though often it didn’t occur quite as promptly as that declaration claimed. But sure enough, the first full-fledged rain arrived this year – with truenos y relampagos (thunder and lightning) — the night of June 12-13, the 13th being the feast day of San Antonio de Padua. And folks out late marking that saint’s day got soaked, as they expected.

Some while later, I began helping campesino friends clear and re-fence and then plant their milpas with Mexico’s ancient agricultural trinity — maize, frijol, calabaza. The celestial furnace of late May, early June — still air, silence, unrelenting heat — prompted us into inventive celebration. We ripped off swear-soaked shirts, whooped, swore, danced, thanked the clouds with salvos from ancient firearms.

This year, I and a younger friend helped Mica Garcia with her milpa. Her husband Chucho had disappeared during a New Year’s celebration last year. Some people think he was kidnapped. But Mica believes he ran off to gringolandia. He has relatives in Oklahoma, and always had an eye for what Mica called “those blondies.” But when she arranged a telephone call — she’s one of the few people I know who doesn’t have cell phone now — they said they hadn’t seen or heard from him. She believed they were lying.

Mica is what country people — ranchers I grew up with — would call a throwback. She lives at the edge of a modest-sized pueblo that thinks it’s a real town, and cultivates sueños that it’s suddenly become middle class. This is principally because folks who are said to be dabbling in the drug trade — often in minor ways — and those of the overlarge staff of the ayuntamiento suddenly can afford new pickups. Mica Garcia quite definitely does not drive a hulking double-cab shinny white Silverado. For one thing, she doesn’t know how to drive. And the cost of one of those gas-hogs is beyond her wanting to know about.

In her corral at the edge of the pueblo, she illegally raises chickens, rabbits, a burro, a cow and two horses. In May she finally settled with a skimping landowner on “renting” a nearby plot of land where she is planting a milpa. The rent she had to pay, after long wrangling, was the traditional fifth of the crop.

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