The Guadalajara Reporter

Illiteracy is still a harsh, stunting reality among us, as many mature Mexicans continue to conceal their disadvantage

Guillermo (Memo) Sanchez was a handsome, rather short, muscular young man who had been carried as an infant on his mother’s back into the mountainside above Jocotepec as she and his father worked the family milpa there. In 1972, a good number of local residents, though they resided in the pueblo of Jocotepec, were still actually cerro Mexicans, living primarily by cultivating and harvesting domestic and wild flora and fauna from the northern mountainsides.

It was only after Memo, then 17, had been working some time as a peon ­ — a stonemason’s helper — for my wife and me as we built a home on a lower slant of a mountainside called Las Agraciadas, that I noticed that he couldn’t read well.   A number of people living in Nextipac, a barrio of Jocotepec, mostly older folks, were illiterate. They told time by the Joco church bells. They possessed a knowledge of smaller numbers, and weights of common merchandise. This was easy because they seldom made large purchases, and almost never of “sophisticated” — and therefore “complicated” — merchandise.

I watched Memo work and interact with neighbors, his family, and with us — we lived fairly nearby and early on became friends with his parents. Memo, who in my naiveté seemed to be missing out on a huge part of the world in which he lived, was canny in concealing his handicap.

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