The Guadalajara Reporter

Getting a handle on where you are, and what that means. Solving problems here can call for thinking in challenging ways

In 1995, a campesino named Jose (“Pepe”) Peredo married into the large extended Hernando Diaz family, which was big enough, and generally self-sufficient and insular enough to possess the aura of a clan.  He was an unlikely candidate to be accepted by his wife’s many kinfolk because he was both poor and so promiscuous in his personal life that he had two gringo friends.  Despite her family’s early skepticism, it was this social adventureness that first attracted the 17-year-old girl who was to become Pepe’s wife.  Younger members of the clan were the first generation to become “more broadly socialized,” said a gringo permitted past the rancho’s tree-trunk anchored front gate.

Pepe had been reared in a small pueblo of under 4,000 people that was the cabacera (equivalent of a country seat) of one of Jalisco’s poorest municipalities.   In 1999, municipal fathers boasted that it had a population of “over 5,000,” and ten localidades (towns).  It had three medical facilities and ten schools, including a new kindergarten, eight elementary schools and one high school.  But it had no “cultural centers,” though it boasted a library, two restaurants and three fondas.  There were no hotels or supermarkets, but two small pharmacies.  It sported one empty jail (housing detainees only after a major fiesta, or an especially exuberant weekend), 50 ranches/farms, and one priest who was overworked. The municipio’s ten localidades and smaller pueblos were widely scattered across a mountainous topography.

Last August 18, Pepe’s successful search for rustled horseflesh appeared in this space, including the fact that he had several children.  A close reader of words in this space wrote a letter, noting that while many middle-class Mexican families are now having fewer children, many poor Mexican families often have more children than they can satisfactorily care for – by foreign urban standards – or educate.  Begging mothers with children in tow, was his example.  Pepe has eight kids. This reader argued that a vasectomy – “simple, safe and cheap” – was the answer to this problem.

Coincidently, columnist Jeanne Chaussee, writer for the Reporter since 1986, noted August 25, “Why is it that so many people moving here from other countries seem to think that Mexico didn’t exist before they arrived?”  And she nimbly dented the seemingly incorrigible propensity for foreigners to criticize so many things Mexican, without understanding them.  (Fodder for another day.)

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