I did two things for the first time today, Sunday, one of them surely for the last time also. A student from IU South-East sent me an e-mail message yesterday inviting me to join her for church services today, and like an idiot (“I am not an idiot, I am afflicted by idiocy”) I accepted. This morning I went to the Centro Cristiano (CC) de Cuernavaca at noon and met her and two members of the family she is staying with, a mother and her grown-up son, a man in his forties. The señora told me she has seven children and, so far, eleven grandchildren. Sombrero! Chelsey, the IUS student, is a nice young woman with too much goo curling her eyelashes. I asked her what denomination the church was (it was obviously not Catholic) and she told me “Christian”; at that point I should have said “muchas gracias” and fled, but I managed to convince myself that I was pretending to be an anthropologist and that, for once, I would observe dispassionately a gathering of a cultural group. My admiration for anthropologists has grown; I found it nearly impossible to be scientifically dispassionate in a “Christian” church.
In Modern English one uses the adjective “excruciating” with a certain frequency; I invite you to attend a CC Cuernavaca service to check if you had the meaning right.
The place, on Avenida Alvaro Obregón 312, seemed unprepossessing from the street, like so many entrances to garages one sees here. Right from the street one entered an atrium of sorts (functional, cheap, unadorned architecture) where a small crowd was hanging out. There was food for sale –both hot and cold--, ice creams, popsicles, coffee; and also books, CDs, pamphlets, and crafts: handbags and shirts with the outline of a fish in faux diamonds. (What happened to kicking the merchants from the Temple, I asked myself). The atmosphere was friendly in a churchy sort of way; folks seemed happy to be there, greeting each other. There were tons of children, as Mexicans are anything but procreationally challenged. Nice enough, I thought. But I had not descended to the belly of the whale.
The area of worship was the size of an airport hangar; you could fit a jumbo jet easily there, once you got rid of all the chairs. Jonah would have felt perfectly at home. That sanctuary also looked like a hangar, except that a bunch of fans hung from the ceiling. Chairs were arranged longitudinally; the wall opposite the door was occupied by a wide center stage; a video of that center stage was projected to both sides of the hangar so anybody could have a good look at what supposedly mattered.
The stage was literally a stage, with microphones, and musicians (keyboard, electric guitar, and drums) playing and singing as most of the folks stood and clapped their hands to the rhythm. The atmosphere was disco-like, minus the strobe lights and the booze and pheromones. Most people swayed or hopped with the music, at times they fanned the air with their stretched hands. Some folks raised from time to time a fist and pointed up with outstretched index. The volume was so high that I swore off anthropology after just ten minutes. There were banners behind the musicians with words such as PODEROSO, JUSTO, MAGNÍFICO in gold letters over dark blues, and greens. In the middle of the… sancturay? arena? hangar? a man waved a flag with also some gold letters over blood red. I could only read the last of the words: CORDERO; I found it (I told you I was slipping fast off my ethnographic resolution) somewhat incongruous since “cordero” means ‘lamb’ not ‘bull’. In front of the stage/platform/altar stood four young women wearing lamé outfits and shaking pom-poms, cheerleader style. This whole spectacle or participatory dance lasted about an hour; I was checking my wristwatch regularly trying to decide whether I could make a gracious escape, so I know how long it took to the second. Several singers took turns, all pretty much stressing the same motif: God is great and don’t worry be happy. Forty five minutes into the event, a man with a Brazilian accent took the stand, was introduced along with his wife, and proceeded to play a few tunes first on a tenor saxophone and then on a baritone one (the most typical kind); the wife played too. Their music was not too bad, jazzy and melodic, an improvement over the brainwashing rock beat that preceded them. He spoke some, always inspirationally, and informed the faithful (and me), that doctors once diagnosed that he’d lose a lung in four months. What do you know? (He shied from using the word miracle; even in this place there was some restraint.) He then proceeded to blow hard some very high notes; the audience applauded.
At this point, with the volume returning to a human level, I was beginning to regain my anthropological calm. I was meditating on the fact that, so far, there had been nothing remotely preachy about the service. Indeed a lot of “we give you Glory, Lord” stuff, and plenty of sputtered “amens,” but no reference to sin or repenting; nothing ethical at all, much less intellectual. We’d been an hour in that hot hangar, and, I thought, naively, the service was coming to an end. Not bad, went my thoughts: this must be the secret of this church, early Sunday disco, religion-lite. Then the preacher was announced, climbed the stage and strutting and shifting a wireless microphone from hand to hand, began to speak. He read a bit from the New Testament (Peter 4) and went on to gloss the passage with the insistence of true prophets. The man used no notes or teleprompter and uttered a torrent of words that kept to the topic and respected the essential rules of syntax.
I remember that many years ago a colleague professor, a historian, revealed to me that in graduate school he’d been told how to deliver a successful classroom lecture. “You just give them three ideas,” he said, “no more. That way you make sure they get the points.” This morning’s preacher went one better and took to one idea: life is short, prepare for eternity in Heaven by acting well. A smidgeon of poetic figures (there was something about “cielo” [heaven] versus “suelo” [ground]), and a lot of rhetoric had the man going for a whole hour: sixty holy minutes. If he wanted to give us a sense of eternity, he succeeded with flying colors.
At this point, my wristwatch signaling it was 2:00 pm, I lost it. I looked pleadingly to my student and bade as polite an adieu to her, her house mother and brother (all three of them seemed to be having a good time throughout, even though they were all restrained and did not jump up and down or waved arms like most of the other people; they had also told me that was not their church) and I took to the street which, even in 90 degree Fahrenheit sun, seemed much cooler that the heavenly place I had left. I headed downtown and asked a policeman where a restaurant I had been recommended, called El Barco, was. He pointed it out to me, and corrected me by saying El Barco was no ‘restaurante’ but a ‘pozolería.’ And that was the second, shorter, cooler, calmer, and more pleasant of my firsts this morning.
Pozole
I have no culinary guide to Mexico. A good one would help, as the menus do puzzle. For the pozole this afternoon I had to choose between chico [small] and grande [big]; I went for chico and was glad I did. Then between chicken, pork, or a combination of both; I chose pork, lucky again. Then between ‘maciza’ and something else with a term I forget; the waiter informed me that ‘maciza’ [‘solid’] was from the body of the pork and the other from the head; you bet I went for maciza (I’d been anthropologically adventurous enough for one day). Then I had to choose between plain, verde [green] or rojo [red]. I inquired again, but the explanation used words I was not familiar with, having to do with different kinds of chiles none of which I’d ever heard before. I went with verde, not without the feeling of a guy who at night is trying to decide which of the three headlights coming to him on a narrow street is the motorcycle.
Pozole, at least the ‘cerdo’, ‘maciza’ and ‘verde’ kind, is a soup. Quite tasty, though more of a home cooking tastiness than any gourmet delicacy. (Which suited me fine after Brother Microphone, believe me.) I would surmise it is a vegetable-base soup to which shreds of meat are added (the pork was macizo no longer). It was served in a nice earthen bowl, and toppled with avocado (for a supplement); the waiter also brought two little bowls, one with sliced radishes and shredded lettuce and one with minced onion and wedges of lime. One thing is for certain: scurvy will never afflict the Mexicans; they serve lime with just about anything. And I love it. I squeeze it on fruit, in soup, on rice, on tortillas, on tequila, and on beer –the famous ‘michelada’ of which I enjoyed one at El Barco. The booklet that the TEC gave the students and me says that pozole is “a Mexican dish made of corn and meat.” Nice try, Tec: just about anything served in this country is made of corn and meat. Except, perhaps, pozole; I couldn’t find any corn in it. So go figure. But indeed isn’t this why we travel, to find out other people’s contradictions and then go home and feel more at ease with our own?
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