EDUCACIÓN

 

Secondary school here is run by an ambitious standardisation program which stretches across the entire country and involves a kind of televised classroom from eight a.m. till two p.m. daily for millions and millions of children. You sit and watch a program then answer questions in your copybook about what you’ve just seen. Big parabolic dishes stuck on the concrete roofs of these full-to-bursting schools beam in these lesson clusters twice a day to all public school students, and no other curricular activities can interfere with their broadcast for fear of falling behind. These big parabólicas are starting to bristle across the landscape, blooming like big white mushrooms. Even in small remote communities there might be one, sticking out as strangely as the Hubble Telescope amid the cement block and cactus. Television is taking over from radio as the primary source of non-local news, and those with access to it spread the word. Millions tune in daily to Venezuelan soap operas, cartoons and sport. When Mexico played in the soccer World Cup, tiny portable TVs appeared everywhere and the council erected sets in the zócalo so that nobody needed to miss out on their fix.

It would be nice to think some programming time would be devoted to literacy and education, but why should poor people be expected to watch improving television, rather than what the rest of us do? On paper, television may be a great educative tool, but the vast majority of us use it for something different, both its creators and its consumers. Go round to someone’s house who’s scrimped for a TV set and you’ll like as not find ten neighbourhood kids sitting on the cement floor watching a dubbed version of Los Simpsons, their faces as glassy and vacant as kids in front of the idiot box anywhere.

Without a daily dose of television or newspapers, the campesinos here garner what they need to know for their day-to-day survival by word of mouth and the report on somebody’s radio – the human voice is what they trust – but they still remain sitting ducks for sophisticated weapons of the media like glossy billboard campaigns and hustings involving laid-on food and mariachi bands. It seems particularly easy to convince them when they can’t read or write and are swayed by verbal powers of persuasion and withheld facts. Electioneering campaigns here are a sight to behold, with a barrage of blatant vote-buying coming from all directions: free food, free T-shirts, free Coca-Cola, just sign your cross here and we’ll be back to build the health centre later.

One day, a few weeks before the general election, signs appeared in one town offering free haircuts to anyone who wanted them, courtesy of one of the political party candidates. In response, the ruling party opened surplus grain stores and handed out ‘free’ sacks of corn to farmers, stamped with the party logo. Then logo-emblazoned machinery appeared to seal a notorious stretch of local road. If only the stakes could have been raised again – maybe, eventually, they might have increased the daily basic wage.

A lot of people realise they’re being bought, but believe that nothing will change for them anyway, whoever gets in, so why not get a free T-shirt, at least? In fact, as a few local wits demonstrate, why not get a free hat from one rival, and the T-shirt from the other, and wear them both at the same time?

‘I had a terrible night the other night,’ goes a Mexican joke. ‘I had all my worldly goods stolen, so I jumped in my car and gave chase to the thieves. On the road, someone smashed into me, totalling the car and breaking every bone in my body. As I lay there helpless someone robbed me of my watch, wallet and shoes. But then my troubles really started … then the bloody police arrived!’

Nepotism and corruption might rule politics and bureaucracy here, but a special public scorn is reserved for law enforcers. Being a policeman in Mexico is not, people agree, the most lucrative work – you have to pay for your own uniform and apparently your own bullets. There are cops of all stripes here: cops for guarding jewellery stores and tourist precincts, cops for standing in the middle of roaring traffic controlling intersections with imperious waves of white-gloved hands and a repertoire of whistles, cops for street pacing, for transporting money, patrolling nightclubs and restaurants and, it seems, just for driving around in state-of-the-art utilities, armed to the teeth.

In fact, they are all armed to the teeth, and the full uniform of machinegun, truncheon, bulletproof vest, braided hat, polished boots and walkie-talkie presents a formidably pumped-up long arm of the law.

But, no, it’s not lucrative, the Mexicans say philosophically, and that is why they are all on the take.

Tourists to Latin America frequently have police corruption stories to make your hair curl.

The Mexicans themselves tend to laugh hollowly and get out their wallet when they’re pulled over for some minor or imaginary infringement. A complicated choreography of polite, double-entendre language and meaningful pauses and barely concealed haggling will ensue. Once we were on a late bus that was pulled over by a police roadblock. The driver got out cheerfully enough and some discussion ensued with the cops behind the vehicle, some back-and-forthing like men bargaining at a garage sale. The driver hopped back on and addressed the passengers.

‘Have any of you got change for fifty pesos?’ he said.

The factory workers in the bus shook their heads. Finally Phil and I came up with notes of smaller denominations and he jumped off again. Within moments we were on the road again, a fifty-peso note dutifully delivered back to us.

‘What happened?’ we ventured to ask.

‘Ah – didn’t have the tail-lights working. But I only had that fifty-peso note and I wasn’t going to hand it over. Hell, that was only a twenty-five-pesomordida, not a penny more.’

The mordida– ‘the bite’ – is the currency of choice here, rather than the official multa, the fine. Sometimes it’s carefully referred to as la propina, the tip. The fine will often be plucked from some outrageous book of infringements carrying a sliding scale, and as a kind of introduction and incentive to the subject of the cash bribe, will be mentioned as starting figures. Five hundred pesos, say, or if you’re a gringo with US plates and a shiny new rental car, say … five thousand pesos.

A short spiel will follow, outlining the seriousness of your crime, expressing regret and a formal reassurance that the law, señor, after all, is the law. Then, well, you’re free to come to a convenient cash arrangement.

Sometimes it doesn’t go quite so smoothly, though, and the repercussions are no laughing matter.

If the officers sense there may be a nice little earner in the offing, a confiscation of papers or a vehicle, a planting of drugs, or even a short stint in jail can apparently result. Many a chastened gringo can relate their own personal tale of woe and intimidation when they failed to understand the rich subtext of the mordida or struck a particularly corrupt bully and were foolish enough to accompany the officers down to the station to check that all papers were in order. A far greater ‘fine’ will await them there. Mexican police hate the trouble and inconvenience of real bureaucratic paperwork. Why fill out a parking ticket, for instance, when you can far more easily and profitably carry a small spanner and simply remove the plates of the offending vehicle on the spot? Down at the station, when the owner races in to hear the ransom demand required to get them back, it’s amazing just how much red tape we can cut through.

After nearly eighteen months without a single brush with the law, we’re finally pulled over on a quiet street in Mexico City by an imperious whistle.

We both get out to investigate. The policeman is looking sorrowfully at the front grille of the car.

‘No front number plate here, I notice,’ he says.

No. The front plate is propped on the dashboard, visible through the windscreen. In a country where many cars lack a front grille altogether, where trucks carry either six storeys of haphazardly tied hay bales or thirty people crammed into the back, where cracked or smashed windscreens are held together with masking tape until they eventually buckle and fall in, it seems a terribly minor infraction. But now the policeman is thumbing through his legendary little black book.

‘Failure to display number plate adequately,’ he says, flipping pages, ‘contrary to ordinance seventy-two, clause nine. I’m afraid I have to fine you. Here, you can see for yourselves.’

He flashes us a glimpse of a page of figures, snapping the book shut as we’re focusing on the list.

‘Nine hundred pesos’ he says sternly.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Nine hundred pesos. As the rulebook says, the equivalent of thirty days of the basic wage.’

Our apologies begin. We offer to find some wire immediately and attach the plate. We don’t live in the city, we explain. We are only here briefly, and have overlooked this one requirement.

‘By all means find some wire,’ he replies, arms folded, ‘but you must also pay your fine.’

Phil does something guaranteed to put the guy in a bad mood.

‘Alright,’ he says. ‘I’m happy to pay the fine, but I’d like a receipt so that I can keep it for my own records – that seems a very high figure, after all.’

The cop breathes out irritably through his nose. With a sigh, he takes out his fine book, snaps open a pen and begins to slowly prepare a page with a piece of carbon paper. Every movement is designed to give us the opportunity to start the haggling. He waits for us to crack under the bluff as he waits, pen poised, over the page. It is the first, virgin page of the book. Another ploy strikes him.

‘Also, if I write out this fine, you have to give me your driver’s licence and then come and retrieve it when you pay your fine at the police station,’ he says triumphantly.

Phil shrugs. I recognise a stubborn expression which says, ‘I’ll see you and raise you.’

‘Okay, fine,’ he says.

The hand smooths down the page again, the point of the pen hovers. The cop’s brow furrows. ‘In four days’ time,’ he adds slyly.

‘Okay.’

‘At a police station I designate.’

‘Okay,’ parries Phil again. The officer almost groans aloud. Why isn’t this crazy gringo getting out his wallet and murmuring something about sorting this out?

‘Also, can I see the book again, with the figure of how much I owe?’ Phil adds relentlessly.

The policeman’s head snaps back and he looks pointedly across the road for some moments, composing himself. He shifts position in his hot uniform and squeaky shined boots, not about to admit defeat.

‘Four hundred pesos,’ he barks suddenly.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Four hundred pesos and I won’t take your licence and we won’t trouble ourselves with a receipt.’

‘But I want a receipt. The car belongs to the organisation I work for and they’ll want all the details.’

The policeman’s sweating now. There is a slight shift in the atmosphere, a pause like that between duelling fencers after a quick exchange of thrusts and deflections.

‘Well, then,’ he says with a gusty, ‘you-leave-me-no-choice’ sigh.

He aligns the carbon paper again, brushes a few imaginary specks of dust from his book. Stalling, he reads Phil’s licence again and licks his lips. He is a man clearly running out of ideas.

‘One hundred pesos,’ he mutters, seeming to physically diminish in size as he speaks.

‘Whatever you decide to fine me,’ says Phil deliberately, ‘you will have to give me a receipt and let me know where I can go to officially pay it.’

The policeman’s brown eyes look bitterly puzzled, like someone has somehow beaten him at a rigged card game in which he was meant to be the dealer.

Staring at his shoes, he begins a barely audible tirade about traffic ordinances and how, in our ignorance, we clearly do not understand the complicated systems under which he is compelled to work, how he had tried to make things easier for us and surely that is worthy of something?

Phil does not buckle. He may not have the home-ground advantage, but it’s clear he’s got the ball.

After all, the policeman goes on a little more pointedly, look, here I am giving you back your driver’s licence, here I am working a long and tiring day, surely that is worth, say, something as a memory of the meeting? A small souvenir of the occasion?

At Phil’s answering silence, he finally holds up a limp defeated palm, re-caps his pen and returns his leather fine book to his belt. He needs an ace now, but all he’s got is a three of clubs.

‘How about ... enough for a cup of coffee?’ he says at last.

God, put him out of his misery, I want to hiss to Phil. Give him money for a coffee.

But Phil’s not having a bar of this last-ditch bid for sympathy, or any truck with corruption. Fresh in our minds is a recent human-rights report showing that a shocking percentage of all crimes here – thefts, torture, kidnapping and graft – are actually committed by uniformed people meant to be enforcing the law. A child in this country, goes the popular Mexican joke, can play cops and robbers all by himself.

Suddenly the talk of fines is over. The policeman, wiping perspiration from under his hat, shrugs resignedly and hands back the licence.

He proffers his hand like someone beaten fair and square, and shakes Phil’s admiringly.

‘Buen viaje,’ he says formally, ‘que le vaya bien.’ Have a good trip, may you go well.

We start up the car and move back into the traffic as he turns back to his post on the corner, and he straightens his shoulders and gives us a snappy farewell salute.

Learning hurts. You step out of it swollen, your toes stepped on, a bit bruised. It takes it out of you, whatever ‘it’ is. Ego, I suspect, and presumption. It knocks us into shape – another interesting turn of phrase – leaving us stretched a little more out of the shape we thought we were.

I used to say – confidently, blithely – the old chestnut about poverty and development: ‘Give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and feed him the rest of his life.’

Now I cringe at my own complacent naivety. As if you’re going to feed someone for their whole life, solve their hunger problem, with a theory like this. Usually, they already know perfectly well how to fish. The problem is they can’t afford to buy a rod, or the river’s polluted with effluent, or the fish are full of mercury, or their government’s deregulated the fishing industry. Who do you think you are, anyway, some expert on fish?

There are a million reasons why they’re not fishing, and we have no idea about any of them until we crawl down onto that bank and ask.

Then you begin to see that there’s no proverb you can apply here, no comforting cure-all. Pull a thread somewhere, thinking you’re making an inroad with a simple problem that requires a simple solution, and you see the stitches being dropped in a big snarled web keeping itself in an anxious kind of equilibrium. You see your good intentions looking, in fact, very like a kind of moralistic intervention that just makes things tougher for people.

You notice a glaring problem whose solution seems so obvious you can’t believe nobody’s thought of it before. That in itself should be a clue that you don’t actually understand the problem, but you press on, thinking ‘Why don’t they ...?’

Why don’t they stop after-hours alcohol sales in the little corner stores in the towns, for example, which cause drunkenness, social problems and financial hardship?

There are local soccer games on Sundays in the towns and teenage boys, hanging out with older groups of men watching the game, are introduced to binge drinking early. Little kids are often sent down to the shop to buy the alcohol, and it’s sold to them by adolescents working there, setting up a whole culture of accepted, predictable drunkenness. Why can’t we just lobby the local councils to crack down on this?

The women in the meetings look troubled when we bring up the issue of petitioning. Nobody’s keen.

‘These soccer games,’ says Maricruz energetically. ‘Aren’t you sick and tired of the drinking there?’

Yes, say the women, but Sunday is the only day the men have off. That’s what they like to do.

‘What would happen if you stopped the after-hours sales?’

They’d walk to the next town, the women say reluctantly, and watch the game over there, and drink.

‘Wouldn’t even that be better than the state things are in now?’ she perseveres.

They nod uncomfortably, but it’s clear we don’t get the subtext of what’s going on.

Later Doña Augustina, staring at the ground, tries to explain to me why they don’t want to mount a petition, not just yet.

‘I’d rather my husband stayed watching the game here at home and drinking than go to the next town for their game.’

‘But if you stopped selling the alcohol, wouldn’t it at least work as a … um … disincentive?’

She pauses. ‘The thing is,’ she says at last, with the greatest reluctance, ‘if he gets paralytic here he only has to stagger up the hill and I can usually get him to fall into bed.’

I stare at her, stupidly uncomprehending. She twists her hands.

‘But if he has to walk home from the next town after their game he’s got half an hour of walking to sober up a bit, and then he gets ... angry.’

Okay, so we’d only make things worse by opening that can of worms, or wade in to tackle exacerbated domestic violence. Why don’t they round up and destroy the roaming packs of stray half-starved dogs in the towns? They attack people, they spread disease. Most of the underweight kids in the nutrition program suffer from intestinal worms, and there’s no point dealing with that until we get rid of the ubiquitous packs of strays. Phil says he’d be willing to destroy all the dogs humanely.

But the members look uneasy. They can’t be responsible for these dogs. They don’t own them. What if their owners came back to town and found their neighbours had let them be destroyed?

‘What owners?’ we ask, exasperated.

Well, the men, the men who are elsewhere, the people who own the dogs in some theoretical way. The members want no part of it. Not even desexing the dogs, which regularly drop litters of sick, skinny pups. No, they won’t interfere. They can’t afford to be seen as being accountable, and risk the trouble and conflict it might cause.

After a few months we’re not so quick to jump in with our obvious solutions, especially after an episode where we’d discussed long and hard whether we should take big cakes to the meetings on Mother’s Day, and give every mother a slice for a tiny token treat. The other workers are concerned that this might look a little like what the campaigners for the political parties do, in the lead-up to the national election, something we certainly don’t want to be identified with.

‘Instead of cake,’ Phil wades in gamely, ‘why don’t we make all the mothers cards that just say ‘Have a happy day from URAC?’

The other workers are polite about the idea but it’s clear he’s grabbed the wrong end of the stick, or misinterpreted traditions, or misjudged literacy levels, or something. Later in the day, coincidentally, it’s the birthday of someone in the office. Ceci buys a big cake to share, and everybody gets a piece. Everyone, that is, except Phil, who gets an empty plate with a small handwritten note on it saying ‘Have a good day’.

Everyone bursts into laughter, especially us. Phil later comes up with the solution we actually adopt – giving out tree seedlings to women for Mother’s Day – and we slowly start to see how it pays to adjust your focus before thinking you’ve got everything in frame.

Just as I’m beginning to see how my assumptions are the biggest stumbling block, my workmates ask if I can start teaching a few classes in the communities. I nod and agree, feeling my heartrate go up a few knots.

Here, I can see clearly that if you’re lucky enough to have learned a skill, teaching it to someone else is practically mandatory. You can have the most impressive CV in town, but how useful your fields of knowledge are depend on where you’re standing. Can I lay bricks? Build latrines? Work out how to collect water off the roof during the wet season? I shake my head, shamefaced. Never have my ‘skills’ seemed so ridiculous, so superfluous. I’ve told my workmates I’ve taught community art, run workshops in things like painting and theatre. Art? Don’t I know anything about the law? Well, what about medicine? Can I castrate a pig, prune a fruit tree, show people how to make their kids’ school uniforms?

At the last, I find myself nodding. I can sew. Or more correctly, I can provide access to a sewing machine so that they can learn to sew, I can thread that machine and do a straight seam and probably even a zigzag stitch. They’ve identified something, through the haze of my postgraduate qualifications, that might actually be useful to them. We’re on our way.

‘If we do have a sewing class, it won’t be compulsory to attend,’ I say to a group of campesina women in the town of Bordo Blanco.

They look at me, stunned. ‘Why not?’

‘Well, it would be a class for enjoyment. Time for you. Not work. If you don’t have time to come, you don’t have to.’

I’m saying this partly for myself – with eighteen participants and their children waiting on the one gleaming new sewing machine, I could do with a few absentees from week to week.

In one class I’m teaching, the women walk down the hill to the generic concrete room we use as a classroom all carrying their own chairs on their heads. They need a while to consider this, the idea of recreational time.

‘And we have ten weeks,’ I say. ‘So if there’s anything you’d particularly like to cover, tell me and we’ll do it.’

Again, eighteen pairs of incredulous eyes meet mine. ‘Whatever you think, Maestra,’ they murmur. ‘Whatever we do, we would appreciate.’

This is something I begin to hear over the weeks. ‘Whatever you think, Maestra.’ Do you want to make this in blue or white? Zip or elastic? Whatever you think. They use the formal of you, usted, to denote respect and acknowledgement of my superior status, and even though I know them reasonably well through community meetings, they are suddenly shy and deferential here in the sewing classes.

They touch the fabric, carefully, their heads bowed. They wait their turn at the machine patiently, sometimes for three weeks, walking to class with their unfinished folded sewing, walking home again with it still folded, untouched, in the bag.

I stumble along in Spanish, trying hard to make a comfortable atmosphere. But people’s experience of school has been either non-existent or a strict regimentation of terse instruction and examination, and even a small class like this is intimidating for them.

I’m uncomfortable in this patently inaccurate guise of someone who knows everything, who can decree and display a false expertise, uncomfortable with the word ‘maestra’, which smacks of some virtuoso performer.

If only they knew I practise with the machine, the instruction book and a dictionary between classes, working out how to do buttonholes hours before I see them. Of course I should realise that it is when I stop instructing, when I sit down, that things are levelled, and even reversed.

‘Why do you have no children, Maestra?’ one woman says one day as we all sit and hem by hand. I can tell by the way all heads subtly tune themselves to me that this has been discussed without me already.

‘Well, that’s a good question.’

‘Are you infertile?’

‘No.’ I have learned to take this kind of frank directness without offence, just as I have graduated my long-term defacto relationship to a marriage to make it comprehensible.

‘How long have you been married?’

‘Ah ... well, years, really.’

‘¡Dios mío! And no children! What’s gone wrong?’

‘In my country,’ I say, feeling myself flush as I thread a needle, ‘it’s not so strange. Most people have two or three children and that’s it. Some people choose not to have any. It’s really unusual for people to have nine or ten like here.’

Something in me, teethgritted and sanctimonious, wants to ignore the condition of their lack of choice, and point out what we’re surrounded by. This chronic poverty, for starters, the weekly weighings we do as part of the nutrition program which hands out protein cereals to the children of these very women and others, too thin and small for their age, the stultifying and overcrowded schools. I feel defensive, boiling irritation brushing through me, the way it did the time Phil told me a campesino man asked him pointblank why we had no kids, and enquired curiously whether I ‘worked’ or not.

I need to justify myself, point out that there are plenty of children in the world already, swarming shoeless and poorly fed and with poorer futures, and that in many other countries women see having control over their fertility as their right, hard as that may seem to believe, and people work hard trying to initiate it here in Mexico to enormous resistance and vigorous religious interference. The embattled feminists who try to improve the lot of women with education programs and awareness campaigns are usually derisively dismissed as las locas – the crazy women.

All this wants to come pouring from me as I sit there jabbing the needle into the hem of a school tunic. I swallow it, seeing already the unfairness of my barrage. From a position of free choice, after all, I have all the ammunition.

I know if I said the word ‘contraception’ it would drop into the room like a grenade, like saying ‘boong’ in Australia. I wonder suddenly if the almost-taboo topic is what they are really hinting at in raising the subject. Do they want to know some secrets I patently have, of how not to fall pregnant? We sit awkwardly in the unresolved silence.

‘Children!’ says Doña Juana cheerfully. ‘Here, we have mountains of them!’

And they all laugh. We are in their area of expertise now, the having of children – all they lack is the knowledge of how to make clothes for all of them, how to stretch the beans and tortillas to feed them all. Yet I can tell they feel sorry for me, for being childless.

I reflect on how hard it is to shut up at a time like this. Hard to relinquish your perspective and tolerate, silently, the idea that you are to be pitied. Hard to stomach the view that your carefully cultivated state of being informed is actually irrelevant and useless here, that everything you could discourse knowledgably on would provoke only uncomprehending polite smiles. I am learning again how deeply things penetrate – a careless criticism, a joke at your expense, a brief compliment. I am in the lonely hesitant sensitivity of a child on the first day of school, pretending to be thickskinned but in reality raw and shy and with the vocabulary of a five-year-old.

Each week I buy fabric remnants in a market town on the way to class, because the women can’t afford bus fares to get there themselves. Today, though, the sewing machine is not working. Someone, at my ongoing encouragement, has been practising using different buttons and dials and something has broken inside somewhere, a tiny piece of plastic has come loose. Instead, I say, we are going to paint fabric, using embroidery designs stamped onto cotton serviettes and teacloths I’ve bought for a few pesos at the market stall I noticed next to the remnant stall.

‘There are a few different patterns, so choose the one you want.’

Their hands hesitate over the pieces, return folded to their laps uncomfortably. It’s the same with the material, the paintbrushes, the colours.

‘You can really do whatever you want,’ I say, struggling. ‘It’s your time. You can choose a design and paint it in whatever colours you want.’

One woman finally speaks. ‘We don’t know how, Maestra.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘These.’ She picks up a paintbrush, holding it like a drinking straw. Everyone looks at me, smiling uncertainly, and I smile uncertainly back. They have never painted anything in their lives. You can offer choices, but you forget that making a choice takes a certain confidence, and the time and opportunity, at some stage in your life, to master frivolous materials like paintbrushes. I fiddle with the craft paint, my assumptions jerking me back on a sensitive place, like a bit in the mouth.

‘This is time for you,’ I say in my fumbling Spanish. ‘Time to practise. Nobody’s an expert, there’s no test. It doesn’t matter if it’s not very good.’

‘No hay pena,’ I say finally, grabbing a phrase people have often said to me to assure me there was no need to feel embarrassed: there’s no shame. For once, I’ve chosen the right phrase – this is what they need to hear, the words that put them back at their ease.

They grab the brushes, stick the spare ones upright in their plaits for safekeeping. There is a silence as they survey the patterns and their possibilities, the colours of the new paints in their bright bottles, a silence like saying grace, broken by Doña Amelia.

‘How much time do we have?’ she says. There is sudden inhaled galvanised energy at the prospect of making something, something to do with art and fun, craved for like oxygen.

‘There are only two important things to remember,’ I say, moving around the table. ‘One is watch out for your clothes and the other is to mix the paint with this fabric medium, in equal quantities, to make it permanent …’

They nod politely but their eyes are elsewhere, unscrewing bottles and smoothing fabric. Within a few minutes they have paint on their sleeves, and nobody mixes the medium with the paint. The concentrated storm of tentative energy around the table almost crackles with electricity. I hold a brush, show people how to stroke on the paint. They nod, muttering, ‘Thank you, Maestra, thank you.’

‘Do you want the leaves like this, or like this, or how?’ I say to a latecomer, showing her how to iron transfer a design.

‘Whatever you think, Maestra.’

‘No, whatever you think,’ I counter for once, trampling across cultural delicacies and formalities.

‘I don’t know, though.’

‘Well, think it over, take your time.’

Five minutes later, as I am reiterating the medium business once again to deaf ears, she catches my eye. ‘Like this,’ she says, touching the leaf transfers.

‘Okay. That looks great,’ I say. ‘Adelante,’ I add with a smile: on your way.

I leave her, watching from the corner of my eye as she wrestles with some internal hesitation before pressing the iron to the fabric. These women bring up seven or eight children almost single-handedly, manage backyard farms and flocks of sheep, juggle a budget so meagre it defies belief, often build their own houses rock by rock. Now Doña Esperanza sits back and rubs her hands on her apron.

‘I’m too nervous.’ she announces. ‘My hand is shaking.’

I watch, not knowing what to say. Carefully she wipes perspiration from both palms, then her jaw sets. She pauses before picking up the brush again, and in that long moment I fight the knee-jerk desire to jump in with more reassurances and praise. My hesitation sets up a few moments of silence and I see the problem right itself without my interference. I quell my instinct. I remember suddenly that sooner or later there has to be this moment, when there is nobody there but you. So I say nothing, and watch her paint a jagged, trembling line, holding the brush like a soup spoon. It strikes me that learning is essentially a decision made in isolation, not actually directly related to teaching. Nobody else can even guess at the obstacles in the path of that decision. I wait.

Instead of my voice praising everyone’s painting to the heavens, I hear instead the women admiring each other’s work, sharing the colours they’ve mixed. Yet another kind of silence falls, thick and industrious, the kind I know a high-school teacher must dream of. Something flows under that silence the way creativity flows under fear. The thing that lets our tongue creep between our teeth, the mysterious impulse that absorbs all our attention. Yet what are we actually doing here? Something useless, according to our usual measures. Something difficult to justify in terms of economic gain or skills development, something purely decorative and recreational that looks very much like wasting time.

Like all teachers, all I want is to inspire students – infect them – with that high-altitude purity of fascination with the new. When I first learned to develop photos I walked out of the darkroom like a sleepwalker, like someone who’d just spent four hours meditating. My jaw ached – not, I realised, from clenching it shut with the stress of new information, but from letting it fall open and leaving it there, from the slack-jawed utter absorption of learning. Here, standing awkwardly at the front of the class, I cling to this memory like a poor swimmer holds onto a buoy. They’re into it! I see their mouths open with undiluted engagement, the opposite of anxiety. Making something.

If only we could stop trying to constantly teach, give that silence a right to be heard. If only we could give away the illusion of expertise, and greet the fact that we don’t know all the answers with this absence of noise, however transitory.

Usually in this class the machine is constantly humming, but something’s broken inside the machine, and I’m profoundly grateful. The youngest student here is twelve, the oldest sixty-five. Their heads bend to their fabric squares as if they are reading a map. As I watch, still saying nothing, one of them picks up the bottle of fabric medium and, frowning, reads the label. She pours some onto her tray and gives it to the woman next to her, who does the same. They explain what it is in a few whispers to the others who can’t read, and they all mix it with their paint, to make it permanent.

The women’s children burst in from playing outside and hang over their mothers’ shoulders, watching them paint. They look longingly at the colours, their hands dart out and are jerked back into pockets.

Next week, from somewhere, I will hunt up another table and some benches, I will buy more fabric and brushes, I will effect this tiny change in their lives and try not to automatically underestimate its impact. I will remember how it felt, this longing to try, this unclamping.

‘Next Wednesday,’ I say to the kids, ‘you can paint too.’ They smile and shake their heads, laughing, but they don’t take their eyes from the table.

I look at the women’s finished painting and I imagine how I would go, handling brushes and paints for the first time – something as natural to me now as brushing my teeth. But after how many years of experience, and of taking that ability for granted? Someone stood by when as a child I first messily dipped a brush in paint, ready to show me how to hold it, and I am certain I only really began to learn when they chose their moment and walked away. I gaze at the messy, splotched designs now, and I think of my nervous attempts at Spanish – uneven, uncertain, aching just to be understood. And the patience of these women, my teachers.

Take more care, I itch to say. Take more time and you’ll be prouder of what you’ve achieved. Paint slower, take the time to experiment and learn. This, I am sure, is approved teaching methodology: room for improvement, something to strive for.

‘¡Bien hecho!” I say instead. Well done. They are proud enough. Their painting is good enough, they have made something beautiful enough. And this is the enormous step, the act itself. Degrees of finish, well, who cares? We’ve forgotten, with our twelve years of competitive schooling, our constant obsession to raise the bar, our unshakeable First World confidence born of a conditioned expectation of success, what it means to just look at something and think it’s only in the world because you made it. Finely done or not, it’s been the act of your hand holding the brush, making the mark. How churlish to criticise the mark itself. The mark is a miracle. The mark is more than enough to carry home with you.

We stand there in the dusty courtyard after our first-ever improvised art class, chatting. Now, after three short hours, real life resumes, with its endless grinding routine of work and making do. For these women, and for most people on the planet, recreation is a luxury. Time and space (and even a free chair) to create something joins the endless list of things I’ve always taken for granted until now. Because they’ve enjoyed themselves, I tell them, we’ll include painting every week as well as sewing once I get the machine fixed.

I think of my first-grade teacher, so anxious to begin grading our paintings with a merit system of gold, silver and green stars, or no stars at all, oblivious to what she was setting in motion. I think of colouring within the lines, extra points for neatness, the idea frozen because we couldn’t spell the word, and before that barrage began, I remember how it felt as a five-year-old, that seductive swoop of fearful need, that window opening. We take up the brush, we dip it in the colour, we feel – ¡adelante! – our hearts jump at this totally new risk.

‘Next week, can you bring some more white cotton? And some gold paint? That’s the colour we’d really like – gold,’ say the women as they hold their wet fabric squares carefully away from their clothes, pausing before trudging home to catch up on their work. They begin to walk away, holding their paintings stiffly in front of them, like banners, like flags. A short distance away, they turn to say thanks and goodbye. Instead of Maestra, they’ve gone back to calling me by my first name, and they use the informal, familiar ‘you’. I have ceased to be a teacher. Something else is in motion, and as I stand there immersed in it, I gently close my mouth, to taste it better.

I don’t know it yet, but in a few months’ time URAC will hit upon a new idea for gathering statistics: asking groups from each community to make a presentation at the Union Day, showcasing their town and its attributes – population, assets, the sort of work people do, any special foods or music they identify with, and so on. When it’s this town’s turn to present their community, this group will make a display of tablecloths and cushions made from these painted squares, carefully hand-sewn and bordered in bright crocheted designs. The display will cause a flood of admiration and word-of-mouth demand. I will be buying the entire stock of the serviette stall, and a great deal of gold fabric paint.

Children here are named sumptuously: two Christian names and two surnames that roll musically off the tongue, their first names chosen from the ultimate 1001 Names for Baby book – the Bible. Names such as Visitation, Purification, Luminosa, Conception and Revelation. But with a name like Maria de la Guadalupe Anunciación Flores Gonzalez, you’re going to be wanting a nickname for everyday use, and it will be Lupe or Lupita. Thus the great tradition of apodos, nicknames, begins. If you’re wondering, for example, why José (Joseph) is known as Pepe, it is because ‘PP’ stands for ‘Putative Parent’, in reference to Joseph and the Immaculate Conception.

The custom is rich in puns and cross-referencing. It’s a compliment to tell mothers their children are fat – in fact, Gordo or Gordito (Fatty or Fatty Junior) is common and not derogatory, along with Chaparro (Shorty), Flacco (Skinny), Huevo (Baldy) and Pelos (Hairy). It’s like Snow White and the ninety-six million dwarves.

One of my most common nicknames, Guera, doesn’t in fact just mean ‘blonde’, it means ‘pale-skinned’. Ask a Mexican what it means and they would touch their inside arm (pale) and touch their jet-black hair: ‘fairer than this’. Because it’s slang, though, it’s probably more like Paleface or Whitey.

‘Hey, Whitey!’ is how I suppose I’m addressed then, not exactly insulting, not in a country which calls Moreno (darkskinned) children Negrito and makes a blanket assumption, cheerfully, that we’re all gringos.

Hey, gringa, guera, how many oranges would you like? Señora, patrona, guerita?

Phil and I wait at the door of a travel agent’s in Mexico City where you have to buzz and announce yourself through an intercom. A man is ahead of us, a well-dressed businessman, who clearly thinks we can’t speak Spanish. He announces rapidly for both of us: ‘Antonio José Rabassa Perez and two whiteys here to see you.’ He turns and gives us a dazzling and polite smile. Is this the mirror image of ‘darkie’? I can never work it out. But there’s the evidence in front of us – in the plaza, in the media. The paler and blonder and taller you are, the richer and luckier and more powerful you are;the shorter and darker (and we may as well say ‘Indian’ as beat around the bush), the less chance you have of ever getting anywhere near a travel agent’s.

Blonde Barbie dolls sell by the millions. Every advertisement on television portraying the happy middle-class family (as opposed to the government-sponsored ones, which idealise the simple hardworking peasant) shows them as impossibly blonde, blue-eyed, dancing through a home full of sunlight and imported appliances. Go to a big public event in Mexico, look down upon a big crowd, and as in Asia, what strikes you is the absolute uniformity of hair colour – black as night, straight and glossy as a sheet of black silk. A very small percentage of people have naturally curly hair. Mexicans call curly hair chino, ‘Chinese’, not because they know a real Chinese person, but because ‘Chinese’ means disordered, incomprehensible, back to front, a mess.

They work their straight black hair into varieties of elaborate styles to make themselves stand out in the sea of uniformity: big stiffly sprayed bangs in front, teased frizzes, bottle-red streaks, and of course, impossible, implausible blonde. Several Mexican women have their own TV variety shows here and they all look as dyed and phoney as Barbie herself – a mess of peroxide, plastic surgery, clothing like a drag queen – to complete the illusion of how far, how very far they are from the dark, short, unglamorous, hardworking norm. Australian friends in Mexico City have adopted two indigenous babies, both a deep shade of moreno, and were told conversationally one day by their maid, ‘You’ve done well with Alicia. She’s really lightening up.’

In a meeting the staff team throw this shorthand back and forth, trying to identify people: ‘Yeah, you know her. Really moreno. Chino hair, though.’ Somebody particularly rustic, the stolid countrified type, is ‘very campesina’ – very peasant. Campesino kids themselves, when they get to know me a little, love to touch not just my hair but my skin and – what are these? – the dark freckles on my arms. Their skin is dusky, smooth as cocoa, hairless. Their hair is so black it’s almost blue.

There are Mexicans who identify themselves as ‘Castilian’ – some kind of grade of pure Spanish blood, as if blood can be classified like olive oil. On some colour chart of variables which I must admit is invisible to me, they insist their skin is lighter, their features are finer. ‘Ay,’ said a frustrated Mexican friend once, exasperatedly talking about just such a mutual acquaintance. ‘She tries to pretend, but look at her – she may as well have a cactus stuck to her forehead.’

There’s a great market in skin-lightening creams, for ‘evening up’ a complexion ‘marred by pigmentation’. Restaurants and cafes advertise for staff ‘of good appearance’, which is tacitly understood to signify ‘of light skin’. The girls all love the pop singers with the brown hair and the green eyes, and on their CD covers these boys dress themselves up as either dyed-in-the-wool bullfighters or brand-emblazoned North American teenagers, in a painful kind of schizophrenia.

Spain or the USA – anywhere has to be better than this, anywhere other than in a cornfield or a small cement house. It’s escape they want, like the Barbie in her Cinderella dress or Rodeo Drive lounging outfit, like the happy blue-eyed television family eating white Bimbo bread and reconstituted Californian orange juice.

The media and the evidence of success and failure around you work their hardest to wrench your vision around. The gueros are the desirable norm, your life and that of ninety million of your ordinary, mixed-blood, hardworking compatriots is one of poor appearance, marred by – do we have to spell it out? – pigmentation.

‘Hey guera, how are jew? Ay mamacita, over here! Come home wit me, baby!’ The machismo-sodden boys have seen the bootleg videos, they know the score – the blonde western girl might frown and shake her head, but that’s just her way of saying yes yes yes! She’ll come across in the end, just like in the movie and the comics. They’re panting for it, blondes, they’re immoral and easy and rich, they are here for some hot Latino love. The Mexicans, they are the greatest lovers in the world, they are famous. Oye, guera, here it is!

They want to jump ship, they want to be seen to belong to the other tribe, and hope that a baseball cap on backwards will somehow work to suggest a big house with a swimming pool, the ones their mothers work in as maids. They watch the rich North American retirees here, so rich they don’t even check their change when you bring it at the restaurant, so rich they reach into their pocket and give a begging child coins without even looking at him, without even breaking stride in their conversation at the outdoor cafe table. What you need, to identify with the gueros and the gringos, is a wardrobe of designer knock-offs: fake Tommy Hilfiger baseball cap, fake Calvin Klein or Chicago Bears T-shirt, fake Nikes (or the real thing if you have a brother working there, in Los Angeles, and you’re going there too, next June, to work in his restaurant … ) You need a smattering of English from Chuck Norris videos and some pirate rap tapes. What you need, if you are a woman, is a layer of cosmetics to lighten you up and blonde or red hair. If your name is Rosaria, you might want to change it to Rose.

Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, especially young men, it seems, go to try out the real thing ‘on the other side’, over the frontier. They make a little money and return home with a litany for you: the work they did, the building sites or the farm, the taxi they drove there. It was ‘cold’, they say, at a loss for words to describe the place the artist Frida Kahlo scathingly called Gringolandia. The people, they smiled, but they only seemed like your friends at first. It was hard.

I missed my culture, they say finally, making an eloquent Mediterranean hand gesture, holding something imaginary, clutching it, shaking the hand for emphasis. I missed this. They sweep the hand around, grinning ruefully, and despite the roaming chooks and dust and houses made of rubble I have a glimmer of what they mean.

Westerners in a group of strangers are flinty and cold as a bag of marbles, clicking together uncomfortably and avoiding eye contact. I’ve seen them myself in the zócalo; US tourists hurrying along clutching their cameras and moneybelts, stiff with anxiety, eyes darting left and right like minesweepers. South of the border, being in a crowd is like being tumbled in a bag of rose petals, a bag of mixed-up washing home clean from the laundry.

I feel myself, a fortunate marble in among all that soft physical camaraderie, and realise that I’ve never heard a westerner unabashedly say they miss their culture. We have holes in our discourse for this in Australia, groping words about national pride and homesickness, a flood of relief upon returning home, but culture? That’s a word we’re careful of, scared of seeming pretentious or embarrassingly effusive, scared of unleashing indescribable emotions. We choose coldness, we choose hardness. We reach into our pockets without looking and bestow some crumb on the thing appealing to our humanity, and wave it away and get on with our conversation.

I crouch by the outside tap with all the kids from my sewing class, cross with them for racing around and getting fabric paint on the new clothes their mothers have just finished making for them. I scrub the paint smears with tap water, grumbling.

‘Your mothers are very sad you’ve ruined your new clothes,’ I scold. I flush as I speak, because we all know I’m fibbing – their mothers have shrugged, smiled, told the kids to give back the brushes and stop wasting paint. I am the one playing disciplinarian. ‘Look, it’s not coming out. Your lovely new dresses!’

The beautiful twins crouch next to me, letting me scrub and wring out their clothes, looking at me kindly.

‘It’s all right,’ they say soothingly, these seven-year-olds. ‘We don’t care.

‘Your mum spent hours making these dresses. She’ll, well ...’

They smile and nod, puzzled. All the children crowd politely around the tap, letting the grouchy guera wash the paint marks, waiting to get back to playing. One lays her hand on my arm, looks at me in the eye like a beam of bright sun.

‘Usted es muy bonita,’ she says shyly. You are very beautiful.

I bite my lip. In my culture I am very plain, standard and freckled and unremarkable. Here what I am is a conglomerate of desirability, someone in the envied favoured circle of light. Just by dint of random difference, I am exotic. Barbie and Bimbo bread have done their work well. Perfect olive skin is so common it is devalued as marred – too dark, too ordinary. The unearthly deer-like lashes of these kids, their huge almond eyes, their high mixed-blood cheekbones – these things will never be celebrated on billboards or television or in magazines. You are very beautiful. No, I’m not. I’m frustrated and bossy and sunburnt and grumpy, but so many light-years away from this reality that if I’m beautiful, it’s only like an untouchable sphere of glass, you wise, lovely children. What I really long to be is beautiful like a rose petal, like clean clothes, wadded up in the bag with the others, fragrant and sun-dried, worn and useful. I want someone’s arm around me as I walk down the road, tired, with black glossy hair in a rope down my back, plaited with a loving grandmother’s hands and fastened with red ribbons.

Hey, guera, how many oranges do you want? At your service, guerita.

A Mexican woman, hair permed and dyed a bright unnatural orange, caked with pale make-up and lipstick, drowned with cloned US perfume, gives me her name and address. ‘Elvira Rosalba Chávez Reséndiz,’ she says, and smiles proudly. ‘Also known as the guera.’

And waits while I write that down, too.

On the streets on the weekends, people sell second-hand clothes bought from the Goodwill charities in the USA. This is where you can buy your T-shirts that say ‘Chicago Cubs’ and ‘University of Minnesota’, or an affordable dress. Our workmates are extremely puzzled that we buy our clothes here when financial hardship doesn’t force us to. It’s as if we’re so rich and confident that we can even buy secondhand clothes and not lose face.

The majority of people can’t speak or read English, so, like westerners in T-shirts covered in Japanese characters, they’re taking a lot on trust, and the incongruity is striking. I see a wizened little old lady wearing one that says ‘Make Mine A Budweiser’, and a grumpy young macho swaggering along in one that proclaimed, ‘It’s PMS – Wanna Make Something Of It?’ (Come to think of it, that’s not so silly. Machismo behaviour is, in a way, like a perpetual case of PMS).

A fun-loving cashier at URAC laughs till she cries when I tell her that her T-shirt, stretched over her heavily pregnant belly, reads: ‘It Started With A Kiss’.

You couldn’t exactly call it cultural imperialism. Bits and pieces of the imperfectly understood but still exotically desirable aspects of the USA and the English-speaking world are purchased at cut rates and uniquely assimilated.

You’ll be strolling in some beautiful town, ears tuned to the murmur of voices calling ‘¡Buenas días!’, the gentle brushing of brooms on steps and the silvery ringing of cathedral bells, and you’ll pass some picturesque little whitewashed cantina. You pause, certain that inside you will find peasants in red bandanas and coarsely woven shirts. They will be singing simple traditional ranchero songs together over a beer, plucking a guitar. You hear the guitar alright, but it’s an intro you know all too well as the crackly tape begins.

We won’t be staying in a remote Mexican cantina, we’ll be staying at the Hotel California.

Ah yes. Los Eagles.

I have been invited to quite a few fifteenth birthday parties, which are a very big deal here for girls. Bigger than weddings; much, much bigger than a twenty-first in Australia. By the time a Mexican girl is twenty-one, her adult life has long started. The quince años party when a girl turns fifteen is like a debutante ball for one. It is one of the fiestas campesino parents happily go into debt for. To whatever extent the family can afford, the girl of the night changes her frock twice during the evening, and food and alcohol is laid on, often for hundreds of guests. Everybody dresses to the nines, because a young girl is turning fifteen, and a blowout is in order. There will be many emotional speeches, punctuated with good-natured heckling and applause.

The girl will be dressed, at first, in a beautiful white dress with enough tulle in it for Christo to wrap the Opera House, and she will dance in turn with every one of her male relatives, in a symbolic ‘giving away’ by all her familial protectors now that she is ripe for wooing. Teary fathers get up to waltz her around the floor, old great-uncles, stiff and proud in their best clothes, stand up and take over. Blushing but determined eight-year-old nephews approach, to warm applause, and solemnly steer her around, frowning with concentration. Laughter and tears, always close to the surface in this country, threaten to spill over at any moment. Then the girl disappears for a while as her guests eat cake and mingle. Suddenly she is back on the dance floor, striking a pose with the four male cousins who have been accompanying her throughout the night, spiffy in suits. Now, though, their bow ties are off, their collars are up and they wear leather jackets. As for the birthday girl, she’s in a knock-’em-dead red dress with a plunging neckline and a revamped hairdo. The guests gasp and applaud. She is a goddess. She has been transformed from a virginal girl-child to a sophisticated adult in front of our eyes.

The teenagers have been rehearsing the next synchronised dance routine for weeks and weeks. They stand stock still for their musical introduction. I hold my breath. And on it comes.

‘More Than a Woman’, sing Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb, ‘you’re more than a woman to me …’

The crowd goes wild. They watch the dance routine, performed by young bodies that seem born to dance, then they throng the dance floor themselves for the extended mix.

There is a certain gesture, a sharp beckon over the head, which the Mexicans use when they notice you’re sitting down when there’s music on. ‘Get up!’ says that beckon, then the hand is lowered, outstretched, to invite you in. ¡Arriba! ¡Andale!

Only the worst kind of bah-humbug misery guts piker could refuse. I am pulled up and spend the next eight minutes in a sort of purgatory of seventies deja vu. I’m stayin’ alive! Doin’ the Bus Stop! They call it Nutbush! Yeah, Nutbush! The last time I danced to the Bee Gees, I think I was wearing platform shoes and gold-thread harem pants, the girls were dancing around a small shrine on the floor composed of their handbags, and I had to be home by eleven-thirty.

We learn very quickly that Mexico has an enduring love affair with the music of the seventies. It’s probably because you can hear the lyrics, and the lyrics are often so very, very simple.

We’ll be sitting drinking beer and talking late at night with new acquaintances and as soon as a guitar comes out, I know with a sinking sensation that after the beautiful melodic ranchero harmonies have been sung by all the Mexicans, after flamenco-style guitar tunes fill the still, warm night air, someone with no sense of anticlimax is going to hand that guitar to me and ask me to sing something from Australia.

I will refrain from telling them that the Bee Gees are Australian, and ask what they want to hear. Someone will slap the table and roar, ‘Kenny-Rodgers–The-Gambler!’

My memory fails me in many areas, but unfortunately I’m a savant when it comes to seventies song lyrics. My retention is perfect. The girls who work in URAC’s office and shop occasionally ask me to translate Bee Gees songs for them, or the one about the girl who’s been to Nice and the isles of Greece, where she sipped champagne on a yacht. As it happens, I can even dredge up Kenny. I pick up the guitar and strum a dodgy G chord. As soon as I warble, ‘On a hot desert evenin’, on a train bound for nowhere ...’ there is a howl of delight and recognition. The plastic table gets a thumping as the rhythm gets going.

‘He said, son, I’ve made a life, out of readin’ people’s faces,

And knowin’ what their cards were by the way they held their eyes,

So if you don’t mind my sayin’, I can see you’re out of aces,

For a taste of your whiskey, I’ll give you some advice...’

Up the lyrics come from some pointless mental hard drive. The chorus starts up with a whoop.

‘You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em,’ we all sing, the Mexicans either understanding this much English or joining in phonetically.

‘Know when to walk away, know when to run,

You never count your money, when you’re sittin’ at the table,

There’ll be time enough for countin’, when the dealin’s done.’

Now, do I know Whitney Houston, or the Beatles’ great song ‘Hombre Sin Personalidad’? I don’t, until someone starts in with ‘Nowhere Man’.

During the day we all work to the accompaniment of a single cassette tape, beloved of the office girls, and played on a dodgy old tape player with the ‘Play’ switch jammed down by a screwdriver. Air Supply moans that they’re lost in love and they don’t know much. That girl with the bad perm from the Explosive Hits cover informs us that’s she’s torn between two lovers and feeling like a fool, while the prat who used to wear the very pointy collars changes key three times to stress that he’s all by himself, which he doesn’t want to be, any more. By midmorning everyone’s favourite, Kenny Rogers, is growling that he knows it’s hard to love a man who’s bent and paralysed, but Ruby, don’t take your love to town. When side B finishes, side A is begun again, an eternal loop of Ripper 76.

A momentary respite came once as the cassette fell to the ground while being turned over, and broke open. Never fear. All activity in the office stopped to carefully reconstruct it before I had a chance to race in and inadvertently trample it beyond repair.

Another time, sitting in the plaza, we were approached by a visiting purveyor of wall hangings. He draped them lavishly before us like rare Persian carpets, gazing at them with such rapture that words seemed to fail him. Speechless, he could only gesture.

They were macramé. The designs were as familiar to me as old friends – especially the owl with the toggle eyes. They were huge and bulky and made of vast knots and fringes and plaits of blue, violet and aqua acrylic wool. Phil muttered they look like someone had done a scalping raid on the Cabbage Patch Doll factory.

‘No, thank you.’

‘They’re very beautiful, no?’

‘Yes, they’re lovely, but I don’t want one.’

He was wounded, disbelieving. ‘Señora, but why not?’

I smiled apologetically. How could I explain it was because they took me back instantly to the suburban rumpus rooms of the seventies? Once you hung one of these babies on the wall, all you’d need would be a couple of brown velveteen beanbags, a brick feature wall, a couple of RC Colas and Countdown on the telly, and the retro tragedy would be complete.

It happens all the time. Some law students come and do work experience at URAC, and we get talking about the romantic Mexican tradition of serenading loved ones outside their windows at midnight. That night, at midnight, we awaken to the sound of glorious music pouring up over the balcony from the street, the sobbing, throw-back-your-head-and-howl songs of Mexico, of lost love, of aching sadness, of hopeless hope. Leaning over the balcony we see the three students sitting in the back of their white pick-up truck, playing the guitar and singing in the moonlight, smiling up lovingly.

‘Probably,’ they sing in lyrical, poignant Spanish, ‘My love, probably you have forgotten me, but I am still here, in the same place as ever. I will keep everything just as it was, in case you change your mind ...’

‘Welcome to Mexico!’ they call exuberantly as they finish, wave and drive away. My heart swells with emotion – I have to learn that quintessentially Mexican song.

‘Can you guys come around for drinks on Thursday night,’ I say the next day, ‘and bring the lyrics to that song?’

‘Sure,’ Amelia says happily. ‘And in return, can you give us the English words to our favourite songs?’

‘Yes, if I know them. What ... um, what are they?’

‘Is there a chance that you know ‘Father and Son’ by Cat Stevens, and the wonderful song called ‘Seasons in the Sun’?’

No problem. Now that’s what I call cultural exchange.

Later, we go out with these students to a nightclub in the state capital, an hour away, not even setting off on the journey until eleven p.m. The club is huge, strobe lit, smoke filled, noisy and full of beautiful young people. We dance until we’re wet with sweat, trying hard not to feel too old and daggy amid all that sexy, stylishly dressed flesh. Everyone is wearing flares of a type I have not seen for many years, or wanted to. It would take a great deal to get me back into a pair of flares. In fact, it would take a general anaesthetic. These flares in evidence tonight billow out from the knee like spinnakers, covering the shoes in a flapping wave of denim. You don’t turn around in flares like that, you go about, hauling on the mainsail. But the teenagers wear them with hip-swivelling Travolta aplomb. I notice the students gyrating happily in a group. You can just tell they are going to be jumping up onto a table shortly. I realise they are dancing, along with the other one and a half thousand people in the room, to The Village People’s ‘YMCA’.

It’s not the self-conscious Boy Scout semaphoring I recall from seventies Australian dance floors, either. They are doing all the arm actions, but with an extra Latino flick of the hips, an extra sensuous little flourish of the shoulders. Blast them! Do they have to rub my face in it?

‘I’m just going to sit at the bar for a while!’ I yell to them.

‘Why?’

‘I can’t explain … it’s just …’

At that moment, the decades of the seventies and the nineties merge in a dreadful pastiche. A throbbing trance dance beat begins and the kids all roar approval as the lyrics begin. They are in English – a remixed version of Dan Hill’s overwrought old love song ‘Sometimes When We Touch’. I am sure if you recall this song and try to conjure up this mixture you will fail. I am sure that even if Dan Hill tried, it would be beyond him. I race for the exit before someone asks to borrow my Pot o’Gloss.

But the real dose of the surreal occurs the following day. I am sitting quietly, minding my own business, out of the office for a breath of air lasting about ... oh, about the duration of ‘Coward of the County’. I hear a jaunty polka beat blaring from loudspeakers approaching. It bounces along with lots of brass and bassline, a wailing male voice accompanying it. It sounds strangely, warningly familiar. Inevitable. Inescapable

Yes, here come the memory synapses, kicking in. It is a deafening Mexican polka version of ‘The Night Chicago Died’.

The sound comes closer. What comes rolling around the corner is the back half of a 1970s Mini-Minor. The front half has been oxy-torched off and a sort of harness has been improvised via the door handles to enable the whole vehicle to be pulled by a donkey. Strapped to the roof of the halfcar are two giant speakers, and inside, lounging on what was once the back seat, lolls eccentric local legend Alfonso Bonzo, steering the vehicle he calls a Burromobile. He is reading out, through the loudspeaker, a list of specials at the local pharmacy. But the donkey, by some lucky quirk, is marching in time to the music. Its head bobs up and down happily. It is – well, it is dancing.

We may as well admit defeat. You can run, but you can’t hide. One day, when I am an aged pensioner, my head will bob up and down like that to ‘The Night Chicago Died’ when my retirement home has a singalong.

‘Oh,’ we will cry, clutching our song sheets, ‘Can’t we do “Billy Don’t Be A Hero?” Can’t we have “Ra-Ra-Rasputin” just one more time?’

I will be the one in the corner, in the mint-condition flares and lurex-thread Miller shirt. The one who knows all the words.

The rains come, and the parched desert around us sucks the water up and is thirsty for more. It pours down, turning the dirt streets to mud, moisture coating the hills every morning until they glisten as if they’ve been freshly sanded and sealed.

It’s not exactly cold, just fresh. The rain falls straight off the roofs in sheets, or jets through the pieces of hollow pipe protruding from upper walls over the street, splattering down the sandstone in rivulets, hitting the roof at night like a long standing ovation.

For a system so thoroughly dependent on rain, there’s very little in the way of catchment. People put out buckets, but nobody has a water tank.

Just to be without the dust is a relief. Then, after a week or two of sultry, moisture-laden air and the rich smell of heating earth, the arid countryside suddenly explodes into a violent, vibrating, unrecognisable mass of growth. From out of the dirt sprout millions of tendrils and stalks, and within a few more weeks the desert is a carpet of green dotted with wild yellow sunflowers and, pouring over everything, the brilliant blue and purple flowers of morning glory. The creeper rises and falls in waves over mesquite trees and cacti, a huge emerald ocean full of zebra swallowtail butterflies and red-headed woodpeckers and big velvety blooms.

Hummingbirds, like toys beaten out of copper and turquoise enamel, flash through the air going from flower to flower. The prickly pear puts forth waxy blooms so bright they’re almost fluorescent – lurid orange and fuchsia pink, their sticky centres thick with bees. Everywhere smells like honey. Women sell it in the markets, in bucketfuls of chunked-up honeycomb, a few drowned bees suspended in it as if it were amber.

Kids run off into the jungle of growth and return with berries from somewhere, and long trumpet-shaped creamy flowers like magnolias. The goats and sheep fill out, lost among the sunflowers as they forage.

Evening after evening, as the yellow light lengthens, we drive home tired and dirty with our heads out the window, drinking in drafts of cool and fragrant air, spicy with mesquite. The sky, flapping all day like a rinsed blue sheet, turns cobalt around us, every detail rubbed with gilt, burnished like the dome inside a church.

I step out into this hot pulsing landscape stunned at its transformation. To think I ever thought this place was lifeless! Now as I walk, clouds of butterflies gust up from around my ankles and I sneeze with the airborne pollens of millions of wild flowers and grasses.

There’s a waving sea of yellow-headed daisies all around me, on ground that two weeks ago seemed dead and hostile. I’m walking on a path of petals and the air is thick with the scent of nectar. I crouch down. My head seems to pound with the thick heat of growth; I feel sweat starting to trickle between my shoulderblades.

I’m remembering a time once, years ago in Australia, when I found myself on a boat in the Whitsunday Passage. It was a full moon and down in the clean warm depths floated millions of tiny creatures, alight with phosphorus, moving like a dream through the gentle tide in the moonlight. I slipped into the water and felt myself suddenly weightless and bodiless, suspended in a glowing ocean of phosphorescence pouring over and around me. When I dived under the water and it filled my ears, I thought I could hear a faint fizzing and crackling of electricity, like something tuned to another distant frequency. In those few minutes I lost not exactly the power of speech, but the need for speech. I was held in a great forgetful hand of water, shining like molten metal, swirling with whispering currents.

Now, crouching in a desert on the other side of the world, I feel exactly the same sense of silent, rapt attention. I put my hand on the silvery blue-green stalk of an agave cactus and feel its solid, dense interior, as if it were muscled, cool and firm as an animal’s flank, curved like a dolphin. It is smooth, the ridge of spines along its lip like something on a fish or prehistoric creature.

Something is coming to roll over me like water, some glittering swell of sparkling energy. If I can just stay still enough, it will encompass me in all this, absorb me. It is a language, a Babel. My hand has a small murmuring conversation with a leaf; my eye speaks with a curling tendril of morning glory, waving in the garrulous pour of breeze, looking for a toehold, conversing deeply with the light as it moves. A stone speaks privately to my heel. I have to stoop to listen to it. The sun, whispering, gets the attention of the fine hairs on my forearm. A red-striped beetle busily works its way around the blue-grey arm of the cactus. In what I took for silence, everything is talking at once – the insect, the spines of the plant, my hand, the gathering breeze, my eye. It all chants together, breaking over my head in a tide, the world and all its species singing with the absence of mistakes, the vast wheel of everything turning with intricate precision. I stand up, and the voices drop.

The desert, soaked with warm rains, is swelling with fruit, singing itself, humming to a lyric.

I am listening, for once, and learning a language of small words.

Old words, only momentarily forgotten. I rise and walk through a sibilant universe, complex as the Rosetta Stone, aching to take hold of some flexing, shining surface and crack its code. I want to scratch down the notes as they sound, speak in these small tongues until fire breaks over my head, record this, let this record me.

I want to grasp a rope somehow, and ring this whole horrifying, beautiful, vibrating world like a bell.

On cultivated lands stretching all around us springs the greenest, shiniest, freshest thing in the world: corn.

I’ve been learning to draw a stylised little pattern which is always a crowd-pleaser in the painting classes for border motifs – a maize plant with two big ears of corn growing on each side. I buy a white cotton shirt with traditional chainstitch embroidery and notice it’s the same design. Presidential candidates’ billboard campaigns show a brown hand holding an iconic ripe corncob aloft. The stuff’s everywhere.

In Mexican mythology, when the gods created humans they were fashioned from maize itself. Scientists have found artefacts, and the grinding stones called mutates show that domesticated corn has been cultivated by the Mexicans from as far back as 5000 BC. It’s been estimated that, next to rice, maize feeds more millions throughout the world than any other grain, and there’s always a close connection with a farmer – it must be sown by human hands.

It’s no wonder corn is still mystical, grown as it is on two-thirds of all arable land by three out of five farmers. Miles and miles of it, stretching as far as the eye can see, corn growing dense and green and spiky, ready to feed almost a hundred million people in this country alone their staple food. Stalky corn straggling up on the poor stony fields of the campo, thirsty for the rain, and corn shining and uniform as a gigantic hedge, twice the size and flourishing on the irrigated, superphosphated flatlands of the corporations.

It’s never going to stop being worshipped. Indigenous people place bowls of corn gruel in gourds before altars, as they’ve always done, since long before the image on the altar was a bleeding Christ. Feral corn is rarely hacked down. You can see single corn stalks growing in otherwise well-manicured public gardens, on roadside verges, and in fields of other vegetables, standing incongruous but victorious in a field of zucchinis.

Australians have no concept of how corn is revered in the Americas and in what diverse quantities it is consumed. The early European inhabitants didn’t get it either. ‘If one looks closely at these Indians he will find that everything they do and say has something to do with maize,’ one seventeenth-century Franciscan observed. ‘A little more, and they would make a god of it. There is so much conjuring and fussing about their corn fields, that for them they will forget wives and children and any other pleasure, as if the only end and aim of life was to secure a crop of corn.’

One time I was making a short video of the work the women in a small isolated town engaged in for their Union Day presentation. We ended up filming a section in the community-owned corn plot that everybody still traditionally maintained in this town. A group of campesina women, all of them stolid and no-nonsense community matriarchs in their shawls and aprons, were ranged out around the rows of corn in the plot they called their parcela, vigorously hacking at weeds with machetes in the sun.

I thought it would be good to interview one of them and ask her about the complex community ownership of the parcelas, which were slowly disappearing under economic restructuring.

‘Doña,’ I called to her as the video camera rolled, ‘Whose cornfield is this?’

She stopped slashing, straightened up and looked up at me, taken aback by the question.

‘God’s, of course,’ she answered kindly, as if to a child.

‘No, I mean, who takes care of it and harvests it?’

She paused, considering. ‘Well, we all help,’ she said, then pointed up to heaven, ‘but it’s all God’s, it’s all thanks to Him.’

Generations of trial and error produced the dozens of varieties of hybridised corn grown today, but techniques for growing it have changed drastically. Traditionally, Indian farmers grew the corn in small mounds, which minimised water run-off and stabilised the soil. Early white farmers in America adopted this technique, calling it ‘hilling’. It’s been abandoned now, though, in favour of rigid ploughed rows across vast fields, and predictably, thousands of tons of topsoil are lost from US farmland each year.

There’s another system you still sometimes see in the small backyard farms, which at first seems random and chaotic. Corn plants are festooned with climbing beans, the stalk providing a living stake, and throughout the plot zucchini or squash vines cover the ground. URAC’s agronomist José explains the symbiotic logic of the interrelationship.

‘The corn gives the beans something to climb on, the beans put nitrogen into the soil and the squash leaves cover the ground to keep it shady and moist and to stop so many weeds,’ he says.

When I notice a plot like this in someone’s garden, she is proud when I want to take a photo, although her explanation for the planting is less scientific. ‘All three together – we call that the Holy Trinity,’ she says.

I wonder what the indigenous farmers used to call it.

There are two cosechas, or harvests. First comes that of the fresh green cobs, which are still soft enough to be eaten boiled or roasted on the spot. Campesinos have harvest parties out in the cornfields, making a big fire and toasting the ears, called elotes, until the green outer husk is burned off and the sweet smell of smoking cellulose fills the air. The remaining cobs are left to dry and harden on the stalk to a point where they can be picked and degrained to be stored for the rest of the year. Then comes a laborious but sophisticated process of preparation. First the kernels are poured into vast vats of water and powdered lime to produce nixtamal, which is cooked for hours and hours, the calcium hydroxide softening the hard outer layer. Then it’s ground into a paste, the masa, and formed into the flat pancakes called tortillas.

If you had to find a symbol for Mexico which levelled every citizen, rich or poor, young or old, it would have to be these ubiquitous flat cakes of cornmeal. Everybody eats at least ten every day. The rich lavish them with cheese, chicken, creamy mixtures of roasted chillies and squash flowers, douse them in sauces made of coriander, green tomatoes and chillies, or savoury chocolate. The less rich consume many more tortillas, spread with refried beans and sometimes sprinkled with dry white cheese. And the very impoverished, for whom corn prevents starvation, sometimes eat only tortillas three times a day, sprinkled with salt, and there is a saltcellar on a string on the counter of the tortilla shop especially for this purpose.

Like African mealiemeal or Chinese rice, corn tortillas here are on every table, in every labourer’s bag, on every street corner. Wrapped in an embroidered cloth and placed in a basket, they are brought to your table by the kilo. Eat them all and ask for more, it’s never questioned. Have them with soup, torn up and made into little spoons to scoop up beans and rice, rolled up and fried for a snack. Have the masa pinched into little cakes and fried, covered in spicy toppings. Have them dyed lurid purple and pink for celebrations.

Almost every town and village has a tortillería, the shop where the tortillas are made, and those that don’t have them fresh-delivered, or markets where old women and girls sell baskets of the homemade tortillas considered much superior to the machine-made versions. Traditionally they were all made by hand, of course, the corn ground against metates by kneeling women, cooked on outdoor fires with wood they’d walked miles to gather. Middle-class women tell me they can cite the onset of Mexican feminism with the advent of the tortillería a generation ago, simply because of the daily hours of drudgery it saved. In any case, a daily pile of tortillas is as essential as water. Every morning, in the tortillería around the corner, the machinery on the conveyer belt groans and squeaks like instruments of the Inquisition, cranking out hundreds of thousands of tortillas. Housewives and children queue outside, holding their tea towels and cloths ready. They will buy six, eight, twelve kilos, depending on the size of their families, each morning. A kilo of tortillas costs a government-controlled one peso, seventy centavos – around thirty-five cents. Paper costs an extra thirty centavos, and the fact that I am the only person here without a cloth tells you something about how tightly people are budgeting their lives here. They line up and chat outside the tortillería.

Inside, apart from the conveyer machinery, the scene is medieval. Men with huge sacks of corn on their backs tramp in and out. The corn kernels are poured into a vat like a small swimming pool. Another worker, his white hat and neat red neckerchief glowing in the filtered light, pours off the excess brownish water and stirs this great vat of corn soup with long planks of wood, lifting it out with buckets suspended on ropes. Great balls of pasty dough are stacked behind the counter ready for the machine. Steam pervades the whole shop, as does the overwhelming, sweet, starchy smell of toasting corn. On the counter, a set of scales weighs up the stacks and stacks of tortillas every shawled housewife and shy little girl is buying.

Whether by fortunate coincidence or evolutionary master plan, the diet of the Americas is a near-perfect one for cheap, nutritious sustenance, a local dietician visiting for a nutrition talk tells me. Modern research shows that this process of soaking the corn in a heated alkaline solution, as women here have been doing for centuries, allows the human body to absorb the maximum amount of niacin from the corn, increases its calcium and better utilises its proteins.

If, that is, they get enough to eat. In the towns around us, at least, most people look a bit better nourished than I imagined they would. The children walking their goats along the country roads have legs muscled like those of long-distance athletes, and the teeth they flash when they smile are white and perfect. Dental caries have only really become a problem here since the soft-drink manufacturers set their sights on the market. Mexico is now second only to the USA as the biggest per-capita consumer of Coca-Cola in the world – and it’s subsidised to make it the same price as bottled water.

Thanks to that measure of calcium, osteoporosis only really began to be seen when North American retirees started to move here. The children are small but sinewy and strong; old people wrap their bundles and go on walking miles every day, sustained on corn and beans and not a lot else.

The cooking process gives tortillas a certain al dente grittiness. You have to grow to like the flavour of corn, which rises to the surface like a harmony in every dish prepared with it. Tourists swear after a week they will never eat another tortilla, but the options are slim.

The white Wonder Bread sold here is like eating a piece of wettex; sometimes bakeries sell white Spanish-style dinner rolls that grow stale in a day. Otherwise, your choice is the tortilla. They adapt and change depending on the region. Here in Mexico they are large and thin. Like pancakes, one surface is different from the other. ‘Ah,’ say Mexicans when someone introduces a contrary point of view. ‘Now that is the other side of the tortilla.’

Further down south and in Guatemala the tortillas are smaller and fatter, frequently shaped by hand. I’ve heard the soft patting sounds of women’s hands making tortillas in the morning described as ‘the heartbeat of the Americas’. In El Salvador tortillas are larger and fatter, a more robust version that fills you up more solidly and quickly, like Yorkshire pudding staving off the hunger pangs before the skimpy roast. Their affectionate slang names change as they nourish so many hardworking people across the continent, and they are yellow and pink and occasionally a purplishblue, depending on the maize which has made them.

Walk through a street at mealtime and you are accosted by their distinctive aroma. Early in the morning I hear the creaking of the machinery and soon the whole flat is filled with the smell. That day I know I will eat a few for breakfast, around eight with the main meal of the day at two, and probably a couple more in the evening. They will be fried, sprinkled, cut up in my soup, filled with shreds of chicken and onion and squeezed lime juice. In this form, they will be tacos. I never see or eat the corn-chip crisp variety called a taco in Australia. I never see a ‘nacho’. Instead I will receive kilos of soft tortillas at get-togethers in the communities, rolled up and spread with fiery, lip-numbing chilli pounded into a paste with oil. ‘Delicious,’ I will gasp as I try to eat at least one of everybody’s, steam coming out of my ears, stuffed to the brim with them.

At the tortillería, watching the vats of corn grains being stirred with planks, I imagine the logistics of that huge harvest each year. In front of me a tiny woman purchases ten kilos of tortillas, wraps them into a bundle, and hoists them over her shoulder. The thought of consuming that much corn meal is a daunting one, but strangely comforting. Her hungry kids will spread each with refried beans, some chilli, and, on special occasions, chicken or spicy sausage. The tortillas will stretch what other food there is, making a full meal out of a pot of beans. I purchase my modest kilo, marvelling again at how much nutrition I am buying for thirty-five cents. The tortillas are steaming fresh, wrapped in paper, moist and soft and gritty. It is nearly lunchtime and I am surrounded by delicious cheap food: market fondas selling soups and rice and beans; restaurants and street stalls. I could eat anything I wanted from this cornucopia of choice, but I hesitate.

What I want is a tortilla. A plain tortilla, without even salt. My fingers wriggle under the paper and I pull one off the stack, my mouth watering. I stand there in the sunny street, chewing and swallowing. That taste! Bueno como pan, the people here say to describe something or somebody sincere and unpretentious: ‘good like bread’. That satisfying stone-ground texture and simple warm flavour of nourishment on everyone’s table in the country.

The next day I’m out early with Phil and a few other workmates in a community and we are invited by one of the cashiers for ‘a bit of breakfast’. Around the back, her mother, who looks to be about seventy, is kneeling over an open fire covered with a comal, or flat metal plate. She is cooking tortillas, her hands deft and quick, with masa she’s ground and mixed herself, from corn she’s grown here in the garden.

For the whole time we are there, this old woman never once shifts from her position on her knees. She calls to her grandchildren, two little girls, to search the garden and hunt out where the chooks have laid an egg or two, and they run off industriously, peering under bushes. Her fingers tap and shift the cooking tortillas around, releasing a smoky corn smell through the woodsmoke of the fire. The girls run back exuberantly, each holding an egg in their hands.

We, the big overnourished westerners, will be getting these eggs. Their grandmother sprinkles salt on the comal and breaks the eggs on, stirring them a little with a stick. I wish I’d brought some fruit juice, or a tin of coffee, or some sweet buns to share around. But the family sits delightedly watching us eat our eggs and tortillas, smiling and nodding and munching plain tortillas themselves, the sun getting warmer as it rises higher.

I have to tell you, I have never eaten such a delicious meal.

‘Come and take a photo of Monserrat,’ says her mother Maria, seeing me with a camera one day. ‘She’s all ready for her first day at school.’

I do, as the smiling Monzie proudly unzips her pencil case and lays out its contents carefully on a rock for the photo, arranging herself next to it with her new plastic backpack and zip-up windcheater. As I take the picture I see her bright eyes and the big smile fighting self-consciousness to slide across her clean-scrubbed face.

It’s only later that I look at the copy of the photo I kept for myself, and see the treasures she has assembled ready to tackle school are eight half-used pencils, an old eraser, a sharpener and three stubs of crayon.

I look again at her beaming face. There are so many kids in primary schools here, some of them have to run a ‘double day’ – some of the kids coming from eight o’clock till twelve-thirty, then the others attending from one till fivethirty. I’d once asked some schoolkids, early in the morning, why they were hurrying to school when there was still an hour to spare.

‘We want to get a seat,’ they’d said.

The gear the members’ children need to buy to go to secondary school here – a backpack, pencils, textbooks, new shirt and shoes – costs about fifteen US dollars. The temptation to put my hand in my pocket and ‘solve’ this problem every time I see a mother depositing thirty cents for her child is overwhelming. But it’s not fair, my workmates tell me. If you can’t do it for all of them, don’t do it for any of them. You’ll only create division.

I draw a big multicoloured illustration of the five food groups to assist with the nutrition workshops we’re running. It does wonders for your Spanish, being made to stand in front of a group and explain about carbohydrates. I dread asking if there are any questions at the end of my stumbling little spiel.

‘Yes,’ a mother says shyly. ‘I have a question. I’m not sure … what is that thing there, with the proteins?’ She points to a fish I’ve drawn. It’s not just my artistic skills that have created the confusion, either. It’s the nature of what it’s actually representing.

‘That’s the fish I was telling you about,’ I say. It dawns on me what the problem is here, and I take the texta and draw a tin of tuna with the familiar red brand name on the label. Their faces clear – they nod. They’ve seen these at the shop.

Fifteen dollars to make sure a kid gets the chance to go to school, twenty-five million kids, or thereabouts, who could really use that money. Per capita income: US $4440.

Foreign debt to the US is a figure so ludicrous it only gets stupider the more you say it. Try it: one hundred and fifty-five thousand million dollars. That’s what they say.

The rescue package from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank a few years ago, which sold off major public assets like railways, electricity plants and airports, was called an ‘austerity’ program. There are six hundred and thirty people for every doctor. Why are these women sitting listening so politely and respectfully to someone lecturing them on foods they’ve barely seen, let alone could afford?

I visit someone’s house with a questionnaire to fill out. The householder’s arms are covered in soapy water from doing the family wash in the outdoor trough.

‘Come in!’ she says delightedly as she invites me into her bare yard. ‘Mi casa es su casa.’ My house is your house. She asks me to wait under the one tree while she brings her two chairs from the house. We sit on them and she calls to her daughter, doing her homework, to go to the shop for some drinks. The girl disappears into the house to get money, trots out the gate, then returns with a bottle of Coca-Cola. Her mother pours it into plastic cups, hands one to me, and settles herself into her chair.

‘This is the life, isn’t it?’ she says with a smile.

I recognise in myself a reflexive impulse to see people’s chronic hardships in terms of how many dollars they would take to fix, but I realise that is only seeing part of the problem.

I’ve seen the savings books – I know exactly what stands between these people and destitution. I think part of me doesn’t want to believe what’s staring me in the face.

Here before me, every day, is evidence of what’s possible. These people not only survive on so little, they create a whole life, a whole world, with it.

In that world there is birth and death, success and failure, hope and joy, quite a lot of dancing, happy, excitable kids and warm hospitality. I’ve been taught you need something for that kind of life which patently isn’t here. At URAC, where money and debt is constantly on the agenda, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone use the word ‘pobre’, poor, to describe themselves. That word is reserved for objects of pity, or thin animals, or victims of the hurricane in Honduras.

Usually, they say they ‘falta dinero’, they lack money. A few years before we arrived here, Oxfam included URAC in an international survey it was conducting on microcredit and poverty reduction. It chose one of the communities as a typical representative sample and did a ‘wealth-ranking exercise’ to assess people’s perception of ‘relative poverty’.

The respondents divided people in the town into three categories: those who ‘tienen el modo’, those who’ve ‘got it’; ‘los amolados’, the grounddown; and the poorest group, ‘los fregados’, the buggered.

There are a few families around who’ve ‘got it’ – usually those who have relatives in the States sending them money. If you’ve ‘got it’, you’re not exactly sipping cocktails by the pool, of course. It means you have a stove you run on gas, a house with a few rooms, and indoor plumbing. There’s an okay ratio, in your family, of workers to dependents.

Most people, to use the blunt but unsentimental terms of the respondents, are ground down and buggered. Ground down in the mill of years of toil, keeping things together with nothing, desperate for your kids to have a better chance. Seventy is considered a grand old age.

And yet the thing western sociologists have taken to calling ‘social capital’ spreads across these towns like a huge and fragile ecosystem. People lack so much that they share a common struggle, with common goals. It’s a heavy price to pay for equality, and a system which needs constant sensitive awareness. How will we equitably utilise the three stoves that someone has donated to URAC, without creating dissent and division? We must raffle them. A lottery, the idea of random chance in which all equally deserving participants shed some subjective judgement of merit and allow the grace of providence to play a part – this makes sense to people’s concept of fairness.

I look at the contented face before me. She is perfectly well aware of what she has to give me – twenty minutes of shady rest, a chair, a cool drink, a chat, an opportunity of respite raised by a questionnaire. I’m a guest here, and she’s a hostess. How mean-spirited it would be to insist upon paying for the Coke. I raise my cup to her.

‘This is the life,’ I agree.

The lives of the people in these small communities are tied fast with complex loyalties. They’re bound by systems of reciprocity, like the tradition of throwing and then attending family and community fiestas, where favours and hospitality are returned. You can’t afford to move away, and to leave your extended family group except under duress is unthinkable, so people resolve conflicts because they have no other choice. Because they share equally in this hardship, everyone tolerates someone else’s shamefaced admission that their loan repayment is a week overdue because the money hasn’t come from California, or somebody has been laid off.

The thought that some people might be favoured with a handout and others not, would cause possibly irreparable tears in this fabric of community. It would create disharmony, something the members dread. Better for all to have nothing than for a few to suddenly have something their neighbours cannot.

My workmate Maricruz tells me a story one day. Someone has donated some bolts of waterproof material to URAC, and a great deal of discussion has taken place about how to distribute it fairly. Finally, we have organised to pay some members with overlockers, who do piecework for the Playtex factory, to sew this fabric into backpacks for child members and then to sell them for a nominal amount in the shop. A simple donation has taken a huge amount of extra logistical work to be utilised, and I say I can’t see why we couldn’t just have given the fabric to the members with the machines, and let them sell the backpacks themselves.

‘We can’t show any favouritism,’ says Maricruz. ‘It’s for the same reason we can’t create disharmony.’

She tells me that about fifteen years ago a nationwide program called Solidarity was implemented, through which the government addressed unemployment and lack of resources in one fell swoop – by providing towns with materials to build their own public buildings. As well as providing bags of cement and bricks, they assessed the most impoverished, marginalised families in each of the towns involved in Solidarity and instituted a temporary kind of food voucher system, where those families received a discount on tortillas, say, or milk.

Today URAC often holds meetings in that one community room in town, ‘constructed’, as the sign painted on the side will say, ‘with Solidarity’.

URAC conducted a survey once, Maricruz goes on, trying to establish what assets each of the communities had in terms of washing facilities, telephones, taps, sealed roads, and so on. To get a better idea of what community-owned buildings there were, one of the questions had been: ‘What did the Solidarity project leave your community with?’

Unprompted, nearly a third of respondents had written: ‘Envy’.

One of the members approaches me and asks me nervously for a big favour. URAC has a video camera, and she is getting married, at one of the little communities clustered along the highway leading out of town. Would I be able to come on Saturday and videotape her wedding? I agree awkwardly, thinking with a slightly sinking heart that I’m probably doing the wrong thing, showing favouritism or at the very least setting up a precedent for an unwelcome weekly gig once other members see what I’m up to.

The wedding reception is under plastic tarpaulins in a big dusty backyard. All around us are thousands of bricks drying in the sun. The ubiquitous band plays loves songs as I take some shaky handheld footage of the tables and guests. The bride’s female relatives, all dressed up in their best dresses, are running between the tables and the hastily improvised kitchen, serving people food on plastic plates. Somewhere in the house a giant white frosted cake awaits. When it appears, the bride and groom will have a few photos taken as they cut it and make a wish, and then be heckled playfully into taking a mouthful from the cake itself, a signal for relatives hovering behind them to push their faces into the frosting for a comic effect, just in case anyone’s getting a bit serious.

At this point it is permitted for guests to make noises about leaving, but not before. I will have to stay until the very end. I wander, asking guests to record a short message of good luck for the couple on the video. Finally I go into the kitchen to record the rapid, orderly activity of food preparation: giant copper vats of chicken and beans and rice, piles of tortillas, litres of soft drink and tequila on ice. The bride’s aunty is a blur of organised activity, all peach-coloured satin and hairspray, as she stacks tortillas and replenishes drinks. This is her day – working like a whirlwind, waiting on everyone. Her husband, already three sheets to the wind, sits on a plastic chair slap-bang in the middle of the busy passageway, so that they all have to edge around him with trays.

‘I want to say something!’ he slurs happily as I’m asking his wife if she’d care to pause for a few seconds to record a message.

‘Okay,’ I say, and point the camera at him, a bit impatient. Sure enough, he stares owlishly down the lens, befuddled with drink and rendered speechless. His hand goes up and grabs his wife as she hurries by, and she stops to see what he wants. What a day for her, I think, conditioned to waiting on him hand and foot, and now working like a packhorse.

I’m just about to make a joke of it, give him the brush-off and go on to someone else when I realise tears have started in his eyes and are pouring down his cheeks.

‘Care for each other,’ he blurts at last, his voice cracking. ‘I only hope you will be as happy as we’ve always been.’ He’s holding onto his wife’s arm and I see she is crying too, squeezing his bony shoulder.

He shakily holds up his glass and toasts the camera.

‘God’s love to you,’ he sobs. ‘Long live … long live the lovers.’

‘Long live the lovers,’ his wife echoes, and they hug, weeping.

I creep away, shamefaced.

Thirty years of marriage, probably, and still there. Still in life.

‘This can’t be true, Cati, but I thought I should check it with you,’ says Doña Ofelia, sewing away at a skirt for herself, frowning short-sightedly in the light that comes pouring through the window. ‘Somebody told me that in the rich countries, the girls, the teenage girls, starve themselves to get thin.’

I glance around the faces, looking at me with concern.

‘Yes, that is true,’ I say.

‘Why, though?’

‘Ah … they’re worried about getting fat.’

Small, wry twists of smiles. Everyone is too polite to point out that here, people are worried about getting too thin.

‘No, well … the thing is, this person said sometimes they starve themselves until they die. Surely not?’

I hesitate. ‘I’m afraid that’s true too.’

‘Cati! The poor things. Why would they do that?’

I have no idea what to answer. I look up at her, a sinewy old woman in a worn rebozo who looks like she’s fought for every mouthful she’s ever got.

‘I don’t know. Why do you think they do?’ I say.

She smooths her sewing thoughtfully, shakes her head. ‘I think they are just not hungry enough,’ she says.

I go to a savings meeting not long after this. As it happens, it’s Maricruz’s birthday, and coincidentally five years since the town’s been involved in the Union. She enlists me to help to get the banking done quickly, to get on with a community party.

Women arrive with the ubiquitous blue enamel pots and bundles wrapped up in clean tea towels, ready for this feast. But something in the meeting causes a snag.

There’s a dispute between five women over who is next in line for a loan. One woman sticks to her guns and claims it’s her, while the others quietly insist they have all been waiting too. She cites her need for the money, and the others nod, saying, ‘I hear you, but we are all in the same boat. We are all waiting, and we all have projects.’

Maricruz stands her ground and does not offer to intervene on their behalf, and the other forty or so members stand solidly, not interfering either. An impasse is reached but nothing is resolved, the women separating uncomfortably, rewrapping their shawls, not speaking.

There is an unfamiliar tension in the air, of unaddressed business and hurt feelings, which nobody seems to know how to handle. The isolated woman moves away to stand with her mother, mutinously, all her stress in her teeth as she chews and chews her gum. There is nowhere to go. The matriarchs who’ve brought the food are annoyed that the party’s been delayed by such unpleasant business, and glance glumly at the defensive, unbending postures of the five women in conflict.

Other members confer with each other again, shaking their heads, their eyes bright and strained. Suddenly the lids are taken off the saucepans, the tacos are laid out, serviettes and paper plates appear and the kids start jumping up and down for cups of Coca-Cola. Voices are muted and plates are ladled high with food, too much food, as if this abundance of chicken and mole and rice and piled plates could salve the strain of the bad feeling we’ve all witnessed. A big cake, a surprise for Maricruz, is cut and the kids each get a little moulded jelly.

The dissenting woman stands wretchedly, her jaw set and her face stony. Then as it gets dark there is a moment of dusk which falls into place as necessary as sunset. One of the four women meets the eye of the stubborn arguer, still flexing her jaw on gum, standing miserable and alone.

‘Hey,’ she says, and holds out a plate.

There are four seconds of held breath, then the woman by the fence smiles, moves her clenched arms apart, and steps forward.

Which is harder, would you say, the giving or the taking? The offering or the accepting? I know suddenly as I stand there that I want for myself, and for my own world, something of the courage this takes. Not just the courage to hold out the plate, but the courage to move forward to take it. I stand with my plate of cooling, lovingly prepared food, witness to such necessary, painful compromise, and all that it asks of us.

On a lightning visit over the border to the USA to renew visas, we are jarred into sudden culture shock. Every bar and nightclub seems to be patrolled by bouncers, who want to see photo ID before they let us in. It’s hard to strike up a conversation. The few people we do meet are keen to tell us what’s wrong with Mexico, based on a weekend they once spent in Tijuana, or their annual holiday at the beach resort Cancún. There’s a scathing report in the local newspaper about pollution drifting intermittently over the border and spoiling the vistas from the mountains and parks, threatening the tourism dollar. The border’s only half a day away, but the journalist and letterwriters seem unaware that most of the pollution’s pumping from the chimneys of the large number of US-owned companies and factories taking advantage of lax pollution laws in the twenty-kilometre NAFTA buffer zone on the Mexican side.

Strangest of all is their often-cited distaste at the beggars on Mexican streets, who hounded them during their holidays. It’s true that beggars congregate around tourist hotels and holiday centres in Mexico, but their numbers and insistence are no greater or more shocking than the homeless people in the United States. Drunk and drug-addled, or just plain mentally ill and delusional, they roam the streets here alone and muttering, or loom in front of you demanding money, or sprawl unconscious on sidewalks and verges. They seem as invisible to everyone else as an Untouchable, and yet they’re so in your face that this must be wilful blindness, a general tacit collusion. People have to work hard to maintain the illusion that they are not being addressed by a crazy man on the bus, or not stepping over somebody insensate and soaked with urine outside McDonald’s, but they all do.

Everybody’s so ... curt. Every interaction with someone behind a counter seems strange and flat, a rehearsed bare minimum. We board the bus for the airport in a major city. The driver stares straight ahead behind glass, glass that looks thick enough to be bulletproof. Nobody looks at anybody else as they sit in numbered seats and wait for departure time, counted down by the second on the big electronic clock installed over the big tinted windscreen. We set off precisely at the appointed time and stop at a hotel or two to pick up more passengers. At one of them, a paraplegic is waiting to get on. The driver manoeuvres the bus to the kerb and presses a button which lowers a hydraulic hoist, a marvel of modern science. Nobody looks at the person in the wheelchair as she wheels herself onto the hoist, for fear of our glances being misconstrued as prejudiced or insensitive. Nobody offers to help, for fear of seeming patronising. The sound of the airdoors wheezing shut is very loud in the silent bus.

The paraplegic woman wheels herself into a specially designated ‘wheelchair-friendly’ compartment and locks her chair in place, and the bus starts up again. Mission completed, and not a single word, glance or gesture exchanged between anyone. Nobody can be accused of treating a disabled person any differently from anybody else – state-of-the-art machinery has removed any possibility of bungling with an accidental touch, and everything has functioned perfectly.

It’s all gone exactly, efficiently, according to plan.

We get on the plane, off again in Mexico City and down to the teeming, chaotic Northern Bus Terminal to get a bus home. The driver and his assistant are chatting at the door as we approach, and scoop up our luggage as they wish us a good afternoon and take the tickets. We get on board. Every eye we meet here has a small nod and a smile. The driver gets in and starts up the bus, ready to reverse out of the bay. There is a shout from further down the terminal.

‘Open up the doors!’ his assistant calls, peering down the causeway. ‘It’s us.’

One of the ticketing staff appears, pushing an older woman in a wheelchair down to the bus. The driver and his mate both get off. Then the assistant leans down and gathers the disabled woman into his arms and carries her gently up the steps into the bus. He finds her a seat and settles her. The driver folds up her chair and stows it with the luggage. When everyone’s ready again, we set off.

I feel a slumping physical sensation of pins and needles as the accumulated stress of the journey leaves my body. I feel close to tears. I am back in the ragged, dusty and disorganised world, infuriating and heart-wrenching, cradled back in solicitous arms, back with people who get willingly into debt to host parties, who sing as they load garbage, whose two-year-old children reach up to shake my hand solemnly. Back with the shoeshine man who cleans the polish off his fingers to play his guitar before he packs up for the night, and the old women arranging their few pieces of fruit scrupulously on a blanket, up early and walking miles to be there. Back with the beautiful Monzie, laying out her precious pencils for a photographic record, her mother carefully smoothing her hair for the camera, full of fierce and irrepressible joy.