What Comes Around from Door to Door

By Ariana


Door to door salesmanship, once a thriving commercial enterprise in the United States, but now mainly left to fundraising schoolchildren, overzealous girl scouts, and ex-convicts, is alive and well in Mexico.  Everyday a knife salesman walks up and down our street playing a little flute hoping that the music will put you in the mood to purchase a knife.  As I was walking home the other day I practically crashed into a cart full of brooms that a man was trying to sell to a neighbor.  There is also a woman who pushes a cart with a pot of steaming tamales up and down the street and yells "tamales" at the top of her lungs during the early hours of the morning.  Her tamales never tempt me, but her pre-dawn sales pitch is almost enough to make me want to buy a knife from the flute player.
These are just the salesmen on my relatively quiet neighborhood street.  As I venture out of the neighborhood and towards the city square, or the zócalo, as it is called here, the number of vendors noticeably increases.  The area surrounding the zócalo is prime real estate, turf here is highly sought after and well guarded once attained.  Having a corner in the center of town makes pushing a cart unnecessary, there’s no need to go looking for potential customers when you can get the people to come to you instead.

Hippie street, photo taken by Leslie Ruster

It is most common to see a solitary vendor on a corner but occasionally a whole street will be taken over by carts and tarps covered with brightly colored wares.  There is one street that has been completely taken over by hippie vendors.  While most of the vendors around town are elderly women and men whose long days pushing a cart around in the sun have taken a toll on them, the hippies are different.  The hippies are all under the age of thirty and they refuse to push a cart.  They may lay down a tarp, but usually they don’t bother, they’ll set their goods right on the street.  The hippies also refuse to sell neither things that are functional nor things that are made in China. The former because they are more concerned with ethereal, spiritual things than with material, functional things, the latter simply on matter of principle.  There is one other key difference between the hippies and any other vendor that you might meet and that is their refusal to barter.  It is a near impossible feat to strike a deal with a hippie.  One time, I did get a hippie to give me a discount because he thought I had a pretty smile, but I don’t think I would have gotten the same treatment had I actually tried to haggle with him.

Getting a "trensa gitana" (gypsy braid) from a hippie vendor. Note the winning smile that got me a discount (Photo by Leslie Ruster).

Salesmen are associated just as much with their locale as they are with the goods they are hawking.  There is the woman who sells elote by the church, the woman who sells elote by the university, and the woman who sells elote on the corner where the bars let out.  I could visit any of these women to get my fix of corn covered in mayonnaise, cheese, lemon juice, and chili, but I really only ever patronize the cart in front of the church.  This is mainly because she stands right in front of where my bus stops but I like to think that it is also because I have a connection with her.  While my conversations with her are limited to the few words necessary to order an elote and make sure that the mayonnaise is used sparingly, I still feel an affinity for her and a loyalty to her.  If something were to ever happen to her, I don’t know if I’d be able to bear going to any of the other eloteros in town.  It just wouldn’t taste the same.  I hate to admit it, but I have similar feelings towards the woman who sells tamales on my street.  As much as I dislike being woken up at six am on a Saturday to a gravelly screech of “Tamales!  Tamales!” I can’t imagine what I’d do without that all too familiar wake-up call.

A word on mosquito bites and family as a way to sum up the Mayan Empire

By Karla

Four days into my trip to my father’s homeland, Guatemala, we go to the most beautiful terrain I have ever seen. A mix between jungle and forest, parrots flying past me, butterfly’s the size of your hand, and the buzzing of insects. At some point we stop in what can only be described as a Lychee forest, huge lychee everywhere in tons of different colors, lots of yellows, reds, red with green spindles, and oranges. There it is – the entire world’s beauty there for me to enjoy.
I get to our family’s home and realize I have been massively bitten by mosquitoes. Now a few bad mosquito bites is a blip on my travel radar. My father, a man who always praised toughening up, looks obscenely worried.
His reaction surprises me. The father that I know and love has always been slightly apathetic. That night, I am up writing in my journal and about to slather on menthol. My father comes in the room and asks me if he can put the menthol on my legs for me. I look at the worry lines creasing his forehead and ease myself back on my uncle’s couch and make room for him to sit as I think "Let him be your dad right now". For the next 30 minutes my dad sits on the couch and rubs menthol on each of my mosquito bites. He shakes his head as he looks and thoroughly rubs the cool balm into each of the bites. It dawns on me then, 1 am, sitting on the couch of an uncle I've only known for days, in a tiny tropical and rural port town in the south east of Guatemala, just how much my dad loves me. It hurts him to see my mosquito bites. Where as I was fully willing to brush them off as inconvenience and take a minimal 5 minutes to care for them, my dad thinks it’s worth 30 minutes of his time to try and make it better.

Now, my father isn't the most expressive man. He has a gruff exterior and his expression in the states is usually one that verges on scowl. I am quite the emotional and expressive woman, I was a toughy for him to handle. That night, and many other moments on the trip, I was struck by how in our baggage as father and daughter, I had not ever truly understood just how much my dad loves me, even if its hard for him to say it. I am loved. There it is – the entire world’s beauty there for me to enjoy.
My family in Guatemala relates to each other so powerfully. When one family member hurts the whole family does, when one family member has joy the whole family rejoices. My dad, I discovered, was pulled from all this love at a very young age and put in orphanages until coming to the United States, this is where his base was created. Everything he learned about being a dad got packed into the first 8 to 9 years of his life. A nine year old boy soaked in family and all the bruises and trauma that followed created the man who sat at my legs and dedicated 30 minutes every night for 5 nights to provide his daughter with comfort.
I heard so many rich stories in those three weeks. Stories about my revolutionary great-grandmother "La Abuela", that hid propaganda in tortillas to help Pancho Villa, the Mexican revolutionary. Stories about her exile from her mother country. Stories about the loss of her 13 children and her raising all her grandchildren in their absence. Stories that are full of immense pain and tremendous pride at what each of them had to do to guarantee survival for the rest.
I understand now, perhaps better than at any time in my life, that I am Guatemalan, Mexican, and American. This visit was not a visit to a foreign land but a return to another home. I am fundamentally tied to my culture. To a people whose ruins remain more amazing than any modern day building I have seen. Linked to traditions and values created out of struggle and hope. I am loved by them. I was loved by them before I ever was even born. And they fought for themselves, each other and my future. Now I get the distinct honor of being their historian; making sure that my kids, my students, and my friends know where they come from.