“It was my first time in California. Near a town called Guadalupe. I was very happy. I believed this town must be very special. In Mexico no one is more important to us that Our Lady of Guadalupe. I believed her protection reached me even here where people picked strawberries by the sea. And there was Santa Maria. And the Sierra Madre Mountains behind her. I was overjoyed. These were the mountains of my childhood. It was like home. I was surrounded by saints. San Miguel, San Rafael, Santa Margarita, Santa Rosa. These words were like spells to me. I thought it must be one of the safest, most blessed places in the world. The saints had kissed the mountains, they had set their feet on the islands, they had founded the towns and blessed the missions. I was standing by the strawberry fields looking across the highway at the sea, and it was very beautiful. It was beautiful, yes. Beautiful, beautiful. It was a beautiful trap.”
And we aren’t animists? In the United States our most pervasive spirituality is in our devotion to the almighty dollar—the minting, making, growing, trading, lending, spending and redistributing it. There’s nothing that makes us tremble or glory like the ups and downs of the economy, no realm whose signs and portents we read with more care, no power we’ll do more to appease and to exalt, no conversion more inspiring than the world’s to capitalism, no ether more universal, more just, more undeniable and inescapable than the cash communion binding us together.
“And you say first Spaniard exploits Indian, then, when he had children, he exploited the halfbreed, then the pure-blooded Mexican Spaniard, the criollo, then the mestizo exploits everybody, foreigners, Indians, and all. Then the Germans and Americans exploited him: now the final chapter, the exploitation of everybody by everybody else—”
—Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
“Good-day, Woman,” she said to Famine. “Sit down and eat some tortillas,” she said to Famine. And Famine said: “Just one hot tortilla I will eat,” she said. She took a hot tortilla and ate it. She kept tightening the clothing around her baby. And the woman saw that Famine’s baby was tiny and skinny. Then Famine said: “I will go and I will come.” And she went away. And the story is that a severe famine entered that town. -Mixtec Omen*
When we were ten and twelve years old we were put for a month in the house of a well-to-do mercantile family in Mexico City. They were clothiers and business associates of our paternal uncle, a Texan who imported their garments and sold them to Mexican-American women in the States. They ate five-course afternoon meals, they had a second house in Querétaro, a crumbling, walled hacienda with a tennis court, and their sons were being educated at USC. One expects such people to be of the secular-hypocritical class, but, far from it, they appeared, to our young eyes, to be extraordinarily devout. The women attended weekly Mass, they wore imposing black dresses, and, since Mexicans think everyone is Catholic until proven otherwise, and since ten- and twelve-year-olds aren’t especially courageous, there was never a thought in either my head or my brother’s that we might stay in our pews when these large, handsome matriarchs beckoned us to come along with them to the front of the church and take the Eucharist from the priest.
You should have seen the looks on their faces when they learned the truth. It must be a greater sin to eat and drink when you’re not meant to than not to when you’re obliged. “But you can’t do that! Why didn’t you speak!” We were en route to Chapultepec Park when we confessed to them. Their Sunday stroll was ruined. They spent the afternoon worrying their gloves, asking us were we quite sure we weren’t Catholic, and nervously laughing over the incident, persuaded by a combination of maternal solicitude and amateur theology that we were much too naïve to have committed a serious sacrilege.
