Ron D’Aloisio
GUAJOLOTE BUS
I learned that people in Mexico jokingly referred to the third class buses, the ones the poor rode in, as Guajolote buses – Turkey buses. Calling them “Turkey” buses was a way of laughing about a reality of poverty and enduring difficult times and difficult travels. But my first experience on one of these buses was a shock. There really were chickens, turkeys and goats on board. This experience on a third class bus was a ride to Zinapécuaro, the first morning after my arrival in Mexico in 1962. I was a college kid, just a month beyond my 19th birthday. It was a rickety, probably over thirty years old, full-size, gasoline run bus with two rows of two-person metal seats going straight back in the interior. Even though made of metal, the seats showed the wear of decades of use. The bus’s exterior was painted with bright, gaudy colors – the only part of the bus that looked cared for enough to run properly. The space between the rows of seats was small, made for the descendents Purhepecha Indians, the indigenous people of that area, not for tall American college students like me. The roof carried all the larger belongings that wouldn't fit inside, like fencing material, huge baskets, sacks of grains, rice or potatoes, sugar cane, and even some passengers.
I was actually lucky to have to stand only for the first half of the ride from the state capital of Morelia, out 30 miles or so, to Zinapécuaro, the small village that was my destination. I was deep in the countryside of central Mexico. The state of Michoacán was characterized by rugged mountain ranges, volcanoes everywhere, sprouting up as prevalent as the corn fields. I learned later that the name Michoacán actually means the place of the lakes or waters in the indigenous Purhepecha language.
The bus was full, standing room only. The only Gringo on the bus, maybe the only one a lot of these people had ever seen, I tried to look as inconspicuous as I could. I tried to find some way to make myself smaller. All the while a stray chicken pecked at my tennis shoes. The women wore dark rebozos, or shawls, that had multi-purpose uses, from keeping warm, to hiding one’s face, and often to carry babies. The older ones’ rebozos covered both their heads and most of their faces. Many on this bus used the rebozos to hold babies tight against their chests. The men, regardless of age, all wore flat-rimmed cowboy hats with little tassels on the back ends.
The people watched me in an indirect, polite but curious way. They were obviously wondering who this gringo was on this particular bus on this particular morning. Where could he be going? Gringos are strange anyway, so let him be. We’ll find out later where he gets off. I could feel eyes on me, but at the same time the people were polite. They did not stare when I could see them, and they tried to avoid making too direct eye contact. That was a traditional way of avoiding trouble, of showing respect and letting one another be.
The bus smelled of the farm animals, peoples' fruit and groceries they had picked up in Morelia, chicken and other types of droppings, the earth, and a couple of bales of green alfalfa hanging over the wire luggage bars at my eye level.
I kept my hard-sided, old box-like suitcase next to my left foot and hung on as the bus swayed through the cobble-stoned and paved streets of Morelia on its way out. Everything seemed chaotic to me -- the driver stopped seemingly wherever he wanted to pick up other passengers -- at street corners, in the middle of blocks, sometimes only slowing down so a young man could jump on. The front door never closed regardless of the speed of the bus. The front of the bus was crowded with a seemingly random mixture of objects in all parts of the compartment. There was a shrine with pictures of saints, the Virgen de Guadalupe, a Rosary hanging from the mirror, and tassels with little red, white and green balls hanging along the top and sides of the windshield. A bit distracting, I thought, if you’re driving on unpaved, winding roads, trying to avoid stray cattle, burros, and pedestrians along the way.
During the whole trip, the driver kept an animated conversation going with his assistant sitting at his right in the front of the bus, the assistant always looking either back or out the door, and the driver only looking at the road half of the time. The assistant kept talking to the driver even as he collected fares and directed new people to crowd toward the back of the already too crowded, I thought, bus. Everybody laughed whenever the bus lurched causing someone's plastic shopping bag to fall on the floor from its perch, or causing people to crash into each other.
As soon as we got out of the city, there was a man who went toward the front, turned out he had to pee -- and in the middle of nowhere the bus stopped for him. He jumped off toward the side of the road, walked shakily – the guy was still drunk from partying the night before -- out about 20 feet from us and, in full view of everyone, turned his back to the bus, fumbled with his zipper, pissed out as long a distance as he possibly could, jiggled his body theatrically to clear off the last drops, zipped his pants up while keeping his legs spread wide, and then turned to run toward the bus's front door, to the cheers and laughter of the passengers, since by that time most of the people on the far side of the bus had crammed themselves toward the other side to watch his performance.
This bus ride was my first experience with the campesinos of central Mexico with whom I would be living for the next three months. I was shaky, pretty much in shock. I had started college young at 17, and the 3 semesters of Spanish I had studied at Cal Berkeley didn't seem to have helped my ears understand what people were saying so far. Their accents were much stronger, and the words were spoken much quicker, maybe with slang I wondered, compared to the urbane Spaniards and Americans who had taught at Cal. At this point, I felt like I was lucky to have even found my way to this bus to Zinapécuaro right after arriving at the central bus station of Morelia, a city of 100,000 people. I had just come in early that morning after an overnight bus ride from Mexico City over the two-lane road they call, "Mil Cumbres", one thousand mountain peaks -- the name gives you an idea of what that bus trip was like, with constantly climbing up and down mountainsides, and taking hairpin curves at as fast as the driver could coax the greyhound-type bus. Anytime another bus or truck that was in front of us was going too slow for the driver, he’d pass it, totally without regard to how close an oncoming vehicle might appear. It was as if he was living in a contest daring death again and again. Once during this long evening journey we began to pass another, slower bus in our lane. We pulled out into the oncoming traffic lane, and slowly made up ground on the other bus, passing it very slowly as we approached top speed on this hill. During the pass, on my side, I saw sparks fly as we brushed against the side of the slower bus. I then stayed awake for the rest of the night.
This was a transformative journey for me. I had wanted to do something different this summer. I didn’t know what, but I had a strange longing. In search of who knows what, earlier in the spring of this year I had joined a rag-tag group of young men and women in an organization we called “The International Student Worker Corps”. “What a wonderful revolutionary name”, as my friend, Jack from those experiences said years later. These people were committed to living with the rural poor in Mexico to show their solidarity and do something tangible about poverty and injustice in the world. They were willing to live out their beliefs. They were willing to endure suffering and to struggle through difficult experiences for their beliefs. The leaders were all veterans of the Catholic Worker Movement. They had followed Dorothy Day and others who created shelters and soup kitchens for the urban poor in the big cities of the U.S. They were strongly committed to their beliefs, which included identifying with the poor and working with the poor to achieve justice. These people were kind of the precursors to that whole radical, revolutionary movement of being in solidarity with the poor that later became known as Liberation Theology within the Catholic Church. I really didn’t know anything about any of it, but I was deeply impressed by these peoples’ courage and commitment. I thought these were really lofty, maybe unreachable ideals, but at that time I was searching for a direction in my life.
I was more than eager to join my fellow students who had already gotten to Zinapécuaro in our old 1935 “Bracero” bus. I had flown into Mexico City on June 10, 1962. I had flown because when my parents had seen the old bus in Palo Alto, they immediately forbade me from taking the trip with the young men of the group. Standing by that bus that day of departure and not being able to leave with the rest of the students, I felt I wanted to hide. How embarrassing and humiliating! But at that time, I didn't know I could go against my parents’ wishes. Plus, I was only eighteen. They had always been over-protective; definitely my mother was, afraid of anything new involving their only child.
Sports, high school activities, going out at night with friends were all extremely discouraged as unapproved activities. "Why don't you just stay home where it's safe?" was my mother's constant comment. Actually, she was speaking from the perspective of an old family myth. It seems that my uncle, Americo, the last child of my grandmother, had died suddenly of a mysterious ailment when he was only 15. He had played baseball for the first time the year before, so my grandmother always thought that his play, coming home tired and dirty, had something to do with him contracting a sickness that quickly took his life. My mother shared this fear, and thought any sport, any physical activity, might somehow result in debilitating illness or death.
Of course, I didn't share in the myth in the way my mother and my aunts all worried together about. No, my idea of safe was always outside the house that I thought was a dead place. Never heard my father's opinion because he seldom said much. But my parents were just first generation Italians who thought I was out of my mind to even want to go to Mexico to work with the poor, especially with these other not-well-dressed-at-all students.
I wanted to get away from this scene at the departure of our old 1935 bus and from my new friends as fast as I could to try to hide my embarrassment, but it seemed OK to the group, especially since my father allowed me to bring a half-dozen shovels, picks, rakes, and hammers from his hardware store for the work in Mexico. We thought we would be doing physical labor in the village in Mexico, so we had needed tools. I was never sure why he was willing to donate the tools. I guess I didn't realize then that most of my parents' disapproval, reluctance and resistance about the trip must have come from my mother, who was fit the stereotype of a little old Italian woman, worried about everything, expecting the worst at all times. So by the time I had got onto the bus to Zinapécuaro, I already felt like I was late getting to the project with the group.
Just as my "Guajolote" bus reached the end of the paved part of the road from Morelia to Zinapécuaro, the passengers thinned out enough so I could sit. I sat on an aisle because my legs wouldn't fit behind the seat. I began to think that this village I was going to must really be in the sticks! We were now on a dirt road, and hardly even half way there, by my calculations, although I was never sure where we were. I had no idea what my destination might be like. We would stop at these little, tiny ranchos -- five or ten adobe, one room buildings, with huge puddles in the middle of the dirt streets, and one little store on a corner with a Coca-cola sign. Little snot-nosed kids wearing tops, but no bottoms, would be playing in the mud. I guessed no one had the money for diapers, and this way it was easier to deal with their peeing and pooping rather than having to wash underwear and pants all the time. These kids impressed me a lot because they were happy playing with the simplest of things. No toys at all. Smiling and laughing, they would play with sticks, rocks or a stray piece of wood.
Each time we would approach one of these barren little ranchos, my heart went to my throat, my stomach sank, "God,” I said to myself. “I hope this ain't the place I'm going! There's nothing here! Where would I live, how would I survive? Can I really handle living in a place like this?" I thought about hardship, the lack of accommodations, no bathrooms, no restaurants, and maybe getting sick because it didn’t look like there was much in the way of sanitation.
After going through about seven of these little ranchos, and a couple of stops at even smaller out-of-the-way places, the road gradually got a little wider. We passed a few houses. There were more people around. It seemed as though we were coming to an actual town, maybe. Then, the bus driver's assistant, a teenager who had kept his eye on me during the trip, slowly walked down the aisle to where I sat and, pointing his eyes and head to the front of the bus, "Zinapécuaro!", he said with a smile. Then he made his way back to his perch in the front of the bus.
******* ****** ****** *****
I learned that people in Mexico jokingly referred to the third class buses, the ones the poor rode in, as Guajolote buses – Turkey buses. Calling them “Turkey” buses was a way of laughing about a reality of poverty and enduring difficult times and difficult travels. But my first experience on one of these buses was a shock. There really were chickens, turkeys and goats on board. This experience on a third class bus was a ride to Zinapécuaro, the first morning after my arrival in Mexico in 1962. I was a college kid, just a month beyond my 19th birthday. It was a rickety, probably over thirty years old, full-size, gasoline run bus with two rows of two-person metal seats going straight back in the interior. Even though made of metal, the seats showed the wear of decades of use. The bus’s exterior was painted with bright, gaudy colors – the only part of the bus that looked cared for enough to run properly. The space between the rows of seats was small, made for the descendents Purhepecha Indians, the indigenous people of that area, not for tall American college students like me. The roof carried all the larger belongings that wouldn't fit inside, like fencing material, huge baskets, sacks of grains, rice or potatoes, sugar cane, and even some passengers.
I was actually lucky to have to stand only for the first half of the ride from the state capital of Morelia, out 30 miles or so, to Zinapécuaro, the small village that was my destination. I was deep in the countryside of central Mexico. The state of Michoacán was characterized by rugged mountain ranges, volcanoes everywhere, sprouting up as prevalent as the corn fields. I learned later that the name Michoacán actually means the place of the lakes or waters in the indigenous Purhepecha language.
The bus was full, standing room only. The only Gringo on the bus, maybe the only one a lot of these people had ever seen, I tried to look as inconspicuous as I could. I tried to find some way to make myself smaller. All the while a stray chicken pecked at my tennis shoes. The women wore dark rebozos, or shawls, that had multi-purpose uses, from keeping warm, to hiding one’s face, and often to carry babies. The older ones’ rebozos covered both their heads and most of their faces. Many on this bus used the rebozos to hold babies tight against their chests. The men, regardless of age, all wore flat-rimmed cowboy hats with little tassels on the back ends.
The people watched me in an indirect, polite but curious way. They were obviously wondering who this gringo was on this particular bus on this particular morning. Where could he be going? Gringos are strange anyway, so let him be. We’ll find out later where he gets off. I could feel eyes on me, but at the same time the people were polite. They did not stare when I could see them, and they tried to avoid making too direct eye contact. That was a traditional way of avoiding trouble, of showing respect and letting one another be.
The bus smelled of the farm animals, peoples' fruit and groceries they had picked up in Morelia, chicken and other types of droppings, the earth, and a couple of bales of green alfalfa hanging over the wire luggage bars at my eye level.
I kept my hard-sided, old box-like suitcase next to my left foot and hung on as the bus swayed through the cobble-stoned and paved streets of Morelia on its way out. Everything seemed chaotic to me -- the driver stopped seemingly wherever he wanted to pick up other passengers -- at street corners, in the middle of blocks, sometimes only slowing down so a young man could jump on. The front door never closed regardless of the speed of the bus. The front of the bus was crowded with a seemingly random mixture of objects in all parts of the compartment. There was a shrine with pictures of saints, the Virgen de Guadalupe, a Rosary hanging from the mirror, and tassels with little red, white and green balls hanging along the top and sides of the windshield. A bit distracting, I thought, if you’re driving on unpaved, winding roads, trying to avoid stray cattle, burros, and pedestrians along the way.
During the whole trip, the driver kept an animated conversation going with his assistant sitting at his right in the front of the bus, the assistant always looking either back or out the door, and the driver only looking at the road half of the time. The assistant kept talking to the driver even as he collected fares and directed new people to crowd toward the back of the already too crowded, I thought, bus. Everybody laughed whenever the bus lurched causing someone's plastic shopping bag to fall on the floor from its perch, or causing people to crash into each other.
As soon as we got out of the city, there was a man who went toward the front, turned out he had to pee -- and in the middle of nowhere the bus stopped for him. He jumped off toward the side of the road, walked shakily – the guy was still drunk from partying the night before -- out about 20 feet from us and, in full view of everyone, turned his back to the bus, fumbled with his zipper, pissed out as long a distance as he possibly could, jiggled his body theatrically to clear off the last drops, zipped his pants up while keeping his legs spread wide, and then turned to run toward the bus's front door, to the cheers and laughter of the passengers, since by that time most of the people on the far side of the bus had crammed themselves toward the other side to watch his performance.
This bus ride was my first experience with the campesinos of central Mexico with whom I would be living for the next three months. I was shaky, pretty much in shock. I had started college young at 17, and the 3 semesters of Spanish I had studied at Cal Berkeley didn't seem to have helped my ears understand what people were saying so far. Their accents were much stronger, and the words were spoken much quicker, maybe with slang I wondered, compared to the urbane Spaniards and Americans who had taught at Cal. At this point, I felt like I was lucky to have even found my way to this bus to Zinapécuaro right after arriving at the central bus station of Morelia, a city of 100,000 people. I had just come in early that morning after an overnight bus ride from Mexico City over the two-lane road they call, "Mil Cumbres", one thousand mountain peaks -- the name gives you an idea of what that bus trip was like, with constantly climbing up and down mountainsides, and taking hairpin curves at as fast as the driver could coax the greyhound-type bus. Anytime another bus or truck that was in front of us was going too slow for the driver, he’d pass it, totally without regard to how close an oncoming vehicle might appear. It was as if he was living in a contest daring death again and again. Once during this long evening journey we began to pass another, slower bus in our lane. We pulled out into the oncoming traffic lane, and slowly made up ground on the other bus, passing it very slowly as we approached top speed on this hill. During the pass, on my side, I saw sparks fly as we brushed against the side of the slower bus. I then stayed awake for the rest of the night.
This was a transformative journey for me. I had wanted to do something different this summer. I didn’t know what, but I had a strange longing. In search of who knows what, earlier in the spring of this year I had joined a rag-tag group of young men and women in an organization we called “The International Student Worker Corps”. “What a wonderful revolutionary name”, as my friend, Jack from those experiences said years later. These people were committed to living with the rural poor in Mexico to show their solidarity and do something tangible about poverty and injustice in the world. They were willing to live out their beliefs. They were willing to endure suffering and to struggle through difficult experiences for their beliefs. The leaders were all veterans of the Catholic Worker Movement. They had followed Dorothy Day and others who created shelters and soup kitchens for the urban poor in the big cities of the U.S. They were strongly committed to their beliefs, which included identifying with the poor and working with the poor to achieve justice. These people were kind of the precursors to that whole radical, revolutionary movement of being in solidarity with the poor that later became known as Liberation Theology within the Catholic Church. I really didn’t know anything about any of it, but I was deeply impressed by these peoples’ courage and commitment. I thought these were really lofty, maybe unreachable ideals, but at that time I was searching for a direction in my life.
I was more than eager to join my fellow students who had already gotten to Zinapécuaro in our old 1935 “Bracero” bus. I had flown into Mexico City on June 10, 1962. I had flown because when my parents had seen the old bus in Palo Alto, they immediately forbade me from taking the trip with the young men of the group. Standing by that bus that day of departure and not being able to leave with the rest of the students, I felt I wanted to hide. How embarrassing and humiliating! But at that time, I didn't know I could go against my parents’ wishes. Plus, I was only eighteen. They had always been over-protective; definitely my mother was, afraid of anything new involving their only child.
Sports, high school activities, going out at night with friends were all extremely discouraged as unapproved activities. "Why don't you just stay home where it's safe?" was my mother's constant comment. Actually, she was speaking from the perspective of an old family myth. It seems that my uncle, Americo, the last child of my grandmother, had died suddenly of a mysterious ailment when he was only 15. He had played baseball for the first time the year before, so my grandmother always thought that his play, coming home tired and dirty, had something to do with him contracting a sickness that quickly took his life. My mother shared this fear, and thought any sport, any physical activity, might somehow result in debilitating illness or death.
Of course, I didn't share in the myth in the way my mother and my aunts all worried together about. No, my idea of safe was always outside the house that I thought was a dead place. Never heard my father's opinion because he seldom said much. But my parents were just first generation Italians who thought I was out of my mind to even want to go to Mexico to work with the poor, especially with these other not-well-dressed-at-all students.
I wanted to get away from this scene at the departure of our old 1935 bus and from my new friends as fast as I could to try to hide my embarrassment, but it seemed OK to the group, especially since my father allowed me to bring a half-dozen shovels, picks, rakes, and hammers from his hardware store for the work in Mexico. We thought we would be doing physical labor in the village in Mexico, so we had needed tools. I was never sure why he was willing to donate the tools. I guess I didn't realize then that most of my parents' disapproval, reluctance and resistance about the trip must have come from my mother, who was fit the stereotype of a little old Italian woman, worried about everything, expecting the worst at all times. So by the time I had got onto the bus to Zinapécuaro, I already felt like I was late getting to the project with the group.
Just as my "Guajolote" bus reached the end of the paved part of the road from Morelia to Zinapécuaro, the passengers thinned out enough so I could sit. I sat on an aisle because my legs wouldn't fit behind the seat. I began to think that this village I was going to must really be in the sticks! We were now on a dirt road, and hardly even half way there, by my calculations, although I was never sure where we were. I had no idea what my destination might be like. We would stop at these little, tiny ranchos -- five or ten adobe, one room buildings, with huge puddles in the middle of the dirt streets, and one little store on a corner with a Coca-cola sign. Little snot-nosed kids wearing tops, but no bottoms, would be playing in the mud. I guessed no one had the money for diapers, and this way it was easier to deal with their peeing and pooping rather than having to wash underwear and pants all the time. These kids impressed me a lot because they were happy playing with the simplest of things. No toys at all. Smiling and laughing, they would play with sticks, rocks or a stray piece of wood.
Each time we would approach one of these barren little ranchos, my heart went to my throat, my stomach sank, "God,” I said to myself. “I hope this ain't the place I'm going! There's nothing here! Where would I live, how would I survive? Can I really handle living in a place like this?" I thought about hardship, the lack of accommodations, no bathrooms, no restaurants, and maybe getting sick because it didn’t look like there was much in the way of sanitation.
After going through about seven of these little ranchos, and a couple of stops at even smaller out-of-the-way places, the road gradually got a little wider. We passed a few houses. There were more people around. It seemed as though we were coming to an actual town, maybe. Then, the bus driver's assistant, a teenager who had kept his eye on me during the trip, slowly walked down the aisle to where I sat and, pointing his eyes and head to the front of the bus, "Zinapécuaro!", he said with a smile. Then he made his way back to his perch in the front of the bus.
******* ****** ****** *****