Zumpahuacan

     I have been working on a tour of the area about Tenancingo for the last 6 months. We will be hosting 14 people from the states for a week and Peter is the tour guide. It's a trip actually visiting places I have passed for so long,, finally making the time to "investigate the ticker". This has been a very positive experience for me. Anything that reminds one of their ignorance promotes humility and that is the best condition for learning. Tenancingo has varied identities. "Commercial" being the strongest,, with its flower and vegetable markets, and myriad business Tenancingo's surface presentation seems soiled,, but one must always scratch the surface, no? It's just a stone's throw away to paradise if we bend over to pick up the stone.
     Yesterday I went to a town called Zumpahuacan near Tenancingo to set up a meeting with two mescaleros for the tour. Everyone sees "Zumpa" as a place of tribes that settle disputes with guns and knives. This has never been my experience. The day was hot. Zumpahuacan is drier than Tenancingo and desertified, the mountainous landscape sparsely dotted by, cactus, acacias, and palmettos. After sipping a mezcal with a mezcaleros wife, Tomasa, I left their porch decorated with hanging maracuyas to firm up a lunch for the tour at a reataurant close by. That done I wanted to find some people who wove items of ixtle,, the fibrous structure of cactus leaves. After receiving varied directions, and visiting some dead ends, I ended up on a steep hill awash in sweat and a little desperation.  A lady wrapped in a rebozo was passing. ¿Señora, perdon, hay personas aqui que hacen cosas de ixtle? Si yo,, she replied. In the course of a short conversation she told me she was heading to her workshop and invited me to come along. I told her to hop in the pick-up and we climbed higher up the road. Matilde Casanova Arellano told me to pull over by the water tank. We exited and walked down a path on the edge of a scraggly corn field. The sun made me feel like greasy bacon until we passed under some large trees that gave relief from the intense heat. Her workshop was in the distance,, part cement block and part carrizo. Some chickens scratched and cackled. Her daughters were inside and they invited me in. I had to duck to enter the low door made of carrizo and hung with rope hinges. The room was a small oval and the light pierced the upright stalks of carrizo that made the walls slicing the room into shafts of cafe and yellow.  The floor was fine packed dirt and there was a bed. 
     Just like that she began to work showing me every stage of the operation from the joshua trees outside from which they harvested the raw material for their weaving to the finished product. Something isn't dying, at least yet,, and someone here and in many places about this diverse world is still making something useful and beautiful from what is all around them. They participate in that special club of people outside the chase yet carrying on. Matilde talked throughout the work in clear tones as if she were made more alive by her craft. She told me her father taught her,, and his father taught him. I thought this craft must be

thousands of years old.