I used to collect money at the church called San Francisco on Sundays. These collections were organized by a local man named Beto, a political hopeful,with the aim of restoring each of the 32 churches in Tenancingo Center one at a time.
During and after The Mexican Revolution church property was expropriated. The churches themselves were looted and the buildings ignored. The catholic church was not held in high esteem by the new post revolutuionary political stewards of Mexico. Most viewed the church as a plague upon the people,, and a competitive force with which to be reckoned. In 1926 President Plutarco Elías Calles, a particulary rabid hater of the church, launched a decree called "Ley de Calles", where many of the church's rights were taken away. The Calles Law was meant to supress and limit Catholic worship in Mexico. Laws against religion are like laws against bowel movements.They don't work. Humans seem to have a genetic spiritual "chip" installed in their hearts. Calles's attempt to curtail religion led to The Cristero War which sought the annulment of the law. Eighty years has passed and the catholic religion is held dear by 90% of Mexicans.
When I arrived in Tenancingo sixteen years ago The Parroquia or San Franciso, on one side of the zocalo was in rough shape and looked like a dreadful collage on the inside,,, the synthesis of a country priest's colorful lust for God perhaps encountering a donation from a wealthy parishoner. My muster of money on those sundays in 2004 , were meant to help with restoring 75 years of neglect. In 2009, when Tenancingo became a dioses and received a bishop, The Parroquia was given a tasteful remake. Then came the sept 19th 2017 earthquake rattling up from the restive bowels of the earth that brought everything back to zero.
Each sunday, 14 years ago I arrived before the 8:00 AM mass and was assigned a door where I would wait for people to exit after the service. I was given a little brown box with a slot on top. I had prepared and practiced my lines in spanish.
"¿Te gustaría cooperar con la reastauración? ¡Cooperemos con la restauración! ¡Ahora estamos cooperando!"
More often than not I was sent to the smaller market side entrance of the church. I was a "lesser soldier". During the mass I had my routine which was based on biding my time and wondering. I would march towards the huge Ahuehuete near the entrance and then back again wondering if God does exist often thinking about how lazy and uninvolved this fellow is. We do all the work building His network and maintaining it,,, and He is just somewhere way out there in the stardust. Jesus says we must "cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness". Was he talking about his father, the deadbeat dad, or is it all a neatly tied bundle of contradictions. Perhaps I am just a bundle of contradictions as well.
My curiosity at times waivered from religious questions and focused on the construction of the church. San Francisco is not a huge church but it took some doing to erect it. The oldest part of the church dates from 1640. I imagined a cacaphony of sounds, hammering, chiseling, and scraping. There would have been heavy wooden staging, donkeys, and men,,, most likely indigenous men. I often tried to decipher the spanish on an old sand stone baptismal font left outside like an after thought on the grass. The style of the carved letters were in a Greek font, a kind of geometric format.
One morning between the nine and ten o'clock mass while killing time I noticed something new. There, on the lawn space in front of my entrance was a 10 foot tall 10,000 liter blue plastic water cistern rising up from the dirt and casting a big shadow. There it stood, waiting for enterrment. I thought at first that the shadow would be good protection for my ever balding pate baking in the sun. During the week the workers had begun a cylindrical hole that was about 2.5 meters deep and in typical Mexican left open to the world, a gaping unprotected chasm inviting curious little boys and presenting an obstacle to wobbly footed older ladies. This is Mexico however and I can still ride in the back of a pickup truck so who cares if we lose a couple of little unruly brats or a few grannies in the pit. It is the price we pay for our freedom from the shackles of insurance.
Being male and genetically prone to explore holes I walked over to take a look. I peered in. My eyes traced the path down. There was some rubble visible in the upper layer, beginning about 50 centimeters down and ending at about a meter into the hole. Below that beautiful dark fine soil lead into the darkness. My eyes wandered around the rim and the rubble. It hadn't registered yet what I was seeing. There where the rim met the corner of the wall was a pile of gray bones mixed with the dirt excavated from the hole.. What is this I thought? They seemed to be too big for animals and too small for,,,,heavens,,,humans? I was freshly curious and went to see Beto, the person coordinating the restoration, to ask about these mysterious shards. He was disoriented at first. His first reaction was ,,"those damn people who come onto church grounds at night and leave their trash". I told him that this was not the refuse from a mini bar-b-cue by delinquents but something much older.
"Show me these, Beto said".
We walked over, he hunched over leaning on his cane taking baby steps as he edged nearer the rim .We talked, He told me there are rumors that there is a secret tunnel under the church that was used during the bloody mexican revolution. This, I could see was going to evolve into pure guy talk about holes. He gingerly extended his cane and rolled over some of the discarded bones with the rubber tip staring down expressionless.
"They are the bones of pigs from the market", Beto affirmed.
I said half joking, " or goats maybe"? However I was thinking these are not pigs or goats", these are human femurs".
I took note of how many femurs there were and their length. The diameter of the hole was perhaps a meter and a half and starting within the thickness of 50 to 1 meter there was a layer of hundreds of bones like a layer of sediment. These were indeed very short people. Pygmies perhaps?,,the true first visitors to the continent,,, before the land bridge? Babies? No. These were fully developed. Indigenous people? A massacre,,, a plague? Questions were arriving like taxi's at the close of a musical event.
An older gent, Raimundo, known as Mundo, who aided with the restoration entered the scene. He is a retired school teacher, nearly deaf, and a devout catholic. He hollers, as he always does,, "Oh yeah we found a skull in the soil during the dig and when we put it in the Sun it just fell apart". His loud voice only amplified the absurdity. I was beginning to feel aloof when Mundo insists as does Beto that this just has no historical value.
"It is just an old graveyard. This was sanctified ground."
Beto transforms into Francisco Pissaro before my eyes and Mundo starts to resemble Hernan Cortez seeing only the glitter of gold and eliminating everything human. Their disinterest was foreign to me. Beto, who sees himself as the town historian, commented that when the Spanish arrived 500 years ago all the Indians lived in Teotla or Acatzingo,,,not here. I often feel this agitation rising within me when people are sure of something when all records have been destroyed. Teotla is only five blocks away so I don't consider that a grand distance for an Indian. Also I have seen the soil in Teotla and Acatzingo and it's all rocks. These Indians in this region were food producers, not hunter gatherers so they would have sought out better soil. Ancient people were close to the soil. They would have exploited this option. I was fishing for defense against Beto's surety however I had no answers only questions.
Beto and Mundo added that many churches here had cemeteries about them. This was familiar enough to me but why was there no pieces of clothes, or baubles, and why were all so short? Why was there only femurs I thought. When I told my wife later that day she theorized that these were the remains of the babies of nuns.
With a half angry tone I said to Beto and Mundo, "How do you know for sure, are you paleontologists? Whomever they are,,,they are part of the history of Tenancingo, and the church,,, and their muteness should be heard."
Beto and Mundo maintained their disinterest and returned to the main entrance of the church. The only one to express interest was Virginia, an expat, who was also helping with the restoration. We went over with some plastic bags to collect some samples finding a jawbone and trying to separate teeth from legs and pot shards. Then we went back with Beto to try to convince him that this begs further investigation.
Mundo shouts,,,"Come on over tomorrow, and if we find another skull,,I'll save it for you". There is very little of value in the streets of Mexico because the gleaners have scoured anything usable. This is not like the states where "good" garbage abounds for the free picking. You would have trouble finding a few pieces of wood to rub together to make a fire here. And Mundo is offering me a skull of unknown origin as if it were worthless. Alas poor Yorick, I knew him well. In this case no one wants to know Yorick or Citlalli or anything. This could have been Mundo's great great great great great great x 10 to the minus ten grandparents. That night I couldn't sleep well. I was haunted by short people trying to sell me memories, chanting, "memorias memorias cuatro por diez, cuatro por diez". Virginia e-mailed me that morning with the information that Beto had placed the bones we had bagged in the Camerine fo safe keeping and had changed his attitude.They will be studied. I doubted all she said, thinking he just strolled over to the nearest garbage can and tossed Atahualpa into the can.
