Evil in the Village

The sun set across the valley and over the distant hills. Our first day of hitchhiking. The truck driver stopped to drop us off at the fork in Isucar de Matamoros. To the left, the road curved off through Puebla to Veracruz. Heading straight, all roads led to Oaxaca. 

Stepping down from the truck groggy (for we had both been napping), the first thing we noticed was a palpable coldness that seemed to be coming towards us from everyone we passed. We walked under an enormous poster of the president Enrique Peña Nieto, who was posing looking deeply concerned about the country’s well being. I made a joke about his expression. Nick missed it because he didn’t see the poster and he didn’t know who the president was. I didn’t feel like explaining the joke. I just wanted to get away from the mechanics who were glaring at us as quickly as possible. 

We passed a kid our age sitting on a concrete stump. I said Buenas Tardes. He stared at me and didn’t respond.

We ate dinner at a restaurant, then walked along the highway, looking for the edge of town. The sun was getting low. Not a good time to start hitching, but we both felt instinctively that we wanted to get the hell out of town. It was the first time anywhere in Mexico has given me such a sinister vibe.

As we walked, an effeminate twenty year old boy appeared next to me without warning and started talking to us, asking who we were and what we were doing there. His name was Jesus and he was flirty in a way that gave me the impression he was trying to take us home. He started talking about a party and a place we could sleep. We were polite but continued forward hoping he would get the hint that what we really wanted was to get out of town as soon as possible. He walked us to a gas station, then left us to return to his party. 

After a few minutes in the gas station parking lot, a truck drove up and the driver called out his window in English, “Where are you trying to get to?”

“Oaxaca.”

“It’s too late to hitchhike now. You ask the people at the station if you can sleep there tonight. Start again in the morning. This place is dangerous. I speak a little English so I thought you should know that.” He drove off.

Nick and I looked at each other then walked to the station where we sat down to discuss what to do. Why did we both get such creepy vibes from this place? We talked about the difference between warnings from people that should be ignored and those that should be heeded. For example, a lot of people told both of us before we came to Mexico to be incredibly careful because Mexico is very very dangerous. I’ve been here four months now without once even feeling uncomfortable, much less in danger. And yet, if that warning is coming from a local about his own village, then isn’t that something to be taken a little more seriously? Nick and I debated the difference between paranoia and real danger while considering paying for a hotel for the night. 

Suddenly a bike screeched to a halt in front of us. It was Jesus again. Now he had gifts for us. They were rosaries to put around our necks to keep us safe. Nick was given a little felt cross tied with a cord and I got a plastic cartoon Virgin de Guadeloupe with the words Cuida Mi Novio Plis, on a string of fluorescent pink beads. Now I really felt like he was trying to take (at least one of) us home.

Jesus asked what we were planning to do. We told him we were thinking of getting a hotel, but reminded him about the place that he knew. He said there were no showers at there...or roof. But we could camp and it would be safe. Then he said he would invite us to stay at his house but his family was like everyone else in the town. He used a word I didn’t know, so I looked it up in my dictionary. Espantado. Terrified. What was the deal with this place?

Now Nick and I had to solve the other question. If the first was who to trust about whether the danger is real or not, the other is who to trust with your safety for the night. I thought about the quote from the door of Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise. We followed Jesus.

On the way, I asked him if he was an angel. He said “No. I just don’t like to suffer and I don’t like to see others suffer either.” Later, he said, “Most people here think people are bad because they’ve had only bad experiences, but I’ve met good people, so I believe people are good.”

The place he took us to turned out to be an awesome post-apocalyptic compound with walls but no ceilings, totally overgrown with weeds and huge piles of brush and branches, and sleepy turkeys wandering everywhere. We dropped our packs, and made a bonfire while dogs barked menacingly and people shouted on the other side of the ten foot walls. It was the first bonfire Jesus had ever seen.

He left and we tended the fire, and talked about whether the world is really dangerous and we’ve just been lucky in our lives, or whether the danger is exaggerated. We also talked about New Age ideas of ‘manifesting the world you want to live it.’ Neither of us share that attitude (though we both lived in Berkeley, where it’s popular), yet neither of us fully discredit it either. Oftentimes the world does seem to deliver exactly what our attitudes toward it have requested. 

Jesus returned to introduce us to his little sister. Nick stood up, shook her hand, and said mucho gusto. She breathed a vocal sigh of relief and told us that now she felt she could trust us (because Nick had shaken her hand and looked her in the eye). Then she left. We wondered at such scared and paranoid people. 

Jesus gave us gifts of fruit, t-shirts, water, and a blanket for Nick to use for the night (He gave me his sleeping bag in Cuernavaca because he wants to make his own blanket from raw wool. I gave away my sleeping bag because it’s big and I no longer needed one. Maybe the exchange was premature as he was freezing the first night without a blanket.). He also found an old cot for me to sleep on under the stars, and left us his phone to listen to music such as N*Sync, Ricky Martin, and Taylor Swift.

In the morning, he gave Nick a questionnaire to fill out about his life and everything he wanted to know about us that he hadn’t asked the night before. Once we were packed, he walked us to the highway, gave us his contact information, and wished us well. 

Over the course of our next few rides, we finally got some information about the story of the town. Apparently, there have been a lot of gang problems there, including bus robberies. It was one of those remote places in the desert foothills of the mountains that I guess had ceased to have much of an economy, so had reverted back to a Wild West mode of existence: take what you can grab. Everyone had paid the price. What was left was the eeriest, most closed off town I’ve ever seen. 

By the time the sun set on the second day, we made it to Oaxaca.