Mazatlan
Mazatlan, Mexico
Okay. Americans learn
at an early age how many states we have in our nation and where they are. But do you know how many states Mexico has
and where they are? Yesterday’s tour
began to fill some of my educational gaps.
Overnight, our ship had cruised from Cabo San Lucas south
along the coast to Mazatlan. First
glimpses from the bay portrayed a much more ancient city with white-ish layers
of buildings going up the rock hills. A
golden cathedral dome glinted behind two tall steeples. Clay tiles offered a colorful contrast. Before reading or hearing anything, it’s
obvious that the city wears its history of colonization. There’s an old town away from the newer port
area. But the city itself was not on our
schedule for the day.
Today, we had chosen to take a small guided tour away from
the city, up into the Sierra Madre Mountains, to see some small villages, to
learn their old histories, and to observe some of their ways of life. Our comfortable tour coach could hold 13, but
8 of us (4 from our ship and an American family of 4 who were vacationing in
Mazatlan—the 80-ish parents for 9 weeks and the adult daughter and husband
there for 7 days) climbed in and settled back for the four hours of
learning.
Our first stop was at a “brick factory” which was an outdoor sectioned field that can only be described by looking at the photos. A clean man in a white hat supervised two tall barefooted men with short shovels, wooden wheelbarrows, and a mold with 4 rectangular sections into which they tossed globs of mud with bare hands.
My mind immediately went to Old Testament Egypt where slaves worked in mud to form bricks for Pharoah. Not much had changed in 25 centuries or so. This mud was composed of a special kind of dirt hauled in from the southern part of the state and then mixed with cow manure and water. The workers arrived at 4 or 5 am finished around noon if their[a1] allotment of bricks was complete. They get paid by the brick at .80 pesos per, expected to yield about 400-500 in a day. It takes 2-3 days to dry on the ground, then they are stacked on a loose rectangular open-topped formation.
After drying in the stacks they create a kiln using the bricks themselves and fill in around them with pieces of mango wood (mango trees replenish themselves and do not need to be replanted),
Once the kiln is completed they burn for a couple days until all wood is ash, then left to cool for about 4 days before being restacked for sale. Many older homes are 130 or so years old and people prefer the larger size and quality of the bricks used back then.
Next stop was a “tile factory”—not the tiles on the roof, rather the square or round tiles typically used on kitchen walls as colorful accents. Because this painstaking detailing requires hours of individual labor, most tile making has been automated. But Mazatlan still has three “factories” who still make tiles one-by-one. The photos will show faster than my words can explain.
The heavy iron press that shoves the dyes
into the plaster is 120 years old. The
artist can make up to 200 in a day!
The third and fourth stops were between the curves and dips
and ear-popping scenery of the Sierra Madres with lots of info from our guide
as we passed fruit trees, chili pepper fields, tomato fields, and such. # 3 was in a small town named Concordia (“the
name,” our guide said, “means when all agree.”) which still has a church built
in the 1500s by the Spanish as they colonized the space and mined the nearby
gold and silver mines. #4 was in a
smaller, quaint village named Copola which has a large church from the same era
built for the same reasons, but not in such manicured shape for tourists who
don’t usually go further than Concordia.
Our guide did not present Catholics in a good light—historically or
currently—claiming he was a Christian and he didn’t believe what they did. Note: if you look closely above the entrance to the
Copola church, you will see the bust of a mineworker boss leaning down, as if
counting and supervising each person as they enter.
Comments
Post a Comment