Mexico Bleeds

It's a love story I want to write:

Oscar Rivera got nervously out of the truck, smiling.   He then vomited, over and over again, apologizing to me in Spanish as he was retching, crying.   I had picked him up from a Houston street corner a couple of hours before.   It was powerfully hot and humid. I put Oscar to digging holes, for shiny shrubbery, in the exclusive River Oaks neighborhood. He struck at the wet, sticky clay earth zealously, earnestly, too hard , very eager to please -- guiltily stealing glances at Mercedes Binzes, Porches, Big Cadillacs and a DeLorean.

I noticed that he was slowing down, I had already tried twice to get him to work at a more even pace, he would only nod, smile, and then look painfully lost and frightened.   The other fellows either ignored him or gave him inscrutable glances.  

I thought it best that he rest so I took him with me to Burger King to get lunch for everyone.   He ate too fast and too much.   He didn't know what to do with the packages of ketchup, so he put them in his pocket.   I had forgotten how to say ketchup in Spanish.

He had only been in the United States for about thirty-six hours.   He was a very young ranchero fellow from Michoacan.   I don't think he was even five foot tall.   He was vomiting up something I don't think he really understood.   He held the burger with two hands, underneath like a Dickens' orphan, or one taking communion.

Oscar told me, in our brief initial conversation, that he was a Purepecha from close to Lake Patzcuaro, Mexico.   He knew only about tending the milpa.   His little bother was very good at throwing rocks at crows, keeping them out of the corn.  

I made him take it easy the rest of the day.   I asked him if he wanted to work the following day.   He said that he did.   When I went to pick him up with the rest of the guys, he wasn't there.   He'd been humiliated.   The Purepecha people were a very proud and powerful people.   Although their lands bordered on the powerful Aztec empire, the Mexica could not conquer them, only when the Spaniards came and laid waste to all of indigenous Mexico did the Tarascans, as the Spaniards called them, fall.   Their capital city was called Tzintzuntzan (place of the hummingbirds).      

I'll never forget Oscar Rivera.   There were many, many more just like him -- I can't forget any of them.

Please check-out the story and photos below:

http://youtu.be/lKQ2QjF74Xc 

http://flickrhivemind.net/Tags/semanasanta,tzintzuntzan/Interesting