December 1, 2014
Things we didn’t used
to need to know
Got a minute? Here are three quizzes.
Quiz # 1: Consider the following 6 items:
a. cow
poop b. horse
poop c. sheep
poop
d. donkey
poop e. mule
poop f. camel
dung
Now, assuming you are thinking of building a house in Santa
Cruz Etla, rank these six items in terms of potential usefulness. Hint: the
least useful category may be a three-way tie.
Quiz # 2: Consider the following 6 items and, if you are
not too pooped to continue thinking of building a house in Santa Cruz Etla,
rank them in terms of potential usefulness:
a. Pine
tree resin
b. fermented
prickly pear cactus paddles
c. egg
whites
d. mashed
guava skins
e. sheep
excrement
f. elmer’s
glue (you may substitute library paste)
Quiz # 3: What classic sitcom is inextricably linked to quizzes 1
and 2?
The winners will be announced in due course.
Way back when we started this project, Linda and I agreed
that we wanted to have at least part of our casa built from adobe, and that we
wanted the adobe to be made from our dirt on this property. In long talks with
Cynthia, the architect, and Lalo, the chief contractor, we learned a number of
things that we never imagined that we would ever need to know.
That adobe is a wonderful aislante, or insulating material, that
will keep a house warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer than just about
any other building material.
That adobe is not impervious to wind
and rain and, if exposed to the elements, over time will fray and crumble.
That
when adobe dries it tends to shrink a little bit, so when you are calculating
heights and volumes ...
That
you can pound a nail into a wall of concrete, or brick, or cinder block, or
adobe, but it will probably hold least well in adobe.
That
of those four materials in this day and age, adobe is the most expensive,
largely because of the cost of the labor to make it.
That
formulas for adobe vary, that every master adobe maker thinks he has the
perfect one, and that every formula at some time doesn’t work.
That
“dust thou art and to dust returnest” was originally written about adobe
houses.
OK, then, so we won’t build the whole house out of adobe,
maybe just a decorative symbolic part. And maybe a wise choice would be an
internal wall, say in the sala
(living room) or a recámara (bedroom),
someplace far from the elements. After more conferring with Lalo and Cynthia,
we decide on just one wall in the living room. Well, and maybe a fireplace.
Lalo contracts with two local adoberos, Socorro and Pedro, veterans of many campaigns of making
adobe. Socorro, tall, scruffy, cigarette smoking, rides to work on a horse and
brings with him a donkey (his) and two more horses (his nephew’s), which he
day-pastures in a field across the street. He also brings two dogs that mostly
sleep on our Casita porch and drink water from our garden pails. Pedro, at
fifty a few years older than Socorro, is shorter, mild-mannered, and has a very
engaging smile. Neither has been to the States. Of all the Mexicans I talk with
regularly, here on the work site and around the village, Socorro has an
aggressive sense of humor that comes closest to the US “put on.” When I ask him
something, a technical question about

adobe making or anything having to do
with local custom, his answer is likely to be exaggerated, or slightly off
base, or completely outrageous, as if he were testing the limits of my credulousness.
The two men work as a team, and are always together, but Socorro does all the
talking, even when I direct a question to Pedro.
The house-site is at the top of the property, and the adobe
factory is at the bottom, closest to the paved road. As I write we are about
six weeks into the adobe making process. The first step was for Socorro and
Pedro to clear off a patio, which means leveling a large piece of ground,
removing all the large stones, the small stones, the gravel, the pea-sized
impedimenta, and in fact anything that might mar the surface of the adobe. It
takes, as Socorro patiently explains to Linda, three or four days, and
involves—in order of usage—a pick, a shovel, a rake, a hand trowel, and a
broom.
The next step is to assemble the basic ingredients. We have
dirt everywhere, but Socorro and Pedro think the large pile that the retro has
mounded up alongside the entrance road is best. The men set up a large screen
and begin sifting. The dirt is filled with bits of crumbly caliche, pebbles,
and a number of other things that will not do for the adobe. The pile of sifted
dirt grows, and the throwaways are mounded to one side.
While Socorro shovels and sifts, Pedro chops nopal paddles into fist-sized bits.
Nopal, that folks up north call prickly pear, is Mexico’s all-purpose cactus
staple. Planted in tight rows it makes a dandy fence. The juicy red fruits can
be eaten raw, pressed for drinking, frozen and shaved to make raspas (ices that are a favorite snack
in the Zócalo), or made into ice cream or popsicles. It thrives in the wet
season and the dry. The eggs that parasitic bugs lay on the paddles produce
wo
rms that manufacture an acid that will stain fabric a fade-resistant scarlet
red. It’s called cochineal. The paddles, scraped of their thorns, cut into
strips, and lightly fried or boiled, are a delicious, nutrient-rich vegetable; and
are good in salads, too. If paddles are coarsely chopped and soaked for several
days in vats of water, they decompose and get all slimy and stinky; this liquid,
called baba de nopal, when it has
been strained out and mixed into the adobe mud, is a wonderful binder. (Aha!
The answer to quiz #2.)
The fiber in foliage is another essential adobe ingredient,
and, this being the tropics, there is no shortage of foliage. But, Socorro
explains, only a certain kind of grass stem will do. Piles of the stuff appear
in some fashion—I never see them delivered—and against a board the two men
patiently chop them into the appropriate lengths with their machetes. They
spread the stemlets on a plastic tarp, and stir them intermittently for a
couple of days to insure that they dry evenly.

The fourth key ingredient of adobe is organically processed
foliage. It seems to be the essential catalyst that makes the other ingredients
adhere to each other. While any number of quadrupeds process foliage, the Equus asinus is by far the best, and
fortunately Socorro has a number of the stubborn little beasts at his house, so
that his pack horses can bring us sacks and sacks of sun-dried donkey poop (and
the answer to quiz #1). The two adoberos take turns shoveling donkey poop onto
the sifting screen and massaging it through the mesh to make pile of finely
particularized adobe binder.
When all the ingredients have been assembled and prepped, it
is time to mix the dough. The sifted dirt is wet down with water and fermented
nopal juice until it takes the consistency of glutinous mud. Pedro sprinkles pailsful
of the donkey poop onto the mud and mixes it in with a shovel. Then he does the
same with the chopped grass. Then comes the serious mixing.
Since Lucy and Ethel are not available (Quiz #3), it is Pedro
who mixes the adobe dough in the classic style, stomping barefoot round and
round the mud pile, his toes searching out every reticent pocket of unmixed
dirt/baba/grass/poop until the mud is of the homogenous appropriate consistency
to be molded into bricks. This takes longer than I would have stamina for, but
it looks like fun.
PHOTOS 5
Socorro is the master molder. The mold is a rectangular
hardwood frame, open at both the top and bottom. It is late morning, and he and
Pedro have been working since dawn, laying out the fresh adobes in precise
geometric rows. Socorro places the frame in the next position on the row, and one
of them shovels a precise amount of mud into the frame. Socorro, with his bare
hands, squishes it into the corners. His fingers are the equivalent of Pedro’s
talented toes. The new adobe can have no inconsistencies of texture that might
invite a fracture, no treacherous air pockets that might harbor a weakness that
causes the adobe to bubble and break. Any extra mud is carefully troweled away
and returned the ur-mound. Any shortfall is rectified spoonful by spoonful.
When Socorro is confident that the adobe sits perfect and serene in the frame,
he carefully lifts the frame and hands it to Pedro to be washed, leaving the
newly formed wet brick to dry in its place in the row. Pedro hands back the
washed frame, Socorro places it in the next position down the row, and they
begin again.



As they dry, a few adobes from the first batch develop
cracks. For this initial batch Lalo and Cynthia had insisted that Socorro add a
little sand to the mudpile, as one does when mixing concrete, believing that it
would give the bricks extra strength. Socorro did as instructed—el jefe es el jefe—but he was unhappy
about it. He thought it impugned his expertise. Moreover, for no reason that
Lalo ever articulated to Socorro, he didn’t like the color of the bricks. So
Socorro and Pedro stack those first adobes to one side—(“You can always use
them for something,” he says to me. “Maybe a wall for the garden ...”)—and
start a new batch, using sifted dirt from further up the hill that was lighter
in color. All agreed: this time no sand. And a week later, examining the dried
pudding of this batch of bricks, all agreed that it proved perfect.
We run into another problem: dogs. As I learn from talking
with Socorro, if there is one thing that Mexican dogs like better than bacon or
freshly killed chickens, it is wet adobe. They like to piss on it. Make tracks
in it. Crumble the edges and the corners with their paws. Out of curiosity,
perhaps, or sheer cussedness. Our large property is fenced all the way around,
but somehow the dogs are getting in. Our immediate neighbors, among them, have
at least a dozen dogs, and we don’t have to go much further afield to tally a
couple of dozen more. I walk the peripheral fence, find a hole dug under the malla behind the latrine, and stop it
with a hunk of board buttressed with a cinderblock. Socorro stops up the gaps
on the side of the entrance gate. I plug the entrances and exits to the
irrigation ditch with a leftover piece of closet shelving (and try to remember
to remove the plugs when water is flowing). But the dogs still get in. Socorro
covers the freshest adobe each night with a tarp. I find and plug another hole
up by the storage shed. They still get in. Like it or not, we resolve to
tolerate a bit of loss.
Over the weeks the brick lines grow. After several days of
drying, Pedro and Socorro turn the adobes over. When they are sufficiently dry
on both sides, they turn them on end. When they are completely dry, they stack
them in the traditional way that minimizes pressure on them and lets them dry
further. When the first patio is filled, Socorro and Pedro prepare another one
on the other side of the entrance road. Soon it, too, is nearly full. They tell
me they are nearly done, another day or two at most.
And then,
in a few days, those well-dried, dog-piss-impervious adobes will be lugged 30
meters north to their permanent home in the west wall of the living room of our
Casa. And maybe the fireplace.