19 July 2015
This
morning I did my first tequio in
Santa Cruz Etla.
Santa Cruz
gets most of its money for public works from the federal government, but indirectly.
The federal government allocates to the states; the State of Oaxaca allocates
to the municipalities; and the town of San Pablo Etla allocates to its agencias, of which the village of Santa
Cruz is one, effectively the only one. In Santa Cruz the list of projects
begging to be done is long, and the money is always short. When it comes to
fixing roads, what money there is goes for things like cement, gravel, and
sand, things that are not found in Santa Cruz and therefore have to be
purchased.
Labor, on
the other hand, can be contributed. The contributions take two forms. Big jobs,
the ones that involve repeated duties over a considerable portion of time, are
assigned as cargos, something like
“offices” or “positions.” Julio is serving his cargo as agente, or
village manager; Alfonso is village treasure; Guillermo (Memo) heads public
works. Lalo, the contractor who built our house, is serving his cargo in night duty on the village
police force four nights a week. And so forth. When there are specific projects
to be undertaken that require many hands and skills, a call goes out that on
such and such a day volunteers should appear at the agencia to participate in a tequio.
Tequio day is almost always Sunday,
when people are presumed to be not otherwise engaged.
This
morning’s walk with Qalba took us by the agencia.
The town loudspeaker was blaring music and a message. Santa Cruz doesn’t have a
bulletin board or a local newspaper, so important announcements are
communicated through a loudspeaker mounted on the roof of the agencia. It may play for a half hour or
so: loud music interspersed with a spoken message. Unfortunately the system
seems to be ultra low fidelity, so while the rhythm of the music comes through
clearly, the words of the announcement are—to these aging ears—unintelligible.
But today I was close enough to the village center that I could actually make
out the message, at least on its third repetition: tequio; nine o’clock; meet at the agencia.
Fair
enough. I hustled Qalba home over the shortest of our looping morning routes,
left my binoculars and notebook in my study, told Linda to have breakfast
without me (though the aroma of frying bacon got me salivating), and panted my
way back up hill to the agencia by
8:59.
There were
two men sitting on the steps at the far end of the covered basketball court;
both had brought shovels. Soon two more, one with a battered carretilla (wheelbarrow) and one with a
pick. Nobody said anything. I suspected that having an old bearded güero sitting on the steps with them was
a little inhibiting. When I asked if this was the place to show up for the tequio they all seemed a little
surprised I had broken the silence. Don Julio, the agente came out of the office, saw me, broke into a huge grin, and
gave me warm welcoming handshake, expressed how happy he was that I had come
for the tequio, and introduced me to
the others. Now it was all chatter.
“The
announcement didn’t say what the tequio was
for, so I didn’t know what tools I should bring. I can easily go home for a
shovel or a carretilla . . . .”
“No, no; no
need. We’ll have plenty of tools. Mano de
obra, people to work, that’s all we really need.”
Don Julio
explained that today’s job was to finish making the culverts on the sides of
the third of the Calle Cinco de Mayo
that had been adoquinado a couple of
months back. Cinco de Mayo is one of
the cross streets that run between the ridges that come down from the mountain,
the lomas. The cross streets all
plunge from the loma down to a gulley
and then rise steeply to the loma on
the other side. For the most part the streets are dirt, terracería, and in the rains the steep bits get rutted and the flat
bits at the bottom get muddy. To date only one of the cross streets in Santa
Cruz has been completely surfaced with adoquines,
interlocking cement blocks over a thin base of gravel. Cinco de Mayo was been partially surfaced about the time we
finished building and Lalo had to lay off much of the workforce. Lalo’s brother
Gabriel headed that adoquinado crew. They
only did one third of the street because that is all the resource allotment
permitted. Now the village had received a little more money for cement and
gravel, so they could put in the rest of the culverts on both borders of the adoquines.
Before long,
we were twelve. All men and all seemingly in their forties or fifties except me
and one other, a boy of about ten or twelve who had showed up with his father. We
walked down to the work site at the bottom of the gully where half of us began
pulling rocks out of a dirt-covered mound between Julio’s house and an alfalfa
field, and half walked up the hill to the culvert site to get the revolvera (small gas-powered cement
mixer) fired up. I stuck with the rock men. The alfalfa field was about two
meters lower than the road, and the rock/dirt pile about three meters distant
from the road. Two men dug out the rocks with picks and pry bars, tossing their
finds to another two who had braced themselves against some bushes on the side
of the embankment. The two catchers then swiveled and tossed the rocks up onto
the street, where I and another man loaded them into wheelbarrows.
I can push
a loaded carretilla on the level; downhill,
it gets away from me; uphill I didn’t think I could do it. But everyone else
was busy, so I gripped the wheelbarrow’s handles, leaned forward and put all my
weight into it, and slowly rolled it up to the culvert site. When I finally got
there—we’re talking thirty or forty steps worth of climb—I was panting as if
I’d just finished a triathlon. Still, I managed wheel up three more loads of
stone before I succeeded in handing off the carretilla
to one of the younger guys. Good aerobic exercise, this tequio.
Meanwhile,
everything was set to begin mixing cement except getting the revolvera’s motor to fire up. The man
who’d taken on that task wound the pull cord and yanked it with all his might
at least a dozen times until the sweat had soaked through his shirt and was
pouring down his face. Nothing. Then a young couple on their way to church came
down the street, their two-year-old holding tight to their hands and swinging between
them. As they drew near, Memo called out to them.
“José, you
know about motors. Can you help us out a moment?”
The young
woman picked up the child and José, neat white shirt and Sunday pants, walked
over to the revolvera. He fiddled
with the gas feed and the air mixture for about fifteen seconds, gave the cord
a yank, and “putta-putta-putta” we were in business. José took the child from
his wife and started up t
he hill toward Santa Cruz’s small church, trailed by a
chorus of “¡Gracias, compadre!”
By now we
were fifteen. No one seemed to be in charge, but everybody (except me) seemed
to know exactly what to do. People took up the required tasks with a minimum of
fuss and an extraordinary economy of movement. Feeding the revolvera with buckets with sand, gravel, and water. Dumping two
50-kilo bags of cement into each batch. Clearing weeds from the edges of the
culverts (me). Cutting wooden forms and form braces for the culverts and
hammering them into place (the man who’d brought a saw). Repositioning the
water pipes that fed into the two compounds that bordered the culvert. I moved
some detritus out of an old man’s gateway so that he could get his thirty goats
out of his yard and onto the road to go up to pasture, while his dogs barked
and his granddaughter watched with wide open eyes the scrambling goats and the
bearded güero. Mostly I picked up
this and cleaned that and brought people tools and carted off waste as needed,
just like one of the young apprentice chalanes
on our Casa project.
Mostly I
moved rocks, the ones that we had dug out and hauled up the hill in carretillas earlier that day. In several
places the terrain over which the culvert had to run had large dips in it. The
rocks were to fill in the dips before the concrete was poured over them. The
spaces could have been filled with concrete, of course, but cement and sand and
gravel cost money, and the rocks were there for the finding, with the labor to
move them, as always, donated. I moved the rocks that I could lift and fitted
them as tightly as I could into the bottom of the culvert ditch. The ones I
couldn’t lift — well, everybody else at the tequio
could handle them with apparent ease, and I was pleased to let them take up the
task.
After an
hour and a half of uninterrupted work, three women came out of Julio´s compound,
bringing through his bright green gate a garrafón,
a 20-liter water bottle, on a stand and a sack of plastic cups. In tequios, I’d heard, the men do the heavy
work and the women support, mainly by providing food and drink. Sure enough, 45
minutes later a woman appeared with a bucket of individually wrapped tortas, sandwiches with a slice of ham,
a slice of cheese, several slices of green chiles, all in a long soft roll,
each torta wrapped in paper. Another
dispensed agua de jamaica, hibiscus
drink, from a blue bucket. It was almuerzo time, mid-morning break, an absolutely sacred moment of
calm in every construction job. For twenty minutes we all sat on the road’s
edge, munching our tortas, drinking
glasses of water or Coke, and quietly exchanging gossip. Then, as if someone
had rung a bell, we were all back at it.
We started
at 9:00 and finished just before 1:00. The new culverts, s
culpted smooth with
hand trowels and scraps of board, were curing in the sun. Four men rolled the revolvera down to a side road until Lalo
—yes, our construction boss, that Lalo, who had loaned his revolvera for the tequio—
could come with his truck and pick it up. No one else looked as wiped out as I
felt, but we were all equally dirty, covered with mud, flakes of stone, and
blobs of cement. Four women were sweeping the road free of leftover sand and
gravel. The job was done, but I couldn’t figure out why no one was leaving.
“Julio, so when
are you bringing out the mescal?”
“Mescal? What for? Why would I? No one
here drinks, do they?”
A chorus of
jeers and sarcastic comments.
Well, that
explained why no one was leaving. No one but me, that is. I’d long since passed
my sunshine limit, my legs were trembling, and I ached from my shoulders to my
ankles. Explaining that I didn’t drink mescal
(protests), or any alcohol, really (disbelief), because of my transplant
(astonishment, that doubled when I pulled up my shirt to display my scar), I
bid my adioses and staggered up the
hill toward home. But not before I’d extracted separate promises from Julio,
Memo, and Alfonso that, since I couldn’t hear the loudspeaker announcements
down at the Casa Davilinda, they would make certain I was notified the next
time they were calling a tequio. I
figured if I asked all three, maybe one of them would remember.
David