Journeys, Australian Women in Mexico

By Riverton Press

Thirteen Australian women have composed an atypical collection of travel writings which cover a period of more than 50 years. Some visited Mexico several times for work and/or pleasure; some visited by chance and chose to remain; some returned to stay after a long absence, pulled back by something Mexican which they certainly feel strongly. Not

• Language: English
• Publisher: Riverton Press
• Release date: Feb 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9780648230595

Book preview

Journeys

Australian Women in Mexico

Compiled and edited by Ruth Adler, Jacqueline Buswell and Jenny Cooper.

First published in 2021 by Riverton Press, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher at [e-mail] or to the editors at [e-mail].

Copyright © of each contribution belongs to the author, 2021.

Copyright © of this collection belongs to Riverton Press, 2021.

ISBN paperback: 978-0-6482305-8-8

ISBN epub: 978-0-6482305-9-5

ISBN mobi: 978-0-6450335-0-2

Cover image by Manon Saur.

Photo of cover artwork by John Davies.

Book design by Mutare, Ciudad de México, México.

Printed by Gráfica C&C, Ecatepec, Estado de México, México.

Published with the financial support of the Australian Embassy in Mexico.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

ASTONISHING MEXICO

Mexico, new world•Jacqueline Buswell

Heaven and Earth•Jacqueline Buswell

The earthquake•Ruth Adler

Still here•Jenny Cooper

JOURNEYS

Learning in Mexico•Raewyn Connell

On the track of the elusive B. Traven•Heidi Zogbaum

The posting•Ruth Adler

Tijuana freeway•Jacqueline Buswell

Mexico remembered•Lilit Thwaites

My journey to Misión México and beyond•Pamela Jean Skuse

Cathy Carey: A tribute•Jenny Cooper

Just dancing•Jacqueline Buswell

Peg Job: A tribute•Jacqueline Buswell

Livin’ la vida loca•Lulu Honeywild

What not to do•Jennifer Perkin

True story•Jacqueline Buswell

LOVE STORIES

My life in Mexico•Manon Saur

Magical•Jacqueline Buswell

Camino de flores•Rachael Byrne

Little things of nothing•Jenny Pollak

Extracts from correspondence between Luis Vidal and Jenny Pollak, 1988-1989•Jenny Pollak

A green chilli sauce made from tomatoes•Jenny Pollak

Pilgrimages•Jeannie Lewis

Land of corn•Jacqueline Buswell

White rabbits•Jenny Pollak

Between•Jenny Pollak

The expats•Ruth Adler

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank all the contributors to this anthology for freely sharing their stories. We are very grateful to the Australian Embassy in Mexico for its support and generous financial assistance for the publication of Journeys, in particular, Bernard Unkles, Deputy Head of Mission and Counsellor, and Lorena Zapiain, Public Diplomacy Officer. We also extend our thanks and appreciation to Ricardo Gallardo Sánchez of Mutare for his creative input and excellent suggestions regarding the book’s design and to Manon Saur for her imagination and insight in creating the image for the book’s cover. We acknowledge our families and friends for their enthusiastic support for this project and for encouraging us to bring what began as an idea among a few friends to this collection of stories, poems, letters, song lyrics and reflections.

Introduction

Journeys: Australian Women in Mexico seeks to capture the experiences of thirteen Australian women who have lived, or are currently living, in Mexico or have some attachment to the country. The contributors to this book differ in age, their motives for travelling to Mexico and the time frame of their contact with the country: their stories, poems, letters, song lyrics and reflections span a period of 50 years since the 1970s. They look back on their experiences with varying mixtures of nostalgia, pleasure and pain. One set up a business, another established a refuge and surf project for children, and another undertook gender transition between her visits and so experienced the country on new terms. Our contributors include academics, poets, a diplomat, a singer, a model and women who went to Mexico to accompany or meet a partner. And sadly, two Australians who might have participated in this book have died, so we have written tributes to them.

Many of the contributors have not written previously about their Mexican experiences and impressions. Given the opportunity to express themselves on their involvement with Mexico, these authors have conveyed through their writing how much they have enjoyed reliving their time there. The collection is a testimony to the diversity and richness of long-standing personal links between Australia and Mexico, and we hope that the reader will enjoy this insight into Mexican culture that is not to be found in classic travel books.

The idea for the book arose as a spontaneous response to an academic treatise by a young Mexican author, Mónica Laura Vázquez Maggio, titled Mobility Patterns and Experiences of the Middle Classes in a Globalizing Age: The Case of Mexican Migrants in Australia (Springer International Publishing, 2017). Over a glass of wine in Canberra with some friends who had met in Mexico, somebody suggested somewhat flippantly ‘Why don’t we write about our experiences in Mexico?’ The invitation to participate was by word of mouth, until the Australian Embassy in Mexico published a call for submissions on its Facebook page in October 2019.

Astonishing Mexico highlights the impression of first visits to Mexico and the impact of events which the writers had not previously experienced. Journeys documents the interaction of the authors with Mexico as a result of academic research or travel, work or business, and/or involvement with cultural and political issues. Love stories are well, just that and all of that, love stories.

Astonishing Mexico

Mexico, new world

Jacqueline Buswell

JACQUELINE BUSWELL was born in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, and completed a Bachelor of Arts at the Australian National University. She lived in Mexico for more than 20 years, in Mexico City and in Tepoztlán, Morelos. Jacqueline has worked as a journalist, teacher of English as a second language, and Spanish-English translator and interpreter. She completed a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Sydney in 2011. Ginninderra Press published her first book of poems, Song of a Journeywoman, in 2013. Jacqueline established Riverton Press in 2018 and has recently published a new book of poetry, sprinting on quicksand.

The sky was showing off a magnificent sunset, with the west reflected in the eastern clouds, where there seemed to be two snow-tipped mountains. This was my first glimpse of the very real and live volcano Popocatépetl and its ‘partner’ Ixtaccíhuatl, and I mistook them for clouds. So great, my ignorance of Mexican geography, vulcanology! El Popo is a perfect and active volcanic cone, and beside it lies the Sleeping Woman mountain, stuff of mythology of course, hero and maiden...

This was the first of many experiences of shifting realities in Mexico, it happened just a few days after arrival, when I was wandering the mundane streets near the southern bus station at Taxqueña. An introductory example of contrasts with my known world – Mexico City is more or less as high as Australia’s highest mountain, and the population of the greater metropolitan area is greater than that of all Australia.

A few months later, workers digging near the Zócalo for some urban improvement found the Moon Goddess Coyolxauhqui. She was carved on a round stone more than three metres in diameter. A member of warring Aztec deity families, Coyolxauhqui was killed, dismembered and her head was thrown to the sky. She thus became a moon goddess, though some say she belonged to the stars of the Milky Way.

I was thrilled because she was a goddess, but it was exciting too for the archaeologists, as this was a fantastic discovery right at city centre, at the site of the siege of the Grand Tenochtitlan, where the Aztecs held out for months against the Spaniards in 1521. Eight years later we could see the stone for ourselves when the Great Temple Museum was opened.

It took me some time to appreciate Mexico’s many layers and the complexity of its history and society. The layers were visible enough: giant Olmec heads, Mayan, Zapotec, Aztec pyramids, Spanish churches and palaces, elegant colonial buildings in the red volcanic rock tezontle, indigenous adobe housing, shacks of tar-coated cardboard, glass constructions like the Stock Exchange (monument to capitalism).

The ancient peoples had their gods, myths and social hierarchies, and the Spanish invasion by Cross and Spade did not extinguish many of those deep-seated traditions during three centuries of colonial rule. Native Mexicans and Creoles alike fought for and won independence in 1821, and entered a quandary over Nationalism and Europeanism. Another hundred years passed before the Revolution when perhaps a million people died.

In the democracy established after that, one political party held power for nearly seventy years. Speaking in Mexico City in 1990, Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa described the system as a ‘perfect dictatorship’ (and left town the next day). For there was a perceptible shadow and sadness marking the psyche of the country and eroding the exercise of freedom. In 1968, just before the Mexican Olympics, government troops attacked student protests and killed some 400 people at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco, and imprisoned many students, workers and intellectuals for several years. There was another tragedy like this in 1971 at the Polytechnic Institute in Mexico City, and armed guerrilla warfare was waged in the state of Guerrero in that decade. In fact, one always had to stop at one or more military roadblocks entering that state.

The contrasts between rich and poor were easy to see: high walls of the houses with gardens and art collections, and across the road, zones where families carry in their water and let the grey waters flow onto the street. It took longer to perceive other human rights violations, the racism against indigenous peoples even while their ancient cultures were exalted, and to read, see, hear the richness of poetic, artistic and musical expressions – surrealism, social realism and much else beyond and in between.

Firstly of course, I had to learn the language! I had a little school French and Latin, but all I knew of Spanish when I arrived in Mexico was gracias, and the old cliché that Mexicans left everything for mañana.

A visit to the Anthropology Museum is an over-whelming introduction to Mexican history and culture and I won’t attempt to describe it here. I’ll just mention a poem by the ancient poet Netzahualcoyotl, an extract from which is engraved at the Museum entrance, and which puts things in perspective:

Yo Nezahualcóyotl lo pregunto:

¿Acaso de veras se vive con raíz en la tierra?

Nada es para siempre en la tierra: Sólo un poco aquí.

Aunque sea de jade se quiebra, Aunque sea de oro se rompe,

Aunque sea plumaje de quetzal se desgarra.

No para siempre en la tierra:

Sólo un poco aquí.

This is Nezahualcóyotl. My question is,

Do we really have any roots on this earth?

Nothing on earth is forever: just a short time here.

Even if it’s made of jade, it breaks, even gold fractures,

Even the quetzal feather is torn.

Not forever on this earth: only a short time here.

In Mexico I never forgot the sense of space I knew from Australia, but I came to know that I was just part of the masses. I used the metro a lot; it was built by the French and the wagons were bright orange with rubber tyres. Most but not all of it was underground. Some four million people were said to use the metro every day. Three memorable interchange stations were Balderas, Pino Suárez and La Raza. Passageways were filled with commuters, jam packed but moving. A pyramid was found during the construction of the Pino Suárez station, it was dedicated to one of my favourites, the god of wind Ehécatl. His task, obviously, was to provide air to the underground. La Raza featured extensive corridors where one could meditate on walking a mile in another’s shoes. Metro Balderas was honoured in a love song of that name by rock star Rockdrigo, who died in his apartment during the 1985 earthquake.

And if I wasn’t learning about the vulnerability of masses fast enough, there was always help from a dear flatmate who pasted a certain photo on a cupboard door. The picture showed a crowd being crushed against a cyclone fence at a football stadium in England. Death by crushing; fright and horror written on the close-up of a young woman. My flatmate didn’t want to tell me to avoid crowds; she was just morbidly fascinated by the terrors of human existence.

The 1985 earthquakes were by far the most traumatic geological/social event I have experienced. And yet, where I lived in southern Mexico City, not even the salt shaker fell off the shelf. I was a journalist at the time, with a pass issued by the all-powerful Presidency of the Nation, and I was amazed and disturbed to be given access to areas by soldiers who closed the way to people who really wanted and needed to get to a certain spot. Collapsed buildings, rubble, dust, displacements, loss of family, loss of homes. Stunning rescues. A powerful solidarity shown by residents helping each other. The statistics battle between official sources and others about how many people died. Four thousand? Forty thousand? Some years later, I wrote a poem, you can read it below.

REBELLION IN CHIAPAS

On New Year’s Day in 1994 Mexico woke to the Zapatista Revolution in the southern state of Chiapas. Armed men and women in balaclavas had taken several towns overnight and declared their rejection of bad government, and the following demands for the rights of indigenous people: techo, tierra, trabajo, pan, salud. To give the full list: housing, land, work, bread, health, education, independence, democracy, freedom, justice and peace, with dignity.

While the government sent out the Army in response, popular support for the indigenous cause was so strong and widespread that rulers had to change tactics and start negotiations. Many years of talks and government betrayals on accords followed, including military attacks by the Army. The uprising was accompanied by the writings of subcomandante Marcos, a non-indigenous man whose words were imaginative, humorous and inspiring, and provided a unique theoretical base and publicity campaign. Thousands of people, including well known artists, writers, militants from many countries, visited the Zapatista communities to show their support, to join in meetings and conferences to plan the new world where ‘for everyone, everything’.

I had visited Chiapas before the uprising and I visited two or three times after. Once I travelled with a musician from the women’s circus, the English