Adventures in Hitchhiking: Part 1 - Goats, Roosters, and Shrimp. Oh my!

To hitchhike in Mexico, you stand on the side of the road and wait for a truck to come by. Then you stick out your thumb and yell, “Raite (pronounced ‘rite-tay’)!” If the driver is willing to give you a ride he will slow down enough that you can grab the side of the truck with both hands as it passes and use the forward momentum to swing your legs up over the walls of the truck bed, letting go with one hand as you settle into a sitting position in the bed of the truck. It is surprisingly easy, and once you are seated on the side of the bed, it is surprisingly easy to keep your balance, even at high speeds and around corners.  

In the rural parts of Mexico hitchhiking is so socially acceptable that the official mission policy was that all missionaries serving in rural areas were expected to hitchhike in order to save money. Since I served three quarters of my mission in the farming and ranching communities of inland Sinaloa, I did a lot of hitchhiking. Most of the time it was uneventful. Except for when it wasn’t.

Part 1: Goats, roosters, shrimp. Oh my!

One Sunday morning my companion and I left the apartment early to stop by some investigators’ houses so we could escort them to church. They were all within walking distance, but to save time we decided to hitchhike, since there were more than one family we needed to see. We stuck our thumbs out for the first truck that passed, a shiny new Honda Ridgeline. As the truck slowed, we grabbed the side and hoisted ourselves over the side. I was already in midair when I realized that two live, large male goats were hog-tied lying the bed of the truck. Even though we both back-pedaled furiously in midair, the momentum of the truck launched us right on top of them. The goats thrashed about furiously, bleating loudly and swinging their horns. My first thought was to jump back out and catch the next ride that came along, but with a loud laugh and a rev of his engine, the driver sped down the road so fast that we had to fight to keep from tumbling over the goats and out of the truck bed.

This is what the truck looked like, except in a muted gold color. Because of the ugly, high walls on the truck bed, we had to exert extra effort to clear them. They also prevented us from seeing the trussed-up goats in the bed.

Once the goats calmed down, I thought to myself, “This isn’t so bad, they’ve had their laugh at our expense, but they’ll get us where we need to go with time to spare at the rate we’re driving.” So I settled in for the rest of the ride. As we approached our stop I tapped on the glass of the back window and yelled, “Baja!” (pronounced bah-hah, it means 'down' and is the signal that we'd like to get out) but the truck kept barrelling down the road and out of town.

At this point we knew we could be in big trouble. We began pounding on the sides of the truck and the glass on the back of the window, yelling for them to let us down. At first their loud laughter increased, as if the work “baja” were the punchline to some hilarious joke. After that they impatiently snapped “Ahorita!” (pronounced "aah-or-ee-tah' and roughly translates to “in a minute”) and ignored us. I looked at our chauffers-turned-captors through the back window. There were four grown men, wearing expensive “texano” cowboy hats, brightly patterned silk button up collared shirts, and expensive ostrich skin cowboy boots. Each of them was drinking a cauguama of Tecate (including the driver); the floor was already littered with a few empty bottles and a bucket of ice chilled their next round of drinks. The  driver turned up the volume on his speakers, blasting  Los Tigres del Norte so loud I wondered if my mom Washington could hear it.  One of the men yelled, “Vamos a comer tres kilos de camaron! (we’re going to eat three kilos of shrimp!)” I guess he really liked shrimp. 

SIDE NOTE:  Los Tigres del Norte were a popular grupo norteno group, famous for their Narco Corridos. Narco Corridos are songs that tell action-packed stories about the adventures of trafficking drugs to the U.S. Some are pretty explicit, and others are more subtle. Take, for example, the lyrics of the Corrido of the White Horse:

This is the corrido of the white horse\that started out happily on a Sunday\He set out for the north\having departed from Guadalajara.
His noble rider took the rein off\removed the saddle and all of a sudden\he tore off like a lightening bolt through Nayarit\between the green hills and blue skies.
At a slower pace he arrived in Escuinapa\and near Culiacan he was lagging\they say that in Los Mochis he was close to collapsing\and that his snout was gushing blood.
But he was seen going through Sonora\and the valley of the Yaqui river treated him tenderly\they say he was limping with his left leg\but he still continued his adventure.
He arrived at Hermosillo and continued towards Caborca\ and near Mexicali he felt he was dying\ he climbed step by step through la Rumorosa\ arriving at Tijuana with the break of day
Having finished his errand he went to Rosarito\ and didn’t want to lie down before seeing Ensenada.\This has been the corrido of the white horse\that departed one Sunday from Guadalajara.

Not only is the song rich with drug symbolism (i.e. white horse as a metaphor for the white powder itself), it also describes the route drug runners take to deliver their goods to the U.S.

To the unaccustomed american ear, the musical style and tempo of these songs sound laughably like circus music, or music written for little children. They feature a heavy “oom-paa-paa oom-paa-paa” rhythm with lots of tubas, accordions, and horns. I remember being confused at seeing these gatherings of flamboyantly dressed men around the bed of a truck with their swearing and yelling and drinking listening to circus music.

Spotting a Narco Traficante is easy: they aren’t trying to hide. Look for flashy shirts, lots of bling, snakeskin cowboy boots, big buckles, big hats, big guns, and big expensive trucks. It is not uncommon to see a group of them hanging around the bed of a truck, drinking Tecate Caguamas and listening to Banda Corridos at high volume.

To these men, speed limits seemed to be theoretical. While I don’t know for sure how fast we were driving, we seemed to be tearing through town at highway speeds.

After endangering man and beast in three small towns, the truck peeled off the road onto a dirt path carved into a cornfield. The truck trundled down the path, and the bumpy ride caused two trussed-up goats and two scared missionaries to bleat out their discomfort. Finally the truck lurched to a stop in a clearing in the middle of the field, where three or four cages were stacked, each one holding a beautifully  plumed fighting cock. The men got out of the truck, shouting about how much they liked shrimp and how their rooster would kill the other one’s rooster, and what they would do with the goats (kill them, bury them in a pit with live coals and leave them there for two days before digging them up and eating them).

Cockfighting is illegal in Mexico, but it is still very common - and very popular - in northern Sinaloa

My mind was conjuring up images of my companion and I tied up with apples in our mouths while these guys slow roasted us on a spit white shirts, nametags, and all. I knew we’d be in a different kind of trouble if we jumped from the truck and ran and hid in the corn field: they might still find us, or, they might not even look and we would be stuck. I knew they were just drunken idiots who would probably eventually get bored and take us back to town, so we waited. Eventually, they ran out of things to shout about. They stood there amongst the corn and cages and cauguamas, shifting their weight from one foot to the other and muttering under their breath. As if on cue, they all shuffled back to the car and drove (at slightly tamer speeds) back to the exact spot where we stuck our thumbs out to begin with, and dropped us off.

By this time we were an hour late for church, but we didn’t try to catch anymore rides that day.

¡El Chapulín Colorado!

“¡Que no panda el cúnico!” - El Chapulín Colorado

This is a dog story; no mission memoire would be complete without one. But first, let me tell you about a character on a popular Mexican television show; El Chapulín Colorado

El Chapulín Colorado is a bumbling superhero who, in spite of his idiocy, is able to always save the day through slapstick, puns, and because...well...it is in the script. He dresses up in a silly costume with antennas on his head. His superhero name means “the colorful grasshopper.”

The quote at the top of this post is one of his catchphrases. It is the Spanish equivalent of shouting "Pobody nanic!" when you meant to shout "Nobody panic!"

Now that I have introduced you to El Chapulín, I’ll get to the dog part of the story. Don’t worry, this will make sense by the end.

One unusually cool day my companion and I decided to go tracting in a well-to-do part of town, “knocking” on doors. We were happily making our way down the street, getting politely rejected repeatedly but enjoying the walk and the refreshing weather. Eventually we came to a house that had an unusual two-foot-high fence around the yard. There was a 15 foot walk from the fence to their front porch. We stood outside the fence and clapped loudly, watching the windows like hawks for any signs of movement, which we saw. Knowing they were home, but not getting any response, we switched from clapping to yelling out, “¡Buenos dias!” Still getting no response, I decided to step over the low fence, walk up to the porch and tap on the door, just so we knew we tried all our options. Convinced I was wasting my time, my companion waited for me in the street.

SIDE NOTE: Actually, we very seldom physically “knocked” on a door. I don’t think I ever saw a wooden door my entire mission. Almost without exception, doors were either made of sheet metal, or there were no doors on the house at all. If there was a door we would gently tap the metal with a pen or small rock and the sound would reverberate throughout the entire house. If there was no door, or if there were a fence preventing us from reaching the door, we would either clap loudly or yell out “¡Buenos dias!” or “¡Buenas tardes!” until someone came to the door.

After I had tapped twice on the door, I heard a dog barking. It was one of those shrill yapping barks, like a little ankle biter. Not concerned in the least, I tapped again. More yapping, but this time I could hear that the yapping was moving away from the door, towards the back of the house. I turned to my companion to speak, but the look on his face stopped me before I could say a word. In a split second he had gone from that dark shade that Mexicans call “moreno” to a shade I call “ghost,” his eyes wide and fixated on a point to the left of the house, just outside my field of  vision. As I turned to see what was the matter, a dog the size of a shetland pony came barrelling at full speed around the corner, not 5 feet from me. There was a blurred flurry of activity, and the next thing I knew I was standing in the middle of the street with the contents of my pockets littering the ground in a 10-foot radius around me (A pen, my wallet, missionary nametag, pocket-sized notebook, the white missionary handbook and our folding yellow agendas, my vial of consecrated oil and a penknife, to be exact).

The dog had stopped just short of the low fence that he could have crossed without even  jumping. I was amazed at the sheer size of this dog. He seemed to come up to my shoulder when he was on all fours. But what was even more amazing to me is the sounds he was making. Out of his huge beast-dog mouth came a tiny little yap, just like what I heard when I assumed that an ankle biter was in the house.

El Chapulín Colorado, always ready for anything!

After the fact, my companion told me that I leapt from a standstill on their porch all the way across the 15-foot yard, clearing the little mini-fence and landing in the street, my pockets having emptied themselves mid-flight.

Ever since he called me El Chapulín Colorado.

Faith to be healed

Lay your hands upon the sick, and they shall recover. Return not till I, the Lord, shall send you. Be patient in affliction. Ask, and ye shall receive; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. (D&C 66:9)

Hispanics give each other really cool names sometimes. Take, for example, the Spanish explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca who explored the Americas. His last name translates to “cow’s head.” Maria Del Rayo, one of our converts, had one of those cool names. Maria Del Rayo means “Maria of the Lightning Bolt.”

Maria was a neat lady. She was a municipal judge and she worked at the Civil Registrar’s office, registering marriages and divorces, etc. I don’t remember how we met Maria, or what sparked her interest in The Church. I do remember that there were a lot of obstacles leading up to her baptism. One of her biggest challenges was her husband. Maria and her husband had a rocky marriage for years. Although he was always very polite to us when we were at their home or if he saw us in the community, he did not like his wife meeting with us. He pressured her in many ways to break off the discussions. After many lessons, Maria decided to accept our invitation to be baptized in spite of her husband’s wishes. We set a baptism date that was a few weeks off, due to some work and family related travel she had scheduled.

We kept visiting Maria whenever she was in town to keep her progressing. The Enemy was working hard on her but she was determined to be baptised on schedule. We were very proud of her, and we held weekly fasts for her benefit.

Finally, the day of her baptism arrived. I woke up with a strange feeling in my gut, but I was excited for the baptism and I just ignored the feeling. My companion and I went through all the steps of preparing: filling the pool, double checking the assignments, making sure the members were invited, etc. As the day wore on I felt increasingly sick. The strange feeling turned into disorientation and vertigo. Then nausea set in. Next a fever and a pounding headache. I was so sick we had to go back to the apartment for me to lie down.

To complicate things, that morning Maria’s husband threatened to leave her if she went through with the baptism. She called us to let us know that the baptism might be canceled. I was bedridden, too sick to move and Maria needed our support. There were about four hours before her baptism.

My companion and I prayed about what we should do. We both felt that if I showed the faith to get out of bed and go see Maria, that the Lord would help us and her. My companion gave me a priesthood blessing, and blessed me that I would be cured and able to help Maria that day.

Still feeling terrible, I stumbled out the door behind my companion. My head was throbbing and a couple of times I had to stop because I thought I was going to be sick. By the time we had walked about three blocks, however, I was feeling slightly better. It felt as if each step towards Maria’s house was a physical improvement. By the time we knocked on her door, I felt completely healthy and strong.

We bore our testimonies to Maria of the gospel and expressed our great appreciation for her and our support for her. We told her we would be waiting at the font at the appointed time, said a prayer with her, and left to set up the chairs at the church.

Maria was baptized on schedule.  

La Llorona

There is a bridge that crosses the marisma and becomes a road running past a large empty field filled with gravel, sand, dust, and the occasional stubborn bush or shrub. This field is sandwiched by the marisma on one side and a busy thoroughfare on the other. The houses that look across the thoroughfare have an uninhibited view of the field and the marisma on the other side.

SIDE NOTE: Once, a member of the ward was walking with us across this field and he freaked us out by telling us that there was quicksand in that field. It seemed legit to me, since we knew that the field actually used to be part of the marisma and there could be pockets of moisture welling up below. It turned out he was just trying to scare us; it worked. We were terrified. 

The Robles family, a part-member family that we loved dearly, lived in one of those houses overlooking the vacant field and marisma. My companion and I were teaching the entire family the discussions and they were progressing enthusiastically. We tried to schedule our appointments with them last so that we could end our days on a high note.

On one of our evening visits we were teaching the second discussion. We arrived at the principle of the Holy Ghost (Espiritu Santo). The family listened respectfully, but we could tell that something was wrong. They all seemed uncomfortable, and the warm cheery feeling in the room abruptly left. We pushed through the principle and asked them questions to see if they understood and find out how they felt about the Holy Ghost, to which they politely murmured the acceptable answers but the discomfort of the room became almost palpable. Finally, I confronted them directly about the elephant in the room. I looked them directly in the eye and said, “Brother and Sister Robles, we have noticed that you seem uncomfortable with this principle. Is there something specific about the Holy Ghost that bothers you?“

Brother Robles stared at his feet. Sister Robles looked steadily at us but said nothing.Their teenage daughter who was usually silent, leaned in and asked solemnly, “Elder, do you believe in Ghosts besides the Holy Ghost?”

My companion and I looked at each other and replied something like “Maybe. Depends. Tell us more about what you believe about Ghosts.” That's when things got really creepy.

The daughter (whose name I cannot remember) leaned in closer and told us the story of La Llorona (The Weeping Woman) in hushed tones and with great conviction. We were sitting around their living room on lawn chairs, our feet resting on the dirt floor, dimly lit by a single bare light bulb. I can’t tell the story the way she did, but I will do my best to summarize it:

Long ago, there was a young woman so beautiful all the young men who saw her competed for her affection. She would have none of them, saying that she would only marry the most handsome man in the land. One day a stunningly handsome young man rode into town. He was so manly, he would only ride wild untamed horses. He was so handsome all the women young and old would swoon to see him pass by.  He was the wealthy son of a rich Ranchero. The young woman caught his eye and they were soon wed. As time wore on, she bare him beautiful children that he loved dearly. However, as she aged, his attentions turned to younger women. One day she took the children for a walk along the river. Her husband rode by driving a team of horses, with an enamored young woman on his arm. He stopped and spoke lovingly to each of the children but did not even look at his wife. Then he rode off. In a fit of rage, the young mother flung her children one by one into the deep waters of the river and they were dragged by the swift current to their deaths. Regretting what she had done, the woman returned every day to the river and wailed, crying out for her children, “¡Ay, mis hijos! ¡Mis hijos!” The woman was dubbed, “La Llorona.” Her apparition has been sighted stalking the banks of bodies of water by night all throughout Latin America, wearing a long, flowing, brilliantly shining white dress and wailing forlornly for her murdered children.

SIDE NOTE: Hispanic mothers have been telling their children this story for years to scare them into obedience. In certain versions of the story La Llorona snatches misbehaving children and drags them to the bottom of a river with her where she spends eternity. 

The daughter finished the story and leaned back in her chair, and Brother Robles looked at us and said, “Hermanos, nosotros hemos visto a La Llorona muchas veces (Bretheren, we’ve seen La Llorona many times).”

Then they took us to the back patio where we looked out across the now vacant thoroughfare and the large empty field. We could vaguely make out the dark form of the marisma at the opposite end of the field. Pointing at the marisma, Brother Robles told us how at least once each week, they saw a glowing apparition accompanied by eerie wailing late at night. Every time it appeared to travel along the bank of the marisma before suddenly being extinguished.

Thoroughly creeped out, my companion and I gave many logical alternatives for the sightings: Light from passing traffic reflecting off the waters of the marisma. Gases venting off the rancid water. The wind. Over-active imaginations. It was after dark and close to the time of our curfew, so we finished up our discussion quickly, left with a prayer and started the walk back to our apartment.

As we crossed the field, we could faintly hear the wind softly moaning. The moans seemed to take shape into actual words, unintelligible at first but then seeming to say “hiiiiijooooosss.” Knowing I was being paranoid, but wanting visual confirmation that I was imagining things, I looked over my right shoulder towards the marisma. It may have been my imagination, but I can still see in my mind’s eye a glowing white form moving slowly away from the bridge along the marisma.

SIDE NOTE:I am certain that I was so spooked by the story and the chilling way it was told, and from being in that part of town after dark, that my imagination was running wild.

The Head in the Marisma

I was surprised to learn how permeable the membrane is between economic classes in Mazatlán. While there are definitely “rich” and “poor” parts of town, there are bits of rich mixed into the poor, and bits of poor mixed into the rich. Typically, in the United States, if a poor person comes into money he will move to a better house in a better part of town. In Mazatlán, often they will stay in the same neighborhood and just improve their home. As a result, you will find neighborhoods where a house literally made out of spare car parts and shipping pallets sits next to a well-constructed, three-story home with a swimming pool in the back.

However, there was a part of Mazatlán with no rich mixed in. It was a part that I wouldn’t dare set foot in now that I am not a missionary. Whenever some lucky soul would find a way to move out, they would take it. What made this particular neighborhood so bad was the Mazatlán marisma.

The marisma is a saltwater marsh that rises and falls with the tides. It has the appearance of a slow moving river, but it is actually connected to the ocean, and the flow of the water changes directions based on whether the tide is ebbing or flowing. It smells like raw sewage that has been fermenting in a dark, warm space for months to a ripe stew. Since plumbing in this part of town was not always reliable (or present), it is very possible that what we were were smelling actually was raw human waste dumped into the marisma in buckets.

SIDE NOTE: The Mexican Spinytail Iguana (ctenosaura pectinata) is a large black, yellow and brown iguana that lives in and around the marisma and can be found there in abundance. Locals told me that they used to eat them, but they had been rendered inedible by the pollution of their habitat. They actually nicknamed them “kakeros” (which roughly translates as “crap-eaters”). They are currently listed as a threatened species.

The worst part of this neighborhood consisted of a street (it was actually a dirt path that somebody eventually gave a name to) that ran directly along the edge of the marisma. Both the families that we baptized lived on this street, so we ended up spending a lot of time there.

The Mazatlán Marisma

My companion and I were on our way to an appointment with one of these families. As we walked along the marisma, we noticed a group of about seven people huddled near the waters edge talking and gesturing excitedly. One of them looked up and saw us approaching. He ran towards us with a manic expression and, throwing his hands into the air, yelled “¡Miralo! ¡Miralo! ¡Les dará el susto de la vida! (Look at it! Look at it! It will give you the fright of your life!).”  Against our better judgement, we looked into the water close to the edge of the street.  There, gently bobbing in the brown, scummy water, was a severed human head.

We heard distant sirens slowly growing louder. Someone must have called the police.

It was gruesome scene, but I felt completely at peace. My companion and I looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders, and kept walking to our appointment.  I remember being confused that I was not more shocked by what we had just seen. At our appointment we told the family about our experience, and contrasted the panic in the man’s face and voice as he described the “fright of your life” with the peace we felt. We bore our testimonies to them of the peace that the gospel of Jesus Christ brings even during disturbing times and situations. It was a message I believe they understood differently than I, perhaps better. They lived everyday in that environment, while I only experienced it in passing.

We learned later that the head belonged to a 70-year-old homosexual man who was murdered, dismembered and tossed into the marisma by some local gang members.

SIDE NOTE: This was another surprise to me. It had never occurred to me that Mexican men could be homosexual. In my mind they were all cowboy-boot-wearing truck-driving hard-drinking meat-eating macho hombres. While the United States common culture appears to be rapidly accepting and even championing homosexuality, in Sinaloa, Mexico, homosexuals (especially men) were often aggressively persecuted.