THE GRANDEUR OF LA PIEDAD
Is there any magic in one of Mexico’s most mundane towns?
If we’re going to talk about La Piedad, Michoacán, before we begin, two predominant myths have to be refuted:
It stinks of pigs. Not any longer. It stank – prodigiously – twenty or so years ago, when local breeders sold 900,000 swine a year. Not only were there huge pig farms, but in many private homes there were little pens, where average citizens bred five or ten hogs to sell later on. The result was an unholy stench throughout the city, which was enough to make anyone dizzy – anyone, that is, who hadn’t grown up among what the townspeople, with a certain elegance, refer to as la porcicultura. Residents tended to inhale deeply of the fetid air and with pride comment to the uninitiated, “It doesn’t smell of pigs. It smells of money.”
Those days are gone. Today, if 50,000 pigs from La Piedad are sold in a given year, it’s a lot. The largest farms are far from the city, and hardly anyone has any swine at home any longer – except for those who buy cooked carnitas in the market, or to take away from the Simitrio restaurant.
It is the ugliest town in all of Mexico. This is abject slander. There have got to be five, maybe ten, towns that are even uglier. If their names don’t occur to me quickly, surely it is because of the limits of my knowledge of Mexican geography. In any case, it is hard to ignore that La Piedad is not beautiful. When José Antonio Martínez, the historian of the municipality, was asked about the town’s unattractiveness, he contemplated the ceiling in silence for a while. Finally, Martínez, slender, sixtyish and professorial, said, “There has been a certain neglect in terms of architectural embellishment.” He added that this negligence is overall, and is even evidenced in the town’s name. Officially, it is called La Piedad de Cabadas, with a b, although it is named after José María Cavadas, a 19th-century priest, who spelled his name with a v.
The optimistic Martínez assured me that the town’s aesthetic problem “is better than before.” He mentioned the cleanliness of the main plaza, a triangle with two arched walkways, a gazebo with a fountain, and trees that have been pruned so that their leaves grow in a continuous shape, like an enormous green triangular shaft. Martínez also mentioned the other plaza – the one in front of the Templo de la Purísima Concepción. Surrounded by trees that have been trimmed to resemble marshmallows, in recent years the plaza has been decorated with a circular display of the busts of La Piedad’s most prominent scions: the engraver Carlos Álvaro Lang, the lawyer Manuel Antonio Mercado Paz, the writer Mariano Silva y Aceves. What they all have in common is their departure from La Piedad when they were very young.
Before he sent me off on a tour of the town, Martínez gave me five of his books, among them Figures from La Piedad and Distinguished People from La Piedad. He is the author of over 60 titles.
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While walking across the beautiful Cavadas (with a v) Bridge, constructed in 1833, I was alarmed by the toxic green color of the Lerma River underneath. A recent edition of the newspapaper La Voz de Michocán noted that ecologists detected lead, nickel, chrome, copper and zinc in the water, at levels so dangerous they could provoke bone and lung cancer, leukemia and birth defects.
The most beautiful place in La Piedad is the tiny Morelos Park, particularly in the spring when the jacaranda and the bougainvillea are in bloom. I didn’t become any less enthusiastic after being informed that, until the beginning of the 1980s, the park was a cemetery.
Without a doubt, the city’s greatest attraction is its people. They’re cheerful, frank but polite, with a sense of humor, and warm to visitors. While it is a commonplace for a Mexican to say está en su casa (“you are in your home”) to a stranger, in La Piedad one gets the sense that it is meant sincerely. “I think our warmth is due to the heat of the sun of the Bajío region,” suggested Yara Ortega Bribiesca, a beauty with black hair and eyes who works with the Special Research Organization of La Piedad.
Although located in the state of Michoacán, La Piedad is on the border of two other states. Cross the Cavadas Bridge, and you’re in the town of Santa Ana Pacueco in Guanajuato. Ten kilometers from the other side of town, you cross into Jalisco. The cities of León, San Miguel de Allende, and Celaya (all in Guanajuato State) are an hour away by car, and a two-hour ride will get you to Guadalajara, Jalisco’s capital and Mexico’s second-largest city.
Almost as soon as I arrived, I realized that La Piedad has few culinary offerings. Apart from the pork carnitas in Simitrio, a snack bar called Palomar, a franchise of KFC and another of Domino’s pizza, there are hardly any restaurants. A young man from a well-to-do family mentioned that people of his social class tend to go to restaurants in Guadalajara or León on weekends. The most distinguished gastronomic zone is on the corner of 20 de Noviembre Street and 16 de Septiembre Street. There one has the exquisite anxiety of choosing between stands that sell tacos al pastor (filled with pork in an annatto spice rub), tacos with the meat from a pig’s head, hot dogs or steamed chick peas.
I also found that the farther away a traveler is willing to stay from the center of the city, the more sumptuous are the lodgings. The Hilton, constructed in 1993, has all the typical services of that chain, but is located about four miles from the center of the city. You get there via “the boulevard,” which turns into the highway to Guadalajara, and passes by various empty lots and car cemeteries. I stayed in the Hotel Mirage, somewhat closer to the center, which defined the word “basic.” Apart from these two, there are a couple of other hotels smack in the center, but the townspeople, with their customary frankness, recommended against staying in them.
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Curious about La Piedad’s cultural offerings, I went to the Museo de la Ciudad (The City Museum), which turned out to be closed during the four days of my visit. La Casa de Cultura (The House of Culture) and El Palacio Municipal (The Municipal Palace) also had their doors shut throughout my stay. Nonetheless, I verified that there is indeed culture in La Piedad. Laura Graciela Méndez Reyes, who is the cultural spokeswoman for a local school called El Colegio de Michoacán, points out that the dean recently presented his book Nueva Galicia en el Ocaso del Imperio Español (New Galicia in the Sunset of the Spanish Empire) in the Colegio’s auditorium. I read in the paper that the day before I arrived, a local poetess had presented her tome Lo que dejan los días (What is Left by the Days) in the school.
The school offers a free concert each Friday night. During my stay, a crowd filled the auditorium for the recital of Las Señoritas de Aviñon, a blues group from Mexico City, whose drummer, Francisco Javier García, is one of La Piedad’s prodigal sons.
Garcia’s personal motto is “How small is the world and how grand is La Piedad.” His pride at his birthplace is characteristic of its residents. “The culture of La Piedad is about effort and hard work,” he said. “What we have – great or small – is a result of that effort. That’s why we are proud of everything we accomplish.”
Other musicians who have passed through La Piedad recently include a duet of guitarists from Bulgaria (imported from the International Guitar Festival in the city of Morelia) and a chorus called Voices of Guanajuato. Sometimes open-air concerts are sponsored by the municipality. According to local youths, the stars are usually bands of norteño musicians who sing corridos about drug traffickers.
The Saturday of my visit, a rock group called Ángel Veneno, native to La Piedad, performs a concert in a club called Barroco. The day after, I had a drink with a couple of the group’s musicians. They realize that if they are ever going to be able to live from their music, they’ll have to leave La Piedad. “I love my town,” said Juan Carlos Zambrano, the drummer. “I was born here and I want to die here. But we need something else, to open up our minds.”
He and his brother, Luis Alejandro, who sings and composes the lyrics to Ángel Veneno’s songs, reflected on the life of La Piedad’s youth: “Around here, they say that there are two kinds of amusement. Either you play soccer or you’re a big drunk,” said Juan Carlos. “The girls dream about getting married and having children.” Some of the townspeople have active imaginations; one accused the drummer of attracting local girls to participate in satanic rituals. “They believe that rock is a tool of the devil,” added Luis Alejandro.
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I noticed on my first day that in La Piedad they preserve the old-fashioned custom of closing shops during lunch hour, and then reopening at six in the afternoon. But I also observed that during the siesta, people tended to move with equal slowness as during working hours. I tended to divide my time between the Café Sorrento and the Café del Portal, both in the central square, and watch the people pass by.
Suddenly, on Sunday, La Piedad woke up. There were so many people walking around the square that it seemed as if the whole town was present. It turned out that apart from the locals, many people from the even smaller surrounding towns had shown up. For them, La Piedad has the same mythic fascination that metropoli like León and Celaya have for people who live in La Piedad.
Sunday activity revolved around the largest and most central church, La Parroquia del Señor de la Piedad. Apart from attending mass and walking around the plaza, on Sundays people consume industrial quantities of potato chips, chicharrón and soda pop, before going to eat carnitas at the Simitrio restaurant. The action doesn’t stop in the afternoon. At sunset, the plaza is at its fullest, mostly with local youths flirting with each other. I was amazed at the number of stunning women (principally the type of Mexican beauty who breaks hearts at 16 and by 25 has three children and a waist that resembles a boiler).
Among the Piedad youth, a significant number of boys go back and forth from the United States to work. Apparently, they don’t go out of necessity – on the contrary, lots of work is available locally. They go to “the other side” in search of a particular aspect of the American dream – a SUV with a stereo system that can be turned up to an ear-splitting volume. When they return, their speech is peppered with the slang of hip-hop and rap songs, and they tend to patronize a discotheque that is only open on Sundays, on top of the Café del Portal. Daniel Quiroz, a young policeman, told me that sometimes gang members show up at the disco. “They’re bad guys,” he said, “who are desperate until they find someone to fuck with.”
Quiroz, so slender that he was practically swimming in his uniform, added that in his short career with the local police, he has seen kidnappings, assaults, robberies, and many car accidents. Not long ago he and his colleagues found the naked body of a young man, “more dead than alive,” who continues in a coma in the hospital. The cop said he doesn’t know why the young man was victimized so brutally, but it sounds likely to have been a settling of scores between drug traffickers.
Drugs have become a part of the culture of La Piedad. “It’s normal, it’s what you live here. Among kids, it’s fashionable,” said Luis Alejandro Zambrano. Yara Ortega said that she worries about her kids, who are approaching adolescence. “There are places where you can get cocaine as if it was beer,” she said.
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Before the peak of porcicultura in the late 20th century, between 1920 and 1950 La Piedad was famous for the manufacture of shawls known as rebozos. Yara Ortega has done much historical research about that article of clothing, and tends to speak of the rebozo in a poetic-romantic fashion. She calls it “a garment that has memory, energy, love and a little white magic.” Nevertheless, today you can hardly find a rebozo in La Piedad. Ortega took me to a store on Aquiles Serdán Street, where a few hung among other less sophisticated garments.
Later I found the Artisanal Textile Cooperative Society, on Emiliano Zapata Street behind the Hotel Mirage. There, a group of craftsmen, principally senior citizens, makes rebozos. One of them gave me a tour of the place, explaining everything one could want to know about rebozos and more. He finished by begging me to buy one.
Given the dramatic drop in pig farming in the last decade, there is a danger that, like the rebozos, it could disappear entirely from La Piedad. When people in the town are asked why La Piedad no longer “smells of money,” they tend to blame the North American Free Trade Agreement, which has allowed the U.S. to dump pork in Mexico at bargain-basement prices.
It isn’t that simple, explained Alejandro Toledo Catalán, a veterinary specialist for Grupo Delta, which stopped raising hogs in 2003 after nearly 50 years. Delta remains one of the most important manufacturers of bacon and cold cuts in the area, but they are principally made from meat imported from Mexico’s northern neighbor.
“There are other factors,” said Toledo. In the first place, the cost of feed for pigs has almost doubled in recent years. Food and medication represent about 80 per cent of the cost of raising swine.
Moreover, pig farming has been an ecological disaster. In La Piedad many small farmers dealt with genetics and cleanliness in an ad hoc manner, if at all. “There was no sanitary prototype,” says Toledo. “No studies of biosecurity. There was no norm or equilibrium. In terms of sanitation this is a complicated area. There is a high level of microbes in the atmosphere, as well as many bacterias and viruses that created infertility problems.” Many pigs were stillborn, or died while in their growth phase. Thus, the business became unsustainable for the majority of small farmers.
Delta has a store that sells sausage, hot dogs, lard and shredded pork skin. However, after Toledo went into detail about classic pork fever and the Asuszky virus, I became less inclined to go shopping.
Nevertheless, the industrial panorama of La Piedad isn’t all bad news. Jose Antonio Martínez, the optimistic historian, compared the city to a phoenix rising from its ashes. He said that in the 1950s, hog farming replaced the moribund rebozo manufacture in the city. Today, apart from pigs, La Piedad has a turbomachinery industry and also makes medicines for animals. The fastest-growing enterprise in the last few years has been the manufacture of gym attire and sporting goods. If everything works out, in the near future, La Piedad will smell like sneakers.