Gringo in the Sierra Madre

"Tienen derecho, as the saying went. They have a right to what they do"

Richard Grant

Gods Middle Finger

When I think of Mexico now days I think of drugs, cartels, Day of the Dead, and violence. We hear stories about kidnappings, rapes, and executions. The drug trade in Mexico is driven by supply in the United States, and we hear about the violence of the warring cartels and the corruption of the government.  I know that it's a generalization,  and that both times I had been to Mexico I had a wonderful time. The first time I was fourteen Cozumel was a stop-over point for the cruise I was on with my sister and my mother. We snorkeled, swam with rays, took a bus from Cancun into the interior of Quintana Roo to look at the Mayan ruins. The trip was heavily framed by the tourism industry: no violence, and a very limited experience of poverty. I was young and it was my first introduction, as light as it was, in another culture. 

For the next trip I was much older. When I was nineteen my father worked in Mexico, and for spring break my sister and went to spend spring break with him in Bahia Kino, a small town on the Sea of Cortez in Sonora. We flew to Tuscon, where our father picked us up, and the next day we crossed the border in Nogales and drove south to the city of Hermosillo. I remember how different things were when I crossed the border. The houses were much closer together, the streets narrow and dirty. The highway was completely separated from the city by a high fence. The drive down was long and hot. The Virgin Guadalupe was painted on almost every wall, and there was almost always a small shrine below it. The speed bumps were steep and sudden with bumpers and other car parts knocked loose by it in the ditch by the road (it wasn't often there was much of a shoulder). Crosses stood side by side down the road where people had died in car accidents. The small towns we passed through sometimes had a level of poverty that I had never seen in the States.

Once we had reached Hermosillo, we made the mandatory stop at the grocery store. When ever I travel somewhere I always have to go into a grocery store or to the market. It is the most local experience I think you can have if you are visiting for a short time, everyone shops for food, and grocery stores differ so much from place to place. It was huge! They had fruit I had never seen before, corn chowder made by Campbell's, Mennonite queso (I had no clue that there were Mennonites in Mexico but, it turns out, there is a sizable population of them. Mormons too). 

From there it was an hour drive to the coast where we spent the week on the beach, looking at shells and buying fish from the local fisherman. It was a wonderful trip (aside from a rather violent bout of sickness for my sister from the water. It's hard to get used to having to only use bottled water to brush your teeth when you've had clean water all your life) and I had seen very little of everything that I had heard of in Mexico. I was still looking through the veil of a tourist.

Richard Grant tried very hard to get beneath that veil. His plan was to go into Mexico and traverse the Sierra Madre, the rugged mountain range that bisects most of the country, and from this trip came the book God's Middle Finger. This was an epic undertaking as the range is long, wide, and rugged. Only two roads cross the range all the way through, and they are often plagued by bandits and cartel checkpoints. The last of the Apache hid in those mountains, outlaws have used them for centuries as a place to hide. Marijuana growers farm their product high up in their slopes.  Most of the violence and lawlessness that we hear about in Mexico originates from there, from cartel warfare to Mexico's war on drugs. I was really interested in this book for many reasons: I was interested in the cartels and the drug violence in Mexico, I was interested in the machismo culture, and I was very interested in comparing the very tempered trip I had gone on with the news that was often coming out of Mexico.

This book was a wonderful insight into what is happening in the Sierra Madre. While I know that it is far from a complete picture, and has bias as it is an American looking in and describing a foreign culture, it was and interesting look on what we often see in the news. There is violence, the author at one point is hunted through the night by two men fully intent on killing him, but there is also joy and revelry. Everyone is trying to make there way and survive, and who are we to judge them for doing what they must. Sure there are bad people, and desperate people, but there are also good people who are just trying to make their way.

This book was dark, but it was also hilarious. There is a remarkable ridiculousness to his stories that I couldn't help but smile at, the innocent charm of him bumbling his way through another culture, learning the language, and the mannerisms. While I may never travel to the Sierra Madre, I am very glad that Richard Grant did, and that he wrote God's Middle Finger, as it shows that the Mexican people are just that: people, even if they are complicated and confusing to us. The have a right to what they do.