Armed robbery? checked
Scams? checked
Extortion? checked
Working at the convenience store involved lots of things that went beyond spending fourteen hours a day serving people. It involved being together as a family, but more so as co-workers. It implied that whatever our mood, we always had to smile to the costumers and, we always had to smile to our colleagues.
The context of how complex the dynamics in the store could be included our individual issues, I was deeply in debt, my mum, my dad and my brother were having health issues, my brother and I needed to go to school, our egos were really big at the time, we had self-imposed and inherited expectations, we relied economically on the store, and there was uncertainty about the future.
It was a fortune that we didn’t explode that often, deep down each of us knew that we worked better as a team, and as such we needed to swallow our prides.
Antonio wanted to keep working in the store, though he now has a good job as a Geologist. Irma and Victor saw themselves there for longer, despite they live quietly in their retirement. I never really liked the store that much, but I respected and admired it, and to some extent I had esteem for it.
When we closed the store, our lives went through significant changes, mostly for good and perhaps the same could be said about the store. The new owners have it well-stocked and they sell products that we didn't. Of course the neighbours occasionally mention that they missed the familiarity with which we treated them.
Leaving the store behind also meant stopping worrying about plenty of things, no more getting up at 7 am on Saturdays, no more starving ourselves until ungodly hours, in short, there was even time to have family dinner, as we hadn't had done for so many years.
Eventually we also forgot about the hell-hole we lived in. The anxiety associated with deprivation in the town works a bit like an immune system, or like our fight or flight response: When you are constantly exposed to danger, a new instance of a crime is just that, a crime. Your head is already prepared to be alert, to avoid danger and to move on. And just as it happens with an immune system, if it is not stimulated, it loses defences.
By not depending on the store any more, and with the lock downs, the family house becomes a fortress that protects us from all evil, crime becomes intangible even when you watch the news daily. You simply close your eyes, and are confident that everything is going be fine… Or at least that was what Irma and Victor liked to believe, even though they knew it wasn't entirely true.
When I went to see Diana, I took the family car, naively thinking that the traffic in Mexico City would be kind to me. That time I was ten minutes late and instead of going straight home, I decided to catch up with my parents at the dancing club.
My dad didn't look happy, my mum was noticeably in shock, clearly it wasn't because of me being late. They explained to me that, since they didn’t have the car at hand, they decided to leave on foot, and unfortunately they witnessed a shooting, in broad daylight, at the beginning of the week in one of the main streets of Santa Clara. We found out later that the shooting was essentially due to a local drug-dealer not meeting the monthly sales, and the solution of course, was simply to shoot him.
In the beginning, Santa Clara was only a small town with very few inhabitants, but due to the charms of Mexico City, it began to attract residents from neighbouring states.
Santa Clara had a large influx of residents coming from Mexico City after they lost their homes during the 1985 earthquake.
Industrialisation helped the settlers who arrived to prosper economically, to the extent that it was relatively common for people earning just a little above the minimum wage, to have a small house and support their family without too much problem. Life might not have been easy for them, but it was never particularly difficult.
Whether we like it or not, many Mexicans like to romanticise poverty, to have the nobility associated with belonging to low social strata and not falling into the vices that are traditionally associated with wealthy people.
The overpopulation, the lack of opportunities, the atmosphere of apathy and conformism associated with the fact that Santa Clara was a comfortable place, brought with it, that the inhabitants entered a stage where very few progressed, those who did, did so because they worked really hard, or because they were very lucky, or because they were wrong doers.
Admittedly, I used to believe in the false idea that poor people were poor because they wanted to, the evidence I had was overwhelming.
My neighbours had plenty of opportunities to progress, which they let pass by being in the comfort of Santa Clara, preferring to spend the little money they had, on beer and junk food, instead of, I don't know, properly feeding their children.
I now understand that poverty is much more complex than it appears at first glance, and that there are a thousand reasons why people let opportunities of any kind pass by.
On one occasion, while going to the GP, my father told me -while pointing to a busy food stall- that there was the meeting point for the local drug dealers. It was a strange feeling to think about the familiarity with which it was known that the dealers met there, even knowing that the police passed by, and even more incredible, that they had lunch there regularly, just because.
When I first thought of documenting my visit to Mexico, I thought of including photos in each chapter to finish each story, but for this chapter it would be better to include the song Thela Hun Ginjeet by the British band King Crimson included in their 1981 album Discipline.
If you don’t know that song, stop reading immediately, open Spotify, play the Discipline and come back in 37 minutes.
I’ll wait
In the aforementioned song (which title is an anagram for heat in the jungle), Adrian Belew describes his experience when he was trying to film a video documentary about criminal life.
And it's just about New York City, it's about crime in the streets
While he was filming, a couple of rastafarians in London approached him, thinking that he was a policeman:
So, suddenly, these two guys appear in front of me
They stopped
Real aggressive
Stared at me, you know
"W-what's that? What's that on that tape?"
"Yeah, what do you got there?"
After an endless conversation, the rastafarians let him go, Adrian, scared and shaking, went on describing his experience which ends ironically:
And I thought, "This is a dangerous place" once again, you know
Who should appear but two policemen
That song is undoubtedly one of my favourites, and it is one of the reasons why I wrote this collection of essays.
This is a dangerous place you know
Back to the disastrous afternoon in which I arrived ten minutes late to Santa Clara, it was one thing to have a vague idea of how crime works in Mexico, and quite another to witness a murder just meters away. A murder that was the cause and consequence of the prevailing environment of the neighbourhood and the town.
After the scare, all that remained was to trust the immune system, the fight or flight response, be alert, avoid danger, move on.
The danzon lesson continued for Irma and Victor, partly to take their minds off, partly because the show must go on, and partly because as crude as it sounds, this murder was just another case among the approximately 80 murders that are committed daily in Mexico.
Some neighbours knew the now deceased, maybe he had family, friends, hobbies, maybe he even had a garden in his house... maybe not. Maybe he was a hard drug user, maybe he was your typical alpha male who physically and mentally abused his girlfriend... none of that mattered now.
Tomorrow, someone else would fill his position, sell his merchandise, and perhaps would be better at meeting the monthly sales.
This is a dangerous place you know
Weeks later, Irma, Victor and I got ready to visit Antonio in Playa del Carmen, I wanted to see my brother, my best friend. At that time, I was spending a lot of time in the no less dangerous Gustavo A. Madero municipality. This time I would return to Santa Clara to pack my suitcase, something small, a t-shirt, swimming clothes, shorts.
My mum's incoming call took me by surprise, she, in a noticeably state of shock, interrupted my evening, telling me not to come home.
Things with the local drug dealers were still hot in Santa Clara, this time they took things further, they flipped over a car, which they used as a barricade in a shoot out that lasted about twenty minutes.
My dad went out to walk the dogs, he barely had reached the corner when the shooting started, in the same place as the previous shooting, probably perpetrated by the same criminals and possibly for the same reasons.
No matter how much I searched for the news about the shooting on social networks and information portals, there was no coverage, just some neighbours talking about the reasons for the shooting.
No one claimed the wrecked car, and no one would do anything to change the situation. I don't know if there were casualties, if so, they would only be part of the eighty-something that accumulate every day.
It saddens me to write about this because although in the big scheme of things, we are insignificantly small, in our micro environments we can be important to our beloved ones, our friends, our students and teachers, and just like that, in the blink of an eye, someone picks up a gun and decides to take someone’s life, no matter how important or special the deceased was to someone else.
That time I didn't go home, instead I caught up with my parents at the airport, my mum was still in shock.
Our holiday in Playa del Carmen would be useful to clear our minds, to forget what had happened, to spend some time as a family, to have a beer with my dad and my brother, to smoke a cigarette and to enjoy what Mexico could offer us.
Mexico is a complicated entity, it is horrible, it is the place where more than eighty people are murdered every day, where committing crimes of any kind is relatively easy because the authorities are understandably (but not justifiably) useless at least, corrupt at most.
Mexico is the place where you can forge a PhD thesis and get to occupy positions in the government kissing the right people’s arses, where the one who does not cheat does not progress, where you can witness two shootings in close range in less than three weeks.
Mexico is a complicated entity, it is beautiful, with beaches that simultaneously invite introspection and hard partying, mountains that harbour mystical trails, underground rivers that allow you to swim among stalactites and stalagmites, passing through the same places that our ancestors did.
Mexico is the place where you can find really cool people doing incredible things for healthcare, for economy, science, and education.
Mexico is a jungle, literally and figuratively, and it is in the heat of the jungle that the coolest and most horrible things happen in the country that fascinates me this much.
Oh it is a dangerous place
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