The Past Is Never Dead

"Every time a man stands for an ideal or speaks out 

against injustice, he sends out a tiny ripple of hope." 

                                                             ~  Aaron Henry

                                                                           Clarksdale, Mississippi

“Aaron Henry recalls the days when Bobby Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey were on the line, calling from Washington to his tiny Fourth Street Drugstore in Clarksdale to give heart to the movement. Foot soldiers in the bloody civil rights wars crowded the store's narrow aisles in those days, desperation and what sometimes seemed like misplaced hope overcoming their justified fears. Now, in the soft afternoon shadow, the phone is silent, and there is only one visitor, come to ask how things have changed.

Henry, a thickset man of 68, has been head of the state chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People since the civil rights movement was at its peak. Mississippi's Delta was one of its deadliest battlegrounds, a crescent of tormented land between Memphis and Vicksburg, hemmed by the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, the poorest and blackest part of this country. A generation ago, some of the most oppressed blacks in the most harshly segregated state in the U.S. rose to claim their share of America's dream, and some whites did their violent worst to stop them.

Henry himself was arrested several times for his civil rights activities, and was once chained and shackled to a garbage truck to keep him from escaping. He glances up at the piece of tin that covers the hole in the ceiling where a bomb was thrown in 1964. All that is dim history now to most of the world. But not to Henry… ”

                                                            ~ Excerpt from Time Magazine 1991

                                                               Hugh Sidey’s America: Sad Song of the Delta 

I met Aaron Henry in 1971 at his 4^th Street Drugstore as he rushed back and forth between his pharmacy and the soda fountain, his campaign staff and the scores of UAW workers down from Detroit to support the civil rights movement. We campaigned for him that year knocking on doors, assisting in voter registration and doing what we could to help get out the vote in rural Clarksdale, Mississippi.

It had been eight years since his friend Medgar Evers, having dropped him off at the airport and headed home, was assassinated in his driveway as his wife, hearing the shots, sheltered their children in the only place she thought might offer some protection, their iron, claw footed bathtub. Aaron Henry was told years later that it had been a coin toss that decided that it would be Medgar and not he who would be assassinated that night. 

It had been seven years since a speech by Aaron Henry inspired a young student by the name of Andrew Goodman to volunteer in Mississippi along with James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, and it was in the summer of that year that the remains of all three young men were found buried in a dam, murdered by white supremacists. 20 years later the film “Mississippi Burning”, based on their story, would be nominated for 7 Academy Awards.

It had been three years since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968 as he stood on a motel balcony in Memphis, barely 75 miles north of Clarksdale, and two months later that Robert Kennedy was gunned down in a hotel in Los Angeles.

All this was swirling through my head as we drove across the state line, the enormous Mississippi sky looming over us, miles of cotton fields and abandoned sharecroppers shacks rolling past. But to a naïve college kid from Washington D.C., this was also a time when all things were possible. A man had walked on the moon just two years prior, the Supreme Court had just ruled that the US Government’s attempt to suppress publication of the Pentagon Papers would amount to prior restraint and allowed the New York Times to continue publication, the 26^th amendment had just lowered the voting age to 18, opposition to the Vietnam War had reached a fever pitch, and  Lt. William Calley had just been sentenced to life in prison for atrocities committed during that war. It seemed as though the world was finally beginning to right itself, and I remembered what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had once said “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice“, and at the time, I believed.

Medgar Ever’s brother Charles also ran for public office in 1971 and his hopes were focused on becoming the first black Governor of Mississippi. Charles, always a controversial figure, had returned home from Chicago upon the death of his brother and had taken over as field director of the NAACP in Mississippi. Charles had subsequently been elected mayor of Fayetteville in 1969 and became the first African American mayor of a bi-racial town in the state of Mississippi since reconstruction. When he was elected mayor all of the white members of the police department resigned rather than serve under a black administration.

Charles Evers
1971 Campaign for Governor of Mississippi

So in 1971 the lives and the campaigns of these two men were intertwined in an effort to move  Mississippi to a place beyond racial divides. So too were the names of many prominent Americans; Ramsey Clark, John Doar, Walter Reuther, Fannie Lou Hamer, Orville Freemen, Hubert  Humphrey, Ralph Abernathy, John Lewis, and nearly every leader in the field of civil rights, all focused once again on the seemingly endless struggle for justice and equality in a state that at times seemed determined to enforce segregation at all costs, and for all time.

These people all knew the odds that they were facing in their struggle for justice and equality in Mississippi. No state in the South was more resistant to the struggle for racial justice. No place was more violent. No place had a higher rate of lynchings. No state in the country had a lower percentage of African Americans registered to vote. The pernicious effects of poverty, the denial of equal education, the state's plantation economy, and the lack of legal recourse all served to deny African Americans jobs and opportunity, and to enforce racial oppression.

Still, I was optimistic. The Voting Rights Act had been signed by Lyndon Johnson just a few years prior in the wake of the brutal and deadly violence at Edmund Pettis Bridge during the march from Selma to Montgomery. Despite continued defiance of the 1954 Brown vs Board of Education ruling and the massive resistance coordinated by a group of white southern congressmen in their "Southern Manifesto" the Federal Government had promised to step in to enforce the ruling, and the Congressional Black Caucus had just been established as a way to meet and discuss concerns that were important to the nine (out of 435) black members of the House of Representatives.  

But in 1971 uncertainty was still palpable on both sides of every door when a white kid knocked, asking the occupant to vote for a black man. But the United Auto Workers, pastors and divinity students from the National Council of Churches and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, volunteers from the ACLU, and the AFL-CIO, all deemed "outside agitators" by the local police force, were here again to support the movement and their swagger and determination based on previous years experience chided the rest of us to step quickly up the stairs, ready to be either physically thrown off the porch or simply have the door slammed in our face.

Both Aaron Henry and Charles Evers lost their election bids that year, but there was never a sense of defeat. They would simply try again, as they had done over and over, year after year. This was just one more small step in the long march toward justice and equality, and we all promised to return in a few years to bear witness to their eventual and inevitable success. It was an easy promise to make. I could leave this place of conflict and turmoil, of inequality and racial injustice, and return  for a time to a place where these uneasy truths still existed but could conveniently be ignored. At least by a white kid. At least in the north. The people of Clarksdale, Mississippi had no such opportunity. 

Aaron Henry (1997)
4th St. Drugstore, Clarksdale, Mississippi
Posters of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner

It has been 48 years since I was last in Mississippi and the state still has not elected an African American as Governor. As a matter of fact, Mississippi has not elected a black candidate to any statewide office in the 140 years since reconstruction. Just last November, amid statements swirling about a “public hanging”, glorification of the Confederacy, and a revisionist view of the Civil War, a white candidate from Mississippi once again defeated a better qualified, more experienced black candidate for the U.S. Senate seat.

But the clock is now being turned back in Mississippi. In 2013 a conservative majority on the Supreme Court struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 freeing nine states, mostly in the South, to change their election laws without Federal approval and once again allowed barriers to be established against free and fair elections such that the nation has not tolerated since the era of Jim Crow. More challenges to the Voting Rights Act are currently being prepared and that court is now more conservative than it was just six years ago. The devastating effects of historically founded racism both subtle and overt, along with the codified bigotry and dog whistles sparked by the tolerance of the current administration, are eroding the gains made at such a terrible cost in the 50's, 60's and 70's. The current climate in Washington D.C. fuels the conflicts at the state level. Problems remain to this day with voter registration, voter engagement, and voter participation, but the supreme issue now, as then, is racism. Infighting, gerrymandering, and the overwhelming power of the mostly white Republican Party compound the problem. 

That the name J. Edgar Hoover is still chiseled in stone atop the FBI building in Washington D.C. is a clear indication to anyone willing to notice that bigotry and racism are still tolerated here. It was J. Edgar Hoover who quashed the FBI investigation into the 1963 bombing of the 16^th St. Baptist Church in which four young girls were killed in one of the Ku Klux Klan’s most heinous acts of violence in the civil rights era. It was J. Edgar Hoover who did everything in his considerable power to destroy Martin Luther King Jr. and his legacy.

In March of last year Linda Brown, the Kansas child at the heart of the landmark 1954 ruling “Brown v Board of Education” died at the age of 76, and we need to ask ourselves what, if anything, has changed. As the prominent Southern writer, William Faulkner once remarked, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Ajijic is getting Too Crowded!

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Everyone talks about the multitude of new arrivals that continue to flood into Ajijic and how fast the neighborhood is growing. Everywhere we go it keeps getting more and more crowded.

Just this week we’ve got three new additions to the neighborhood!

If this keeps up we’ll soon be running out of room!

Abuelinda's Cooking School

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Abuelinda's Cooking School

It’s a Mexican history lesson, it’s a cultural emersion course, it’s a health seminar, an international economics tutorial, an anthropology lesson, a culinary shopping experience, and it’s a cooking class!

Linda has been cooking in Latin America and the Caribbean for 35 years, and the classes that she offers are an astonishing mix of everything she’s encountered during that time. Every Wednesday she offers a “Tianguis to Table” class which starts in the local open air street market called the tianguis (tay-yán-gays) learning about and selecting local fruit, vegetables, Mexican foods, and then returning to Abuelinda’s kitchen and preparing a meal. She also offers classes from the culinary worlds of Chiapas, Oaxaca, Veracruz, Puebla, all unique, all fascinating.

We started early one morning at the local tianquis  where blue plastic tarps tethered haphazardly to trees and each other arc low over the jostling crowds. The  rows of tables that line the cobblestone streets feature beautifully crafted corn-husk dolls, excruciatingly detailed beadwork by the local Huichol Indians, magnificent woolen shawls and clothing from the highlands outside of Chiapas, homeopathic remedies, and an astonishing array of fruits, vegetable, meats, fish, cheeses.  Queso fresco and panela cheeses, spiny nopal cactus, plump blueberries, roasted garbanzo beans, natural pig skin pickled in vinegar (cueritos), or fried (chicharrón), candied quince, fresh fish, chickens, flowers, The variety is endless!

We bought ingredients for our afternoon menu of Chiles en Nogada, deep green poblano chilies, a pork shoulder, plump raisins, dried mango, candied bisnaga cactus, pears, apples, peaches, plantains, Mexican canela, pomegranates, Queso de cabra, walnuts, rice, the list goes on.

But it was in Abuelindas kitchen that the real magic happened. We were each guided through an assigned a task, charring the poblanos over an open flame, dicing the pork, mixing and grinding spices in a molcajete (volcanic rock mortar & pestle), chopping fruits, seeding pomegranates, all accompanied by a running commentary and explanation of our many unfamiliar ingredients, and delightful stories about the cultures and cuisines of Mexico.

And then the best part. We got to enjoy the fruits of our labors. The roasted, smoky, earthy flavor of the poblano chile is the essence of Mexico, and when stuffed with the warm picadillo filling of diced pork, fruits, nuts, herbs, and spices, covered in a cool, creamy walnut sauce, and sprinkled with tangy, tart, pomegranate seeds, the result is simply heaven! I could eat this every day of my life!

Dia de la Candelaria

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Dia de la Candelaria

If you found a plastic baby Jesus in your King’s Cake on El dia de Los Reyes (Three Kings Day) on January 6^ththen listen up!  Tradition states that if you get the plastic baby, you are the designated Padrino (Godfather) and get to host the fiesta for everyone on Dia de la Candelaria which is today (Feb. 2) and, among other responsibilities, you have been designated to provide tamales for everyone! Perhaps you should have been paying attention a little earlier, because this is a really big deal (and a lot of work).

Día de la Candelaria, like so many other Mexican celebrations, is a fascinating fusion of pre-Hispanic traditions and Catholic beliefs. It’s a seasonal celebration (midway between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox), an agricultural celebration (the January rains will determine the best time to plant, indeed they’re thought to predict the weather for the entire year), and a couple of religious celebrations (the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin, and the Presentation at the Temple). 

In many cultures the forty days of postpartum confinement after the birth of a child, often referred to as ‘lying-in’, provides a recovery period for the mother and a time for mother and child to bond (referred to as “la cuarentena” or “forty days” in Latin American countries, the source of the English word “quarantine”). At the end of this period a ceremony called “churching” provides a blessing or purification and celebrates the recovery of the mother and her return to the church and a full social life. Celebrated on February 2nd, forty days after Christmas, the feast of the “Purification of the Virgin”, coincides with the time, according to Jewish law, that it was customary to bring a newborn baby to the temple, thus the feast of the “Presentation of the Christ Child at The Temple”.

In Mexico the baby Jesus is the most important part of the Christmas celebration. On Christmas Eve the baby is placed in the Nativity scene, and on January 6, King’s Day, the child is brought gifts from the Three Kings, and then on February 2^nd, the official end of the Christmas season, the figure of the Christ child that has been lying in the manger must be presented at the local church to be blessed in a ceremony that remembers the presentation at the Temple.

But this is not as simple as it sounds. The swaddling clothes that Jesus has been wearing for the past month or so are not the proper attire for this very special occasion. So if you were the lucky one to find a plastic baby Jesus in your Rosca de Reyes on Three Kings Day, then you are the designated “Padrino” (godfather) and must, among various other responsibilities, dress the baby Jesus in the finest of  clothes for his big day. The first year the baby is traditionally dressed in white representing El Nino de las Palomas (The Child of the Doves) or El Nino de las Azucenas (The Child of the Lilies), signifying purity. The second year the Baby Jesus is dressed with a blue, yellow or pink gown and the third year, and thereafter, he is dressed according to the preference of the Godparents, but traditionally as the Nino de la Candelaria (Child of the Candles) with a white gown, a candle in the left hand and flowers in the right.

The Padrino also takes candles to the church and in some agricultural communities he will also take a handful of seeds to be blessed and pray for a year of abundant harvest. At the end of the church ceremony the Padrinos take the Christ child back to the home where the Rosca de Reyes was served on Three Kings Day and the candles are lit. Later, in the evening there is a traditional “tamalada” where the tamales are made according to the custom of the place. There are many variations depending on which part of the country you reside, some are sweet, some savory, some are wrapped in corn husks, others in banana leaves, but they are all absolutely delicious! Traditionally these are served with “atole de pinole”, a drink made of a toasted corn meal, sometimes sweetened and mixed with cocoa, cinnamon or aniseed,  or “champurrado” (a chocolaty flavored thick drink). What a way to bring the Christmas season to a close!

In addition to The Feast of the Purification of the Virgin and the Presentation of the Christ Child at the Temple, not entirely coincidentally Feb 2^nd falls halfway between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox, a date that signaled that it was time to prepare the earth for planting of crops and of course the need to assess the upcoming weather. Celebrated in Ireland, and other European countries as “Imbolc” (or Saint Brigids’s Day) and in the United States as “Groundhogs Day”, there is also a Spanish tradition referred to as "Cabañuelas" but that's another story.