surrounding Guadalajara. Soon lines of children and women, and often
men, could be encountered slowly zigzagging their way down the cerro
with barrel-sized bundles of bushy branches balanced on their heads.
They had been up on the flanks of mountains gathering wild brooms and
brushes for use and for sale.
From mid-November through January is the part of the dry season when
wild amargosa and limoncillo plants are the bushiest, creating in
guarded barrancas and out-of-the-way parcelas low matted walls that
sometimes are nearly impossible to walk through.
Various uses
From these plants countryfolk such as my friend Chucho Lopez have been
making traditional brooms and brushes most of their lives. A small,
amiable but reticent man in his 60s, with an Aztec blade of a nose, a
campesino's hard-worn sombrero, patched clothes and huaraches so well-
used they've turned black, he binds the thick woody bases of these
bunchy, wispy, but sturdy, branches of these plants to form narrow-
handled, broad-bottomed escobas that are sometimes a meter wide. Not
only does his extended family use them but he sells them to his
neighbors, especially gardeners and housewives, for every kind of
sweeping and brushing, from cleaning houses (in some cases) and
terrazas to whisking up leaves and cut grass in gardens and sweeping
up charales drying in patios and on unused municipal basketball
courts.
Amargosa
Chucho, who often finds the commotion of his large family
unsympathetic -- invariably there is a passle of in-laws crowding the
small adobe-and-brick four-room house -- spends a good deal of his
time in the cerro. The trail he takes aboard his burro winds steeply
across territory that provides a bountiful supply of amargosa, frail-
seeming, deep-green, maroon-and-yellow flowered plants that grow only
about a meter high.
The delicate stems of the amargosas look as though they'd be crushed
by the first serious wind or by any vigorous attempt to harvest them,
yet these are the resilient tiny branches that Chucho and others --
often women and children -- gather to tie, hundreds to a single
bundle, to form brushes with which painters will whitewash adobe and
brick garden walls during the dry season. Wild amargosas grow like
weeds in the moist meadowlands, barrancas and arroyos, usually low on
the mountainsides, of the Jalisco highlands.
Limoncillo
To find tougher, stronger, larger limoncillo, Chucho goes father up
the cerro, nearer his own fields. It's a thicker, tougher plant,
truly a large wild bush, with branches which reach four to five feet
in length. The limoncillo is greenish-brown and at this time of year
still has tiny clusters of semillitas (small seeds) and florecitas
(minute flowers) turned cinnamon at its tip. The plant possesses a
warm pollenish odor and stains one's hands a dusty yellow when it's
fresh and being cut and bundled.
Limoncillo is usually gathered by men and older boys, while collecting
firewood or herding cattle and goats.
Using the simplest of tools -- his ever-present machete and pocket
knife -- Chucho sits in the warming sun out of the way of family
traffic behind the corral of his house, carefully trimming the butts
and stalks and leaves before tying the limoncillo branches together.
Putting 15 to 20 of the shrubby-ended limbs in pressed bundles, he
binds the butts with several twists of twine pulled as tight as he can
get them. He lays the escobas in a sunny place with rocks weighing
them down and flattening them to make a broad bushy end that will
sweep a wide swath when used. Three of four days of good sun "cures"
the escobas, he says. He then shakes them lightly beats these bundles
against the ground to clear them of dried seeds, flowers and loose
leaves. What is left is a narrow-butted, many-stemmed, broad, flat,
four-foot broom that will whisk up the most stubborn dust furls.
Durable
Carefully-selected, well-cured mature limoncillo branches, Chucho
contends, will make a broom that can last a busy, neat rural housewife
close to two months. Of course he adds, if a woman doesn't clean much
the broom will last as long as four months.
Both limoncillo and amargosa begin growing as soon as the rainy season
has drenched the mountainsides. They mature during September and
remain green to the end of December. After the milpas are harvested,
starting in October, farmers and ranchers customarily begin gradually
moving cattle and horses up into the cerro for grazing in those
fields, and whatever amargosa and limoncillo bushes are left are soon
consumed by livestock and fodder. Thus, during the last months of the
year and into January, the cerro is laced with families busily
gathering branches for wild brooms and brushes. Because for them, as
well as Chucho, not only are these brushy limbs put to use throughout
the year by their own households, the wild plants also are goods of
commerce. A broad, sturdy escoba limoncillo will bring seven or eight
pesos today, depending on its width -- and the maker's bargaining
prowess.
Though the carnival-colored plastic brooms that now have made their
appearance in stores everywhere and on the backs of door-to-door
venders sometimes (but not always) last longer, their price soars with
every national (and regional) economic bump and trend. And as
Mexico's recent economic crisis has left the budgets of most families
at the bottom of the economic ladder shattered, many local folk some
time ago returned to Mexico's traditional homemade brooms, las escobas
del cerro.
(Allyn Hunt, former editor and publisher of the Guadalajara Reporter,
has written for several newspapers and magazines in the United States.
His fiction appeared in the Best American Short Stories and other
anthologies. Since 1985, he has written an opinion column for the
Mexico City News. He has lived in Mexico since 1963.)
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