On my earliest, teenaged trip to Jalisco, I stumbled right past (right through, actually) Guadalajara to a very different place--the edge of that high, scrubby, red-clay plateau in the easternmost part of the state, called Los Altos. It's a dusty, arid mesa northeast of Lake Chapala that stabs up between the states of Zacatecas, Aguascalientes and Guanajuato, out over Michoacan.
Like most people in Mexico in those days, I rode a lot of buses, which not only was the most inexpensive and sensible way to travel (the "highways" then tended to demolish anything but a reinforced jeep in about 200 miles), but it was also a good way to meet people.
A couple of cousins who had been in the "otro lado" working illegally and were returning to their home near Ayo el Chico, invited me to come with them. I got the impression that their invitation, an obviously impulsive one, had its basis in a teasing kind of humor. They wanted to show me off to their family (families, I was to find out, of gargantuan size) as a souvenir from the United States, rather like a Paracho guitar that northern tourists bring back from Mexico to assure friends that they have, indeed, been to a strange land.
Besides being stared at a lot with amused and critical expressions, what I did mostly in Los Altos was to follow Eufemio Silva, the brother of one of my hosts, around while he tried to make a living playing guitar and singing songs for people. This was before transistor radios, televisions, before most pueblos in such places had much electricity. Local musicians were in great demand then and no fiesta was complete without several groups of mariachis booming away, and even the smallest "sope" party and "tardeada" was ornamented by two or three guitar-playing singers.
I've met few Mexican males who do not believe they are natural-born singers and guitar players of first rank. Eufemio was no exception, though it seemed to me his single qualification as a musician was the fact that his grandfather had been a famous alteño singer and player.
Nonetheless, every day, or just about, we bumped toward town in the back of some neighbor's burro-drawn cart to look for the unsuspecting, the generous, the uncaring, the stone-deaf to play for.
"Thank God for the Catholic church and all its fine saints," Eufemio's pretty younger sister, Leticia, told me. "Every day's a saint's day, every day it's someone's name day." And that was true, the Catholic calendar is the street musician's mother lode. There is the day of the Juanes--and Juanas--the day of Manueles, the day of Luis, the day of Arnulfo, the day of Ignacio. Happily for musicians there are more Catholic saints than there are days in the year. Yet even with the Catholic Church and all its many saints working for him, Eufemio had a hard time of it.
I think he and his brother, one of the two cousins who had brought me up to Ayo el Chico, hoped the presence of a gringo gawking at Eufemio's side would be an oddity enticing enough to attract the generosity of local spendthrifts. They outfitted me with a split-backed guitar that had three loose, knotted gut strings and taught me how to band on it to produce a vaguely accompanying thump for Eufemio's fervid, careening ululations. We must have made a distinct peculiar pair, loping through the streets not merely of Ayo el Chico and surrounding pueblos, but ranging as far afield--in pure desperation--as Tepatitlan and even Zapotlanejo. Both of these larger towns were long journeys for us, usually overnight expeditions in search of customers whose indifference to the quality of music they purchased was equivalent to our intense and ungifted efforts.
At cantinas or at such pozole stands as the Fuente de la Esperanza, where drinkers gathered, we were often hired and made fun of. Even these occasions were grand adventures to a green, teengage tourist such as me, though Eufemio suffered searing anguish when customers mocked his music. Their drunken derision would crush his reckless confidence and he would pull down his Sayula sombrero, bend his head down over the wayward sounds of his guitar so they couldn't see the pain in his face, the tears that sometimes came.
But we got few whistles and catcalls when we gave them songs about the Cristero Revolution, that bloody, doomed Catholic rebellion against the government that began in 1926 and was centered, to great extent, in Los Altos. When we sang about the Union Popular--La U--the Brigadas de las Mujeres (The Women's Brigades), the Tlacuileras (women who carried rations for the Cristero solders), of Maria Goyaz (the young woman who organized the Women's Brigades in Guadalajara) and of Anacleto, El Maestro (Anacleto Gonzalez Flores, a Cristero hero from Los Altos and head of the Union Popular) the giggles and guffaws coughed to a halt. Listeners even seemed to consider my irregular, mindless thumping with serious regard.
And when we lurched into corridos about El Catorce--Victoriano Ramirez--that Cristero paragon of alteño machismo, we received not merely grudging silence, but shouts of approval, cries of genuine delight and usually more money than we expected...or deserved.
So, if the Church's saints weren't going to preserve Eufemio's dream of catgut glory, then its reckless, doomed heroes of the Critiada were.
"To hell with the saints," I told him, "stick to the gunmen, the rebels, the priests with rifles." Once he saw it was working well, I even persuaded him to start practicing a little in the mornings. In Mexico, because one is surely born a God-gifted guitar player and singer of great, if often unrecognized, talent, it is widely believed to be beneath one's dignity to practice.
Soon our specialization led us to entertaining entire neighborhoods, just going from house to house. Don Nacho Ibarra would invite us into his house--What a miracle!--and we would sit on tiny wood-and-twine chairs and have a cup of Señora Ibarra's hot, sweet atole. Taking a couple of polite sips, Eufemio would nod and break into a corrido about "Cleto, El Maestro," and I would gaze at the calendar of the Las Aguilas Feed Store featuring a picture of the Virgin on it and thump away. After several songs and several cups of atole, a neighbor would come in and invite us down the street to sing about Padre Vega, known as Pancho Villa in a Cassock. A pile of big-eyed giggling kids and several cerveza-soaked adults would cram the doorway to watch our pathetic performance. Then some huge-sombreroed, spurred-and-booted vaquero would join in with a booming voice that threw a sound around our wavering noises like a huge, hugging reata and another neighbor would come by and actually plead with our host and client to let us come and serenade his family. "We need those God-given verses of 'El Catorce's Winged Stallion,' the neighbor would say. "He stayed in our barrio when that 'cabron' Ubaldo Garza was searching for him in '27." Followed by a troop of laughing kids and curious, and evidently fiercely patriotic adults, we would set out for another big-bricked adobe home, more atole and, if luck was with us, enough accompaniment to make us sound good.
But there was always a moment when Eufemio could restrain his recklessness no longer and he would strut into the middle of the room and wave for silence as he threw back his head to cry, "Soy Mexicano verdadero. Soy de los Altos. A los padrecitos de la Cristiada les jure honor."
("I'm a true Mexican. I'm from Los Altos. I swore allegiance to the little fathers of the Cristiada.") And everyone would shout, "Arriba Los Altos," and laugh and ask for more "brave songs" of the alteño Cristeros. We were heroes on such nights, two caterwauling youngsters who, with uncalled-for confidence, brought back memories of brave deeds, of stalwart men and women who faced death for their faith and families. It was an amazing, exciting way to learn history.
But after a month, I was wearing out my welcome and the two cousins had spent or given away most of their money and were getting restless to go back across the border again. They wanted Eufemio to come with us. But he was aflame with his new success. He'd brought a huge, stone-hard mariachi sombrero from Sayula and a black and gray Tapalpa scrape. He was even getting up early in the morning to practice, so early that his sisters and brothers were complaining.
Clearly, the idea that Eufemio was a "true" musician had gotten out of hand in the opinion of some members of the family. His mother had never approved of it. "It leads to associating with bad influences." She meant the habitués of cantinas and night-time women. Eufemio's father, a true alteño, didn't think being a musician was so bad "It's just that the 'joven' sings most of the time like a sick burro." He scowled and blinked angrily when he said that to make sure anyone overhearing him would never repeat those words.
One of the aunts muttered that the "gringo guero" had been the bad influence on Eufemio already, luring him away from "true work" to sing "like a clown" for drunkards down at the Victoriano cantina. Eufemio's brother even asked me how I'd done it. "It's very rare," he told me with a frown like his father's. "You can't even bag that damned broken guitar with any rhythm at all, you don't know Spanish worth a damn and you sing almost worse than Eufemio. What'd you do, put a spell on him?"
"Let's go to Guadalajara," I told him.
"We're going back to El Ayo to work," he said. "And you're coming with us. Everybody here thinks you're some kind of musical 'brujo' or something." He laughed. "Even though you don't know a damned thing about singing."
They all talked and pleaded with Eufemio to go north, to give up his guitar and the "fierce songs" of Los Altos. They even told him what an awful singer, guitar player--musician--he was. It was all ruthless, passionate family love saving him from a bad life, a life of dissipation, a life of failure. Eufemio just softly strummed his guitar, smiled and said. "No." The two cousins finally decided to kidnap him; grab him, put a serape over his head, tie him up and bundle him onto the bus with us. But the father forbade that kind of stuff. "He wants to sing, let him sing. He's so awful that without the gringo to coax him and his ox-eared clients on, he'll come to his senses and settle down to real work." By that Eufemio's father meant farm work.
When I got on the bus with the two cousins at Zapotlanejo, Eufemio was there to smilingly, chirpingly serenade us with going away songs, despedidas, sung to the alteño Cristeros when they went off to fight. The two cousins shook their heads and tried to look disapproving and smile and wave to their musician relative, all at the same time, as the broken-windowed bus started off with a blast of smoke and a clank. I figured that was the last time I'd ever see Eufemio, unless I came back to Los Altos to find him working on one of his family's fields. But I was wrong.
In 1960, I was partying with some friends in Garibaldi Square in Mexico City the center for the capital's top mariachi singers. Eufemio was there enjoying himself, too--leading his own group, that confident smile brilliant beneath his big country mustache, his handsome, disciplined voice ringing out songs of Padre General Areisteo Pedroza and El Catorce and Pancho Villa in a Cassock for homesick alteños displaced and heart-heavy in that great, magnificent city of stone.
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