My former mother in law, Trinidad, called Trini, was a special lady, sweet and kind, who made the best of whatever circumstances life threw her way.
I had been married to her son for four years when she learned that one of her relatives in Monterrey Mexico was ill and she wanted to go see her. She hadn't been to Monterrey for decades. My husband, the Sgt. and I had a station wagon, so we decided to drive her there. Trini wanted to go but was leery. Bandits along some of those lonely dirt roads was her concern.

But we loaded her, my daughter and two step-sons up and packed and ready for bear, headed off. Trini had filled a cooler with enough food to feed an army. Crossed the border at Laredo, and once away from the noisy raucous border, the true Mexico came to life. After a long stretch of driving into desert country, I remember seeing a naked brown toddler playing in the dirt next to an adobe hut. Nothing around but desert, no trees or shade, but in the distance, a line of blue mountains.

Remember slowly driving deeper in on rutted roads, and at daybreak seeing some people who had slept outside of their adobe hut getting up from cots made of woven twigs and pieces of tree branches and covered with grass or some such. Overhead, they had constructed a canopy of the same materials, and the dappled shade falling on that scene made it look primitive and beautiful. There was a goat tethered to a stake next to the hut. An old woman was stirring something in a pot over a cookfire. They gave us unfriendly looks as we passed by.I wanted to go back and take a photo, but my husband and m-i-l were said absolutely no, so that scene lives only in my memory.

And I can never forget the main open air market in Monterey where vendors sold all kinds of fruits and vegetables, some I had never seen before, and the meat section where hunks of goat and plucked chickens and other meats hung on hooks and were covered with flies. My m-i-l, a fastidious person, shuddered. One thing the street vendors sold was a drink made of fresh pineapple. Sweet and pineapply, I love it to this day--but can't find it. My husband ate a burrito from a street vendor--my m-i-l clutched his elbow and said sotto voice "Don't eat that--it might be dog!" We all laughed, but nobody else ate one.

I was shocked to see grimy desperate looking Indian women, some clutching infants, sitting on the sidewalks begging. I had never seen a beggar before. I wanted to take them all home.

It's too bad, such a beautiful place as Mexico, and it is heartbreakingly beautiful, cannot provide all its citizens with the bare minimum of civilized life, roads and social services. The conquistadores trampled, brutalized it and killed off the natives with disease--Now hundreds of years later, this country, a diamond in the rough still feels that opressed.

susil