Tijeras

    Around the 1600s a gang was shipped away. It was likely comprised by peoples of the worst kind. That was the age of the conquistadores in what was later called the wild west and now plainly the west. They were led by Coronado or Oñate guys in suicide seeks for gold up north the Neo Méxican desert. I can't help but picturing something close to Aguirre's expedition in Herzog's film Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Indeed, I visualize something worst.
    Those gangsters, criminals, renegades of their homelands didn't find any gold and some survivors to the long marches settled down around the Santa Fe area just to endure a torment similar to the fictional 40-year long Jew fable in the desert. Only this one for real and longer, with the whole folk continually at the edge of starvation.
    They were just the first ones. Waves of renegados kept coming. Unlike the original ones, the later wouldn't necessary be convicts or mass murderers anymore, but disgraced families striving for a better life. The frontiers here don't matter, despite what politicians say. To be precise, they matter at the individual scale, at which human evil conjures itself to craft some living hell. But at a larger scale people come and go and they stay and go again. And you have these that remain since 400 years ago. These trying to trace a dividing line between us and them, inside a country where everything is mixed together. And they do so as in any war, as you do to mark any frontier: with a flag. In this case, with the Spanish flags.
    Every once a year the great, great, ..., great grandsons of the pioneers parade around the Santa Fe plaza showing off the coat of arms of their families, wearing funny costumes, and looking proud and down on the more recent wetbacks. They hold themselves as the pure race, and their language is heralded as the pristine, Cervantine Spanish. They despise the wets as fool, lazy, and degraded versions of their blood after they were mixed with some Xocolatectl Aztec wives bellow the river.

    As in Herzog's Aguirre, the role of the church can't be dismissed -- «You know, my child, for the good of our Lord, the church was always on the side of the strong.» When I moved into the gas station I noted all the paintings of saints and crosses and our lord jesus christ. It was a pitiful station with a little side food store, somewhere at the route 66 at its passing by Tijeras. So decadent and filthy that I immediately loved it. "Where are you from, Sir?" People call me Sir here, specially after I grew my Movember mustache. "Spain. " It hurts to say that word describing myself. All the sins my country is responsible of weight too much on the tip of my tongue. "¡Oh! ¡España! ¡Mis antepasados vinieron de allí! ¡De Lorca, Murcia! ", said the man behind the counter. "Ah sí? Sus padres? Sus abuelos? " "Noo, mis antepasados en el 1610. " He said proudly how his ancestors were something like the governors at the lands on war -- outsiders of the Spanish crown anyway, I guessed. "Nosotros fuimos de visita a España hace años" the woman said from behind, her eyes wide open and overflowing with hope "con el Padre, ¿sabe? El Sacerdote. " They were talking with a Méxican accent, or with an accent that I couldn't tell apart from the Méxican anyway. And they were happy with my presence and they saw how very important their place on earth had been for these 400 years and "¡Buen viaje, Señor!" they said and "no se olviden que nosotros estamos aquí" and I left weaving bye and I drove away and looked back in the rear-view mirror. The gas station, diminished in its reflection, laid pathetic as if seeded deep on the dirty snow, abandoned forever in the empty desert as a spaceship drifting away and with its last two survivors trapped in, the ambassadors of a kingdom that never existed.