Around about 2005 expat British author Richard Grant decides to drive the 900-mile stretch of the Sierra Madre Mountains in northern Mexico. The Sierra Madres, a rugged, comfortless and dangerous place, are home to drunks, druggies, marijuana growers, meth cookers, drug lords, bandits, rapists, murderers, Mormons, mestizos, cave-dwelling Indians and entire companies of corrupt Mexican Army soldiers, but his wife has just dumped him and as he admits himself he might not be thinking clearly. Well before the end of the book you will agree that he isn’t.
He has always been a traveller to the edge.
I kept going back to the places that people warned me against because there were wilder times and better storytellers there, and because I wanted to know what it was like to live in a culture so different from my own and see the world from such a different point of view.
He succeeds here to the extent that a brutal, lawless population funded by drugs and fueled by alcohol and family feuds that kills “to please the trigger finger” is willing to let him. It is a culture curdled with machismo.
Machismo came to Mexico from Spain, a Spain that had been under heavy Moorish or Arab influence for seven centuries when Columbus set sail. This is not to say that Native American societies weren’t patriarchal or oppressive toward women, but the men were’t macho in the Spanish way. Spaniards, like Arabs, believes that women were inferior wanton creatures who sexuality needed to be strictly controlled and firmly dominated, and that women from other cultures were fair game for rape.
From which follows the charming Sierra Madre practice of rapto, where a man rapes a girl and the girl is forced to marry him.
Part of his initial inspiration for his journey was to hunt down a friend’s story about a group of Apaches who remained in the Sierra Madres after Geronimo surrendered. A local historian tells him that a group of Chiricahua Apaches from Oklahoma visited in 1988 looking for their long lost tribal members.
“The Oklahoma Apaches were scared as deer the whole time they were in the Sierra,” said Nelda. “Afraid of Mexicans, afraid of he Apaches they thought were out there, afraid of wild animals, afraid of their own shadows. Then we brought them out here to do their ceremonies. Most of them had never camped before and the ladies wanted to know where the bathroom was. ‘Wherever you want,’ I said. ‘There must be a bathroom,’ they said. ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘Men over there women over there.’ They couldn’t get over it. No bathrooms!”…as children in Oklahoma they were brought up in mortal terror of the Sierra Madre Apaches. When they were behaving badly and nothing else worked, their grandparents would threaten to call in the wild ones from Mexico…There was more relief than disappointment when the wild ones failed to appear and of course it didn’t mean that they weren’t still out there somewhere and perhaps listening. In the end the visit was deemed a great success.
The Sierra Madre is rife with stories like this that make you feel like Grant has discovered the true source of the magic realism literary tradition. He ends on the surreal account of being chased around the woods in the dark of night by two armed men who “are the type of men who pride themselves on their willingness to kill.” When they leave he climbs back into his sleeping bag instead of climbing into his truck and getting the hell out of there, and of course they come back with friends just to give themselves a sporting chance of bagging a gringo. He escapes but only just.
I drove out of the mountains and then north across the plains and deserts and I didn’t stop driving for fifteen hours until I was in striking distant of the U.S. border…I never wanted to set foot in the Sierra Madre again. The mean drunken hillbillies who lived up there could all feud themselves into extinction and burn in hell. I was out of courage, out of patience, out of compassion. They were sons of their whoring mothers, who had been fornicating with dogs.
There are no grace notes in this tale. Rather it is a present-day narrative of a place that could be fairly described as hell on earth for the people living it, especially the women, that hasn’t changed much in the last 250 years. A recommended read for any American thinking Mexico is a good place to retire.
Book Review Monday Chatter God's Middle Finger No Stars Richard Grant