It is such a treat for me to share who I am, and even better, where I am from. My origin and my being are integrally connected and have fed from one another throughout my life. The place I was raised, Orduña de Abajo, was and continues to be a magical place for me. Orduña is a small village in the municipality of Comonfort in the Mexican state of Guanajuato. It is simple, honest, tranquil, friendly, and most of all, it is REAL Mexico.

That is a loaded term, if not a vague concept, but what I mean by “real” is: this part of the world, it’s people and its culture, is not defined by outside forces. Lifestyle migration, tourism, and colonization have not destroyed it. It maintains not only many of the cultural practices of my native ancestors, but also the way of being, thinking and relating to one another. People here are not concerned with impressing the rest of the world. What they ARE concerned with are the people and other sentient beings surrounding them. There is an awareness for others that is rare in most of the Western World. Here, people matter more than business. Always. And this is the human connection that I have always wanted to return to. I want to share this with others. Hopefully and in the least, as a form of creating an awareness about healthier and more sane manners of existing on this planet.

My early childhood experience on the farm in Orduña taught me the value of community. There was nowhere in that village that felt unsafe or dangerous to us as children. We lived with my parents and grandmother (literally in an avocado orchard), but we might as well have lived with the entire village. Every person knew us, and we knew them. From the elders to the newborns. We celebrated together, we shared resources with each other, we bartered among ourselves, and most importantly, we cared for each other. Granted, those were my carefree years, when I got to run around unsupervised with no worries whatsoever. There wasn’t a day that passed by in which we weren’t off getting ourselves into some kind of trouble. You know, things like getting “stuck” in an avocado tree after climbing too far up. Or getting “the runs” because we ate five times the amount of prickly pears any human should consume in one sitting. Or hiking way too far to get back home in time for dinner or even during daylight, and fearing death among the non-existent packs of wolves. Not to mention the very existent wrath of my mother when we finally got back home. That kind of trouble. And of course, there was the trouble of not getting our chores done. That was the worst kind of trouble. Since a young age, we partook in the labor of the farm, as much as we were capable of, depending on our age and motor skills development stage. We assisted in crop planting, irrigation, and harvest, dekerneling and drying corn grain, sorting the bounty of avocado for shipment, seed and plant propagation, etc. No age was too early for us to start helping. We also had to tend to farm animals like pigs, chickens and goats. My father was a farmworker from northern Mexico who grew up in the fields of the U.S. his entire life. His life experience as a farm laborer was excruciatingly difficult to be sure, but it also made him the savvy and intelligent farmer and hard worker he was. He taught me how to calculate water volume and acreage, run the diesel-fired motor for the well, and run a tractor and till the land by the time I was 8 years old. All this while also making time to help with math homework from school. He loved math. Aside from being the administrator of all things my mom helped us with the humanities side of school things. She was an oppressively strict one, my mom. But she did well by me.

The true master, the real head of the klan and the authority on all questions, however, was mi abuelita (my grandmother). And to our delight, she was on the “Kid Team” about 98% of the time! My abuelita knew how to do everything. She was a born entrepreneur, an incredible chef, a fighter to be feared, a humorist to be envied, an outdoorswoman to behold, and the kindest spirit in the village. Strong, independent, fearless, dependable and never married or dependent on a man, my abuelita was a radical at heart. It was a beautiful time and a magical place to grow up among heroic people.

When I was nine years old, my family migrated to the US. We moved to Northeast Oregon. To a rural little farm town of 520 residents. It was quite a shock. My siblings and I had to learn a new language and adopt a new culture that seemed to us cruel and cold.  It felt devoid of color and flavor. For 40 years I remained in the Pacific Northwest. The shock that any immigrant experiences subsided over time and I became to appreciate the geography and nature of that part of the world. But, throughout those 40 years, I longed to return permanently to my home in Central Mexico. And, so I did.

I feel quite fortunate to be able to return to and live at home. What I feel here, what I feel when I get the opportunity to share “my Mexico” with my non-Mexican friends, with my partner Chris, with friends to come, and with anyone wanting to experience “real” Mexico, well, some call it magic. I call it happiness and purpose in life.