Queretaro

[We're a little behind schedule with the blog. Even though we're in D.F., I wanted to catch us up a little on the places we'd hit earlier.]

The “desayuno” wasn’t exactly a breakfast as I understood the word’s direct translation. Brunch, I suppose, would be a little bit closer. Still, it can’t be a brunch, for starters, if it begins at 9 am.

The map, I think, will go down in history as perhaps the worst map ever drawn.* Here’s a picture of it:

It’s supposed to represent how to get from Alejandro’s cousin’s house, on the west side of Querétaro, to Juan Pablo’s house on the east side. Somehow, mysteriously, we made it there without too many problems. Juan Pablo, Abelardo, and Mirta were there, just beginning to prepare the food. Mirta was chopping tomatoes, onions, and jalapeño chiles for pico de gallo. They immediately served us a dark, rich espresso from a percolator and told us the plan: gorditas.

Masa was bought—a multicolored masa, seemingly made with many varieties of corn, reds, blues, greens, in addition to the standard yellow. (Perhaps some lard as well, though I followed my usual “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.) The gordita-making process looks relatively easy, and I was surprised at how pupusa-like these little corn dumplings are.

We also interviewed Alexis Benhumea’s uncle, Oscar. Alexis was a economics student, adherent to the Other Campaign, who was shot in the head with a teargas canister during the police invasion of Atenco on May 4. He fell into a coma and his father called an ambulance, but the police wouldn’t let it into the city. Alexis laid, slowly dying, there for about 11 hours before finally an American journalist named John Gibler (and others) rented a van to take him to the hospital. He survived there for about a month, but died on June 7. This interview appears in a radio segment that aired yesterday on Flashpoints.

* Followed more or less closely by pencil shavings in a bag.