Killer Tamale
A tamale almost killed me.
No, I’m not complaining about the tremendous amount of food that people
eat around the holidays. It’s not that I had eaten too many tamales. Rather, as
I was walking to work one day, wooooof… I went sailing through the sky and
landed flat on my back. As I rolled over to my front side to push myself up
from the ground, I was perplexed. How had I slipped? And in such a dramatic
way? The ground wasn’t wet and I didn’t remember seeing anything on the
sidewalk on my path. As I stood up, the culprit was there, staring right back
at me. It was a huge tamale. The biggest
I have ever seen. Sitting in the middle of the sidewalk. Cartoons – and of course,
Mario Kart – regularly show people slipping on banana peels, but I’ve never
known that to happen in real life. Now I know that the real threat is
tamales.
While you may find it an irritating exaggeration that I
claimed to have almost died by a tamale, I have found that Mexicans love to exaggerate
in story telling. [As do great story tellers in the U.S. and elsewhere too.] In
Mexican story-telling, what matters most is the effect that one’s words leave,
not the factual accuracy of one’s statement. In fact, telling the facts right,
when the straight facts are unimpressive, would be a greater lie than
exaggerating to portray the same feeling that was experienced. For example,
there is a huge hill in the middle of the town I live in. On one part of the
hill, a staggering number of escalinas [stairs]
lead you from the center of town to the top of the loma [hill]. One of my friends claimed there are a 1,000 steps. I
didn’t believe her, so I counted. There are 251. But as I think about it now,
she was more right than I am. It’s an intimidating number of steps. Enough to
make you consider taking another route to get home. The only way to accurately
explain the grandness of these escalinas is
to share that there are a thousand.
Death of a Globo
After the toasts, the feasting, dancing the cumbia to Juan Gabriel songs, and
bilingual karaoke, the Año Nuevo festivities died down. Around 4am, the party
began to break up and family dispersed to their homes. A handful of us
dedicated partygoers stayed though. We were going to welcome in the New Year by
sending a globo a los cielos [ballon
to the skies/heavens]. This wasn’t a normal plastic balloon though. It was a
balloon made out of tissue paper and glue. Throughout Mexico, people make these
types of globos for special
festivities. In some places, these globos
are gigantic, and elaborate, being formed out of hundreds of pieces of
tissue paper. On this night though, we had a simple globo of just four pieces of tissue paper. We wrote our wishes for
the new year on the paper, then proceeded to carry it outside with the flammable
ring and a box of matches.
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| Photo taken by my friend Hannah Smith. My family's globo looked much like this one |
The streets were dead. We set up in the middle of the busy
boulevard linking the bus station with the university in town. Tía Norma took
the lead to direct us to echar el globo a
los vientos [send the balloon to the winds]. The process works much like
that of a hot air balloon. A hole at the bottom of the globo contains a metal ring which holds a donut-looking flammable
ring, that is lit, causing the globo
to rise in the air. The globo is then
carried by wind farther than the eye can see until eventually the ring burns
up, and the globo falls to the
ground. The process to get the globo
off the ground was taking longer than expected, so I proceeded to offer my
help. I had watched the launching of a globo during YAGM Mexico Orientation in
Cuetzalan several months before, so I figured that I knew what I was doing. As
Tía Norma held the globo, I lit the
ring, but instead of lifting up, up and away, the tissue paper walls of the
balloon enveloped in flame. We dropped the globo
to the ground and watched as our New Years wishes burnt up in flames. ¡Pinche gringo! I thought to myself.*
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| Globos get as big and elaborate as this. Yes, this was made out of tissue paper too - just hundreds and hundreds of sheets of tissue paper. Photo Credit: Hannah Smith. |
*Because I burnt up our wishes for Amor y Paz [love + peace] in the world, I guess I will be
responsible when world peace and boundless love don’t come. jaja. On a serious note though, if I can
inspire one person, comfort one person, restore one person’s dignity, or ignite
one person’s heart with love, it will justify my life.
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