TLACOTALPAN AND THE GRINGO JAROCHO (1)

I’d never heard of José Raúl Pinkham Hellmer until I visited Tlacotalpan. But for a long time afterwards I couldn’t get him out of my mind.

The Rio Papaloapan, “river of butterflies” in the Nahua tongue, pours down from the Orizaba Mountains in the state of Veracruz before emptying out into the Gulf of Mexico, reaching a width of a thousand feet at the point where it passes the little town of Tlacotalpan. From an outdoor restaurant on the malecón, nibbling acamayas (river shrimp) and sipping a torito (a drink of peanut, plum, and coconut), you can gaze across the silver-brown expanse to the far bank, or watch clumps of orchids, river birds perched on them, drift past in the languid air. Warm all year, furnace-hot in the summer - though the river gives off the slightest of breezes, ventilating the town - Tlacotalpan is famously sweet, famously beautiful, famously romantic. “Palmera y mujer…” crooned Agustín Lara, Mexico’s great popular composer, invoking the region of his youth. The Mexican author Elena Poniatowska wrote: “Whenever we wish to smile, we think of Tlacotalpan.” 

On a friend’s advice, I headed there the weekend before the Fiesta de la Candelaria, the great yearly gathering of son jarocho musicians, to secure a room. If I didn’t, she warned, I’d have to put up in nearby Alvarado or Cosamaloapan at best, as Tlacotalpan’s two hotels were booked a year in advance. People rent out rooms in their houses for the weekend of the feria, she said. Just ask around. 

I left Jalapa, where I’d been staying, on a misty Friday morning. I emerged literally from a cloud onto the steep mountain road, the wide Veracruz plain spreading below. The air warmed quickly, and soon the windows were open and I was down to a tee shirt. Reaching the flats, I skirted Veracruz City and bore south through villages of barefoot children and coconut palms until I caught my first whiff of salty Gulf air.

I followed signs pointing to Catemaco, a town known for its healers, curanderos, and sorcerers. This brought to mind a couple of gringas I knew back in San Miguel who always talked of visiting a brujo in Catemaco for a limpieza, a cleansing, to deal with “some self-esteem issues,” as they put it, but they never quite seemed to make it - a symptom, perhaps, of the condition they hoped to address. Or it might have been the advent of Simon, a self-styled British “shaman” who had “trained for six years in Chiapas,” and his popular weekly San Miguel sweat lodges that had rendered their journey to Catemaco superfluous.

Passing Alvarado, a port town of fishermen, carpenters, and son jarocho musicians that still celebrates annually its defeat of invading U.S. military forces in 1846, I crossed a long toll bridge then continued across the Papaloapan river delta, past lagoons, inlets, and clusters of snowy egrets. At the sign for Tlacotalpan I turned inland, following a flat riverside road that brought me, in twenty minutes, into the town.

Stepping out of my car at the wide central plaza, I realize I’d done myself a favor by coming a week early, for Tlacopacan is truly beautiful, worth seeing uncrowded.

Wide rectangular streets were laid out around a succession of interlocking plazas with Moorish kiosks, painted pavilions, gardens of exotic flowers, and white wrought-iron benches. The fantastical colors of the houses and buildings in variegated pastels were moderated by the formalism of columns, colonnades, porticos, balconies, and floral patios. Elegant, ornately furnished living rooms opened to the street, crammed with potted palms and ferns, dim and beckoning, offering respite from the fierce sun. The aroma of cedar wood from carpenter shops filled the air. There were few people about, and no visible signs of preparation for the festival to come.

Tlacotalpan’s beauty reflects its rich past: 549 historic edifices were identified by UNESCO when it declared it a World Heritage Site in 1998. The town struck me as a pocket version of old New Orleans or Havana - courtly, colorful, and defined above all by its music, for son jarocho is Tlacotalpan’s jazz. And like those other Caribbean cities, both town and region were painted with the brush of African history and culture. Soon after the Spanish conquest, slaves from Africa were sent here to work in sugar mills, ranchos, and fisheries. Relations with Mesoamericans and Spanish ensued, and brown-skinned mulatto cowboys drove cattle with rods known as jarochas, the men using them known as jarochos. By the 19th century, jarochos were seen as a separate people with their own habits, laws and special customs. 

Ships crossing the Atlantic could enter the river estuary and debark at Tlacotalpan, picking up cotton, cedar, mahogany, tobacco, and various exotic tropical products, leaving behind luxuries from Europe and other ports in the Caribbean. By the early 20th century Tlacotalpan had a theater, a customs house, tram service, and public lighting. The decline in cotton, and the advent of railroads, ended its glory days, but Tlacotalpan’s fall into decadence was gentle, the town preserved much as it was, its rich river delta culture intact.

Candelaria, or Candelmas, celebrations throughout Mexico mark the end of winter and the advent of spring, often with flowers and quiet religious ceremonies. Tlaotalpan’s has different elements: a pagan bull run on Saturday, and on Sunday the climactic river procession of an image of the Virgin, brought to Tlacotalpan by Andalusian sailors in the seventeenth century. Throughout the three-day festival, the encuentro de jaraneros - the biggest gathering of son jarocho musicians anywhere - draws visitors from all over Mexico and parts more distant.

I’d first encountered the music in the form sometimes called huapango or huasteca, from the regions of northern Veracruz and the Sierra Gorda. The tight guitars, the falsetto singing, the nimble lyrics and propulsive meters clearly stood it apart from thumping Mexican mestizo music. It included a dance form, the elegant, foot-stomping, flamenco-tinged fandango, and poetry, both in sung lyrics and in stand-alone decimas, ten-line rhymed verses declaimed by its poets. Son jarocho was played with the small guitars called jaranas, and with others called requintos, and at times with the addition of Veracruz harpists plucking shimmering single-note lines. Whatever its form, the music had edge, imagination, and heat.

Most North Americans know son jarocho through Richie Valens’ early rock and roll hit “La Bamba,” originally a Veracruz song about a sailor - a staple of the idiom, still sung in endless lyric, rhythmic, and melodic variations. Its coursing eighth-note rhythm, looping melody, and spirit-lifting beat are typical of son jarocho. The music owes as much to Afro-Cubans who settled along this coast as to Spain and central Mexico. Played in villages and towns throughout the Veracruz region, son jarocho in the hands of its masters rises to intoxicating levels - comparable to southern Spain’s flamenco, an early influence. And surely it is the African component that gives the music its distinctive élan and drive.

I could have spent the rest of the afternoon walking the quiet streets, poking into guitar shops, browsing in the Casa de la Cultura Agostín Lara, or drifting along the waterfront. But the heat was bearing down, the streets emptying for the hour of comida, and there remained the problem of finding a place to sleep the following weekend. At Doña LaLa, an old family-run hotel in the center of town, I asked if by chance they might still have a room. “No, no hay,” replied the capacious señora in the antique-filled lobby. At Tlacotalpan’s other hotel, the story was the same, but the receptionist did write out the name of a woman, Lupita, with directions to her store and suggested I ask there.

Crossing several plazas, I found Lupita’s tienda beside a large, pretty church with a blue and white facade. She was in the back room, visible from the door, a large woman in a flower print dress. “Sí, sí hay,” she called, rising to greet me. I followed her to a simple one-story brick house a block away, behind the blue church. She led me through a series of rooms to one in back, separated from the kitchen by a curtain. There were two beds with worn spreads and a bed table with a single lamp. Old cartons and house supplies - cleansers, toilet paper, mops - were stacked along the walls. “These will be cleared away by next week,” she said. “You can use the family bathroom and the kitchen.” We arranged a price and I left her a deposit. Satisfied that I’d secured a bed at least, I headed back to Jalapa. 

Early the following Friday, I repeated the descent to the tropical coast. Arriving in Tlacotalpan in thickening traffic, I found my way back to Lupita’s store, fetched the keys from her, and dropped my bags in the little room off the kitchen. A bowl with a fresh yellow hibiscus bloom decorated the table, though the cartons and cleaning supplies were still there.

By late afternoon the plazas were filling with revelers. Music blared from loudspeakers, camera crews roamed. Musicians in their white guayabera shirts and distinctive small straw hats were tuning up behind the Plaza Doña Marta, laughing and strumming licks. A little after six, following some introductory words from the mayor, a man took the stage and began intoning a decima in praise of the town and the festival. Then the musicians took over with a pulsing song about life along the river, and the fiesta was underway.  

It was a soft, sultry night beneath an ocean of stars and a swelling moon. As band after band lit up the plaza, people sat or stood or wandered in and out, ate tacos or ice cream, sipped cervezas or toritos. Not all the bands were good: one group from a village upriver had a lead singer of about twelve who sang painfully out of tune, the scraggly band accompanying him little better. Still, as the evening wore on, the bands got steadily better, and around nine o’clock a local group with a keening vocalist and a focused requinto soloist who must have been seventy years old had people on their feet, the wooden stage in the middle of the audience rattling with fandango dancers.

Walking over to the thronged main square, I heard snatches of German, English and Japanese among Spanish. A beautiful zapateado, the step-dance that is fandango, was in progress on the main stage, the men in white guayaberas, red scarves and sombreros, feet flying. The straight-backed women, in white dresses, flowing black aprons, and rebozos, whirled like so many tops.

Back at the Plaza Doña Marta, I was browsing a table of CDs for sale by the performing artists when I came upon one with a yellow cover and a lengthy title: “A la trova más bonita de estos nobles cantadores…Grabaciones en Veracruz de José Raúl Hellmer.” “To the most beautiful songs of these noble singers…Recorded in Veracruz by José Raúl Hellmer.” The photo on the front showed three musicians in classic white garb and hats holding a harp and jarana and requinto guitars. As much as I could tell without tearing off the cellophane, it looked to be an anthology, a collection of songs by various groups. I paid ninety pesos for it and stuck it in my shoulder bag.

The music started up again, con gusto. The bands would keep playing until dawn. Sometime around midnight, exhilarated and exhausted, I walked back to the little house, tiptoed to my room, and fell asleep.

I awoke to the sound of a toilet flushing, chatter in the kitchen. Light leaked through the curtain. I waited until it was quiet again, then dressed, washed up, and slipped out. It was a little after nine when I crossed the Plaza Doña Marta, deserted but for some dogs nosing through refuse from the night before. Along the streets by the river, crews were boarding up houses and laying chain link in preparation for the running of the bulls. In Hotel Doña LaLa’s restaurant, sipping coffee among groggy breakfast customers nursing crudas (hangovers), I opened the CD package I’d bought the night before.

It had been put out recently by Conaculta, Mexico’s national cultural institute, and contained nineteen examples of son jarocho field recordings, collected over forty years by one José Raúl Hellmer. A twenty-eight page brochure was inset into the sleeve. I slid it out and opened it.

On the first page, a geeky-looking gringo if I ever saw one looked out from a black and white photo. He wore large, round plastic-rimmed glasses, his hair standing up in a thick clump like Barton Fink’s, dressed in khaki clothes of a 1950’s cut. He had a large face with a long jaw and full lips. Lean, tall it would appear, he looked to be somewhere in his late thirties. A small camera hung from a strap around his neck, a couple of pens clipped to his shirt pocket. He was leaning against a wall, some Mexican town in the background, gazing toward the horizon with an earnest, dedicated expression. The photo reeked of an era - a world-view, even. Everything about it said “field trip.”

On the page opposite the photo, a text began in Spanish, entitled “El Gringo Jarocho.”

…To be continued next Sunday…