On the page opposite the photo, a text began in Spanish, entitled “El Gringo Jarocho.”
The text recounted how Joseph Ralph (Raúl José) Pinkham Hellmer had been born in Philadelphia in 1913 and, attracted in youth to Eastern philosophies, had had an early premonition of his life’s calling; to create brotherhood through music. Coming across a stack of old son jarocho recordings in a bin, he experienced an epiphany, a total identification of some sort. In 1946 he arrived in Mexico to begin what was to be his life’s work: researching and collecting Mexican folklore. He became, the notes said, “one of the most prolific investigators of Mexican music, marked by the search for a human horizon at the margins of the bellicosity that characterized the first half of the twentieth century, a search that had touched him in his very flesh.”
Turning the page, I came upon a second photo of Hellmer, a little bit older, wearing the same round plastic glasses, dressed now like a jarocho himself in a white outfit and a Veracruz hat, still with the pens in his pocket. He was walking beside the ocean, carrying a jarana guitar, a soft smile on his face.
In the pages that followed, a former Mexican colleague recalled Hellmer’s passion for his work: Hellmer in Tlacotalpan recording fandangos and serenades; the chants of roosters, bells, birds; the mysterious noises of the Rio Papaloapan; the morning itself. Hellmer in the foothills of the Pico de Orizaba, capturing some village requinto player on tape, submerged in a sensuous, exotic trance; Hellmer trying to eternalize a moonlit night with his box camera. “This was José Raúl Pinkham Hellmer,” the essayist wrote, “a man who savored every instant, and when it came to the music of the Gulf, a relentless sybarite.”
It was easy to picture Hellmer, headphones on, checking the dials of his reel-to-reel portable Nagra, then closing his eyes in rapture as he recorded Rutilio Parroquin, El Zapateado, the great early singer and jarana player, upriver in Otatlitán, where pilgrims come every year to worship the Black Christ.
Alan Lomax, in the Mississippi Delta, recording Leadbelly and Robert Johnson. Harry Smith documenting the Appalachias. Folkways, Nonesuch Records, the Smithsonian anthologies. The Family of Man. Passionate, idealistic Americans - musicologists, anthropologists, writers, filmmakers - aroused and disgusted by two world wars, armed with notebooks, recording devices and a sincere interest in the people and cultures of the world, setting out to build bridges among tribes and nations. If we could but understand each other better, surely we could beat swords into plowshares! The United Nations Charter. The Declaration of Human Rights. The Peace Corps. Freedom Riders. I thought of the writers and filmmakers who had gone out then too: Gary Snyder to Japan; Paul and Jane Bowles to Morocco; Allen Ginsberg to India; the filmmaker Maya Deren to Haiti. Like Joseph Ralph Hellmer, they went not to convert but to be converted: to sit patiently at the feet of a rough field hand with a guitar, or an indigenous storyteller, or a savant: to listen, watch, record, take notes. Cultural voyagers, seeking a path away from conflict and misunderstanding, mining for revelation in cultures not their own - even as forces in Washington, Moscow, and elsewhere were setting the world on a harder, more cynical course. Their heartfelt documentations yielded treasures we draw upon daily.
Reading on in the CD brochure, I came to a third photo of Hellmer, his glasses black-rimmed now, the lenses thicker, his steel wool hair jutting up intact. He sat in a chair, legs crossed strumming a jarana and singing against what appears to be a painted scrim of a palm tree and a moon - probably some Mexico City television studio. He looked older, crustier, strained.
Opposite the photo was a statement in quotes, in Spanish: “My personality isn’t important for the moment, but I tell people that I am an ex-gringo from Philadelphia - my friends tell me that I am a Veracruzano, born by accident in the United States - who has more than a half century of age and twenty-two years in Mexico struggling for the cause of folklore. I’ve made more than six hundred programs for radio and television. But now I feel confused, with so many obstacles in the system of education, so deficient in its formative aspects and in the consequent confusion in the minds of ordinary people with respect to the true goals of man…”
The quote was dated August 25, 1967. Four years later Raúl Hellmer would be dead in Mexico City at fifty-seven, his ashes scattered off the Veracruz coast by family and friends.
In the restaurant of the Hotel Doña LaLa, staring at the photo of this ardent investigator, this gringo jarocho, my chest filled with sorrow. Here we were again, trapped in the same morass of “bellicosity”. We’d gone nowhere, learned nothing, it seemed.
In 1967, the year of Hellmer’s quote, “folk music” was becoming a dead issue in his home country. Black blues had been co-opted by commercial rock-and-roll. Dylan had gone electric. The growing war in Vietnam darkened the horizon. The following year, protesting students would be mowed down in Mexico City and elsewhere in the world. New currents were sweeping away quaint folklorists like Raúl Hellmer, castigated as sentimental liberals, their preservationist battles a lost cause. Identity politics would discredit the act of empathy with other cultures, assuming the mantle of voices not your own, as just a game of patronizing white men. And how many times had the music turned over since Hellmer’s day? Pop, punk, hip-hop…
The sudden entry of a son jarocho group into Doña LaLa’s brought me out of my bleak reverie. Dressed in white, they began serenading the tables with an electrifying, rouse-the-dead “La Bamba” that all but rendered coffee superfluous, the harpist’s staccato solo lifting the hairs on the back of my neck.
Back outside, sun was warming the Tlacotalpan streets. More buildings had been fenced off for the bull run. The tempo of the weekend was picking up. Today would be all about beer, whooping, and blood. Nobody would care about son jarocho, much less the spectral memory of Raúl Pinkham Hellmer. Reaching the Plaza Doña Marta, I thought how discouraged Hellmer sounded in that final quote, that people couldn’t seem to recognize the glories of their own culture. It was as true now as then: Mexicans, like everybody else, wanted their MTV. Hellmer’s dream had been swatted away by history’s cold hand.
But was that really true? I sat down on a bench in the empty plaza where last night there’d been hardly a place to stand or sit for the singing, playing, and dancing. Tlacotalpan’s Fiesta de la Candelaria celebrated a huge resurgence in the music Hellmer had loved among players and listeners from the region and far beyond. In truth, people everywhere played and listened to each other’s music far more than in Hellmer’s day, if shorn of its socialist idealism. In Jalapa, I hadn’t been able to get into a movie theater to see a screening of The Buena Vista Social Club; tickets were sold out weeks ahead. Music services offered eclectic, international playlists day and night. Cross-cultural sampling and mixing was rampant. Maybe expecting the world’s music to stanch human “bellicosity” was asking too much.
That afternoon, while the bull run raged, I drove upriver for a while in my rented car. Popping Hellmer’s anthology into the dashboard CD player, I listened as glimpses of the Rio Papaloapan, cradle of son jarocho music, flickered past through the palms. Some of the nineteen selections sounded squeaky, antique, the sort of stuff only an aficionado could appreciate; others sounded as fresh as tomorrow, ripping out of the speakers, and would have easily commanded the stage at the Plaza Doña Marta. I eased back into Tlacotalpan at siesta hour as the last song played, “La Lloroncita,” by an old group from Boca del Rio.
The Plaza Doña Marta was jammed that night, the bands even better, the fandango stomping intense. Watching a young Japanese NHK film crew crouched down in front with digital cameras and mikes as Grupo Mono Blanco played an old song Raúl Hellmer would surely have known, I kept seeing his ghost hovering on the fringes of the crowd in his geeky glasses and khaki outfit, pens in his pocket, a blissful smile on his face. “¡Qué vive y revive el son!”
Sunday morning at dawn I walked through deserted Tlacotalpan to the river. A mist hung over the Rio Papaloapan. Water lapped against the jetties. A loan oarsman stood at the back of a pirogue. He beckoned, and I jumped in. The pale light of daybreak spread up from the Gulf behind us as we rode silently upriver, hugging the shore, past mangroves and reeds and old ruined waterfront villas from the time when the Atlantic ships had docked here and the town had been rich. Listening to river sounds and bird calls, I imagined Hellmer holding his microphone out, trying to keep his equipment dry, recording all this. How a person’s passions can overtake him utterly! The music of son jarocho had lured Ralph Hellmer far from his culture of origin, echoing some alienation or displacement already in him, leading him to find inspiration, and a home, elsewhere. In what is our identity truly rooted? The wayfaring stranger. Who among us is not one?
The silent rower crossed the swift current, drawing abreast of an island in the middle of the river. Then as he turned back towards the shore, Tlacotalpan spread before us in profile, first sunlight tipping the church spires. In a few hours the river would become the site of Candelaria’s climactic event, the Paseo de la Virgen. Already a mass was underway, the jaraneros gathering in church to sing her “Las Mañanitas,” the Mexican birthday song, and “La Llorona,” the weeping woman. Then the Virgin would be carried to the malécon and put onto a barge. Thousands would throng to the river to try and take the trip with her. Tonight the Plaza Doña Marta would ring again with son jarocho.
Onshore, I walked back to Lupita’s and started to pack my bags.
“¿Cómo le va, señor?”
I turned around. Lupita’s wide frame filled the doorway.
“Bién,” I said. “Muy bíen.”
“You slept well?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not at the river to see the Virgin.”
No, I said, I wouldn’t be staying today to see it all. I’d gotten what I’d come for, and more.
She looked surprised. Then she just smiled and said, “Ni modo.” Whatever.
The colored walls and plazas flashed past on the road out of Tlacotalpan, echoing with sounds of fandango and son jarocho. I turned east toward the Gulf and drove into the sun.
A Son Jarocho Playlist:
Son de Madera
Grupo Mono Blanco
Chuchumbé
Sonex
Radio Son Jarocho
Judging by popular music, all is lost. But judging by the immense range of music listened to by some, supported by unlimited access to digital music files, the work of the Gringo Jarocho lives on.
Another gem. I’ve had the privilege of visiting Tlacotalpan on a sleepier day but it is a magnificent byway. You evoke it as full of life.