A few years back, Zee was working with Patricia, the department chair here at the University, on a small archaeological survey in the nearby countryside.
Side note for those who don’t know (the rest of you can skip to the next paragraph), an archaeological survey can be either a surface survey, where you walk lines across an open area and collect everything you see on the ground surface, or a test pit survey, where you dig a series of small pits in pre-determined locations to see what is under ground. The idea is usually that you can narrow your area of focus before expending invariably limited resources on a large scale excavation. There are other reasons for doing the survey, but since this is a blog rather than a lecture in archaeological method and theory, I’ll spare you the details... You get the picture!
So Zee and Patricia were doing a test pit survey. They were out in the countryside, just the two of them, digging pit after pit. After the first week, they started having trouble. The men would come out from the villages with their machetes and stand around threateningly. When they arrived in the mornings, Zee and Patricia would discover anything and everything portable had been stolen. As time passed, the men got bolder, and they would surround the pit, machetes pulled, and demand to see everything that came out of the ground. Patricia and Zee were pleasant and placating, said all the things they should say, and showed everybody and anybody all the things that they were doing. Usually, this takes care of lingering doubts among the local population. Often, people go back and get their families for tours. Not in this case!
One Monday, they came to work and discovered that the pits had been filled with human waste. Apparently the entire village had saved up all their urine and feces in buckets all weekend, and came out very early Monday morning to fill up the pits that Zee and Patricia were working on, filled them up right to the brim. Patricia and Zee, being the sort of women who don’t walk away from a challenge, put on gloves and masks, got buckets, and did their best to salvage the excavation. They worked the rest of the week without incident.
Yeah, really. Those of you who envy us archaeologists for our exotic life of glamour and adventure can think about this next Monday morning when your alarm goes off. At least you aren’t going into work to haul buckets of shit out of a hole in the ground while angry men with machetes stand around watching... And just because it happens in Mexico doesn’t make it more fun!
The following Monday morning, they arrived on site wondering what was in store for this week. They were right to be worried. They approached their excavations and discovered that somebody, or bodies, had spent the weekend filling the excavations with concrete, concrete that was now hard set. Patricia and Zee finally admitted defeat. The excavations were officially closed. They were not terribly happy, however, and went into town where Patricia reamed out anybody and everybody with even a bit of authority. Most people just turned their heads away and shrugged, refusing to get involved. Finally, however, they found somebody who let them in on the secret.
Apparently, the week after they began digging, the local priest announced in Mass that the American women who claimed to be archaeologists were in fact spies in the employ of the American Government. He explained in his sermon that they were there digging holes into which, in the middle of the night, they would be installing missiles. He exhorted the townspeople, as good Catholics and good Mexicans, to do anything and everything in their power to prevent the American spies from filling the fields with missiles aimed at Mexico City.
To this day, nobody knows why this sounded like a likely plot to the priest who invented it or the people of the village who bought into it all. Regardless of why, however, the priest continued to harangue at every available moment and helped organize the people to chase off Patricia and Zee. He succeeded, of course, but the local higher ups of the Catholic Church were alerted to the, uhm, “unstable” priest out in the countryside. They decided to reassign him to a remote village high up on the volcano with people too poor to buy concrete, unwilling to waste good fertilizer, and prone to settling disputes with a quick and decisive short-range shotgun blast.
(One of the Anthropologists here works up in one of these villages on the volcano. I asked him awhile back how the annual fiesta had gone. His face lit up as he exclaimed, “Oh it was wonderful! And only three people were murdered this year! I can’t believe how much things have improved in the last ten years!” So I’m thinking that priest had his hands full and no time to be watching James Bond...)
This is my long-winded way of explaining how very important local relationships can be when you are trying to run a project. It is the most amusing of the stories I’ve heard and the only one that doesn’t end with somebody in intensive care recovering from a machete attack. (No, really, I’m not kidding!) And this is my roundabout way of explaining why you haven’t had any updates on my excavation work just yet. As I mentioned last time, I finally got the permit in time for the height of the rainy season. After returning from the states and ready to work, I contacted Don Antonio, the land owner from whom we have permission to excavate. I explained that we were ready and he said, “Oh, fabulous. That is just great. You know, it is the jicama harvest until after Day of the Dead and I can’t give you any workers until then, but otherwise....”
I took a deep, silent breath. Jicama harvest.... Right.... “So, you’ll have men available for the week after the Day of the Dead?”
“Oh yes, yes...” he assured me.
So I settled in to write some grant proposals for next year and apply for a job or two. The Day of the Dead came and went (another blog story on my adventures there, but you’ll have to wait...). We called Don Antonio right after November 2 ready to start work.
“Oh...” he said vaguely, “Uhm, we are still working on some things for two more weeks...”
Two more weeks!?!?!?! It was time to take extreme measures...
I should mention that the grant that is paying for the excavations has to be used up by Dec. 31st. If I don’t use it, I have to send it back. And if I have to send it back, I have no dissertation project. Extreme measures were indeed called for.
I went out and bought a very nice bottle of reposado tequila in a hand blown, hand cut bottle. Very pretty. I forged a note from Harold, the project director back in the states, all about how I was there to run the project for him and he was sending this bottle of tequila from his hospital bed in the United States in hopes that Don Antonio would be able to help poor little Elizabeth who is just trying to do Harold a favor because he is so very sick and misses the village and the hacienda so very much. I put the note on the bottle with a pretty ribbon. I collected my field assistant. We drove to the village in time to catch Don Antonio right after church.
(Harold, incidentally, is doing quite well, his treatments seem to have worked, he is planning a visit to Mexico for late next spring, and he is far from needing to write from a hospital bed, but I didn’t want to ruin the dramatic effect with excessive honesty....)
Don Antonio and his family received us well and with generosity. They found enough chairs for my field assistant, Don Antonio, and me so we wouldn’t have to sit on the dirt floor and opened three bottles of Pepsi. We sat in the windowless adobe room to begin three and a half hours of negotiations.
I’ll spare you all the roundabout discussions. No there was nobody, oh but we only need one or two, well maybe, but couldn’t you, perhaps, well how do you feel about working with a cripple, he isn’t much help with the harvest, oh a cripple would be just find we have no problems with the fact that he can only move slowly, etc....
Finally, after much negotiations, Don Antonio felt he could provide us with two workers to begin the next day. Hooray!
Don Antonio’s daughter joined us with another round of Pepsi’s. She sat down and we began talking about her time in the United States. She had recently returned from New Jersey where she, her husband, and their four daughters had lived for six and a half years. My field assistant and I asked her about her experiences there. She sighed. “Well, the money was good of course....”
We asked what she did. She explained that she worked in the kitchen of a fast food restaurant serving hot dogs and her husband had worked in the kitchen of an Italian restaurant. She said that she worked, seven days a week, from 7 in the morning until 11 at night, and her husband worked similar hours. “Oh,” she added, “But we got to go home at 6 pm on Christmas day.”
Adriana and I said that sounded like a lot of work. She shrugged. She said, “It wasn’t too bad. I mean, the money was good. We were able to send money to my father and help him and my mother. But I never got to see my children and that was hard.”
Adriana asked, somewhat increduously, her why she and her family had returned.
She sighed again. “I was lonely. I know the money is good and I know everybody here thinks I’m crazy to come back. But the truth is, I’d rather have nothing more to eat than a small plate of beans here with my family then the biggest meal, with meat even, alone in the United States.”
She hugged her father and went back to overseeing whatever was happening in the next room. Adriana and I firmed up or arrangements with Don Antonio, and we took our leave. We both felt happy to be beginning work the next day.
That night, Adriana called Don Antonio to confirm the hour we would begin and confirm that the town cripples were indeed ready to work. As luck would have it, they weren’t available after all. The peanut harvest had begun....
No, really, I'm not kidding. No jokes here....
The peanut harvest lasts until Christmas. Our options now are to either wait for the harvest to finish or to bring in workers from the outside. The problem with waiting, of course, is that we have to give the money back. The problem with bringing in outside workers is that we risk alienating the community as a whole, hence the story I began with.
In addition to running the risk of bringing in somebody’s grandfather’s arch enemy from the next town over and possibly showing up for work to discover an inter-pueblo riot in our tidy excavation units, we also have the problem that if salaries are going to people outside the village, the people in the village have no real reason to support the project. When you are paying 10 guys from the town two and a half times minimum wages, there is a certain incentive for the village as a whole to not, say, come out and rob you at gunpoint on payday (or fill your excavation units with human waste and concrete, or to attack you with machetes because they hate the guy you have working with you....).
So here I am. Firmly in between the proverbial rock and hard place and working the politics on all fronts in hopes of making something come together. We’ll see and I’ll try and keep you all posted! I need to go buy a few more bottles of tequila.....
