WHO WERE THE ANCIENT MAYA?

Were they pyramid builders? Astronomers? Lords of the jungle? High priests and shaman? Mathematicians?

After years of studying the Maya, I believe—aside from those glorious pyramids— they’ll most be remembered for their stargazing abilities. The Maya were called naked-eye astronomers.

Say what?

STARGAZERS AND MATHEMATICIANS

The Maya were stargazers for a reason. First and foremost they were mathematicians who painstakingly followed and kept detailed records on the position of the stars and planets day by day, year by year, century by century. Without the use of anything other than the naked eye, they recorded these precise calculations for more than a millennium. They kept track of the night sky in paper-bark books called codices. (Sadly, all but three were burned by Spanish priests in an effort to purge the Maya of their “pagan” beliefs). And through this precise nightly recording of the sky’s movements, they were able to simulate what we today can do in the blink of an eye with a telescope. The Maya viewed the Milky Way as the world tree, their Ceiba. The Ceiba was considered the Maya tree of life—the tree that holds up the world.

THE MILKY WAY

But to the Maya, the Milky Way was more than that familiar smudge across the sky we see each night. The Milky Way was also the Sac-be or road to the underworld for dead souls as well as the path for those souls to the sky. It was their River Styx. Without the Milky Way, dead souls couldn’t find their way and would be caught in a forever limbo.

So Maya astronomers were left with the weighty job of deciphering how each star and planet would align. It was their destiny to forever record the nightly movement of the stars so that those departed could find their way to the underworld.

PAKAL'S TOMB 

Even though all but three of their paper-bark books were destroyed, additional proof in this theory of the Milky Way and the world tree’s importance is carved onto the glorious sarcophagus lid of Pakal, Palenque’s greatest ruler.If you've never been to Palenque, go. To me, it is the most spiritual and mystical pyramid site, off the beaten track and not an easy journey. But once there, it’s like Hawaii with pyramids in a lush jungle setting with a smattering of near Asian style structures. The Asian influence makes one wonder. But back to the sarcophagus lid—it shows the king descending down the world tree into the jaws of the underworld, or Xibalba, to his death. Descending the stairs to Pakal’s musty tomb is a journey in itself. And as an aside, Pakal’s tomb was discovered by accident in 1952 by famous archaeologist Alberto Ruz when a worker noticed holes in a floor slab. When lifted, it showed a stairway filled with rubble that took three years to clear. But Pakal’s tomb, and the discovery of the king’s bejewelled death mask, made those efforts worthwhile.

Palenque was also the site of the famous Palenque Roundtable in the mid-1970s where more than twenty of the world’s foremost archaeologists came together and broke the Maya code.  At that meeting, they deemed that the greatest portal to the underworld was found in the night sky, and it related back to the Maya creation myth. Now having the ability to read the Maya stelae (carved concrete like slabs placed in front of every pyramid), these archaeologists decided the myth portrayed the Milky Way, as a tree, to be the centre of their universe, dating back to their creation myth in the Popul Vuh.

Have I lost you yet?

VENUS FOR ACTS OF WAR

But not only did the Maya gaze at the stars so that they and their rulers could find the starry path to the underworld, They monitored the planet Venus to decide when to make war on fellow Maya city-states, and when to plant their crops, specifically maize.

So determined were the Maya to follow this star-earth continuum that many pyramid sites, such as Chichen Itza’s Temple of Kukulkan, are aligned to certain astronomical specifics. Each spring and autumn equinox, the sun casts its shadow onto this Chichen Itza temple due to its place in the heavens, the building’s position, and the Maya’s precise calculations, configured centuries ago, for for this event. The sun’s shadow creates the illusion of the serpent’s body (the temple sports a huge serpent on each of its four corners) slithering down to the base of the staircase, finishing at the serpent’s mouth at ground level. Again, if you’ve not yet been to Chichen Itza, go. Other sites also are clearly aligned with these spectacularly coordinated spectacles, not unlike sunrise at Stonehenge. One wonders, how on earth did they do it? But they did.

WHO WERE THEY?

So who were the Maya? To me, they will always be stargazers who tamed the night skies long before modern man/woman would have thought it even be possible to do so. Had any more than three of the thousands of paper-bark Maya books burned been saved for posterity, what other wonders would we have discovered? Though they were an early civilization, they were one with extraordinary powers to delineate not only the position of the planets and when full eclipses would occur, but they also created an intricate system of calendars (twenty-eight in all) that, some scholars say, coordinate as accurately as our calendar does today. When the Maya calendars were compared for exactness against a modern day computer, scholars found only a slight difference in accuracy. All done without a slide rule, calculator or telescope.

Naked eye astronomy.

It worked for the Maya. And if this article doesn’t inspire you to go to the nearest pyramid site and stare at in wonder, I have failed to do my job.

Nancy Drew Author Had Connections to Maya Pyramids and Central America

(Photo from Jennifer Fisher, founder of Nancy Drew Society, of The Secret of the Old Clock).

     Who of us girls, as young teens, did not love Nancy Drew? The sleuth with a voracious appetite for getting into scary trouble, being at the center of crime scenes and mysteries? Who taught us how to signal SOS with a tube of lipstick, break out of a window using spike heels, and to always keep an overnight bag in the car, just in case?

CAROLYN KEENE? NO

     For years I thought Carolyn Keene was Nancy's author but later discovered that was a pen name for Mildred Wirt Benson who would write 135 books and 23 of the first Nancy Drew detective tales that came to shape Nancy's "steely bravery" according to an article by Jennifer Fisher in Zócalo. Benson's image of Nancy would create "the tenacious, bold and independent heroine we have come to know." The real author of our favorite "girl" detective was an Iowa homegrown born in 1905, daughter of a country doctor, and the first student—male or female— to earn a masters degree in journalism from University of Iowa (later home to the Iowa Writers Workshop). For fifty years Benson worked in journalism when not penning famous mysteries, covering the courthouse beat and crime and corruption at The Toledo Blade and The Toledo Times.

HEADING TO NYC

     As a child Benson was an avid reader of children's classics. Her first short story, "The Courtesy," appeared in St. Nicholas, a children's magazine, and won her second place in a monthly contest. Finding Iowa too dull for a woman with an agenda, she ventured to NYC and landed a job with an icon in publishing, Edward Stratemeyer. Fortune Magazine said of Stratemeyer in 1934, "As oil and gas has its Rockefeller, literature has its Stratemeyer."
     Stratemeyer published The Bobbsey Twins and The Hardy Boys and famously hired ghost writers for a flat monthly fee. Benson's pen name remained a mystery until the 1970s when researchers discovered Benson was the Oz behind the curtain. During the Great Depression and WWII, parents were candid with their children, according to Fisher's article, and didn't hide life's gravities. Enter Nancy Drew, a new kind of heroine for a new age of young girls. Stratemeyer penned a three-page outline for Benson and depicted her as an "up-to-date American girl at her best—bright, clever, resourceful, and full of energy."

TREATED AS AN EQUAL

     In 1973, Benson wrote an essay about her famous heroine, stating Nancy was treated as an equal by her father and by many in law enforcement and she never gave up when the going got tough. Her spirit struck a chord. Nancy Drew personified "the dream image which exists within most teenagers," Benson said. According to Fisher's article, this 1930s teen remained culturally relevant for more than 80 years, even as young women's roles changed dramatically. Mothers and grandmothers passed the books down to their daughters. "Women still tell me how they identified with Nancy Drew and that Nancy Drew gave them confidence to be whatever they wanted to be," Benson told an interviewer in 1999.


MAYA CONNECTION

     But Benson, perhaps, was her own best role model for the very Nancy Drew we all came to love. She trained as a pilot in the 1960s. Traveling solo, she flew down to Guatemala to view ancient Maya pyramid sites. She traipsed through crocodile-infested rivers and hacked her way through jungles with a machete. In a particularly harrowing very Nancy Drew like experience, she was even locked inside a room in Guatemala by locals who thought she knew too much about criminal activity in their town. Channeling Nancy, she overpowered one of her captors and escaped. "Like any good sleuth," Fisher goes on to explain, "she later returned to Guatemala to learn more about what had happened to her."

THE SMITHSONIAN

     In the 1990s, twenty years after dedicated Nancy Drew lovers had discovered Keene's real name and ID'd Mildred Wirt Benson as Drew's creator, Benson donated a series of papers she'd written about her heroine, along with her trusty Underwood typewriter used for creating Nancy, to the Smithsonian where it sits to this day. And finally, the mystery author got public credit in her native Iowa in 1993 when the University of Iowa had a Nancy Drew Conference. That same year, she was named Person of the Week by ABC's Peter Jennings.

     Asked later if she would ever give up writing, Benson said, "The undertaker will have to pry me away from my typewriter." That's pretty much what happened. At 96, in 2002, she was sitting at her trusty Underwood when she died.

WHY DID FRIDA KAHLO BECOME AN ICON?

      My introduction to Frida came through an arts lecture given by a Kahlo authority whose name I no longer recall. I was writing for an indie newspaper in a California college town and that was my feature assignment for the week. The lecture included a slide show of Kahlo’s works. Needless to say I was intrigued, mesmerized—at times startled—by her work. I loved the colors, her style, the woman (Frida) as center of the universe. Two words described her—No fear.

MEXICO CONNECTION

     And then there was the Mexico connection: Her flamboyant, indigenous clothing, her raven hair parted in the middle, either pulled back in a tight bun or gloriously wild, the artsy jewelry. She appealed to me in all her gutsy wonder. I was not alone. She appealed to everyone, though long had she lived in her husband and mentor’s shadow. By the 1970s, Frida was breaking out and breaking the mold. She was becoming, dare I say it, as popular as her famous husband, painter, muralist and revolutionary, Diego Rivera.

PRESENTING FRIDA

Frida became an icon because the world was finally ready for her. A strong woman who stood equally alongside an alpha male, years his junior, but as powerful in her way as he was in his. Rivera had encouraged her, mentored her in her painting. A star was born. Did she overshadow her husband? Who can determine which painter held more power? That so many Kahlo paintings were self-portraits, that in itself was a symbol of a different spirit. She had been through hell and back (maybe Never back) beginning with suffering through polio and at eighteen, being hideously injured in a trolley/bus accident in Mexico City. She wore a metal body brace her entire life. Her poor tortured frame would not allow her fractured body to push out a baby. And each time she became pregnant, not only did it not come to full term but her body suffered immeasurably due to the additional pressure on her lower torso. That didn’t stop her from portraying her suffering in her artwork, for all the world to see. In a way, suffering was the gateway to her art.

 FRIDA AS ARTIST

Though she never carried a child full term, as an artist – she pressed on. Years later, in my bookstore in Puerto Morelos, Mexico, her paintings hung front and center on the walls. My favorite was Frida in the jungle with the monkeys. Love you, Frida. You have been an icon for decades. Not only because of your over-sized talent but also because of your staunch independence, your genius, your anarchistic politics, your free spirit, your shock value, and your bravery. And because you resonated with a spirit that became a universal spirit. Thank you for the beauty and the pain you portrayed and were not afraid to share. We love you Frida.

If you enjoyed this blog, check out my memoir Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, available on Amazon. Also available on Amazon, books one and two in my narco noir thriller trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown. Also see my journalistic overview of the Maya 2012 calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy. www.jeaninekitchel.com

Alma Reed and Felipe Carrillo Puerto: Tragic Romance of the Yucatán

     Felipe Carrillo Puerto, Yucatan’s progressive governor of the Yucatan, and San Francisco journalist Alma Reed are two names forever linked to Yucatan history.  Their romance fueled pages in newspapers on both sides of the border, but the unlikely outcome of their very public romance enlisted all the elements of Greek tragedy.

            Reed was born in San Francisco and became one of the city’s first women reporters.  An advocate for the poor, Reed assisted a Mexican family in commuting the death sentence of their 17-yer old son in 1921.  The story was picked up by the Mexican press and due to heightened publicity, Mexico President Alvero Obregon invited Reed to visit his country.

ENTER EDWARD THOMPSON

     As a stringer correspondent, she reported for The New York Times and was sent to meet Edward Thompson, the leading archeologist excavating Chichen Itza.  During the visit, Reed met Felipe Carrillo Puerto, dynamic governor of the State of Yucatan.

     Carrillo had commissioned a road to be built from Merida to Chichen Itza, opening the budding archeological site to both tourists and scientists.  To commemorate the event, he’d organized a welcome ceremony inviting North American journalists and archeologists.

UXMAL AND CARRILLO

     At the ruins, Reed interviewed the famed Thompson who had gone to Yucatan specifically to excavate Chichen Itza. Thompson took a liking to Reed and divulged he had in fact dredged Chichen Itza’s sacred cenote, garnering gold and jade jewelry and ornaments he’d taken from the sacrificial victims. Astonished by the enormity of Thompson’s admission, like the true-born paparrizis she was, Reed asked Thompson to sign a confession, which he did.

            After Chichen Itza, the assembled entourage went on to Uxmal.  During this leg of the journey Reed and Carrillo got acquainted.  Reed was fascinated with the charismatic Carrillo who had been called both a Bolshevik and a Marxist for his sweeping reforms.

     In her interview with the governor, Carrillo explained Yucatan had been inhabited by a handful of powerful families dating back to 1542 when Merida was founded. These wealthy landowners were basically slave masters, and notorious for their cruel treatment of the Maya.

REVOLUTIONARY IN THE MAKING

            In 1910 Carrillo had fought alongside Emiliano Zapata in Central Mexico. From their association he took Zapata’s battle cry, Tierra y Liberdad, (land and liberty) for his own.  Back in Yucatan, Carrillo claimed part Maya, part Creole heritage and began his reforms by setting up feminist leagues in Merida that legalized birth control and the first family planning clinics in the western hemisphere. As governor he seized uncultivated land from powerful hacendados and distributed it to the Maya, stating it was their birthright. He built schools. He reformed the prison system.

            No small wonder Reed named him the Abraham Lincoln of Mexico.  As a liberal she agreed with his reforms. And besides that, she was smitten.  But as a divorceé and Catholic, she tried to ignore the feelings she was developing for the married father of four.  She left for the US, vowing never to return, hoping to severe ties in what was becoming amor calido (romance of the steam).

            Two months later, however, The New York Times sent her packing back to Mexico to cover the archeology scandal that involved Edward Thompson and the Chichen Itza cenote.  She had a job to do.

     On her second round in Mexico, both Reed and Carrillo’s feelings couldn’t be ignored.  In the ultimate taboo, Carrillo divorced his wife to become engaged to Reed.  He even had a romantic love song composed for her, still popular today, La Peregrina (The Pilgrim).

     It seemed a match made in heaven.  The two idealists prepared for their wedding that would take place in San Francisco.  Reed hastened back to the U.S. to make arrangements before her permanent move to Mexico.

SEND LAWYERS, GUNS AND MONEY

     Shortly after her departure to the US, however, another revolution seemed imminent.  Fighting had broken out in the Yucatan, and henequen planters and hacendados were trying to overthrow Carrillo.  President Obregon’s right hand man, de la Huerta, was opposing him and because Carrillo backed Obregon, he was at risk.  Carrillo was forced to find guns to fight both the planters and de la Huerta’s forces.  And to make matters worse, he now had a $250,000 reward on his head.

     To secure the guns and ammunition they would need to do battle, Carrillo went by night to the Progreso coast with three brothers and six friends as guards.  Just as they waded out to the launch that would take them to New Orleans where they’d acquire firearms for their revolution, a Navy captain signaled to soldiers lying in wait on shore.  The soldiers rowed out and captured Carrillo who told his small group not to fight, but to go peacefully.

     De la Huerta’s forces took them back to Merida, jailed them for the night and planned an arraignment in the morning.  Carrillo refused to make a plea. He was, after all, governor of the state, and refused to recognize a kangaroo court.  He was condemned on Janurary 3, 1924, and taken to Merida Cemetery where he, his brothers and friends were lined up against the wall to await the firing squad.  The first round of volleys was sent over their heads; the soldiers didn’t want to kill them, so fiercely local were the Yucatecans to Carrillo.

            The commander shouted that those soldiers were to be shot, and over the dead bodies of the first soldiers, Carrillo, brothers and friends were executed as they stood with their backs against the cemetery wall.

A MARTYR'S DEATH

     In San Francisco, Alma Reed had been alerted that trouble was at hand. She heard the news shortly afterwards that Carrillo had died in the Yucatan, a martyr’s death,  at 49.

     Reed insisted on returning to Merida to see the spot where Carrillo fell.  She stayed but briefly in the Yucatan, and on arriving back to New York, was sent on an assignment to Carthage to explore ancient ruins.  She would never re-marry. Her reporting life eventually took her back to Mexico where she helped establish the artist José Clemente Orozco.

     One of Reed’s fears was that President Obregon had a hand in killing Carrillo.  He had, after all, assassinated Zapata after luring him to a truce meeting along with Pancho Villa.  Reed thought Carrillo’s radicalism may have aroused opposition from the Mexican president, but she could never prove the link.

            The pueblo of Chan Santa Cruz, south of Tulum, changed its name to honor the Yucatan governor, and now goes by the name Felipe Carrillo Puerto.  Alma Reed died in Mexico City, November, 1966, while undergoing surgery.  She was 77.

Jeanine Kitchel is the author of Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, and the upcoming nonfiction book, Maya 2012 Revealed, Demystifying the Prophecy, and coming in April: Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival.  Contact the author through her website, www.jeaninekitchel.com.

Stephens and Catherwood Take the Maya World: Review of Jungle of Stone

IN 1839 an energetic American writer and a talented British artist, adventurers to the core, braved the jungles of Yucatan, Guatemala and Honduras and became the first English speaking travelers to explore this region originally known only as Maya.

Though a lawyer by profession, John Lloyd Stephens fell hard for archeology after a two-year sabbatical took him to Europe and the Mediterranean in the mid-1830s.  After trekking through deserts and ancient pyramid sites he came away fueled with a desire for more of the same. Simultaneously he discovered he could write and was dubbed “the American traveler” after he penned his first best seller about Egypt’s pyramids, the Nile, Petra and the Holy Land.

British artist Frederick Catherwood gained his footing during the “Egyptomania”

craze that hit London in the 1820s. A bit older than Stephens, he reached Egypt and the Nile in 1823 and discovered he had an uncanny ability to portray ancient monuments and archeological digs with great accuracy. Egypt was the start of an odyssey that in the end would take him to Copán and Palenque, Uxmal, Labna, Chichén Itzá and beyond.

CENTRAL AMERICA BECKONS

Serendipity brought the adventurers together in London, and shortly afterwards.

Stephens received a special ambassadorship to Central America from President Martin Van Buren to negotiate treaties with several Latin America countries.

Stephens immediately contacted Catherwood and asked him to come along for the ride. After political issues were settled, they’d go exploring for ancient ruins.

The duo headed south and after an intense journey through war torn Guatemala and Honduras, Stephens finished what he could of his diplomatic workload. It was time for exploration with their first destination Copán. Spurred on by a letter written to the Spanish king about ancient sites with large stone structures from an explorer named Deigo Garcia de Palacio three hundred years earlier, Stephens and Catherwood followed the trail of Central American patriot Colonel Juan Galindo. Galindo had discovered the archived letter and traveled to both Palenque and Copán in 1834. Stephens and Catherwood would arrive five years later after pouring over sketchy site coordinates from Galindo’s report made to higher-ups.

ADVANCED CIVILIZATION

Galindo believed whoever built these stone monuments had been an advanced civilization, and the artisans who created the works did so without iron tools. The monuments were covered in hieroglyphics and he conceived it was phonetic writing, which proved accurate, though it would take more than a hundred years to confirm his theory. He believed the site was the seat of a great power, a large population and a people advanced in the arts. The site had a grand plaza that could compete with the coloseum of Rome, he said. He emphasized that local inhabitants had little knowledge of the site’s history. And unbelievably, the account that pushed Galindo to explore Copán had accumulated dust in the archives of a Spanish court for more than three centuries. This mysterious and intriguing report was the reason Stephens and Catherwood found themselves in the depths of a Honduran jungle.

Because terrain in southern Mexico, western Guatemala and Honduras is a thick tangle of vegetation filled with rain forests and swamps, parts of the land were a mystery even to the Maya who lived there. Locals had no explanation for the stone blocks and imposing structures and knew nothing of their creators. So dense was the jungle that Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés passed within one hundred miles of Palenque in the early 1500s, never learning how near he was to a massive pyramid site. (The classic Maya collapse occurred around 900 AD).

WHERE DID THEY COME FROM?

Galindo’s revolutionary view of an ancient sophisticated civilization with no ties to their Northern European brethren fell on deaf ears. Early explorers of Palenque in 1787 insisted it had classical Roman and Greek influences, speculating somehow one of these cultures had crossed the Atlantic, conquered the native locals, built the structures, never to be seen again. Another explorer said it had to be the work of the Lost Tribe of Israel’s doing, underscoring how hesitant each and every western explorer who came in contact with the Maya was to give an advanced indigenous culture its due. 

These discoveries continued to baffle western intellects and religious scholars alike. The existence of vast sophisticated cities hidden in the middle of Central American jungles threatened the biblical order of the known world. Where did these people come from and how old were their cities? One explorer, a crazy outlier named “Count” Jean-Frederic Maximilien de Waldeck, made an accidentally correct claim when he stated Uxmal was at least one thousand years old, basing his claim on the concentric tree circles he counted from a tree that implanted itself in the building’s entryway after it was already in ruins.

It would take Stephens and Catherwood, seasoned with their old world explorations, to examine the evidence at the sites and forge a new, correct narrative.

CAPTURING COPÁN’S ESSENCE

Though Stephens’ written descriptions of the sites were detailed and informative, it was Catherwood’s otherworldly sketches that would forever change the way the world viewed the mysterious, previously unknown Maya culture. On their first week at Copán, Catherwood would toss out countless attempts at capturing the Maya stelae (stones with hieroglyphs) that he found. At first his western mind could simply not contemplate, then draw, what he was seeing. To him, a western European, the gigantic Copán sculptures, some four to five meters high, were so profoundly different than the antiquities of the mideast that he had a difficult time rendering them. The two veteran travelers who had toured the wonders of Egypt knew they were in the cross hairs of an incredibly advanced civilization and they were now on “new ground” as Stephens wrote later in Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán, his best seller about the Maya world.

To capture the soul of the sculptures and to assist himself in so doing, Catherwood took photos with his Camera Lucida, the precursor to a modern camera, then from those drawings, he attempted to re-draw what he saw.  Though it took him many tries, a slight shift in his perspective broke through and with powerful persistence, he finally got it right. He filled page after page with drawings rich in detail of the unfathomable hieroglyphics, monuments, sculptings. His drawings would prove so accurate that long into the future, archeologists would be able to read them when they finally broke the Maya code in 1976 at the famous Palenque Round Table.

But at the time, to convince an uncertain world of what they were seeing, it would take not only the stark beauty of Catherwood’s detailed drawings to put Copán, Palenque and other Maya sites on the map, it would also take Stephens’ energetic and romantic prose to seal the deal.

Copán and Palenque were just the beginning of Stephens and Catherwood’s Maya explorations. They would go on to view forty-four sites in all, many detailed in Jungle of Stone. The struggles they endured to bring this discovery to the world hit them hard. Both were forever plagued by side effects of malaria and other diseases contracted while chasing pyramids.

CATHERWOOD’S SKETCHES

Even if you’re not in the mood for a long read, Frederick Catherwood’s incredible sketches shown in the book, many in color, make Jungle of Stone worthwhile. It’s available at Alma Libre Bookstore in Puerto Morelos, 360 pesos.

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Jeanine Kitchel, author of Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, has a new novel out this April, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival.

Notes From Paradise: Trouble in Paradise

Notes From Paradise: Trouble in Paradise  Mellow out, you're in Mexico!

ISLA AND ME

     

Paul and Me at No Name Restaurant on Isla Mujeres

Waking at Maria's on Isla Mujeres was paradise personified. Nestled in a low comfortable bed in the corner of the rustic stucco room, I stretched and took in the slightly musty smells that accompanied a Mexico vacation. A thick branch of fuchsia-colored bougainvillea spilled across the screened window, leaving way for a clear view of the Caribbean. I heard waves lapping on the shore. Maybe this was perfection personified. Time to greet the day and find out. I crawled out of bed.

A few hours later Paul and I were hopping out of a taxi onto the main malecon of Isla right across from the No Name restaurant. It was 11 a.m. and the streets were quiet except for a few vendors who had set up their wares, mostly fruit and vegetables. Ivory colored jicama with a bright dash of chili pepper was arranged on one cart. Too early for that. Another vendor sold bunches of small ripe bananas tied with rope. Next to the banana vendor, a faded blue cart displayed cups of mangoes sliced like tropical flowers, gorgeous and edible. The owner, sitting on a stool next to her cart, smiled as she peeled more sticky fruit into an art form all its own. I paused.

     "Mango, por favor?"

     "Cinco pesos."

     "Gracias." I said as I dug the coin from my bolsa and handed it over. "Que bonita dia!" What a lovely day.

     "Si, por supuesto," she answered.  "Where are you from?"

     "San Francisco, California."

     "Aaah, California!" she smiled big. "I know someone from California. I was in a movie. The people in the movie, they were from California."

     Her conversation strained the bounds of my newly acquired adult ed Spanish. Slowly I put her words in comprehensive order. The struggle was worth it. We were talking—in Spanish!  Did she say ciné?  Aka movie?

     "Of course!  Against All Odds!  This was that street, the street Jeff Bridges went up to ask if anyone had seen the woman he was searching for on that small island.  This island! And wait a minute!

     "Paul!  I think this woman is the one from Against All Odds!"

     "Yes, yes," she said, now beaming a huge smile my way.  "Jeff Bridges, movie, me!"

     "You're famous!  Famosa!"

      She started laughing and Paul and I broke into laughter, too.  "It's her," he agreed.  "We're right where they filmed the movie."

     Against All Odds, filmed in three Mexico locations--Isla Mujeres, Tulum and Chichen Itza--had been a catalyst for our Mexican sojourn.  We'd never seen water that color of turquoise, nor pyramids of any kind and the sultry movie with Bridges and Rachel Ward had catapulted us across the border.

     After saying our good byes with a few more exclamations on this mujera's fame, we walked to the plaza and the back down to the malecon.  Today we'd decided to go to the mainland.  We boarded the ferry for Cancun.

     Hours later after lunching at an outdoor cafe and shopping at Mercado 23 for silver and trinkets we ventured into the hotel zone to go to dinner on a splurge.  Someone had recommended a hotel-restaurant on the beach with great food and we thought a day and a dinner in Cancun would be fun.  The restaurant had all the amenities all right.  Beachside, low lights, candles. But where was dinner?  Talk about the slow food movement.  This one had crawled to a stop.  After our second request to the waiter about our dinners, we started to panic, slightly.

     "What time is the last ferry?" I asked Paul.

     "At 10."

     "Uh oh.  I'm beginning to wonder if we'll make it."

     "Let me call the waiter over and ask him to bring the check when he brings our dinner, so we can dash out of here."

     At 9:30 p.m. after gulping a delicious fish dinner, with our margarita high slowly fading into oblivion, we bolted out of the restaurant and into the arms of a waiting taxi driver.

     "Puerto Juarez, the dock!"

     As we sped off I caught sight of our waiter at the door, waving good bye.

     The trip to Puerto Juarez was longer than we thought, much longer.

     "We'll never make the ferry," I groaned, now desperately nervous.

     "You're probably right."

     As we pulled up at the dock, madly throwing pesos at the driver, Paul, first out of the cab, spotted what we didn't want to see.  "Oh, no!  It's already left!"

     "Oh, darn!  No.  No.  No!  Now what?" I cried.

     "We'll have to find a hotel here in Puerto Juarez," Paul said.

     I stomped around the dock's parking lot in a huff.  "God, could they have been any slower at the restaurant?  What are we going to do?  This place is a total dive!"

     "It's hotel time.  We've gotta go look for one.  Now."

     That brought me to my senses.  Forget about the warm breeze, the lapping water, the backside of our departing ferry now far in the distance.  It just sunk in; we had to find a hotel in this hood.  Yuck.  These were the early days, and Puerto Juarez hadn't gone through its beautification process yet.  Hardly.  Its most outstanding feature was the steely facade of a military base on the outskirts of town; nothing looked like a tourist mecca here.  Nothing at all.

     I dragged myself back to the pot-holed street and looked both ways.  About a block farther down the road I spotted a sign for a hotel.  As we approached I could tell from the looks of it this was not the Ritz.  Very unappealing.  Very unappealing, indeed.

     "A room," I choked looking at the hotel clerk. "How much per night?"

     "Thirty pesos."

     Oh great, three dollars.  "Can we see it, please?"

     As the clerk led us down a dilapidated, unlit walkway, around a towering banyan tree to a concrete building with a dented door, I knew that paradise wasn't waiting for me inside.  As he turned the key into an ancient lock and the door creaked open, the familiar tantalizing odor of bug spray wafted across the threshold.

     "We'll take it," Paul gagged, giving me the what can we do look as he turned his face away from the smell.  He was right.  In Puerto Juarez it was pretty much lights out by this time of night.

     We followed the clerk back to the office like dead men walking and shelled out thirty pesos.  On retrieving the key I asked if there was a place nearby to get a cold drink.

     "There's a cantina across the street."

     "How late are they open?" I asked.

     "Til midnight but we close the office here at 11 p.m.  If you stay out later, just ring the bell and I'll come let you in.  After you leave I'll close the gate behind you."

     We pushed open the authoritative gate, hearing the click of the lock behind us as we sauntered outside the hotel walls, about two meters high, with the de rigeure broken bottle top finish on top--definitely not a style choice--and wandered into the town's lone cantina.

     We each ordered a Pacifico.  One was all we could take.  It was nearing 11 and we didn't want to miss another deadline, not two in one day, even though we were on Mexican time.  But the thought of staying in that grungy hotel room with eau de DDT wafting about, well, we just couldn't go back too soon to that before we were sleepy enough to pass out.

     Good as his word, gate shut.  Paul was right behind me.  I turned the iron latch--it wasn't 11 yet--and nothing.  What?  I turned the latch again and pushed.  Nothing!

     "Oh, no.  Locked out.  Now we're locked out!"

     "He said to ring him," Paul, ever in control, responded.  Now he was turning and pushing the latch, too.

     "Where's the bell?  Is that it?  Toca, with the arrow pointing to it?  What a weird way to say ring.  Toca means take.  Take the bell?"

     "Just ring it already," Paul said.  Language class was over.

     "Toca, toca, toca," I said each time I pushed it.  "I don't hear anything.  Have we been gone that long?"

     "Try again."

     I pushed til my index finger went numb.  "Now we have a three dollar hotel room and no way to get into it! What are we going to do?"

     "Let me think a minute.  Over there.  At the end of the wall.  See where there's no broken bottles?

     "Yeah, what about it?" I asked, thinking bad thoughts.

     "I think it's time for a reverse jail break."

     "Don't be ridiculous!  You could never climb over that wall!" I said.  Who did he think he was?
Spiderman?

     "Not me, Juanitia," he smiled at me charmingly.  "Tu."

     "Me?" I choked, shocked.

     "But I'm in a skirt."

     "I promise I won't look."

     "Oh, shut up, " I said, realizing he was right.  That was the only way.  All hands on deck. "Okay."

     In the dim light of a lone street lamp we made our attack at the far end of the hotel wall.  Good thing it was dark out, I noted.  I wouldn't want to be caught dead climbing into this dive.

     Paul bent over and laced his palms together providing me a step up so I could then reach the one spot on the wall without broken glass.  I was just at the point of almost heaving myself over when I heard him gasp.  What the heck?

     "Buenos noches."

     Buenos noches?  Who could he be talking to?  In his conversation mode he'd backed away from his helping me over the wall stance and I was dangling unbecomingly about six feet above ground, with my skirt moving up my backside rapidly, not a fashion choice.

     I twisted to the side, no easy feat, and looked down on a Mexico policia.  Police!

     "What are you doing?" he asked.

     Paul:  "Helping her over the wall.  We're locked out, but we have a key, see?" He held up the church key that would open our room inside the gated, walled compound, from which we were firmly locked out.

     "Why not just ring the bell?"

     "Toca el timbre?" I asked.  He gazed up at me.  Could he see up my skirt?  I wondered.

     "Si, toca el timbre."

     "Locked out."

     "I'll try," the policia said.  Toca, toca, toca.  We waited.  All three of us.  Two by land, one by air.

     "They are asleep," he said matter of factly.  "It is late."

      That it was.  "But," he said with what I am sure must have been a smile on his face, "I'll help you."

     "How?" Paul asked.  "Call them?  Do you have their number?" as he scanned the sign for the name of the hotel. Hotel Fizal?  How in the world did they come up with that?

     "No, no.  We both push her."

     So with my bottom now being gently pushed by Paul and a gendarme, my skirt slowly hiking up in an unladylike manner, I made my way up and over Hotel Fizal's two meter wall.  I started to laugh as I touched dirt on the other side.

     "I'm in!" I yelled, feeling like one of the Dirty Dozen.

     As I started to walk down to the gate and let Paul in, I heard him speaking to the policia.  "Mil gracias, and buenos noches to you, too."