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| Holiday Season, Baja Style |
 By Jaqueline Garner
STAFF WRITER
Holidays can be a lonely time anywhere if you are single, and even if you are not, they can be lonely here in Baja Norte, not just for Gringos but for vast numbers of our Mexican neighbors as well. I was born in San Diego, and since my twenties, that made me a real rarity. California has been populated for decades by tourists who came and stayed, students who came and stayed, dustbowlers from the ‘30’s who came and stayed, and countless “California Dreamers” who came for the weather or to be discovered – and stayed. In fact, many of us natives have been priced out of our birthplace, sold our homes during a boom, and moved to some other places following some other dream (and many returned, because they just couldn’t stay away).
So it is in Northern Baja. People from all over Mexico come North for economic opportunity – and not just to cross the border, either. Many of these are single men, or husbands and fathers who leave their families behind to participate in the wealth of Tijuana. Many bring their families up later, and many of those return to what turns out to be a more fulfilling life farther south. But whether single or in families, wealthy Baja is the place to go—to stay, or to risk the increasingly difficult trip across La Linea (the drug war aside, illegal immigration has conspicuously decreased due to the scarcity of employment opportunities on the other side).
These are rough tough days up North, with official unemployment figures at 10% meaning actual unemployment is much more. I’ve even recently met Mexican Americans who left California because of the economic crisis and come here to start a business – almost as many as business owners with prime locations catering to tourist who have been conspicuously absent, are thinking of moving anywhere else for economic opportunity. But no matter how many booms and busts we frontererizos have gone through, this one has hit particularly hard here – and just about everywhere else in the world, too. I call it “California fever gone global”. The lucky ones cling to their jobs or good pensions, and everyone else, prays.
Mexicans from all over have always gone home for the holidays, which mean large numbers generally leave here for wherever home really is. Campo Torres is often deserted by Gringos gone home to where their grown children and their families live. And since Thanksgiving is not a Mexican holiday, those who stay flood to the restaurants or each other’s homes for their essential turkey consumption with all the trimmings. I’ve spent many Thanksgivings alone with my turkey until the weekend, at least Sunday, with my Mexican Significant Other home to share the feast all day.Yet so many Mexicans and Mexican Americans have retired here with their pensions, that Thanksgiving has become a part of their lives here—turkey and all that comes with it just can’t be ignored because of a measly few miles between them and the border!
All over Ensenada and Rosarito and especially Tijuana are families who usually pass the whole month of December all the way to Dia de Los Tres Reyes Magos (Three Kings’ Day, Jan. 6) with their whole extended families-- wherever in Mexico. Many feel relatively stranded in this strange land with American Santas and Christmas canes taking the place of their usual festivities. But however rare up here, Posadas do take place in some neighborhoods, as there are always some enterprising women to make sure they do, usually with designated houses, rather than the more traditional everybody’s house.
Just as Halloween (“tricky tricky haloweenie”) has largely usurped Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). But no matter how much the American influence has intruded, the cemeteries are still full of gold chrysanthemums and families, and sugar glittered skulls on Day of the Dead, though most of the best reminders of these festivities are found in the curio shops for tourists—the dancing skeletons
on all their miniature stages, coming to life during this time which, for the pagans of Europe, is the time when the dead are most in tune with those of us still alive.
But even if Christmas is not as wonderful here as in Mexico City--where lights fill every street and every colonia has Dia de Reyes toy stands with huge figures all in lights and endless toys and churches filled with Nativities and parties lasting long into each night—Navidad (Christmas) and Año Nuevo (New Year’s) still are celebrated with gusto by every family, and lonely solteros gather together to share tequila through the night. (Even Mexico City is virtually deserted and smogless since so many Mexicans from other parts of Mexico go back to their homes and whole factories are closed for weeks!) But there’s still plenty of people left to party! And house after house has salsa and cumbia music streaming out and windows filled with festive dancers enjoying themselves inside.
And even if evangelical Christianity here in Northern Baja has for many people taken the place of the traditional Roman Catholicism and all of its glorious ritual, exchanging it for group singing in simple non-decorated churches where enthusiastic hand shaking and Bible reading keep the spirit alive, nobody gives up Christmas. Both Christmas and New Years are exhausting if wonderful, for this frail Gringa. They don’t even start until after dark on Christmas and New Year’s Eve. The family becomes a vast warm assembly line around stacks of dried corn husks, large pots of chicken, beef and pork in rich stews, and mounds of massa—the best, made with plenty of ground fresh corn. They spend all night making tamales, sometimes also roasting turkeys, either in ovens or holes dug in the ground with plenty of wood fuel inside. Huge pots of apple cinnamon “punch” cook on the stove. Children run around everywhere, and there is music, and dancing, and just plain shivering and shooting the breeze all night long. At some point or another they’ll raise a piñata and let the kids loose to go at it with the littlest ones getting a little help from their (usually competitive) older siblings or parent to guide the sticks to their candy-filled goal. And of course, there is the ever present rostro, a round or long sweet bread always containing more than just one plastic baby Jesus, in a gracious Mexican spirit of fairness making enough kids winners, so nobody ever feels really left out.
Then, usually around 2 or 3 a.m., the tamales and turkey and candied yams and regional specialties (how lucky you are if your family makes stuffed green chiles with pomegranates!) will be consumed as the partying progresses, until, around dawn, everyone konks. Not much happens on Christmas Day.
Everyone’s asleep all over the house, even cuddled outside.
Then, in the late afternoon (and presents fit into this all, somewhere during the night of the “pachanga”), still drowsy women start cleaning up, more tamales are eaten, some relatives go home and others stay for a few more days, or even a couple of weeks.
The lucky ones are the rare ones whose whole families live here in Northern Baja. But for most, there’s plenty of melancholy about who couldn’t make it, or how we couldn’t make it there this year, as well as plenty of gratitude for all the family who did make it and are together, all the kids and the babies and
newlyweds and grampas and gramas, each one of whom gets hugs and kisses and time together with each and everyone else, including a few teen friends who inevitably stop by to participate for a while in their friends’ Navidad and maybe take them home with them for a while, as plenty of warm bodies are an absolute must and totally welcomed on these cold festive winter nights!
Regardless of your wealth or poverty, the same scene plays out in every Mexican family. I always feel so guilty if I have to sneak off to bed and keep warm while the night is still just starting up (it’s not that I want to leave, I insist, it’s my bones!). But even if you can’t make it through the whole night, you still feel so honored and happy to be included in a Mexican all night freezing cold holiday Pachanga. But don’t worry –there are always couches and beds and chairs full of sleeping children who couldn’t make it past the tamale eating stage-- though some are still running around and dancing when even the adults have finally given themselves over to sleep. No problema – they just sleep the next day.
So wherever you spend the holidays, remember, they’re all universal celebrations, first, of the harvest, and then, of the birth of new light coming back to the earth. They are celebrated precisely because we need these life-refreshing gatherings—times to give to each other, to give to the poor, and to give thanks for new hope during these darkest of days.
And even if you’re bed-ridden and all alone, you can enjoy the celebrations around the world via cable or satellite tv!
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