Reading from Mexico to Berlin

We walked into the arrivals hall at Oaxaca airport and we were greeted by my uncle-in-law Tom and his driver Lupe, a Zapotec-Mexican man who had a big smile and cold bottled water for us. As we rolled out onto the highway northwards, Tom started to tell us about how this highway was once blockaded by the teacher’s union. They put up barricades throughout the city and shut off the airport at some point. When we asked him what their demands were, he said something about the teachers rejecting some reforms, wanting to pass their jobs on to family members when they retired.

We passed a Walmart and Tom told us about the part of town with American chains like this that everybody called Gringolandia. There was a sizeable population of retired or semi-retired gringos who appreciated the big box stores. We stopped at the Zócalo to get lunch. Facing onto the square is a Santander bank building painted with the same photogenically pastel colours as the rest of the historic centre. A scorch mark nearly obscures the company logo above the main entrance from when a fire once burned inside.

I was ignorant of most of Mexico’s history and in particular of the radical activism of the unions in Oaxaca as recently as 2006, when Section 22 of the teacher’s union responded to a deadly police shooting at a demonstration by staging a statewide uprising. They called on the governor to resign, they barricaded the highways, blockaded the airport. They formed the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO). Their demands were about proper funding for education. In the end, they were violently put down by federal forces that flew in to deal with them.

We were dropped off in the hills overlooking the city. Our accommodation was in a scruffy compound on eight or so acres of land, with houses scattered around it. They were an animal sanctuary too. A dozen dogs came rushing out to jump on us and wiry women with southern accents called them off.

On the bookshelf of our casita, I found The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins, which has been on my list for years. It turns out the community were mostly leftist retirees who moved south of the border with some mixture of disgust with their motherland as it sank into the Trump decade. The financial expediency of stretching their retirement money further, the weather, they helped too. They’d lost a few dear friends in the past few years, a number of them to the COVID-19 pandemic. The occasional right-wing anti-vaxxers living in the hills were kept at a safe distance and were not invited to the parties where they’d feast and drink their homemade mezcal.

The reading was good. I had hours in the back of Lupe’s car between craft villages out in the valleys around Oaxaca. Somewhere I picked up Oliver Sacks’s Oaxaca Journal. Apparently he’s a fern obsessive and came here with an expedition of amateur botanists. Sometimes I’d look up from the book and notice we were rolling through the place he’d just mentioned. When I moved onto The Jakarta Method, it still felt as though I was in the neighbourhood. Dictator after dictator linked up with the Americans to crunch the leftists under their boots.

Walking backward into the past, I got to Guatemala in 1954, whose president made the fatal mistake of clashing with the United Fruit Company and got overthrown for it. The country on Mexico’s southern border descended into decades of dictator overthrowing dictator. The civil war burned for 35 years and managed to fit in a genocide of the Mayan people. Peace accords were signed in 1996.

Tarantula is the memoir of a Guatemalan man who recalls one summer of his childhood that he spent in a Jewish summer camp in the rainforest. The camp is run by a Zionist fanatic who forces the children to reenact the privations of the victims of the holocaust, to prepare them, so that they can understand what they’re up against, what they should expect from the gentile world. When the boy runs away from camp, he briefly finds himself in the company of guerrilla fighters. The civil war is still going on. The adult protagonist tracks down the camp director who is now living amongst the enemy, in Berlin. There is a locking of horns as the two meet. The director asks him, how does it feel to be among the enemy?

By the time I was reading You Are The Führer’s Unrequited Love, a postmodern biography of the Nazi architect, Albert Speer, we were sitting in the departures lounge in Mexico City airport. They wrapped a luggage tag around the handle of our suitcase, MEX - MAD - BER and sent it down the conveyor. Then I sat back down and read about the guide and the architect’s plans for the Reich Chancellery, for all Germania. I wondered about the historical resonance of the setting around me, of the ratlines used to traffic war criminals into Latin America to escape Nuremberg and the Spandau ballet¹, of the Mossad teams who came through to make sure it wouldn’t be so easy.

On the way to Mexico we were waylaid by striking Lufthansa cabin crew and redirected via Istanbul. I’d seen the bridge over the Bosphorus blinking in the night on final descent. With the time and space confusion only jet travel can give you, we’d moonwalked through the faux souk they’ve built in the terminal building there. On the departure boards I read Tashkent and Moscow Sheremetyevo. I felt like I was in a true interzone. On the way home, the transatlantic flight felt brief, the transfer through Madrid airport hot, sticky, but brief. In Berlin, the airport was as haunted and library-like as ever.