Rhinoceros beetle found dead on his back, apparently unable to right himself. See his horn? (Cheryl Howard/Borderzine.com)

Lessons from the Mimbres

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SAN JUAN, NM – Clothes dancing on clotheslines, rusting tin roofs, propane tanks, trailers scattered around along with crumbling adobes, cattle guards, gates to open and close, more vehicles than people parked at the house, folks who wave (or rather put up a hand from the steering wheel) as they meet you going in the opposite direction. ¡Biénvenidos al valle bajo del Rio Mimbres! I have some lessons to learn here. I took the trash to the dump today. For a little more than five dollars a month, you can put most of your trash in your car or truck and drive about five miles, say hello to Frank, and unload you trash into container one or container two.

A gringo’s tale of two Walmarts

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I have a “gringo” friend here in Rio Rico, Arizona, a town where we both settled to live, which is virtually atop of the United States of America’s border with México. She recently emailed me, “It’s more fun having Latinos as neighbors than, well, almost anybody.”

“So true,” I emailed her back. “Especially so here, where you and I live as minorities. It is so pleasant to read that, you, like me, get such pleasure out of being immersed in a mostly Mexican culture.”

I’m always reminded of that pleasure when I shop the Nogales, Arizona, Walmart which is filled with warmth, smiles, and laughter, as contrasted with shopping the Walmart at the mostly gated and overwhelmingly “gringo” retirement community, Green Valley, Arizona, which is an easy 20-minute drive north via Interstate 19. But what a grim and cold place that cavernous place is to me. Smiles and laughter seem to be forbidden. That’s why I prefer to head, south, on another easy 20-minute drive on Interstate-19 to shop the Nogales’ Walmart. That’s where I rarely leave without learning a new Spanish word, which comes in handy here in my Rio Rico, where 85 percent of my neighbors – most of them far more bilingual than I am – claim Spanish as their native tongue.