Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

are we there yet? testimonial literature 327
month and if we were one or two days late we had to pay interest on the
interest. He is a millionaire today and we helped him get there.
Did you notice anything different about the tortillas today? Last night
the corn grinder in the village broke and I had to take the nixtamal (Nahuatl
for corn soaked in water and limestone prior to grinding) to Tepoztlán on
the fi rst bus to have it ground. They taste the same as always but their texture
is different and they are sticking to the grill. Whenever our village corn
grinding machine breaks down we usually buy tortillas in Tepoztlán instead
of taking nixtamal there because they replace our good white corn with
cheap yellow; the taste is nowhere equal. So, it’s better just to buy tortillas!
Enough of us went in this morning so we could watch the grinders to make
sure they did not switch the corn. There was a time when all of the women
of the village ground their own corn on their metates but nowadays we use
the metate only in the fi nal preparation of the corn dough into tortillas.
Also, all women used to make their tortillas by hand. Few can do that today.
We use these tortilla presses that take only a few seconds. The taste is the
same only the noise is different. I can remember when I was a little girl I
would wake up every morning to the sound of women patting corn dough
into tortillas. And when there were several women in the kitchen doing it
together, it sounded like soft applause.
Nowadays all you hear coming from the houses is the morning television
news and weather or the sound of blenders making juice. Nature’s sounds
are much softer than machine noises and are usually lost. Only when there
is a real bad thunderstorm does Nature win over machines. And you can’t
turn Nature off like you can a machine. [. . .]
Chapter IX. Mother [. . .]
The teachers and the schoolbooks create the impression that every soldier
was a hero. Nobody pays any attention to the poor people who were the ones
who suffered the most. Father still says that the motivation for the Revolution
was the vengeance of one man upon another. The whole country was set
on fi re and all sorts of criminals and bandits or anyone else with a gun joined
the fi ghting and called himself a revolutionary. One by one they eliminated
each other until exhaustion set in. There were no winners in the end.
Mexico lost the Mexican Revolution.—Celsa
San Antonio has achieved a lot since the Revolution but it was more a
question of doing it ourselves or doing it in spite of the Revolution. Santa