Tolimán

The journey begins in Toliman, a small town tucked in the folds of the Sierra Madre. Aged eight, she used to trundle down the hill to the town plaza with a multi-coloured shawl and a bagful of avocados and chiles from her parents’ garden. The surrounding mountains are veined with minerals – silver, opals and topaz.

Turquoise pendant – deseo collection

It only seems appropriate therefore, that after a decade based in England, Gicela (Morales) now has her own fashion jewellery business.  

With typically determined zeal and even more soul and business savvy, she is now into her second year selling .925 silver jewellery handcrafted in Mexico. 

The venture started off small – in the cupboard under the stairs no less. Gicela was heavily pregnant with our second daughter Alice. Nelly was being whisked back and forth from the village nursery.

Two heads are better than one; early on, my sister Sue joined Gicela. Together, thanks to the appeal of the designs, they are building a thriving jewellery business.

“I do all the sourcing myself,” she is fond of telling me. Indeed, all the jewellery is sourced from Zacatecas and Taxco, home to Mexico’s finest silversmiths.

The pieces are in a multiplicity of styles – made up from semi-precious stones and freshwater pearls.

Of course, Gicela only wears her own stuff: “I’m passionate about it” she says.

The glossies have been awash with turquoise this summer and among my favourites of the big sellers is a chunky silver pendant set with turquoise (pictured above).

If you’ve been inspired by the Frida Kahlo exhibition at Tate Modern, pieces like this are downright perfect for setting off those bold print and world traveller ethnic skirts and shawls that seem to be ‘in’ this summer.

Buy some and make me proud.

For information: www.deseo.co.uk; 01934 877325

Over the holidays, I was interested to read Claire Marshall’s BBC report that in Mexico, producers are warning that pulque is in danger of extinction.

This is certainly borne out by Don Lotter’s excellent column – Pulque: Mexico’s unique and vanishing drink – for NewFarm.org, which is well worth a read.

Don Poli milking a maguey

My father-in-law extracts the sap from the flower stalks of the maguey cacti in his garden (pictured left). This he then strings up beneath a mesquite tree to ferment for his own use later on. (Distill pulque and you get a form of mezcal – a close relative of tequila). The result is a drink with a very tart flavour and milky hue. Doña Reyna, a neighbour, also uses pulque as a leavener for making her wonderful bread.

Nevertheless, I think Don is right when he asserts that “most middle class Mexicans turn up their noses at the mention of pulque”, considering it a crude drink that is often abused by campesinos.

The ofrenda at the Casa de la Cultura in Tolimán, Querétaro has been painstakingly assembled on a simply decorated altar.

Candles planted in the flesh of organ pipe cacti infuse the atmosphere with the smoke of copal incense.

The dead come to eat tamales and to drink hot chocolate.

What they take is vapour, or steam, from the food.

They don’t digest it physically: they extract the goodness from what is provided.

At midday on 2 November the dead depart.

Those who have been well received go laden with fruit, mole and good things.

Reyna preparing bread

With Day of the Dead drawing near, my thoughts once again drift back to Toliman. This time, I think of Reyna, the bread maker in the community. She is renowned for her ‘pan de muerto’ (‘bread of the dead’).

Her brieze block house lies just off the main highway into town, set on a rise overlooking the barrio’s dusty dirt soccer pitch. Wary of the dogs, customers make a point of stooping to pick up a loose stone or branch before making the approach up the steep rutted bank to the front door.

Inside, the bread room has one bare bulb and a concrete floor. Her dark and sooty adobe-and-brick bread oven is capable of baking 300 bolillo loaves and sweet pastries each day. She uses the dregs of the pulque pot as leavening for the bread and the results are redolent with pulque’s subtle aroma.

The oven is lit with firewood in the morning and has heated the oven by late afternoon. By 7:00pm, another room will be stacked with warm baked bread fresh from the oven. We would often arrive early and eager. Still unbaked loaves rest on a second rack. We make our selections using the ubiquitous metal tongs, hand over our pesos and head back to the house. Setting some aside for breakfast the next day, we’d sit around the kitchen table and bolt down the rest, occasionally pausing to dunk a piece in our hot chocolate or atole.

“Pedro Limon has been sinfully busy this year. When he wasn’t at his restaurant manager job, he was jogging or lifting weights. In the wee hours, he studied the Bible and watched religious movies. On weekends, it was church and talks with his priest. And in all these months, he didn’t have a single shot of tequila or a date with a girl. If you want to be Jesus during Easter, expect to make sacrifices.” So writes Jennifer Mena, in an excellent article about the Iztapalapa Passion Play published in the Los Angeles Times a couple of years ago: The Role of a Lifetime [Editor: link no longer available].

The scenario has been a little different in the central Mexican town of Toliman. In the ultimate act of self-sacrifice, the presidente municipal has made the role his own, playing Jesus three years’ running and attracting national and local TV coverage. No matter that he neglected to pay utility bills, prompting the state electricity company to ‘shut-down’ street lighting in Toliman for months on end; putting on a royal purple tunic and a real crown of thorns once a year appears enough to resurrect a political career, at least for another twelve months. More photos.