Land, Huejotitan And The Internet

One way in which life in Mexico is different from life in the States (at least how I lived it) is that down here my friend The Internet knows far less than my friend The Internet up there. "How can this be?" you ask, "isn't there but one Internet?" ("And what are you doing fooling around with the much dumber Mexican Internet when your true love waits for you up North?") You see, it works like this: down here in Mexico we don't use the Interwebs for every little thing (for a variety of reasons, but principally because most Mexicans don't have a computer.) It's been my experience that we also don't use the telephone much (both because it's costly and because not everyone has a phone.) Instead, we have to go someplace, or many places, to find a person to talk with, or a variety of people, who, by the way, might all tell you something different.

Consider, for example, the GDL craigslist page: sure it exists, but it isn't the well-used resource for finding a job, used cars, roommates, dining room tables, WWII sniper gear, and adult-size Dora costume that, say, one might find in SF. There are other websites, like MercadoLibre, but the culture of finding what you need online just does not exist down here.

And the same goes for information. If you want to find out how to renew your vehicle permit, for example, you may have to drive to the border because everyone down where you live will give you wrong and incomplete information, and even though you beg and ask The Internet to tell you what to do it just keeps giving you the finger and telling you you have to drive all the way to the border to get a straight answer, and then you get to the border and find out that all of the government employees in your own state were telling you the wrong thing and now your whole trip was in vain and you wasted a lot of time and money for nothing and why can't they goddamn well put ALL the information you need online, or, now here's a thought, make the permits renewable online too, it's not as if Mexico is a small country and driving to the border ain't no thang for crying out loud! Just an example, mind you.

So, naturally, when we needed to find out more about my late grandmother-in-law's properties and the process for transferring the title we went not to the World Wide Web of Information, but rather to Huejotitan.

Huejotitan is a small town north of Jocotepec, off the highway that leads to Guadalajara. It's the town my mother-in-law was born in. When she was about five years old her father killed a man, and the family relocated to San Juan. At some point the law caught up with him, and he served six months in prison before coming home again.

But that has nothing to do with The Internets.

We still have family in the Huejotitan, like Hernan's grandfather's cousin, a spry old man with few teeth who we went to visit Monday. You see, to answer our questions about the land, we went to the town with jurisdiction over it. We then needed to find the town mayor, and to do so we went in search of an ally who could introduce us. That was "Uncle Chano".

He took the men (Hernan and his uncle) to visit the mayor (men's work), and us women (me and my mother-in-law) were left to walk around the town.

It's a very pleasant town. I noticed that there was very little graffiti anywhere and the people didn't gape at us like San Juanecos do. (Even my mother-in-law doesn't like walking through San Juan because, she says, the people are so nosy.) I saw the house that my mother-in-law lived in as a girl, and she pointed out how much had changed.

When she was a girl they had no outhouse. They did their business in the grass by the mango tree. They had no electricity; not until she was married did she live in a house with lights. And men could pick a wife by riding off with her on a horse.

Meanwhile, using the old-fashioned method of talking to people face-to-face, the menfolk discovered that of grandmother's 12 hectares along the highway, only four remain. The other eight have been claimed by "the communists", because the cousin in charge of maintaining the lands hadn't been doing his job.

We also learned that we have to get the title straightened out under the name of just one uncle, whoever is first in the list of succession. To discover who this is, my mother-in-law and her sister will go to an office in Guadalajara, show their birth certificates, credentials, and a letter they have in order to open a "sealed envelope" and discover the list of successors. (It's all very mysterious and reminds me of that little envelope in the game of Clue.) Then they will tell that person, probably an uncle in California, to come down here and square away the title so that no more land gets converted into community lands.

And now back to the internet. I must have become used to living down here because I was thinking about how one might go about doing this kind of thing in the US, and I couldn't remember. But then I thought that at the very least one could look up online the phone number or location of whoever you need to talk to. You probably wouldn't have to drive to another town and find yourself someone who might know someone who could tell you where to find the mayor so that he could tell you where to find an office in another city where they can tell you who needs to then fly in from another country to go who knows where to get the title in order.

But that's how we do it.