Admiring Compost in Hidalgo, By Justine Gardner

San Miguel's Center for Global Justice has started a revolving loan fund to support cooperatives as a means of renewing rural economies. Its first loan was to a group of agricultural cooperatives in Chilcuatla in Hidalgo state, just above Mexico City, for greenhouses and irrigation systems. Patricio Bravo, staff person for the group, recently invited us to come look at their progress. Justine Gardner, a freelance writer working out of New York City, accompanied us on the trip and wrote the following article.
-Bob Stone

In March, I stepped off the spinning centrifuge of New York City and ventured to San Miguel de Allende. This was no idle vacation (although some beach time was quite necessary), nor was it my first trip to the country.

I have been connected to Mexico in one way or another for most of my life; I've spent time in Oaxaca and Guadalajara, and my uncle, the author John Ross, has made Mexico City his home base for decades.

But, as I stated, this most recent trip to Mexico was unique; no tourist or pupil was I, but assistant to my companion, Jon Wetterau, a filmographer and student at the New School's Graduate Program for International Affairs. He needed additional footage for his short documentary on the Center for Global Justice and the transplanted lives of two of its founding members, Bob Stone and Betsy Bowman.

And what better way to document the Center than to see it in action? So, we and other CGJ members packed ourselves into the minivan that Yolanda Millán uses in her work with a San Miguel-area cooperative, Mujeres Productoras. Our destination was Hidalgo, to tour some of the dozen agricultural cooperatives that are part of the Empresa Integradora para el Desarrollo Rural, an umbrella group made up of the cooperative's elected presidents. The Center has been working with the "Integradora" for a year and a half. I didn't even mind the cruel hour at which I was obliged to rouse myself, for after a week seaside in Melaque, I was ready to experience something other than solar rays.

My attempts to mitigate my self-imposed guilt were not unassisted by the knowledge that the Center's fund had made a loan to the collective we were visiting. As we rode along the dusty highway, I had a sudden image of landowners checking on their vassals to ensure crops were in the ground, that money given for seed was not wasted on drink. I rubbed my eyes and shook my head to break myself from this judgmental funk. I tuned in to the pleasant conversations around me: talk of local flora, cookie recipes, packing that needed to be tended to, ordinary life. I laughed at myself. Of course, this was not the intent of the excursion! We were visiting these farms to see, learn, and listen, nothing more.

The first farm did little, however, to release the remaining steam of my uncertainties. Granted, the farmers-the Valera sisters and the Bravo brothers, for example-were pleased to show off their fertilizers and to discuss their intended use of earthworms for organic farming. We enthused appreciatively over bags of lava gravel and piles of compost. We poured ourselves into what would be the first of several chokingly hot greenhouses to examine, in this case, the new irrigation systems for the tomato plants.

At the second farm, as the ritual of polite nodding and smiling continued, we all were treated to glasses of water while we peeped inside a nopal greenhouse, watching a young woman twist the tender leaves from the cactus with calloused deftness.

I found myself pacing uneasily. My Spanish is not the best, and most of the conversation was slipping by me. The best I could do was stand and stare and smile, take pictures with my little digital camera. My companion, Jon, had his video camera, at least, a convenient screen, like a duck hunter's blind. Hauling his camera bag did not provide me with the same. Instead, I followed along as our guides showed us what we had purportedly come to see.

Hot, dust-streaked farms, broiling greenhouses-some verdant, some between rotations. We stepped around chickens and geese, watched goats and sheep rooting in a jumble of barnyards. Children darting out from behind their mothers; old women pausing over their brooms to give a glance at the gaggle of gringos. Old cars turned into tool sheds; little dogs sleeping in abandoned tractor tires. Cow skulls scattered across fence posts, baked and blanched in the sun.

By the end, I could no longer endure the suffocation of the greenhouses. I stayed on the outside, following our group's shadowed outline against the nylon skin of the invernadero, hearing the murmured sounds of questions and answers.

Our day culminated, thankfully, in a magnificent feast of barbacoa and consomé, much to our famished delight. We ate delicious goat and turkey until our tummies were taut; we shared our beers and Coca-Colas with our hosts, sitting at the long picnic table used by the community for their group meals. Our hosts, Paula Cruz and Patricio Bravo, sat with us. They seemed, without question, kind and generous; indeed, this generosity was the subject of much discussion by my companions as we ate the farmers' freshly butchered animals.

Still, many of the farmers and their families chose to sit at a slight distance, spreading themselves on the small hill behind the table, plates between their feet, shooing the famished nursing bitch from their scraps.

So, with our audience behind us, we sat in lingering twilight and I followed the conversation as best I could. True, the farmers might be smiling too easily because they hope to please these potential future monetary sources; we gringos might be smiling too hard because we feel the bounty of food before us is embarrassingly unnecessary. But in the end, it doesn't matter.

As Doña Paula, a wide-smiled woman, pushes another bowl of pavo before me and commands me to eat, I do not think, I do not feel, I simply obey, responding as any well-trained daughter of a Jewish mother would: Always, always, eat.