The little old man in the Jardín
By Jesús Ibarra

Residents and visitors who walk through the Jardin in the early morning often hear a kind of “singing.” It isn’t particularly beautiful, in fact it’s quite peculiar and so inevitably draws the attention of people passing by.

It is a song of protest they are hearing, a cry for justice for the poor and it comes from a little old man, probably in his late 80s, who, almost every morning, sometimes in the afternoons or evenings, paces, hunched over with age, from one side of the Jardín to another. At times he sits on a bench, chanting his anguish in barely intelligible words. 

“I’m going to give the land to the poor. I’m going to take their houses away from the gringos to give them to the poor. The government took the poor away from the school.My president is Manuel Rosas.”

The litany goes on but it is difficult to make out the sentences and their meaning. If one offers him money, he usually refuses; trying to engage him in conversation seems to frighten him and he hardly answers. Nobody knows who he is or where he lives.

Don Nico, the shoe shine man at the corner across from Banamex, said the old man appeared in the Jardín about four years ago. “He used to sell ice cream outside the school in San Juan de Dios,” he said “but one day the authorities removed him from there and he could not sell ice cream anymore. I do not know the reason. Maybe because the school wanted to sell ice cream within its facilities.”

That is all that it is known about this strange old sanmiguelense. The whole story is still a mystery, but he is already a part of the Jardín and of the tapestry of San Miguel. The day he fails to appear, people will miss him.