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The Guaymas Chronicles: La Mandadera-El Guero on the Streets of Northwest Mexico
David E. Stuart
Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2003
408 pp., $24.95, hardcover
ISBN: 0-8263-3188-2

The service class in Mexico-bartenders, waiters and waitresses, maids, hotel clerks, prostitutes-are the people North American travelers and sojourners have had most contact with in Mexico and in different service jobs here in the U.S. Yet a wall of formality and codes of silence keeps those people and their world unknown to gringos-and vice versa.

Dave Stuart's book is a passionate memoir of living with those visible but unknown people in the early 1970s. At the time, he had completed an M.A. in Anthropology at the University of New Mexico (UNM). He had met a waitress he'd fallen in love with in Guaymas, a port on the Sea of Cortez about three hundred miles south of Tucson. After a bad accident on a research trip to Ecuador, he returned to Guaymas with shoulder and arm in a cast and his fiancee edging away from him. He hit bottom, with money for a bowl of soup every other day and lice eating welts on his body as he slept in a flophouse. His helplessness touched the hearts of the bartenders, servers and taxi drivers who already knew him as the genial El Guero-Whitey-who talked and listened to everyone he met. And they saved him.

If ever there was a book of intimate participant observation, this is it. Stuart kept a daily journal in writing and on cassette. The book is a boiling down of several massive typescripts and audio versions he worked on as his UNM career grew. He has "novelized" some identities to protect people's privacy and to render colloquial translations of the original notes in Spanish. It is extremely special in the way it makes those who discreetly serve others come alive in their full humanity and personal idiosyncracies. It is a loving portrait of characters whose range and depth is almost never considered by white Americanos.

The book comes to focus on a character below the working class, a homeless street girl named Lupita. She is about ten or eleven, and she is so audacious and smart that Stuart accepts her first as a messenger (La Mandadera) and then as a business partner in some household appliance smuggling schemes. Finally he realizes that she is teaching him a fresh look at the social landscape of Mexico, and ultimately, that she is a messenger to an aching part of his heart. Stuart's writing gives us an unforgettable slice of illumination across class, culture, and generational lines. It is rich with bilingual explanations, funny, sexy (with mature ladies, not Lupita) and profoundly moving. If it is the logic of western democracy that its social concern be extended to all classes whose suffering and capabilities come to our attention, Stuart has helped the homeless of the world speak to us through Lupita.

Mexicans and North Americans have coexisted as inscrutable "others" for too long. This book joins Ruben Martinez's Crossing Over-A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail (2001) with more detailed and respectful portraits of class, culture and survival in Mexico. It should be must reading for New Mexicans, who have shared the streets with so many citizens from Mexico over the generations, and whose economy depends on them to do the lowest-paid jobs. The Guaymas Chronicles is like Dickens getting involved in the streetlife of a Mexican town and inviting us along. Stuart is working on a sequel.

— Steve Fox

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