Once upon a time in MEXICO Hampden teen journeys with father to embrace his roots

It all started with a cookbook. In our family, it always does.”

Rickey Montes is referring to “Mexico: The Beautiful Cookbook,” which, in part, inspired the trip back in time he and his father, Arturo, took last April to San Jose de Morteros, Mexico.

“As we looked through the cookbook, Dad would study the pictures and tell us stories about growing up in Mexico,” the 16-year-old Hampden teen recalled. “Afterward, I said to Mom, ‘He has to go back.'”

The seed that Rickey planted that night grew quickly. Plans were made, tickets purchased, travel documents found, all without Arturo’s knowledge.

Arturo is half of the ownership team, the other half being wife Carmen, of Montes International Catering on Columbia Street in Bangor. Some 27 years ago, at the age of 16, he left the isolated Mexican village to find a better life in the United States.

Last summer, Rickey landed a job teaching photography at a summer camp. He put aside his earnings to buy a car when he obtained his driver’s license. “Nothing fancy, just something that ran,” said the Hampden Academy senior, who used his savings instead to buy the plane tickets. It was quite a sacrifice for a kid who doesn’t really like to fly.

Morteros, Arturo’s home village, is located in the state of Zacatecas, roughly 200 miles southwest of Monterrey and 400 miles northwest of Mexico City. On Mexico’s central plateau, the landscape is rural, wild and isolated. Since it is on the eastern side of the Sierra Madre mountains, it is also oppressively dry.

Getting there from here is not exactly a milk run. Arturo and Rickey left Portland at 7 one night, flew to Washington, D.C., then to Chicago and finally to Zacatecas, arriving 12 hours later. From the airport, it’s another 70 something miles to Morteros, the last few on a road very few cartographers have taken the trouble to record.

At the Zacatecas airport, despite the miles and lack of sleep, when Rickey saw an older man approaching them, he thought, “the man looked and walked a lot like my Dad. I just knew it was my grandfather when I saw him.” It was the first of 11 days of revelations about his father, his family and the land of their birth.

The Monteses are farmers and cattle ranchers. Although the cattle range free most of the year, the work never stops. Chores of some variety occupy virtually every moment from dawn to dusk. Fences to build, calves to brand, there’s always something. During the winter months, when other ranch chores may decrease, the cattle are fed cactus with the spines burned off. The men also tend the gardens that provide food for the family table.

For the Maine Monteses, it was a working trip. Shortly after arriving at the family home in Morteros, Arturo was on horseback. The years fell away instantly as an astonished Rickey watched his father ride like the cowboy he was in youth. Next came cow-roping. “He never missed, he never missed,” a still astonished Rickey said weeks later. “I couldn’t believe how well he could rope and ride.”

Besides seeing his Dad with new eyes, there was also culture shock. Electricity and running water, while installed in much of Morteros, was not something to be taken for granted. Although the electricity was fairly stable, water was available only one day in three. On “water day,” every available pot and pail was filled to carry the family over until the next.

Arturo saw changes in the 16 years since his last trip to Morteros. The village had once boasted 120 families, many with up to 10 children. Now many houses stood empty or were in such precarious condition that they should have been abandoned. Although most families had a small garden along with a few goats and perhaps some cattle, a few of the people seemed to have simply given up and were living in abject poverty by indeterminate means.

Rickey learned that tasks that would only be performed by machinery in the United States were done by hand in rural Mexico. While there, Arturo and some of his brothers built their parents a new septic tank. They didn’t call a contractor with a backhoe to dig the hole for the tank. It was done by hand with picks and shovels. The ground was hard and stony. In April, with the sun approaching overhead, it is hard, hot work.

One of Rickey’s early observations was of how much his cousins’ lives differed from his own and those of his friends in Maine. Only the very young are allotted time to play. Boys work with their fathers and girls with their mothers at a surprisingly young age. “An American kid could never stay occupied down there. The kids don’t have toys. They play all kinds of games with rocks.”

When the family went to the larger town of Rio Grande on a shopping trip, Rickey bought the cousins some small toys with his own money. He was deeply touched by their joyous reactions. In return, his cousins taught him how to whistle through a bottle cap.

The women and girls work hard in Morteros. Absent the labor-saving devices of a Maine kitchen and laundry, their workday is also from dawn to dusk. Part of their time is spent cooking four meals a day of corn, beans, potatoes and tortillas, all from scratch. Clothes are washed at a common laundry composed of a concrete chute with ripples built in for scrubbing. It resembled a giant washboard. It is no wonder that Rickey noted that the women’s hands have the same rough, work-worn appearance as the men’s.

The kid from Bangor adapted quickly to his new way of life. Before he left Morteros, he learned to ride a horse well enough to be the spotter on an expedition to catch a wild stallion. He roped calves so they could be branded and milked the family cow. He also took his camera and brought back fourteen rolls of film.

There were things that Rickey couldn’t become accustomed to: He found the amount of trash alongside the roads depressing. Many of the roads were narrow with no guardrails, and there were lots of crosses along those stretches. The preponderance of graves in the cemetery were of children. Men and women had their separate places in society. Women stayed inside while the men worked outside. He never saw a woman on a horse. If you were eating in a restaurant, the poor would come in and hover by your table until you gave them money. On the other hand, the people had an ability to live with what they had.

“They’ll take anything and make it something,” he said.

Many of the pictures that Ricky took are in an album that is kept at Montes International Catering. Some of them are troubling. But they are all attempts by a startlingly accomplished young photographer to show rural Mexico as it really is – the stark beauty of the country and the resilience of its people.

The Bangor Daily News is interested in hearing other Mainers’ stories and the lengths they have gone to discover their roots. Send ideas by e-mailing bdnstyle@bangordailynews.net or writing the Style Desk, Bangor Daily News, P.O. Box 1329, Bangor 04402.