The Land and the Memory | Translation

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Translated by MC Editorial

[Daniel Alarcón]:

[Daniel Alarcón]: Hello, ambulantes. When we meet with foundations and potential funders, they always ask us the same question: what makes the journalism you do special?

We tell them that our journalism carries a depth of humanity that is hard to find in other media outlets. We spend hours and hours talking to the protagonists of our episodes, encouraging them to share their stories with greater intimacy. We have a team of journalists across Latin America who understand the context and explain this region like no one else does.

And when they ask us about the impact of our work, perhaps the simplest way to respond is to show them how this community not only listens to us but also supports us. That’s why I want to invite you to support us today. Our goal is for 3 out of every 100 listeners to feel inspired to donate. If you can, please help us today with a donation at RadioAmbulante.org/donar. Thank you in advance!

Here’s the episode.

This is Radio Ambulante. I’m Daniel Alarcón. 

Today we start with a fact: More than half of the world’s population lives in cities. You might be listening to us from one of them. Our production assistant, Selene Mazón, for example, lives in Mexico City, a metropolis of more than 22 million inhabitants, the second largest in Latin America, after Sao Paulo. And according to her, life is more or less like this:

[Selene Mazón]: Always on the move. Always being in a combi [VW minibus], on a subway, standing, waiting in line, running from one place to another, pushing people, not knowing their names, there’s always something to do… It’s chaotic and fascinating at the same time.

[Daniel]: A confusing game board, without fixed or specific rules, where you learn to navigate only through practice.

[Selene]: What I like about the city is that you can blend in and be invisible or anonymous to many people. And for me, there is something comforting even in that—you kind of blend in and you don’t have to prove absolutely anything. Nobody has time. Everyone is very busy.

[Daniel]: A sense of anonymity that doesn’t happen elsewhere.

[Selene]: I feel that the smaller the place where you live, the more there is a story you have to live up to, which is your life story, your decisions. As if you were under a large magnifying glass. Like saying, “I am like this and like that.”

[Daniel]: Versions of ourselves that sometimes we don’t want to explain, stories that we sometimes want to forget. And although Selene considers herself a city person, sometimes she also gets tired of it. That’s why last year she got hooked on a story she found on the internet. 

[Archive soundbite]

[Yazhira Handal]: I bring you to see a ghost town that is about 30 minutes from my town…

[México Desconocido]: Located in Zacatecas, more precisely in Concepción del Oro…

[TV Azteca]: For more than 70 years, Aranzazú was one of the leading mining towns in the country. And of the more than 2,000 inhabitants who came to populate this place, currently only three people live here…

[Daniel]: A ghost town called Aranzazú del Cobre, known to locals only as El Cobre, located 750 kilometers north of Mexico City.

[Selene]: I don’t know whether it happens to everyone, but it happens to me that when I hear the term “ghost town”, I think of them as these spaces with unseen stories, like somehow spaces with invisible memories. 

[Daniel]: One of the things that caught Selene’s attention the most about Aranzazú was the emphasis placed by the media on the fact that only three people lived there.

You can imagine the kind of questions she had. Why did those three residents stay in El Cobre or, in any case, why did they return? What does a person do in a town where there is nothing? What stories does that place hold? With those questions in mind, one day in September 2023, she took a plane, then a bus, then another and another until she reached Aranzazú del Cobre.

[Selene]: We are seeing a lot of prickly pears, a lot of agaves, pine trees, stones, stones, and more stones, and stones…

[Daniel]: But what she found there was more than a story about a ghost town. It was a story about the ways we relate to memory, the promises we make, and the places we go to.

We’ll be back after a break.

[Daniel]: We’re back with Radio Ambulante. Selene continues the story. 

[Archive soundbite]

[Selene]: September, 2023. It is three o’clock in the afternoon and the sun is so strong that it hurts. Aranzazú del Cobre is a high, dry place. Everywhere you look, you see sky, low clouds, and hills bathed in light. 

[Don Chon Ovalle humming]

[Selene]: The person singing is José Ascensión Ovalle Vielma, better known as Don Chon, one of the three residents of El Cobre who are mentioned in the news.

[Don Chon]: I love this place. I enjoy it a lot because there is a lot to do here, many places to walk, lots to think about.

[Selene]: He’s 74 years old, or so he says, but it doesn’t matter. He knows this land as if it were a book he has read many times. He understands its sounds, its silence, its murmurs.

[Don Chon]: Sometimes I hum a song, sometimes I just think, looking at how the land is here, how the small enclosure looks where some branches are missing, where new pine trees are growing (listening to the sound of the wind and sometimes birds that fly around here, some crows), and seeing the view.

[Selene]: In this place where we’re walking, with loose earth and shiny stones, there is no electricity or water supply, much less a telephone signal. Don Chon points to the distance with his finger. 

[Don Chon]: One of my aunts lived there; the other one lived here. Crossing the stream, those ruins you see there, that’s where another aunt lived, my aunt Manuela, and further down was my grandfather. 

[Selene]: He is tall, thin and wears a cowboy hat, red shirt, and a scarf of matching color around his neck. Sometimes, he tells me, he dreams that he is not alone, that his family is there with him.

[Don Chon]: Sometimes you think that they are not gone, just that we do not see them, but in our dreams they live with us. 

[Selene]: There are towns that experienced prosperity and then misfortune. El Cobre is one of them—a piece of fertile mountain with mines that the English divided up more than a century ago. Copper was mined here, as well as gold and silver.

That day, Don Chon carries a sepia-colored photograph. It looks like an image taken from high above. There are several single-story buildings around what appears to be a plaza. There, very small, you can see some people and a few donkeys. In the corner of the photo there is a caption: “Minerales Aranzazú, ZAC-MEX.” This image is Don Chon’s main source to tell me about the daily life that went on in this place. 

[Don Chon]: Few streets had names. People said “in the Pachecos’ neighborhood, in the Herreras’ neighborhood, in so-and-so’s neighborhood,” that’s what they were called. Or the main street or the cinema street. The school street, the church street…

[Selene]: Of what the photo shows, little or nothing remains. Just toppled walls, overgrown weeds. The only thing that’s better preserved is a church. Although it is not in the picture, it does stand out with its white walls and complete structure. And this prosperous town began to die in the 1960s. The decline occurred due to several circumstances: The worldwide fall in the price of minerals, the nationalization of mining some 20 years earlier, and the end of foreign investment.

[Don Chon]: People were laid off; mining companies closed.

[Selene]: And many families migrated.

[Don Chon]: And they went to Saltillo, Monterrey. Some went to Mexico City, others to Guadalajara, and others are here in Concha.

[Selene]: Concha, another name for Concepción del Oro, the municipal seat with more than 12,000 residents. It is the closest town, seven kilometers downhill from El Cobre. 

[Don Chon]: In fact, I lived very little of my childhood here in Aranzazú. My grandparents and my parents were here. Then we moved down to Concha for school and because of my father’s job.

[Selene]: That was when he was about five or six years old. But he talks little about his life outside of El Cobre. Just the most basic things, like at one point in his life he went to live in Saltillo, a larger city, two hours away. There he got married, started a family and lived for more than three decades. But when that marriage ended, he decided to return to Concha, where his parents lived. Up in El Cobre was his grandfather Andrés, who was a merchant and miner. His death was Don Chon’s first big grief.

[Don Chon]: I spent a lot of time with him, but I didn’t learn much from him. And now I think, “Why didn’t I talk to him more? Why didn’t I learn more information than I knew, especially about mining? Why didn’t I learn more history of what his life was like in this place?”

[Selene]: From then on, he began to find out more and more about the history of El Cobre.

He realized that he had a knack for telling stories.

[Don Chon]: When I got together with my family here, I would tell them what I knew about this town, and I saw they liked it, and they liked that I talked to them, you know?

[Selene]: He began to write stories and poems.

[Don Chon]: All this is my inspiration. It says: Along the old and dusty path that leads from the cemetery, through a cobbled alley to a town in ruins, you see a woman walking without enthusiasm. It is Jimena, coming from the cemetery.

[Selene]: And he started collecting objects:

[Don Chon]: My mother even told me, “Oh son, there you are bringing another pile of old metal things.” “But mother, these metal things are pure history.”

[Selene]: And with those objects, years later, he set up a museum. It was a very small room, where he exhibited several things, including the iron bed in which he was born, a typewriter, and other of his grandfather’s belongings.

And although that museum no longer exists, listening to him I can’t stop thinking about one word: roots, which is nothing other than a sense of belonging. I have no doubt that Don Chon belongs to this place and this place belongs to him. Because otherwise, why would he spend so much time among ruins? Thinking about this moves me. And at the same time, it makes my hair stand on end; I could say it terrifies me. What Don Chon feels is something that I have never felt. I don’t mean at that moment, obviously, but something I have never felt. How can I write about being deeply rooted to a place when I don’t know the feeling?

[Selene]: After the death of his grandfather, Don Chon and his father bought land in El Cobre. It has a couple of rooms, a large patio, and is located at the entrance of the town, near the street that leads to the church, the one with white walls that I saw in the distance on our walk. From Concha, the two went up often to take care of it. Move the stones, cut the branches, sweep the dust. But on Friday, December 5, 2003, his father left alone and the passenger truck he was riding in fell into a ravine. That was the second big loss for Don Chon, who volunteered to remove the bodies.

[Don Chon]: When I saw that my father had died, I put him in a comfortable position, because he was battered in the ravine between the rocks. I moved him and straightened his legs, his arms, and I said a prayer for him, and I was there with him for a while.

[Selene]: And despite those griefs, Don Chon has not stopped walking up to this town. To relate and share what he has experienced here.

[Don Chon]: Maybe, as they say, I’m a masochist, right? Because I like to talk about it, knowing that it hurts me, but at the same time I like it. Because I say, “Here is the evidence, I lived it, I have it here so people can learn about it.”

[Archive soundbite, music and drums]

[Selene]: It is September 8, the patron saint’s day. The only day of the year when, in addition to the wind and footsteps on the stones, sounds of life can be heard in El Cobre. At the lower entrance to the town a bus parks and around a dozen people get out. They gather behind two men. One of them carries a banner with the image of Pope John Paul II, and the other has an image of Our Lady of Aranzazú, the sacred guardian of this place, that was brought here in 1908 by Spanish Basques who worked the mines.

People advance at a slow pace, with their heads bowed. Four dancers stirring up the loose earth with their steps. The third bell stroke announces that the mass is about to begin.

[Archive Soundbite, church bells sound]

[Selene]: They arrive at a church with a white facade, the same one I saw near Don Chon’s house. Inside, the walls have ocher tapestry, and the columns are sky blue. Gradually, it fills up until there are no empty seats left. People greet each other.

[Archive Soundbite, people talking]

[Woman 1]: Oh, look at that. My God, what a pleasure.

[Woman 2]: Hello. So good to see you. Look where we run into each other…

[Selene]: It is the only time when the church looks so full. That day, they bring in a priest from Concha to say mass, and they set the electric power generator so that his microphone works. The priest welcomes everyone and asks them to give each other a round of applause for being together again, gathered there.

[Archive soundbite, mass and clapping]

Around sixty people gather to celebrate the Virgin Mary. They sing, they pray, they listen to the Bible reading.

In the streets there are stalls of all kinds, selling bread, quesadillas, finger foods. There is even a trampoline for the children. The dancers dance on the church esplanade. Some people talk, others take pictures, a couple of children run around. They come in families, on excursions, or alone. Many, like Don Chon, are children of mining parents who emigrated to other cities after the mine closed.

I talk to María del Carmen Esquivel…

[Selene]: Why do you keep coming back, if you left so young and didn’t get to know this place?

[María del Carmen Esquivel]: Well, I didn’t get to know it, but it was the land where my… where my parents and all my siblings were born.

[Selene]: To Juan Ibarra…

[Juan Ibarra]: It is a time for relaxing and forgetting about the noise of the city, forgetting about the ambulances, the traffic, the trains, forgetting about all the hustle and bustle of the city.

[Selene]: To Carmen Moreno…

[Carmen Moreno]: I feel some connection to all this, and I usually say when I feel stressed, when I feel tense, pressured, the first thing I think is, “I’m going to my town; I need to go to my town.”

[Selene]: They return to stay connected, through the land, with those they loved. We might say that they are bound by a sense of belonging that is built into the words, the memory, the history, the stories. A feeling of roots that is also identity.

But exploring this place brings out its gray areas. Mining was the source of the town’s wealth, but also of its tragedy. The mine swallowed its children, and although there are no official records of how many people died, the stories of the locals of Concha and visitors to El Cobre say there were hundreds. 

[Martín Flores]: Every time I walked in the mine and recalled, “This is where so-and-so died,” and I walked another 100 meters, “and here is where this other person died.” And so on. Even one of my uncles died there. Two uncles.

[Griselda]: My father lived here and he was a miner. And he had an accident here. The mine collapsed. They all fell, along with the dirt. He was buried under the stones and no one believed he was alive. But thank God… 94 years of life.

[Selene]: Why remember?

[Juanita Ramírez]: You feel nostalgic for the beautiful things they experienced.

[Felicitas]: Well, there are mixed feelings. Mixed.

[Juanita Ramírez]: You feel nostalgic in the sense of my father’s personal experience, because he was here for a long time and went in and out through the hole. He lasted a long time as a miner. He saw many people die, because many people died in the mines, many people.

[Selene]: Mining contributes 2% of Mexico’s GDP along with the metallurgical sector. It is one of those jobs that drive a large part of the country’s economy, but that are hardly talked about, at least in the capital. We only hear about it from time to time in the news, when a catastrophe takes over the headlines. Those people with long hours and minimum wages, risking their lives. I think about my grandfather and his life devoted to the countryside. I think about how little I know about it.

The night of the Aranzazú festival, I meet Elena Hernández, one of the organizers of the pilgrimage. A few days before, she prepares, along with other women, to clean and decorate the church. They do it through a WhatsApp group. Each one is responsible for something. They put new curtains, flowers. She tells me she has been doing this for many years.

[Elena Hernández]: Since our mothers were alive. They took care of it, and now that they are gone, we continue.

[Selene]: Why do you do it?

[Elena]: Well, because…, because my mother always asked me to do it. She was very dedicated to this, and so I promised her that I would continue to do this.

[Selene]: And you have not failed her.

[Elena]: No. That’s why I do it with great pleasure.

[Selene]: There are two extreme views about facing memories. One is nostalgia, the constant homage to what was, remembering even if it sometimes hurts, or perhaps for that very reason. A promise to keep the past alive through storytelling.

The other is silence, oblivion, almost indifference. Don Chon and the people I met in El Cobre were part of that first group. And with all that in my head, I wonder, “Which one do I belong to?”

[Daniel]: We’ll be back after a break.

[MIDROLL]

[Daniel]: We’re back with Radio Ambulante. Before the break, we accompanied Selene Mazón to Aranzazú del Cobre, a ghost town in northern Mexico. In September of each year, hundreds of people return there to celebrate the festival of Our Lady of Aranzazú, and in the process, remember past experiences and the people who are no longer here. During the days Selene spent there, she couldn’t stop thinking about one word: roots. A sense of belonging and connection to a place, which is something she didn’t feel. Selene continues the story.

[Archive Soundbite]

[Selene]: At the beginning of the episode, I mentioned that almost my entire life has revolved around Mexico City. And although I have learned to navigate it, sometimes I feel like I don’t belong there, either. I guess it happens to many of us who live in big cities. Even more so to those of us who grew up on its periphery. My periphery is called Ixtapaluca, a place full of housing units, considered a bedroom municipality because the majority of its residents go there only to sleep, part of a floating population.

For as long as I can remember, a large part of my life has been distances and commutes. So as soon as I started college, which is two hours from home, I insisted on moving out and renting a room. It didn’t matter where. I just wanted to be “in the City.” That’s how I’ve done it ever since. But I always return to Ixtapaluca, mainly because my parents still live there.

[Archive Soundbite, on the way to Ixtapaluca]

Their house is located at the top of a hill from where you can see a gray sky and a landscape devoured by more and more concrete. They live on their own. There, in the living room, I meet with my father. I have wanted to talk to him, because for some time, I have noticed that, unlike Don Chon, he has stopped frequenting the place where he was born and raised—Jojutla, a town in the state of Morelos, 120 kilometers south of Mexico City. He doesn’t talk much about his past, about where he comes from. He says that’s because his memory fails him, but I sense that there is something else. That’s why I want to interview him.

It wasn’t easy to convince him. Although he is very loving, he does not like to be recorded. He becomes more reserved. He speaks between pauses, nuances, few words. The first thing he tells me is that his life is not interesting. The second…

[Miguel Mazón]: I just want you to learn the facts, that is, not the emotions.

[Selene]: Dad, what matters are the emotions, because you are human.

[Miguel]: Sure, but not just now.

[Selene]: Why not now?

[Miguel]: I don’t know; I don’t like to listen to myself. Because since I don’t like to listen to myself, sometimes I don’t like what I say, either. 

[Selene]: My father tells his life almost as if it were a procedure, recording facts without emotion. Sometimes he reminds me of me. Sometimes when I speak, I also try to hide my feelings.

But my father wasn’t always like this. During my childhood, when my sisters or I didn’t want to eat what was on the plate, he told us we had no reason to complain, because in his time, only beans were served at home.

[Miguel]: Beans with a side portion—with a slice of cheese or a spoonful of cream, and sometimes plain beans. 

[Selene]: I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that story. And just like that, many others came out. About when he went on a hunger strike against his mother because he wanted to eat something else, but it didn’t work. Or when the walls of the house where he grew up, made of mud and reeds, would fall when it started to rain… About the heat, especially the heat…

[Miguel]: The sun felt like it was pulling, like it was dragging away my energy.

[Selene]: My father was born in 1963, at a time known as the “Mexican Miracle,” when the country began to transform from a rural society to a more urban one. He was the youngest of ten siblings, almost all of them girls. His father was a farmer. 

[Miguel]: I saw him many times, barefoot in the mud, planting rice.

[Selene]: His mother was a housewife.

[Miguel]: I saw your grandmother washing so much, washing, washing so much. She didn’t just wash our clothes; she washed other people’s. She washed other people’s clothes to earn a little money, and that was every day, every single day. I saw her hands, and they didn’t look the color they should be; they looked like they were white from so much washing.

[Selene]: From a very young age, my father knew he wanted something different.

[Miguel]: I wanted to get out of there. I knew that there were different things, I’m not saying better; there were different things out there, and it was what I… what I wanted. I wanted to experiment. I wanted… well, to lead a free life…

[Selene]: One where the floor wasn’t dirt, a life with a living room, a refrigerator, a fan, a television. One where my grandmother worked less and had time to hug him. One outside of Jojutla, of the rice fields where he saw my grandfather always working.

[Miguel]: And I remember that when I was a child, I said to myself that if I didn’t want to end up working there, then I had to go to school, so of course I decided to go to school.

[Selene]: Then I think about El Cobre, and the word that was with me all those days: roots. Having roots means being attached to a place. It is that deep connection a person feels towards a place. In Don Chon’s case, roots translate into longing, the memory of his relatives, the land itself. On the other hand, my father’s roots took a more abstract form: a promise of access to a better life, in the city, through merit and hard work. A pending debt with my grandfather’s bare feet, my grandmother’s white hands. And to pay it, he had to get as far away from the countryside as possible.

And that’s what he did. My father studied to be a primary school teacher, and at 18 he migrated to Mexico City. As soon as he started earning money, he always divided it into three parts: for his parents, for the sister he lived with, and for himself. Little by little he was building that better life he imagined. He met my mother. He bought a house. He raised a family far away from his own.

He worked for over 30 years until he retired. He took upon himself, with responsibility and aplomb, the mission of giving us a better life than he’d had. And that’s why for years he was a ghost that we only saw in the evenings or on weekends. But when we did see him, he took care to transmit to us that meaning of life he believed in: that, to be someone in life, you had to have schooling.

And we did. I viewed it like a mission. An inherited debt that starts from the principle of a constant search. To pursue something better beyond the borders of what our parents built. Even if that sometimes feels like self-exile. And I did not fail him in that promise. My father, who always wanted to go to college, was filled with pride when he framed my diploma and hung it in the living room.

[Selene]: Have you ever felt the call, the call back to the land?

[Miguel]: No, I have not felt it. I believe that is a stage that is now in the past; it is no longer a need that I have or that is present with me, no. Out of curiosity, sometimes I do feel like I want to go see what has changed and what has not changed.

[Selene]: My father stopped visiting the Jojutla house a few years ago. Several reasons: my grandfather’s death, distance, some misunderstandings with the family… he hardly talks about it.

He is a pragmatic man. He spends his retirement days gardening, listening to political analyses on YouTube, and playing Duolingo on his cell phone.

Inevitably, I think about Don Chon again. About our walks through those dry lands, about his old iron implements, his poems. Two different types of roots. Both he and my father live at peace with the languages they have created to talk about themselves.

I, on the other hand, feel alien. And that’s how I felt before going to Aranzazú. Empty. Fragmented. Some call it an existential crisis. For me it has a clear name: rootlessness. Not only from the land, but also from meaning, from the promises I want to follow. A painful disconnect that became visible when I visited El Cobre and saw myself without a land, like a wandering ghost without a language of my own.

On my last day in El Cobre, I camp out with Rosario and Rocío, two sisters in their mid-20s who took care of me and accompanied me on this journey. We climbed to the top of a hill and set up a tent on the back of a pickup truck.

[Archive soundbite, setting up the tent]

[Selene]: That day there is a lot of wind. We have to put all our strength into preventing the tent from blowing away.

Later, we light a campfire. In the distance, you can hear the murmur of what remains of the Aranzazú festival. Above us, the starry sky.

We talk about various things—about our families, our dreams, expectations. Although we only met the day before, this feels like an old friendship. Like me, they both grew up with the promise of the meaning of progress. This is Rocío:

[Rocío]: Well, my parents taught us from the beginning to set education as a priority. There are four of us, and the four of us got schooling and a degree. We grew up with that mentality, believing that it meant success.

[Selene]: They moved to a bigger city, got their degrees, and started working. But all that changed in 2020, when their father suffered an accident that left him in a wheelchair. 

[Rosario]: That accident, and the pandemic, broke us. They shattered us.

[Rocío]: But only so we’d rebuild ourselves. 

[Rosario]: Exactly. 

[Selene]: From then on, the two decided to live their lives very differently. Give up an abstract debt of success they felt they owed their parents. And instead, look for other ways of living. They began to travel more. One of them became a tattoo artist, the other a community kindergarten teacher. For a few years now, the language they have built prioritizes doing the things they like. Doing them out of love, and that always implies returning to their land. This is Rosario:

[Rosario]: Because here is the root. Here is our root. They say that when you know where you come from, you can know where you are going. Working is not a burden because you know what you’re working for. Because you are taking care of the place where you were born and you are taking care of the place where you want those who come after you to stay.

[Selene]: Two years ago, a fire devoured several hectares of green areas on one of the hills of El Cobre. After that, Rosario and Rocío joined a group of about 15 volunteers called Guardians of El Cobre, to help reforest the area. They also do that out of love, as a way of caring for their origin.

Maybe it’s another type of debt, or perhaps if one does it out of love, it can no longer be called that.

[Archive soundbite, handpan]

[Selene]: Rocío pulls out an instrument that was given to her on one of her trips. It is called a handpan and is a kind of black metallic drum with some indentations on the sides. For a moment, I feel like I am in the place where I want to be.

There is a phrase that I heard several times during my two days in El Cobre: “I am here searching for my navel.” This has an explanation. When a child was born in El Cobre, families would wrap the newborn’s umbilical cord in a piece of paper or a piece of cloth and put it in a slot between the adobes or between the stones. Many return to find it, as a way of reaffirming their passage through this world. A powerful statement that says: We exist here. We are still here.

The next morning, we woke up to the sun peeking over the mountains. The smell of pine, and the golden hills before us. Some of them had been left bare by the fire. We had breakfast there and went down to the church. It’s Sunday and the town is emptying. 

[Archive soundbite] 

[Selene]: Little by little, the families dismantle their tents and leave. I’m watching a man in a plaid shirt and a cap who is dismantling a tent.

But there are people in Don Chon’s house. It is a small room with a tin roof and dirt floor. It has a gas stove, many stacked boxes, and a double bed, the same one in which he was born and that he exhibited in his museum. 

[Archive soundbite, Don Chon’s house] 

[Selene]: That day, there, there is a meeting of the Guardians of El Cobre. It is the General Staff. There are six people or so, all sitting wherever they can—on a bucket, on a chair, on Don Chon’s bed. They heat up a couple of tamales that one of them brought. They talk about that day’s planting, about the plans they are carrying out for reforestation.

It’s like seeing the past and the future coexisting in one place, amid laughter and anecdotes. There is Don Chon, the chronicler of the past. And there are Rocío and Rosario, who, like me, are the youngest in that room. All of them with the same purpose. 

[Selene]: Before saying goodbye, we got a picture of ourselves in front of Don Chon’s house. In a matter of hours, this town will return to silence, back to being a cemetery of faded voices and laughter. I will return to my city, to my transitory space, more convinced than ever of finding my navel. Maybe I’ll find it in Mexico City or Ixtapaluca. And if I don’t find it, well… I’ll have to build it. 

[Daniel]: Selene Mazón is a production assistant at Radio Ambulante and lives in Mexico City. This story was edited by Pablo Argüelles, Camila Segura and me. Bruno Scelza did the fact checking. The sound design is by Andrés Azpiri with music by Rémy Lozano.

The rest of the Radio Ambulante team includes Paola Alean, Lisette Arévalo, Lucía Auerbach, Adriana Bernal, Aneris Casassus, Diego Corzo, Emilia Erbetta, Juan David Naranjo, Melisa Rabanales, Natalia Ramírez, Loayza, Barbara Sawhill, David Trujillo, Ana Tuirán, Elsa Liliana Ulloa, Luis Fernando Vargas and Desireé Yépez.

Carolina Guerrero is the CEO. 

Radio Ambulante is a podcast by Radio Ambulante Estudios, produced and mixed on the Hindenburg PRO program.

If you enjoyed this episode and want us to continue doing independent journalism about Latin America, support us through Deambulantes, our membership program. Visit radioambulante.org/donar and help us continue narrating the region.

Radio Ambulante tells the stories of Latin America. I’m Daniel Alarcón. Thanks for listening.