Straw mats
There was a strange beauty to the straw-mat cities the first few weeks after an “invasion,” as the moves were called. The mats (they were generically called “estera,” meaning reed, in the sense that “estero” means a reed-filled swamp, but I think they were actually made of bamboo trees that had been smashed into flat sticks) were a whitish yellow when new. From a distance they seemed to glitter almost silver in the bright light, and they gave off a pleasant reedy odor. The sun turned them golden after a few days. My dad liked to drive his Land Rover to the top of a dune when he didn’t have anywhere particular to be, and gaze out over the vast sweep of straw and zinc. You could hear the trucks rumbling through with their water and construction supplies, and the dogs barking and children screaming. There was almost always a smell of burning plastic from the informally-designated dump sites.
The intense sunlight – every year had six months of uninterrupted sun and six months of gray skies, never rain or any other weather at all — would leach the color out of the straw before long. The royal yellow would turn to a sickly gray as it dried out, and the bamboo would gradually lose its flexibility until the wind blew holes in it or something hit it, and the owner would have to patch it with a new sheet. Eventually you would have a shambling collection of variously patched straw sheets, with wings heading this way and that, to the borders of whatever sort of plot you had been able to stake out on invasion night.
In his zeal to get close to the people he wanted to serve, or to be the first missionary on the spot in what was rapidly becoming a competitive proselytizing environment, my dad actually was able to catch wind of some of these land invasions ahead of time, and he accompanied one or two of the groups on their midnight moves. It seemed to win him some friends, or at least some patience on the part of the “pobladores,” the land invaders, because I remember at least once watching him nail up some esteras, the morning after an invasion, onto an extra-large wood frame of his own, on a plot he had claimed the night before. He was always a handy guy with wood and things like that. He affixed a cross of two-by-fours to the outside of the structure, set up some rough benches he had built at home for pews, and called it a church.
Only desperate people leave the only home they know to move to a brutal desert near a giant, dangerous metropolis without any assurance of success or even subsistence. Marx, who was familiar with the things desperate people do, noted that they seem to put emotional safety, or spiritual comfort, very near the top of their agendas, even when food and water are by no means guaranteed. My dad’s modest church buildings filled up pretty quickly. The services were entertaining, I think, with songs and rituals a bit like the ones used in the Catholic church but different enough to be interesting. And there was plenty of novelty in just getting close to the roaring Land Rover that brought the tall, burly bald man in from some other world with his thin, smiling wife and her guitar and their pale, loud children with their unintelligible bickering.
Categorised as: Memory, Uncategorized