Opinion – Josimar Melo: Dining in Mexico is celebrating life

Last week I went to Mexico for dinner. Yes, it’s part of the service: take a plane, go eat there 8,000 kilometers away and come back.

It’s a relief when, in addition to being work, dinner is worth it —as was this meal in Guadalajara, made with four hands by local chef Francisco (Paco) Ruano, from the Alcalde restaurant, which celebrates its tenth anniversary, together with the award-winning chef Peruvian Virgílio Martínez, from the Central restaurant.

It is natural for the journalist to prepare this type of trip by researching the characters and the location of the event. But I wanted to look at my new destination from different angles.

Mexico? This hastened my willingness to watch the new film “Bard, False Chronicle of Some Truths” (2022), by Mexican Alejandro González Iñárritu.

And my editor happened to remember that the state of Jalisco, where I was going, was the setting for the novel “Pedro Páramo” (which I had read as a teenager) and the birthplace of author Juan Rulfo (1917-1986). So, the day before I left, I bought it (the urgent delivery was more expensive than the book itself…).

It’s not the first time I’ve invented such synesthesias on business trips. Speaking of Rulfo, precursor of Latin American fantastic realism, I remember that one of his disciples was a character in two chronicles in this space, the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez (1927-1914).

In one of them, I reported that I read his fiction “On Love and Other Demons” —a tragic story of love and religious fanaticism set centuries ago in the old convent of Santa Clara— while I was staying at the same place (now restored as a beautiful hotel) in Cartagena (Colombia). ).

Now it was Rulfo and Iñárritu’s turn. The first wrote only two books, and “Pedro Páramo”, from 1955, marked the literature of the 20th century. , planes of existence and unreality that intertwine. The dead and the living coexist in tragic naturalness, a mirror of the aridity of poverty and the social contrast between the large estates and the impoverished people in the Mexican countryside in the 20th century.

An overlapping of times and states of mind (of the living and the dead) that I see reflected in the film, where the successful Mexican character is swallowed up by the new owners of his land (the United States, which annexed a large part of Mexico) while coexists with the cruelty that mitigates his countrymen on the border between the two countries. And, in the style of magical realism, he flies, talks to the dead and listens to news in a TV studio about what has yet to happen to his destiny.

All this comes to mind at my dinner at Alcalde, in Guadalajara. It obviously starts with tequila, the typical drink of the state of Jalisco —and whose production I witnessed during the afternoon in the producing region, some 70 kilometers northwest of Guadalajara.

There, in the shadow of the dormant Tequila volcano, the blue agave, with its pine-shaped shape and 40-kilogram bulbs (harvested at five years old), is steamed, squeezed and has its juice fermented (with natural yeasts), distilled and part of it rested in wooden barrels. Being of good quality, it does not need make-up with flavors such as salt and lemon when drinking straight.

At dinner, among so many delicacies from such talented chefs, in these few lines I honor, by Paco Ruano, the lamb thymus with bean miso and a shamue sauce —an insect that reminds me of bed bugs. (You read that right.)

The coexistence of the living and the dead, of aridity and strength, in Mexican literature or cinema, is not surprising in a country where massacred indigenous cultures haunt the invaders, where the Day of the Dead is a feast day and eating insects is a celebration of taste and of life.