Part One : La Romantica, La Turista, La Gringa en Fuga (the Romantic, the Tourist, the Gringo on the Run)

The first thing I did when I came back to Oaxaca was go to the park. El llano is not a grassy American park of dispersed jungle gyms and wood chips. The name indicates this from the start – a llano is a tropical plain, a flat, verdant stretch of land. Oaxaca’s llano is a long, rectangular, shaded plaza, an opening-up of the city’s narrow streets into a fresh breath of space.

Indian laurel trees reign over the plaza. They are the Greek Gods, towering over other, mortal trees, their trunks wider than the outstretched arms of five people. Their shadows cover entire swaths of the llano, keeping certain benches and pathways in permanent coolness. Beside them old pines, like wispy green beards, look fragile and in need of protection. The pines emit permanent sighs of dark, resigned green.

The palm and guaje trees, meanwhile, highlight the plaza with bright splashes of lime. They soar hundreds of feet above the long promenades, their leafy tops swaying in long swoops with the wind.

Kids ride bicycles around the fountains, shouting over the splash of the water. Parents sit on the fountains’ stone rims, eating homemade popsicles (the old-school kind, like the ones my mother used to make by freezing juice in square plastic popsicle containers). Skateboarding punks glide off curbs, laughing, hitching up their pants, adjusting their ragged caps. Shoeshine men read the paper, waiting for clients. Señoras with long gray-white hair pleated in twin braids pound tortillas between their palms and toss them on a hard clay grill called a comal. The señoras have perfumed the comal’s charcoal with herbs, and rich smoke rises in plumes. The smoke rises to a blue, blue sky feathered with white clouds.

Young couples in school uniforms kiss unabashedly on benches. The boys, with their greased back hair and their skinny legs in creased pants, whisper into the girls’ ears. They are away from home and school, reckless and bold in the free space of the park.

At the park’s corner is a big newspaper stand, newspapers and magazines clipped to wires. People come up and give peso coins to the gray-haired man working the stand, who hands me my Jornada and my change. I go sit on a bench, and think about the energy I feel here. This feels like a place; a place with felt historical and cultural meaning, human connections and community, roots and rhythms. In a time when so many places have become detached pathways for commerce and goods, devoid of real human presence and commitment, this park feels lived in, storied, full of human, Latin American energy.

*

Part 2: El Irónico, El Mexicano, El Di-Lo-Sin-Pelos-En-La-Lengua (The Ironic, The Mexican, the Tell-It-Like-It-Is)

“What?” says Jorge, as I’m cooking chilaquiles. “Your texto is all romantico, all bonito, el llano like this Latin American paradise. I don’t have any photos of that. Have you ever been to the llano?”

“Of course, you jerk! I go to the llano all the time! I take the dog there every day.”

“Yeah, yeah, but you see it like a gringa.”

“What, it’s bonito!”

“Ok, so I went to try and find you a picturesque photo, and you know what I see?”

“What?”

“That the guy getting his shoes shined? He’s an oreja – a policía judicial, like the FBI. They’re all over the place there, just waiting for some desmadre to happen. You can tell by the boots and the jacket. And the guy waiting to shine somebody’s shoes? He’s reading the Nota Roja, all bloody bodies and car wrecks and murders and stuff. And then there are the kids running all over the place spraying foam on each other.”

“Well, that’s just on Fridays.”

“Sure.”

“You have your llano, I have my llano. They can coexist peacefully.”

“Todo bonito, todo bonito.”

“Why do you have to be so cynical? There’s plenty of quaint, pretty stuff happening in El Llano.”

“Like pudgy old women in sweatpants taking salsa classes together on Saturday mornings, and high school couples groping each other?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

*
Part 3: Memory, Imagination and Symbols

Thank you, postmodernism, for making both llano experiences relevant. So perhaps the llano lives more in my brain as a symbol of what I think Latin America is than as a real pulsing living crazy Latin American park. We all need symbols, right? To link us to places and make sense of them? And parks are the quintessential Latin American symbols. They’re the easiest thing to grab on to when I think about why I keep coming back to Latin America, so they’re an easy thing to romanticize.

Let me try again. Memory and imagination are being squeezed hard here to accommodate reality. Latin American parks are places where public life is active and ridiculous and hilarious and comforting and natural. They’re places where all sorts of randomness can flow together under a panorama of green. Salsa classes, newspaper stands, kids on bikes, little dogs, big dogs, mango-sellers, nut-sellers, clowns, shoe-shiners, hippies on the grass, businessmen on benches, gringas on the edge of the fountain, taking pictures. And the government spies and the Nota Roja, and the kids spraying each other with foam.

In fact, I just might go to the llano right now and have myself a popsicle.