People I admire

If I were teaching in Oaxaca right now, I’d be preparing my seniors for their SAT tests which, for 2015, still has the essay attached. I would shoot a topic at them, put the timer on for 25 minutes and watch them scramble. Then when the timer dinged, we’d talk about how they could do better on the test date, where there’s even more pressure. We’d talk about a hook at the beginning, a solid theme, imagery to support the theme, and framing right through the conclusion to bind the thing together. In and out in 25 minutes. Hopefully when they sat down to take the test for the last time, they’d have practiced enough that the quotes, themes, and facts they’d used before would come to mind quickly, and they would write well. By the time I return to teaching, the SAT essay will be optional, take twice as long, and will be an analysis of a passage rather than an opinion essay. I look forward to the challenge.

I’d also be looking over my seniors’ college application essays. Hopefully they’ve put more than 25 minutes of thought into these. A favorite topic for these essays is: Describe a person you admire. Here’s someone I admire, a someone and his wife.

The very first Mixtec I ever met was Pedro Marquez. Years before, he had migrated from a Oaxacan village to Culiacan, Sinaloa, to work in the vast harvests of cukes and peppers and tomatoes there, had fallen in love with a Hispanic woman named Guille, and had settled to raise his family in a town of dirt streets and makeshift housing 45 minutes outside the city. He no longer made his living picking vegetables but had become a vendor in the camps where the migrant workers stayed during harvest. Every weekend he would pack up his truck with clothes he bought at a wholesale market a day’s bus ride away, bread Guille made in the beehive oven in their back yard, meat they dried on a clothesline, pig fat fritters he fried in a huge tub, and Guille’s pozole (corn kernel soup) prickling with chile. All the kids helped. This was a hard-working family.

While he made his living selling in the camps, Pedro also pastored a church of other Mixtecs who had settled in Villa Juarez as well. This is how we’d come to know him. When we drove into Mexico, someone we met along the way had given us his name as someone working with Indian migrant workers from southern Mexico. And so he was. We showed up at his doorstep and said we wanted to learn Mixtec and learn from him. He took us in, and he and Guille became our family. They found us a place to live, a one-room store front lacking even an out-house, and we slept, between the concrete counter and the wall, on a bed that Robert had built into the back of our pick-up truck that folded into a bench and table during the day.

Pedro introduced us to Mixtecs in the camps where he sold his wares, and everyone loved him. Sometimes the Hispanic vendors were harsh with the Mixtec workers, barging into their tin and cardboard rooms without asking, and rudely demanding payment for things they’d bought on credit without respectfully waiting until the homeowner broached the subject first. Pedro would rather forgive a debt than show such disrespect. Pedro knew people’s names and cared about what was happening in their families.

But he wasn’t just a good salesman. It went much further than that. He genuinely cared about people and was generous to a fault. Many of the people in the church he pastored were there because he had helped establish them in business. He would teach people his own trade, taking them to his own clients, and when they had secured their business, he was the one who would move on to new camps, new sales items, and new relationships. He did this over and over with people who needed his help. Many of them, like us, he helped find places to stay until they could establish themselves. Some lived in his home with him for a time.

And these were not family, not necessarily even believers at first. Pedro and Guille were just very generous people, some of the most unselfish I’ve ever met. Their church was full of people who had seen what God does practically through those he touches with his love. And we watched how they, too, took on this quality of their pastor and became helpers for others as well. I have met many Mixtecs suspicious of all outsiders and closed to the idea of trusting anyone outside their tribe. I’ve also met Mixtecs who have been generous and open-hearted. But the first to show me how God marries evangelism with social work so that the gospel of grace has hands held out to help, were Pedro and his wife Guille.