It’s a funny thing about Pachuca; in the four years or so I’ve been coming here regularly, and in the six months I’ve lived here permanently, yesterday was the very first time I talked to someone who actually likes it here.  Oh, people will say, with rueful smiles, “Well, you know…Está tranquilo.”  But never, that I’ve heard, “I love it here.  This is my homeland.  I could never live anywhere else.” 

Admittedly, these are not the results of a carefully controlled study, and my data could be flawed.  But after going-on-five-years of asking taxi drivers, students, neighbors, my co-workers, Gil’s coworkers, and random acquaintances, I think I can offer a tentative hypothesis that Pachuca is just not beloved by its inhabitants. 

I’m not going to put in a good word for Pachuca.  Honestly, before this past summer, I could have at least said, “The weather is pretty nice,” but the sun has come out approximately four times since May.  So much for that perk.  Some might say, the Tuzos were the soccer champions last year.  But this year, so far, they’ve sucked.  And pastes are admittedly both delicious and convenient, but not so’s you’d miss them if you couldn’t get them—I suspect a Hot Pocket would do in a pinch.  

Maybe I’m especially aware of this lack of warm sentiment towards Pachuca, because I began coming here to visit Gil (and eventually, marry him), and he, more than anyone I’ve ever met, loves his homeland.  I believe that, if shown two photographs of him (with no landmarks visible) I could instantly identify which was taken in Pachuca, and which was taken on the Oaxaca coast, just by the difference in his face—regardless of his actual expression, he looks different in his homeland.  Even his skin changes.  You could say that’s a result of the climate, but you couldn’t convince me.  He’s allergic to being away from his place, his tierra, his home.             

And especially, being away from his home, in Pachuca. 

Pachuca—or the valley it rests in—must, once, have been a wonderful place to live.  Seen from the surrounding mountains, if you imagine away the sprawl, it just looks right.  A perfect human habitat.  Prickly pears everywhere: free dessert everywhere you turn.  Wood for fires.  Good soil.  There must have been game, once.  Never too hot or too cold.  Plenty of rain, and rainbows—perfect, full arches—at least weekly, just to keep your spirits up. 

And so?  There are plenty of cities in the world that rest atop good soil, former hunting grounds, former fields of supper for the gathering, and they are beloved anyway—or at least liked, sort of forgiven for their city-dom because they offer culture, human diversity, art, architecture…What’s up with Pachuca?

Well, first of all, Pachuca offers very little of those things.  Yes, there are occasional plays and concerts, but nothing a resident of just about any other major city I can think of would clap her hands about.  Especially considering that it is a city in México, there is virtually no indigenous presence.  Art, architecture…what?  It’s easy to get lost in Pachuca, because most of it looks the same.  There are at least five Wal-Marts (that includes Sam’s Club and Bodega Aurerra, the Mexican face of Wal-Mart), three Wal-Mart competitors, perhaps 10 Wal-Mart-owned restaurants, two huge malls, and countless strip malls—in a city of about 270,000 people, covering about 8000 square miles.  Okay, I couldn’t get that to work out to any shocking figures, but I’ve never been much for math.  Suffice to say, that’s a lot of Wal-Mart.  Without much in between. 

The city government is wildly corrupt, but this is Mexico: that goes without saying.  That doesn’t explain why the largest group of people I have ever seen gathered for common cause in Pachuca is the daily early-morning march of the police force.  The protest marches that lit up the streets in other Mexican cities a few weeks ago in Pachuca manifested as a straggly line of people with white balloons wandering down a relatively minor downtown street at about noon on a Saturday.  On regular Friday and Saturday nights in Pachuca, the streets are deserted by ten thirty, eleven, while in most other Mexican cities you can see families eating tacos and ice cream and pushing their kids on swings until the wee hours of the morning.  How can this apathy be explained?

I’m probably wrong, but the first thing that occurs to me is the river.  Pachuca’s river—I don’t know what it’s called, or was once called—is the deadest river I’ve ever seen.  Not only does it smell bad, not only is it reduced to a sad brown trickle, it doesn’t even have a river bed anymore.  It has, I guess you could say, a river coffin: a deep concrete box with two lanes of traffic on either side.  It is one of the saddest sights I’ve ever seen. 

How can a town without a living river be a living town?  Without a river, a town is a joke, an illusion, a disaster waiting to happen.  Perhaps it’s coming here straight from Missoula, Montana, that makes me stick on this thought: Missoula’s river—the Clark Fork—is the focal point of the town, its raison d’etre, its soul.  The Clark Fork isn’t pristine, but it’s undoubtedly alive, and becoming more and more alive, because Missoulians of all stripes love it, care for it, clean it up, swim in it, fish in it, write about it, contemplate it, run along it, skip stones on it, and fight like hell for it when it’s threatened.   

My hometown of San Jose’s river—the Guadalupe—is ailing and pathetic, to be sure, trashed and polluted, and flood-controlled into submission.  Yet, when the Guadalupe River Park opened a few years ago, people flocked to it, as though it were exactly what they’d been waiting for—and maybe it is.  A chance to put a finger on the pulse of this place, weak and erratic as it may be.  Proof of life. 

Anyway, that’s my first guess.