The most meaningful souvenir might just be a little cliché
Market in Puebla, Mexico. Photo Credit: Photo by Roberto Carlos Roman Don on Unsplash
I used to be that traveler. Always with a plan, obnoxiously obsessing about the well-researched itinerary no one had asked me to make, and probably the only person in the world who printed out emails with restaurant recommendations from friends and cut them to size in order to paste them into said itinerary.
You laugh, but I was like this because to me, time spent traveling was precious; an always too-brief opportunity to experience new things, not endlessly search for them.
But my favorite part was always bringing home a part of that experience. No plan was complete before I found out what treasure my destination was best known for. I made sure I didn’t come home without it: perfumes from Paris, molas from Panama, alfajores from Buenos Aires. I loved finding the ideal object to remember the place, capture the person I'd been there and then.
Then came a work trip to Mexico City, a location I already loved, and I hatched a plan to bring back the ultimate reward: a patio-full of the legendary Talavera clay pottery the city of Puebla is revered for. I pictured myself buying and shipping huge multicolored hand-thrown pots, pewter accents, maybe a huge ceramic yellow sun to turn my rather drab patio into the tropical paradise I’d always known it could be. (In a fit of generosity, I’d allowed my husband to decorate it “his way” and the result had been more drab man-cabin than I’d bargained for.)
Talavera clay pottery. Credit: Anjanette Delgado
Plus, my mother had been laid low by a knee injury, and badly needed cheering up. “How about a nice Talavera pot for your Amethyst orchid?” I asked, hoping to insert her seamlessly into my carefully planned trip to Puebla, a two-and-a-half-hour drive from the Mexico City neighborhood of La Condesa where I’d be staying.
“I’m thinking of a beautiful Mexican blanket instead,” she said in the serious, definitive tone a jury foreman reserves for reading the guilty verdict of a mass murderer. But Puebla was a long drive from Condesa. I saw my own pottery-shopping expedition slipping away.
I tried to dissuade her. “Aren’t blankets a bit clichéd?”
“Not when you’re decrepit and laid up like me,” she responded. (My mother was in her mid, vibrant 60s, and in great form when it came to manipulation.)
I hit back. “Pardon me for thinking you hated clichés, mom.”
She hit harder: "In my old age I find them comforting.”
“You hate your friend Gloria´s house because it looks like a shrine to Paris, but now you want to be like her?”
She grimaced. “That’s different. This is one authentic blanket. It will not a shrine to Mexico make.”
She had a point, but I still explained that Mexico, specifically Puebla, is the only place in the world where the Mesopotamian art of Talavera, later transported to Spain, had not only been learned and maintained through centuries, but advanced to museum-quality heights. This was her only chance to own an excellent example of it.
“Is a blanket too much trouble, honey?” she asked finally.
No. No, it wasn’t. She’s my mother.
But once in Mexico, people told me that if I wanted to find a true work of art in the form of a blanket, I would have to go to Oaxaca, which was over six hours away. There was no way I’d be able to do that and still make my flight home the next day.
Maybe I could find a miracle blanket in Mexico City. It looked like the only way to get what my mother wanted, and I started early the next day, hoping it wasn’t crazy to think Oaxacan textile artists would have places where they sold their wares locally. After all, Mexico City is the country’s capital.
But by mid-afternoon, I’d searched fourteen high and mid-end artisanal shops for the one-of-a-kind woven piece of wool I knew my mother craved—and, true, most were within or around La Ciudadela, a sprawling Mexico City market, so called because it’s so big it feels like a city—but I was disheartened to find nothing despite all my efforts.
A stroke of luck came in the form of a tip from one of the vendors from whom I’d bought a Tostada de Panza to fuel my search.
Following his advice, I ventured into the Dolores Olmedo Museum, where a group of women were making quilts using fragments from huipiles (traditional Mexican women’s woven sheaths). They were gorgeous. I’d never seen something so sturdy and so delicate at the same time, their threads like children’s fingers holding onto each other. I would have bought them. But they weren’t blankets, woven to warm my mother’s always-cold feet, so on I went.
It was late in the afternoon when I stopped for a snack. The sky was steelish blue and moving fast. An early dusk. I decided to stop at a little Indian restaurant, probably because I was tired of searching. Because my feet had been hurting for a while and I was frustrated with everything Mexican.
Serendipity. When I told the waiter why I looked like I was about to faint, he brought me some delicious tamarind lassi to go with the samosas I’d ordered. Then he told me of a warehouse where they work textiles in the traditional way of Oaxaca, even using pigments made with fruits that turned color once applied to artists’ skins to create the unique shades.
It was a temporary location in the Colonia Roma, but if I hurried….
*
A blanket vendor in Mexico on one of Delgado’s later trips. Credit: Anjanette Delgado.
It was almost night by the time I got there, and I went right inside of what felt like a big courtyard. Tall casement windows looked held in place by cement floors and walls and ceiling. Large, freshly-woven blankets suspended in midair floated toward me as if to embrace me, and I was transported. The owner walked over and spoke quietly to avoid disturbing the weavers, who smiled as they worked, deep in concentration.
I told him I would have had to visit Oaxaca if I hadn’t found his shop, and he told me I must go anyway, visit the Textile Museum there, see what past generations did with gauze and brocade. He called the looms “magic machines.” I nodded, mentally vowing to return with enough time to make the trip; see the marvels he described.
Later, as I paid, I asked if such big windows weren’t a bad thing in a textile shop. “Won’t the sun make the colors of the blankets fade?” The owner shook his head. “But it makes the hearts of the workers smile.”
*
My mother’s blanket is taupe with dark blue stripes at each end, and very thick. I had to ship it, and when it arrived a few days after I did, she laid it out flat on her bed, admiring it, and asked how much it had cost. When I told her, she said,“You should have bought more. For your sister,” which is how I knew she loved it.
And even now, when she visits me, I know if someone has praised my copy of her blanket because I’ll hear her saying, “That blanket? It’s there thanks to me. Tell her to tell you the story of when she said blankets were ‘clichéd.’ Can you imagine, blankets, clichéd?”
Anjanette Delgado is a Puerto Rican writer and journalist. She is the author of The Heartbreak Pill (Simon and Schuster, 2008), 2009 winner of the Latino International Book Award, and of The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho (Kensington Publishing & Penguin Random House, 2014). Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, as well as in The Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Vogue, The New York Times ("Modern Love"), The Hong Kong Review, NPR, and HBO, among others.
This post contains affiliate links to Bookshop.org. This means if you make a purchase from our link, Undomesticated will receive a small commission to help us fund more stories. We do not accept compensation for reviews, and we pay our contributors. All recommendations and opinions are our own.
