The Guadalajara Reporter
Guadalajara's Largest English Newspaper
I live in a tile-and-carrizo-roofed house built in the early 1970s. It’s set in the cerro some distance above Joctotopec.
The United States Center of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which collects such data, reports that there were 40,000 known suicides in the U.S. in 2012. That is the most recent year for which complete data are available. And 40,600 suicide deaths make it the 10th leading cause of death for Americans. Someone in that country died by suicide every 12.9 minutes in 2012. And a physician friend last November suggested that number had grown robustly since then, “continuing its account for more years of lives lost — after cancer and heart disease — than any other cause of death.”
Suicides. Popular lore long attributed them to folks buffeted by unbearable “blues” during the holiday season. Especially around the New Year. Now experts say most suicides in the United States occur in late spring and early summer.
It’s the season to get jolly and many of us will be charging up our good cheer with a few hard-hitting spirits. As a result, a number of holiday aficionados will suffer from crapula. That fitting word is the Latin term for hangover. In Spanish the word is cruda, but in any language it hurts. Pliny the Elder isolated this devastating virus, calling it “A sickness of the head from gross overindulgence,” and hurried off to the public baths to cure himself. Ever since, the search for a reliable antidote has gone on, with paltry results.
On a chilly December morning in a nearby mountain pueblo, a number of people gathered at Deovijilda Lara’s tacos al vapor stand to get some warmth in their bellies. At 7 a.m., Deovijilda’s public market puesto seemed the first and warmest stand open. Dressed in several sweaters, wool knee-length stockings, faded flowered dress and an apron whose bulging pockets served as a minor pharmacy, a requisition center and a cash register, she presided over an assortment of steaming sartenes, cazuelas and ollas.
Mexico’s holiday season folk plays, called pastorelas, were once so controversial — and popular — that Catholic Church officials banned them twice in the 1700s. Over the last few decades, Mexican cultural observers are lamenting their gradual disappearance.
While many in the United States are doing a little better this winter than last, others are still feeling the economic crimp caused initially by the 2008 Great Recession. A significant portion of the United States and Mexico are on thin consumer rations.
