Barbacoa en México

Barbacoa, let it be said, is NOT barbeque.  It’s denser and meatier, with a different kind of smokiness and an emphasis on spice over sweetness.  It has ground chile paste where barbeque has hickory, dark gamey goat where barbeque has beef.  The meat peels off the bone and dissolves in your mouth, piqued by a sip of mezcal with lime and mellowed by smooth black bean paste.

Jorge’s uncles buried a chile-rubbed goat in a big square pit with a bunch of avocado and maguey leaves and left it there for twelve hours.  It slow cooked over a pot of coals.  When it was time to extract it at 3 p.m., the hour of the massive, siesta-inducing Mexican comida, the whole family gathered round to watch.  Kids clamored to get a peek at the covered pit, the men adopted an air of esteemed ceremony, and a few older sombrero-d types who’d already been hitting the mezcal with affection started sending off fireworks in random directions.

Jorge photographed, I gaped.  The men peeled away straw mats to reveal the slow-smoking goat, removed the cooked leaves, and placed the goat parts carefully in a big white bucket.  Then, they heaved the unimaginably heavy pot of soup, full of diced veggies cooked in a spiced tomato broth into which dripped the goat-chile juices, onto a small fire.

We ate.  Out came bowls of creamy bean paste and guacamole, plates of garnishes, limes, peanuts, more beer, more mezcal, tortillas wrapped in warm cloths, small bowls of caldito, and the goat.

This is how we spent New Year’s : with toasts of “Felicidades!” between shots (sipped) of mezcal, handfuls of spicy garlic peanuts (beware the blind grab, or you’ll end up, as my stepmom did on her visit to Oaxaca, taking down a whole clove of roasted garlic.  Pungent.  You’re then a walking garlic bomb for the next two days) and plates of barbacoa decorated in fresh cilantro, sliced onions, and guacamole.  And beer.  Another cold one would surface just as you were down to the last murky quarter of the old one.

The bus ride home was a vague, satisfied rumble along dirt roads, the sun setting in wide pale streaks across the valley.  After we’d stumbled into the house ready to sleep at 8 p.m., there was a knock on the door.  Jorge answered it.  Blurred sentences drifted through the doorway.  Jorge beckoned me forward.

On the stoop was our elderly neighbor, who comes down from Mexico City two weeks a year to get utterly blasted all day long and sing his favorite Mexican classics.  He gives the famous turkey call (“ay ay ay ay ay ay!!!”) with mock sobbing and everything, reaching his peak around 2 p.m.  For some reason, he’d held out longer on New Year’s Day.

“Vecinos!” he slurred.  “Vamosacompartiruntraigo.”  In the name of neighborly peace, there was no way we could turn this down.

“Bueno,” we said, bleary-eyed but resolute.  We stood on the edge of the doorway, the man hoisting the bottle of mezcal and grinning at us, and we shared sips.

He mumbled for awhile about the New Year, about life and work and something about “sexual beings” with a wink in my direction we chose to ignore, and then he said,

“You know, sometimes we need to leave the computer.  We need to leave the computer to live a little, you know, live…in…(sigh)…the world.”

He must’ve been catching glimpses of me all day long, furiously crouched over the keyboard at work on some project or another.  He pinned down my New Year’s resolution in a nutshell.  Go slow.  Slow food, slow, conscious experiences.  Maybe drinking a beer on the balcony and just watching the sky, maybe taking a whole day to go walking somewhere, maybe cooking a mole, grinding all the spices by hand in the mortar and pestle.  But getting away from the computer to live in the world a little (and then coming back in a fervor of stirred up energy to write about it, of course).