It began with the butterflies. In 2011, I went to see their colony on Cerro Pelon, the sanctuary that straddles the border of the State of Mexico and Michoacán. I fell in love that day, with the monarch migration and the man who took me to see them. A few years later, I moved to his village in the State of Mexico, where we ran an ecotourism business together. I still love the butterflies. And Michoacán.
At the time, the US State Department had dire warnings about the ill-advisedness of entering that state. But once I lived on its State of Mexico fringe, I went there all the time. When the power went out in our village, which was often, I could see the houses of our neighboring rancho glowing like fireflies across the invisible state line. We had no cellphone or internet service, so every time I descended into Michoacán, my phone came to life with a frenzy of notifications.
While it wasn't clear to me what being Mexiquense got you (apart from subpar infrastructure), Michoacán seemed distinctive. It had delicious food: carnitas and barbacoa served with consommé, a fragrant broth filled out with garbanzos and rice. Market stalls boasted a rainbow of fruit candies called ate, offered in familiar flavors like mango or piña, or exotic ones like membrillo and tejocote. Other stalls teemed with the gear of Tierra Caliente cowboy culture: walls of styley cowboy hats and pointy snakeskin boots.
Whenever the village had its annual fiesta, guys from Michoacán rode their horses over the mountain to join us. These diminutive men looked tall atop their muscular steeds. The riders favored Charles Bronson mustaches and the sombreros characteristic of the adjacent Tierra Caliente region, a swoopy white hat adorned with a black grosgrain ribbon, plus a tiny tassel dangling from the center back rim.
On the boozier end of the party, when the pile of beer empties grew and the banda got more noticeably off key, the visiting Michoacános re-mounted their horses. A click of the tongue cued their equine companions into an elaborate cloppety clop tap dance sequence, echoing out across the pavement. The riders exuded such confidence, and while I felt a flicker of concern about animal cruelty, the horses looked proud of their performances as well.
Performers from Tierra Caliente at state-sponsored festival K'uincheckua: La Fiesta de Michoacán in 2023. *
Beholding those dancing horses gave me such delight. My joy brought up a thwarted childhood desire: I remembered how badly I wanted to take tap dancing when I was a kid. When I asked my mom about lessons, she said, “No, tap is tacky,” and enrolled me in ballet. I didn't want to slide smooth pink slippers on the floor, I wanted to turn stomping into art. This disappointment was just one among many data points on an overarching trend called, “how I lost touch with what I wanted and learned to contort myself into what others needed me to be.”
Funny thing was, moving to the middle of nowhere to work with the monarch migration had seemed like reconnecting with what I wanted. Sitting on a mountaintop in a storm of monarch butterflies was akin to the pleasure of watching dancing horses, just multiplied by a million. But as time wore on, I started to feel constrained in a familiar way by the family I'd married into. Yet again, expressing my feelings and desires got me scapegoated and silent treated, this time by the ever-shifting alliances in my partner's extended family of 24, with whom we shared a compound.
It was hard to leave; I loved opening the home I'd created to visitors and teaching people to appreciate the monarch migration and their Mexican neighbors. But when my partner was accused of yet another malfeasance, I cracked. The next morning, I hopped in the car with a suitcase and the dog and drove four hours north to freedom in San Miguel de Allende.
Settling in here, there was much that I missed: the shift from boreal forest verdancy to high desert dryness, the relative absence of a distinctive regional cuisine, art or music. Restaurants offered international fusion food that catered to visitors. The best of the artesania sold in stores came from Michoacán. Most music venues featured cover bands of rock classics or jazz. When I did go out, my Spanish was always returned with English. Sometimes I felt like I didn't really live in Mexico anymore.
Not that I noticed at first, because I didn't get out much. I was busy throwing myself into a new project: healing my childhood wounds so that I could stop repeating them in other relationships. I knew that healing meant grieving, yet all my life I'd avoided these difficult feelings with distraction: my favorites were a new romance, travel, and workaholism. Now I had none of these things, and without these standbys, the pain of my accrued losses surfaced. It was far from fun, but I harbored the hope that intentionally leaning into the lows could make me more open to the highs.
When I wasn't feeling my grief, I was reading about it, learning about its tendency to oscillate between the grief cluster (feelings like sadness, anger, regret) and the restoration cluster (making plans, moving forward). In general, we spend more time in the paralysis of the grief cluster right after a loss, while the restoration cluster becomes more dominant in the oscillation later on. That was certainly true for me.
This video compilation, recorded and edited by Jared Jiménez, includes many of the clips and experiences referenced in this article. *
Thirteen months into this process, I finally found myself on the upside of the oscillation. On a day when I felt unusually energetic, I went to the Fabrica Aurora art walk, out to dinner with new friends, and then to a very happening party. At the party, a guy walked in wearing one of those sombreros de Tierra Caliente with the black ribbons. Under the hat, a kind face. When its wearer saw me staring, he started, head jerking back, our eyes locking momentarily.
It was a packed party, and it took several more hours before the guy with the hat approached me. When we started chatting the subject matter was not the kind of small talk I expected: he launched into a disposition about the ethnography and traditions of Michoacán. Jared himself was from Morelia, but he'd spent as much time as possible in the smaller, more traditional towns west of the capital.
It was late, the crowd was thinning, and car services weren't answering my messages, so Jared offered to walk me home. As we descended a deserted Calzada de la Luz, he was describing the dance step people used in the parade in the fiesta in Paracho, the guitar making center of Michoacán. Participants lock arms and move together in a row, three steps forward, two steps back. He linked his arm through mine and showed me this very simple step. A part of me was amused by how he'd used this demonstration as an excuse to touch me. It seemed almost slick, although there was nothing slick about this man who exuded an almost shy sweetness. He continued holding my hand the rest of the walk over the puente and up into San Rafa, where he delivered me to my doorstep.
Then he left town, off to play with his band at a music festival in Michoacán. After a lifetime of rushing into relationships, this slow down felt perfect. Instead, he wooed me from afar with videos from the festival, clips of rehearsals, dance troupes, and impromptu jams at lively after hours parties. And then came a video of one of those tap dancing horses, just like the ones I'd admired at village fiestas. The sight made me teary in a bittersweet way, as the good parts of the life I'd lost came flooding back. When Jared got back to town, we started dating.
The author with Jared Jiménez as they prepare to parade in el Desfile de Corpus en la Feria de Guitarra in Paracho, Michoacan, in August of 2023. *
Six months later, I allowed myself the pleasure of traveling again, joining Jared on his annual pilgrimage to the guitar festival in Paracho, Michoacán. We took part in the event he'd described to me, linking arms with a row as wide as the street and doing that three steps forward, two steps backwards dance together, hundreds of us all the way across town. We only broke arms to accept shots of tequila, poured into the tiny cups we wore on ribbons around our necks. This ecstatically communal drunkenness felt like no other buzz I'd experienced in my life.
The highs of that most perfect of perfect days kept coming. At the after party, the people we'd paraded with pulled out instruments and started playing. One group featured a harp that a man plucked while a woman beat percussion on its fat hollow base, backed by violin and guitar. Its staccato beat spoke to me, like some kind of bizarro world country music, uncanny in its familiarity. Only later did I put it together that I was hearing the genre that went with the tap dancing horses: la música de Tierra Caliente. This insight was followed by another delightful realization: there was also a tradition of people doing percussive dances to this music, slamming their shoes on a wooden board set up in front of the band.
The author's backyard during one of last season's house concerts. *
Last summer, Jared and I collaborated on a series of house concerts at my place. It felt like a new piece of my restoration cluster, a way of recuperating some of what I'd loved and lost with my butterfly business. Once again, I was opening my home to host events focused on creating community and fostering connections, in this case among music-lovers of San Miguel and musicians not usually featured at other venues.
Whenever people asked me what was next for the house concert series, I found myself trying to explain the pleasures of la música de Tierra Caliente. I never felt like I successfully conveyed it. But this season at Conciertos Casa Elena, you can come experience it for yourself. Our first concert on Saturday, April 26, features Conjunto La Endiablada, a group of Morelia-dwelling young people who are dedicated to maintaining the musical traditions of this geographical and cultural region.
While my patio doesn't have space for dancing horses, La Endiablada has offered to give us lessons in how to zapatear, as it's called, in a brief dance lesson demo before they begin their set. As you can imagine, there are some young parts of me that are super-excited by the prospect of finally learning how to turn stomping into art.
Come learn how the dance is done, experience a genre of traditional Mexican music you won't hear anywhere else around here, as we take lessons from the folks who hail from the hot land on how to have fun during the hot season.
*
La Música Tradicional de Michoacán
Saturday, April 26: Música de Tierra Caliente with La Endiablada
Saturday, May 24: Música Purépecha Tradicional with Kustakua
Saturday, June 21: Sonidos Prehispanicos with Jadhex
*
Nicolas Licea 7B in Colonia San Rafael. Doors open at 6pm, show begins at 7pm. Limited first come, first serve seating. $300 cover & cash bar.
**************
Ellen Sharp is a writer and an IFS-trained therapeutic practitioner specializing in recovery from narcissistic abuse. Prior to moving to San Miguel in 2020, she spent a decade developing ecotourism and forest conservation projects at a monarch butterfly sanctuary in rural State of Mexico. She's at work on a memoir about this experience. Sharp holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from UCLA.
