JALPA, MEXICO — O come, all ye Chicagoans and Angelenos, to this town in the hills of Zacatecas, where guava fruit drops from the trees and the fields turn goldenrod in winter.
Local delicacies await you, including "gilded" beef taquitos and coconut milk spiked with gin, drunk straight from the shell. Bullfights, wrestling matches, concerts and Masses will be celebrated in your honor.
When I arrived in Jalpa as the representative of a California newspaper owned in part by a Chicagoan, I was given the deluxe treatment. Cups of the locally produced mescal were placed before me. I ate dinner on the mayor's desk. People with cameras kept grabbing me to pose for pictures.
They even hustled me to a stage and asked me to make a few remarks to 500 or so people.
I began in Spanish, but then said something in English, because I'd heard the language spoken often during my visit: "Are there any Dodger fans out there?" There were a few cheers -- but just as many jeers (probably from Cubs fans).
Los Angeles and Chicago hold a special place in the hearts of the people of Jalpa: Thousands of jalpenses have migrated to those cities, and other places in the United States. And every December, thousands of sons, daughters and grandchildren of Jalpa head south from California and Illinois for a few days or weeks of holiday celebrations with family and friends back in central Mexico.
In December, English becomes the second language of Jalpa. You can hear it spoken in the central plaza of this town of about 20,000 people, by people like Ruby Rodriguez, a 24-year-old gas company employee from Whittier.
"We come here and everybody wants to feed us," said Rodriguez, whose family is from La Villita, just outside Jalpa. She came to Zacatecas this month with half a dozen friends, all born in California and all children of Zacatecas migrants. They've been coming to Jalpa for the holidays for as long as they can remember.
"We would all go to Las Posadas together when we were little," she said, referring to a series of traditional Christmas processions. "When we were 10, we'd run after each other and throw firecrackers. Then when we were 15 we all started drinking."
In part to accommodate the thousands of returning migrants, Jalpa's civic leaders schedule the annual feria, or fair, for December. It is an elaborate, 14-day mix of the sacred and the profane that includes much prayer, the crowning of a queen, a rodeo and a lucha libre wrestling extravaganza.
