The order came from the Mexican government. “Shelter in place” for 14 days. Avoid contact, stay indoors, wash your hands, frequently. An order so simple seemed pathetically inadequate; a typically bureaucratic response, putting the onus on individual responsibility. How could washing your hands often, alone at home, conceivably stop the relentless march of a pandemic? Flights in and out of Mexico were being canceled. As everything shut down, taxi drivers, small businesses, students protested angrily.

 

It was April 2009. The Swine flu-H1N1 had crossed an ominous threshold just as I was finishing the first part of my Fulbright, a COMEXUS Fulbright-García Robles fellowship: teaching in the Mayan language and culture studies department of the Universidad de Oriente in Valladolid, Yucatan.  It had been a thrilling three months, and I was looking forward to the research phase of my grant. I taught a semantics course in Spanish -- two firsts for me.  My students, all first-generation college students from Maya-speaking towns in the area, had worked hard too. For their term project, I had them create the first-ever bilingual glossary of semantics terminology in Yucatec Maya and Spanish, a stretch for them, linguistically and conceptually. Our mutual struggles had made us close, and I missed them.

 

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Now another first: two weeks of quarantine. Alone, at age 56, for the first time in eons. I’d left my husband and grown daughters behind in California. No way to get home. My new “place” consisted of two small rooms in a fortress-like colonial ex-convent, with walls 3 feet thick, on Plaza de la Candelaria. My friendly landlords had left; the remaining occupants were an affable American couple, a Universidad de Oriente English teacher and his wife. We shared an outdoor kitchen and bathroom surrounded by Jacaranda and Oleander trees. In the morning I’d sit at my desk, looking out my window on the empty Plaza, waiting impatiently for the opening bars of Skye that signaled connection with my family. In those days Skype conversations were spotty, pictures blurry and voices distorted. To this day, those opening Skype notes, (daa da da, dee da dee) still trigger potent sense memories of Yucatan: the morning light on the Spanish floor tiles, the smell of street vendor- food carts on the plaza, a feeling of being lost in space/time. 

 

Apart from calls home, what lifted my spirits wasn’t research. I couldn’t concentrate.  What cheered me were the purple Jacaranda flower, the smell of fresh tortillas, the raucous morning calls (wheeeeet ziuuuuuu!) of tropical birds on my roof, the fat vines in the kitchen garden, which seemed to grow taller daily in the tropical sun. The brilliant bio-diversity of the place. On my “socially distant” meanderings, I’d collect strange-looking seeds and take them back to my room to draw. I’d painted and drawn all my childhood, but was sooo rusty. I tried doing rubbings, used local dirt as pigment. Little by little my hands began to remember. 

 

Beyond the Plaza, Mexican creativity blossomed. On the news, I heard swine flu Corridos  and bombas, a form of rhymed couplets; Maya-speakers, gifted at double entendres and puns, made up séen K’eek’en (swine flu) jokes. In the crowded capital, people decorated face masks with smiley faces and skulls; “tapa-bocas” (face masks) cropped up everywhere, on pompous equestrian statues and penciled in on posters. 

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Mealtimes in our communal kitchen, the American couple invited me to join their plans and games. They’d raised their children on a sailboat, and were expert at amusing themselves.  I learned to play Banana grams; we laughed, drank too much, traded stories, went on sorties for groceries, cooked for each other. One day we snuck out to near-by Puerto Barrios in search of a mangrove forest, and feasted on greasy fried fish. 

 

And lo and behold, the days rolled by.  The infection curve began to flatten. As restrictions eased, we ventured out timorously. The cab drivers on my block reappeared and returned to calling out destinations (“Ek Balaaaaam, Ek Balaaaaam”) to the few re-emerging tourists. A UNO colleague, Mayan writer Ana Patricia Martinez Huchim, came from in Tizimin to stay with me. She was editing her Maya language magazine, K’aalay: El Canto de la Memoria, and looking for an image to put on the cover of the current issue.  When she saw my seed drawings, she flipped. 

 

“Normal” life slowly resumed. I joined a team of 25 Maya teachers and linguists to work on the first test of language competency in Yucatec Maya. The work was exhilarating. The exam was administered to the 3,000 teachers in the Peninsula’s bilingual school system, and evaluated with protocols developed by our team.  Based on proficiency levels documented by the test, teachers were assigned classes in Mayan, and their teaching improved. 

 

I began collaborating with Ana Patricia, translating one of her short stories and poems: two of my pieces appeared on K’aalay covers. Years later, she came to California to teach Maya to Yucatecan immigrants in San Francisco, and spent a month with us. Sadly, her life was cut short by illness. Her California friends organized a scholarship in her name, called "Uye'ex In Taan" (Listen to my voice). The grant supports students interested in indigenous language and literature. Next year, its first recipient will graduate from UC Berkeley.