In San Juan Atenco, day of muted joy

Her face as dark and furrowed as a walnut, her body bent from 80 years of hard work, the old woman leaned in close to her visitors and told them why it’s always a mixed blessing when her grandson and his family arrive from Los Angeles. “Yes, I’m happy when they come back,” said Guadalupe Mendoza, the matriarch of a clan that spans two emotionally intertwined but distant worlds. “But I’m sad when they leave again.”

Sitting beside his grandmother in a musty storeroom stacked with dried corncobs, Dario Urbina, 29, took Mendoza’s wrinkled hand and tried to explain why today he lives near the Forum in Inglewood, with his wife and three children, after fleeing his native village when he was only 14. “Little by little,” he said simply, “I got used to the United States.”

It was that kind of day last Thursday for many families in this remote hillside pueblo 3 1/2 hours east of Mexico City. A day for counting blessings and lamenting losses. A day for praying in the morning and dancing in the afternoon. A day of football matches, carnival rides, mariachi singing, horse racing and plates piled high with chicken and pork drenched in thick, sweet chile poblano mole. A day of sweeping sunlight followed by violent hailstorms, and then the chill calm of evening.

Above all it was a day of homecoming, when San Juan Atenco, official population 3,476, celebrated the return of scores of daughters, brothers, aunts, cousins and long-absent friends from places with lyrical, exotic-sounding names like Culver City and Hawthorne and Long Beach and Santa Ana. Most days, San Juan Atenco sits half-empty, its central square practically deserted, its narrow streets lined with abandoned homes. But every year, like the mythical hamlet in the musical “Brigadoon” that appears once a century, San Juan Atenco comes to life and throws itself a giant party. Last Thursday was that day, the start of a weekend of emotional reunions and spontaneous outbursts of civic pride that could be felt all the way to Los Angeles.

“The life here is very beautiful,” said Griselda Urbina, Dario Urbina’s wife, a Culver City preschool teacher, as she celebrated in a large tent outside the house where her husband grew up. “You don’t look at your watch. You don’t think, ‘Now it’s time for this, now it’s time for that.’ ”

It’s estimated that in recent decades about 50% of the population of this serene but work-starved village has fled north across the U.S. border. Most of the migrants have settled in greater Los Angeles, concentrating heavily in the city’s southern suburbs and the San Fernando Valley. They left behind a village as short on economic opportunity as it is long on pastoral charm. A place where some houses, spiffed up with money sent back from L.A., flaunt sparkling new bathrooms, gleaming hot water tanks, Sony TVs and Panasonic stereos, while next door the neighbors still use outhouses with metal latrines and commute on burros. Wander the streets of this village and you’ll spot many deserted houses whose backyards have been converted into plots for feeding cows or planting corn and beans, about the only things that San Juan Atenco still sends out into the world -- besides its restless children.

“The only opportunity for young people is in the state capital or in Mexico City. But here there is nothing,” said Cesar Perez Medina, the municipality’s finance officer. For the men, Perez said, the only available work is in the lush fields of maiz and other crops that surround the town. For the women, there are the fields or there is housework. And yet, Perez insisted, life in San Juan Atenco is good. “There’s no pollution, there’s no security problem.”

And there is San Juan Bautista, the little gemlike church that sits across from the central square, just down the road from where the cavity of a monstrous volcano, long extinguished, forms a deep, cactus-lined natural lake. Named for the pueblo’s patron, St. John the Baptist, whose feast day was being celebrated on Thursday, the church began filling with worshipers early in the morning. By noon practically every inch of its gilded interior was filled, as a priest gave thanks for all those who had returned and for the many gifts they’d brought with them.

Among the prodigal sons and daughters gathered inside the church were Alfredo and Diana Gomez of Hawthorne, with daughters Brianna, 6, Ashley, 5, and Bianca, 1, who, according to her mother, had spent the morning chasing after the dogs and turkeys in her grandmother’s backyard. Also along for the journey were Alfredo Gomez’s niece Joana Garcia and his goddaughter and cousin Aline Gabriela Gomez, both of whom were wearing white first-Communion dresses. Alfredo’s father, Alfredo Gomez Sr., had been specially thanked by the village priest for donating to the church a Ford Ranger, which he drove down from Los Angeles.

“I want my little girls to remember where they come from,” said Alfredo Gomez, who has lived in Hawthorne for 26 years and works as a gardener. “I want them to follow the same traditions. The Catholic tradition is the basis of our lives.” Joana Garcia, a shy, pretty girl with dark hair and braces, already was noticing differences between L.A. and her uncle’s village. “Everybody’s, like, united in this whole area, everybody is kind to each other,” she said. “Here you say hi to everybody whether you know them or not.”

So many pueblitos of a few hundred or a few thousand people dot rural Mexico that the residents of one village may not know the name of another that’s more than two or three stops up the road. But on Thursday people from pueblos throughout the region were making their way into San Juan Atenco, and by early afternoon small private parties were breaking out at many homes. Strains of acoustic guitar floated over walls made of volcanic rock. Women slapped handmade corn tortillas on grills in old-fashioned outdoor kitchens. Every 10 minutes or so, a fusillade of popping firecrackers pierced the air, sometimes followed by a rooster’s crow or a horse’s whinny, but never by a ringing cellphone.

In the village center, a 40-kilometer bicycle race was wrapping up, part of the day’s celebrations. Benancio Alejandro, 72, the oldest participant, wiped his brow with a red bandanna and described the secret of his success. “I don’t drink, I don’t smoke,” he said. “That’s all.”

Orlando Sedeno, 62, whose orange-and-black baseball cap with the word “Juez” identified him as one of the race judges, pointed out Alejandro’s bike leaning against a wall of the municipal government building. “It’s from the year 2000,” he said of the bike, laughing, “but before Christ.” Sedeno has a daughter who lives in L.A., but it’s hard to visit her, he said: too expensive and too hard to get papers to cross the border. “There’s no work here, it’s sad,” he continued. “Here the life is very hard. But I’m happy here -- poor but happy.”

At the south end of the village, where the streets taper off into endless rows of corn, men were setting up metal starting gates for a horse race. Joel Ruiz, 32, stood watching the preparations. Ruiz said he has lived in Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco, Costa Mesa, Long Beach, Santa Ana and Victoria, British Columbia, sustaining himself by picking crops. But he was recently deported back to Mexico after crossing into Olympia, Wash. Now he’s living near San Juan Atenco. “I didn’t want to come back,” he said.

Just then, two horses thundered down the dirt track, kicking up clouds of dust as they crossed the finish line. Ruiz cursed his luck: He’d bet the wrong pony and had just lost 100 pesos.

Around 6 p.m. the clouds that had been gathering all afternoon burst open, and sheets of rain mixed with hail began pelting the fields as people dived under trucks for cover or raced back to the village center. In Mexico, popular superstition holds that it always rains on St. John the Baptist’s feast day. But suddenly it seemed as if the saint were trying to baptize the entire town in one fell swoop.

No matter. Under a huge, somewhat leaky yellow canopy in the central square, local students in traditional Mexican folkloric costumes were smiling and splashing like Gene Kelly as they danced across the zocalo’s old stone pavement to the revolutionary ballad “Adelita.”

Santiago Cervantes de Julian, 34, and his wife and children were among the many families strolling the square, munching on churros and tacos as the rain pattered down. His two brothers had left for Los Angeles years ago, Cervantes said, and only one of them has ever come back to visit. But they sent him something to remember them by, he said, removing the cap from his head. On it was the word “Dodgers” embroidered in royal blue.

Across the street, worshipers were still making their way into the church, whose doors would stay open until 2 the next morning in honor of the saint. Light from the church flooded out into the main road, where a cavalcade of big rigs rumbled by in low gear, perhaps hauling produce from San Juan Atenco’s fields to Mexico City or the border. For a little while longer, at least, the town would be full of music and laughter, as if nothing had changed, as if no one ever had left.

It would be a night to remember, and forget, about so many loved ones, so far away.