San Gabriel

I came to San Gabriel on a Tuesday in late November, arriving from Zapotlán el Grande on a combi that dropped me at the edge of the market. The town smelled of copal and damp stone. It was maybe eleven in the morning and almost no one was moving. I had a copy of Pedro Páramo in my bag — I’d been rereading it on the road — and I remember thinking that the light coming through the jacarandas over the jardín was exactly the light Rulfo seemed to be describing whenever he wasn’t describing darkness. Which is to say, not often, but precisely.

The Archive Is the Town Itself

The Casa Museo Juan Rulfo sits just off the central plaza, modest in the way places are when they know what they contain. A few original manuscripts behind glass, photographs of Rulfo at various ages looking like a man carrying something heavy, and a small collection of the editions that made him famous in the sixty-odd countries that eventually translated him. The woman who showed me around spoke about him the way people in small towns speak about their extraordinary dead — with a kind of proprietary tenderness, like he’d borrowed something and never quite given it back. I spent longer there than I’d planned, reading the wall panels, trying to locate the exact hillside visible from Rulfo’s childhood window. The museum is the container, but what it’s gesturing at is outside: the cerros, the silence, the quality of an afternoon when the sun drops behind the sierra and the temperature falls fast.

The Market and the Afternoon

San Gabriel’s mercado municipal is small enough to walk in four minutes but dense enough that I spent an hour. There’s a woman who sells tamales de rajas at a folding table near the entrance — I don’t know her name, I never asked — and she wraps them in banana leaf, the masa darker and denser than what you get on the coast. I ate two standing up and then found a comedor at the back where they were ladling caldo de res from a pot that had clearly been on the stove since before I was born. The broth was the color of strong tea and tasted like it had opinions. I went back the next morning for the same thing.

The Plaza at Six in the Evening

The thing nobody tells you about San Gabriel is what happens at dusk. The families come out, the ice cream cart appears near the kiosk, and someone usually has a radio on somewhere. It is completely unremarkable in the best sense — a Mexican plaza doing exactly what a Mexican plaza is for. I sat on a bench for a while with the Rulfo still in my bag, not reading it, just watching the light flatten out over the church façade. The dead, for the record, did not start talking. But I thought I understood, a little better than before, why Rulfo had set his novel in a place very much like this one.

Getting There

From Guadalajara, take a bus south to Ciudad Guzmán (Zapotlán el Grande), roughly two and a half hours. From there, combis and shared taxis run to San Gabriel in about forty minutes. The last return to Ciudad Guzmán leaves San Gabriel around six in the evening — confirm locally, schedules shift seasonally.