Jerez de García Salinas

Jerez de García Salinas is 50 kilometers from Zacatecas City on a highway that cuts through the dry highland scrub of the Zacatecas state — cactus and thorn trees, the occasional ranching operation — and arrives in a town that looks like a smaller, calmer version of the capital. The same cantera stone, the same proportioned plaza, the same church anchoring the afternoon light. But Jerez has its own reasons to be here, and none of them are about scale.

The town is the birthplace of Ramón López Velarde, who died in 1921 at thirty-three — the same year his poem “La suave patria” was published posthumously — and whose work became, almost immediately, the defining literary expression of Mexican national identity after the revolution. The poem is an address to Mexico itself, specific and tender in a way that political poetry rarely manages: it describes the smell of corn tortillas, the sound of church bells in provincial towns, the quality of light in places exactly like Jerez. Every Mexican schoolchild reads it. The Casa de la Cultura, in the house where López Velarde was born, is where you begin to understand why.

The Poet’s House

The Casa de la Cultura is a restored colonial house on a street near the main plaza, operating as a combination museum and cultural center. The rooms contain López Velarde’s manuscripts, photographs, first editions, and period furniture recreating the household of a late-nineteenth-century provincial Mexican family of modest professional means. The garden has a bust. The whole thing is quiet in the way of provincial cultural institutions in Mexico — well-maintained, underfunded, genuinely loved by the people who run it.

I had printed a few stanzas of “La suave patria” before the trip and read them sitting in the plaza at five in the afternoon, with the church facade in front of me and the light going warm on the cantera stone. It felt slightly theatrical. It was also completely correct. López Velarde wrote about exactly this kind of afternoon in exactly this kind of town, and reading him in the place he was describing creates a circularity that I don’t know what to do with except acknowledge.

The poem is not easy to translate. The Spanish carries a weight of specific affection that goes flat in English — something about the word “patria” in Spanish carries a tenderness that “homeland” doesn’t reproduce. But reading it in the plaza of his birthplace doesn’t require translation. The context does the work.

Sombreros and the Charro Tradition

Jerez is known throughout northern Mexico for its sombreros charro, the wide-brimmed formal hats of the charro tradition — the Mexican rodeo culture that developed in the Zacatecas-Jalisco highlands and produced both extraordinary equestrian skills and, eventually, the mariachi aesthetic. These hats are made by hand in workshops on the streets around the center: you can walk into several of them, watch craftsmen working felt over wooden molds with wire and ribbon, and buy directly from the people who made what you’re looking at. The precision involved is considerable, and the prices — by any European standard — are absurdly fair.

I bought one. It is now in my apartment in Mexico City. It is an excellent hat and it raises questions from visitors that I am not always equipped to answer.

The Jerez bullring is the oldest in Zacatecas state, and the town’s bullfighting culture is serious and longstanding. I will not pretend to have engaged with it, but the presence of the ring is part of what the town is, and the Feria de Jerez — held every April — is one of the major regional festivals, worth planning around if you’re in Zacatecas state at that time.

The Plaza at Five

What Jerez rewards most is unhurried presence. The Saturday market on the main plaza is the best time to visit — local food vendors, produce from surrounding ranchos, the kind of market that exists to serve the people who live there. The portal restaurants around the plaza are quieter than Zacatecas City’s but have the same fundamental quality: a table, coffee, time.

Jerez makes an easy day trip from Zacatecas City, but there are small guesthouses in the centro if you want to stay. Staying overnight changes it — the town in the morning, before the day heats up, is very quiet, and the light on the church at 7am has a different quality than it does at five in the afternoon, less warm but more honest.

The drive from Zacatecas City takes under an hour. If you’re already in the state capital, Jerez should be on your second day. Go in the afternoon, when the light is what it should be, and bring something to read in the plaza.