Journey to Xibalba: A Life in Archaeology

7: The House of Dogs: Pilot Project

v฀฀ 243฀฀ v Chapter Seven THE HOUSE OF DOGS Pilot Project The Friends Luis Felipe Nieto and I met for the first time in 1978 in the north bus terminal of Mexico City. We were both waiting for transportation to San Miguel via a second-class bus. It was strange—though I already knew members of his family, we had never crossed paths. We soon learned that each spent the week in Mexico City and returned to San Miguel on the weekends. After competing successfully in international martial arts, Luis Felipe had decided to make a career of archaeology and was attending the National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH). I was working at the Templo Mayor for Eduardo Matos. Luis Felipe and I sat together on the four-hour bus ride, talking about the sites along the Río Laja drainage and in the valley of San Miguel. It was a brief encounter and I rarely saw Luis Felipe after that chance meeting. Several years after our bus ride, Luis Felipe and I met again. He came to the apartment during the early winter of 1983 and proposed that my documentation team move to San Miguel and direct a settlement pattern study along the central portion of the Río Laja. He wanted to write his professional thesis on the area. His timing could not have been better. Things were not going well for the documentation team. It had become very apparent that we performed best in the field, far away from the civilized world of Mexico City and the never-ending intrusion of the bureaucracy. Our inability to adjust to the distractions of the urban life of the capital, and our failure to keep from butting heads with the bureaucracy and cope with 244฀฀ v฀฀ CHAPTER SEVEN reduced funding, caused the team to unravel. I had met the new director of INAH, Dr. Enrique Florescano. Although qualified, he faced a series of problems different from those of his predecessor. His biggest problem was financial. The new president of Mexico, José Lopez Portillo, who had promised to defend the peso like a dog, could not. There was little money in the government coffers and cultural investment was not a high priority. The funding that INAH did receive filtered slowly down through the administrative bureaucracy to projects and investigators in greatly reduced amounts. For example, the Chichén Itzá funding dropped from 6,492,497.18 pesos in 1982 to 80,000 pesos in 1983. Not only that, the entire year’s funding was handed to me in November and had to be spent and accounted for by mid-December. Naturally, our project suffered. Instead of working at the site two shifts per day, year-round, we worked one shift with a partial team for less than two months. For the field team, adjusting to Mexico City was a pain in the ass. Having lived in close proximity to one another for several years, the team began to see each other less and less outside of our “unionized” hours of work. Of course, the chilango (from Mexico City) team members returned to live with their families. Some of them lived far across town and from the very beginning they arrived late to work. Someone ratted on them to the union police. As a result, the union installed a time clock, which in turn lowered the morale of the team even more. They felt insulted. What rights did these inefficient and lazy union members have to check our time? It didn’t make sense and seemed unfair. The team had been getting up and leaving for work at 4:30 a.m. for such a long time that I was sympathetic, but their exaggerated criticism of authority in the administration put me in an uncomfortable position. With team morale low, we began to develop bad habits and consequently problems of efficiency, and Luis Felipe’s proposal to join him in a project in San Miguel was opportune, but there were two initial barriers that I had to overcome. In order to make a temporary work transfer from Pre-Hispanic Monuments to the Regional Center of Guanajuato, I needed the TheHouseofDogs(PilotProject)฀฀ v฀฀ 245 regional director to make a formal request for my team’s presence in the state. At the same time, I had to lobby Ing. Joaquín García Barcenas, my immediate superior, arguing that the team...