The night before Revolution Day, David, Patricia, and I took their mother to El Pistolero, “The Gunfighter,” to celebrate her seventieth birthday. I suppose there was a certain revolutionary spirit in Carmela’s tossing back a beer in a bar with her son and daughter — an act of defiance against age, and time. We then spent the night in a motel with an old-fashioned wagon in the courtyard, and I thought, “So Mexico romanticizes its history, too.” We’d planned to go out for breakfast in the morning, but nothing in Nuevo Casas Grandes was open on El Día de la Revolución.
We’d stepped into a spaghetti western.
You see, 101 years ago, Francisco Madero ran for president against dictator Porfirio Diaz. But Diaz rigged the election and threw Madero in prison. Madero escaped to Texas, and on November 20, 1910, he called upon the Mexican people to revolt. On November 20, 2011, David declared, “My mom has to have her morning coffee!” So we stopped at a convenience store in Nuevo Casas Grandes to buy her coffee-to-go.