Finding L.A. Roots in the Dust of Mexico

Mexico City —  The Mexican capital, like Los Angeles, doesn’t let you leave. You drive for miles, past millions of people, and still you’re in the clutches of an endless metropolis. It was midmorning when I finally cleared the northern sprawl, the start of a one-week journey tracing threads that stretch all the way to California.

On this day, my destination was a mountain pueblo too small to be listed on a map. In my satchel was a letter from a woman in Los Angeles, addressed to a brother she had lost touch with years ago.

Sylvia and her six children share a one-bedroom apartment west of downtown L.A. It isn’t much by American standards. But she said that if I knew the life she fled two decades ago, I’d understand why she considers herself lucky, even if she has to juggle two or three jobs at a time.

Two hours out of Mexico City, we started up the forested Sierra Madre. If we could find Sylvia’s brother in a town called Vuelta del Rio, she had told me, he would be able to take me up a steep ravine, by horse, to the outpost where they were raised.

Passing through the village of Metztitlan, we knew we were close. My guide asked at a bodega if anyone knew the way to Vuelta del Rio, and a campesino wondered whom we were looking for.

Juan De Dios Sosa Vazquez.

“I can take you there,” said the man.

Five minutes later, Juan, a stocky gent with his sister’s warm, welcoming eyes, smiled as if he had been expecting us. He said he had recently dreamed that two men would arrive with a letter from his sister.

This didn’t sound so unbelievable once we got to know Juan, who straddles the ancient and modern worlds. He runs a beer stand, paints cars and serves herbal remedies to neighbors who don’t have enough pesos for doctors. It was Saturday, and men gathered around Juan, the self-educated guru and mystic, as he held forth on subjects from Aztec culture to the curse of free trade on local cornfields.

There are no jobs here, Juan said, and rare is the woman who works anywhere but in the fields and in the house. People get by only because the corn farmer trades for a tomato or an onion with his neighbors.

But Sylvia had other dreams, Juan said. The siblings had been abandoned by their parents and were raised by aunts and uncles, working a tiny plot from the time they were kids. Sylvia wanted better.

She was even more desperate to flee, Sylvia had told me, after local men abused her and some half-loco relatives tried to arrange a marriage for her. She didn’t stop running until she hit California.

Juan said he was miserable when his sister disappeared. He didn’t know that Sylvia had ended up in Los Angeles when he later moved to L.A. to find work. One day, several years ago, Juan was waiting for a bus in East L.A. and saw a familiar face. It had been 14 years, though, and he wasn’t sure.

Sylvia?

The chance was 1 in a million, but Juan and Sylvia say there has always been this other-worldly bond between them.

They were joyously reunited for a time in L.A., but lost touch again when Juan returned to Hidalgo to care for the ailing aunt who lives with him now. Sylvia moved. Juan moved. The mail went undelivered.

Six years went by without any contact between them until the moment I handed Juan the letter. He opened it, found his sister’s phone number inside, and smiled.

Could he take us to the house where they were raised? I asked.

Juan said he’d be happy to.

On horse? I asked.

Juan laughed. They’ve built a road since Sylvia left, he said.

Not much of one. We drove into the clouds on a winding trail of dirt and gravel, inches from sheer cliffs. After an hour’s trek we came upon the parched and craggy town of Zotola, with 15 or 20 dwellings of dusty white stone.

“This is the house,” Juan said.

He knew the occupants, and they let us have a tour.

There is no electricity, no running water. The wood-burning oven where Sylvia cooked is still in the yard. The outhouse, too.

On the scraggly cornfields out back, we saw the farm tools Sylvia once used, including a plow no different from the ones used in colonial times. Juan showed us how to make a needle and thread from the thorn and silk of an agave plant, and his friend ladled a glassful of aguamiel from the center of an agave and passed it around.

Looking north, Sylvia’s one-bedroom apartment in L.A., with plumbing, electricity and underground parking, suddenly seemed palatial. The fact that her two oldest daughters are in community college -- one wants to go on to UCLA and become an engineer, the other wants to run an art museum in London--seemed miraculous.

Juan said he misses aspects of life in Los Angeles but feels more needed here, and more rooted. When we were leaving, he looked once more at the stone hut where he grew up and composed himself.

He loves his sister, Juan said, just as he loves this God-forsaken place where the soil is soaked with his sweat. Sylvia is better off where she is, he said. For now, anyway. Should she return home, he’ll be waiting to welcome her.

We stood at the edge of a cliff and looked out over the valley below. Here on a mountain in Mexico, I could feel the pulse of hearts split between two countries, and believed I had begun to know Los Angeles.

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at latimes.com/lopez.