An Early Mexican Morning

Standing in the doorway of a friend’s tortilleria, I watch the morning batch made. The machinery, filling half the shop, makes a constant jingle and screech of wire on metal. Balls of cornflower are pressed and cut into flat round disks, then baked, before sliding down as hot tortillas to be weighed in full, or half, kilos.

A drowsy young boy stacks, wraps and packages the tortillas in a thermal box to safeguard the warm, fresh, flavour of maize for the customers.

A few locals, up in the dawn, rub their sleepy eyes as they buy their portion. They were lone women from the houses or men on their way to work. Never together.

A nod, a grunt of the preferred size, and a mechanical response of ‘gracias‘ are all that’s needed to keep the daily routine moving. The fresh tortillas are carried back to yawning, hungry mouths, or taken in a bag to provide sustenance for a day in the maize fields.

I walk out of the tortilleria as another worker arrives on a dirt-splattered red motorbike, returning from a delivery. We greet each other as he smiles through his sunglasses and takes a half-smoked cigarette from behind his ear.

Looking past him, I see the dark silhouettes of distant mountains, cut against a light orange sky. A cacophony of cock-a-doodling roosters accompanies the daybreak. Ahead on the road, a few of these cockerels strut and sprint in a routine of their own rituals — chasing hens in the hope of morning copulation.