Querétaro and a Theft

June 25 2017

I spent yesterday in the town of Tula, en route to Mexico City, to see the Toltec ruins here.  This morning I’m off for Coyoacán, to make my pilgrimage to the grave of Trotsky and to contemplate Spanish classes.  But first I must catch up on my drive through Querétaro, and my first encounter with theft in Mexico.

After three nights at the Hostal Punto 79 in San Miguel de Allende, it was time to leave.  (For all three nights I had been the only guest in the big high-ceilinged room with ten beds: unexpectedly palatial, but lonely.)  In the morning I gathered up all my things, re-packed my Miata, and set out.  First stop was the city of Querétaro, where I hoped to get an oil change.

Score one for the Grease Monkey in Querétaro!  It was listed on Google Maps, it was exactly where indicated, the attendant spoke English (and indeed looked American, with light-brown hair and beard), I sat in a stale tiled lounge in an orange seat just like the ones in the US, and in swift order Pepin had her oil changed.

That was really my only reason for stopping in Querétaro, but since I was there I decided to check out the Museo Regional for its pre-Columbian art and artifacts from the Mexican-American war.  Ironically, when I drove into the crowded heart of the city I opted for pay parking in a secure lot.  It was when I parked in the open-air lot, set out for the museum, and glanced back at my yellow Miata that I saw it.

Pepin’s license plate was gone.

Robbed!  The Grease Monkey?  But no, on second thought, probably not. 

Shelley Cohee, my contact in San Miguel de Allende, had shrieked with alarm when I told her that I was parking Pepin on the street during my stay, and she urged me to reconsider, or at least extract all belongings from the car.  I didn’t heed her advice.  I HAD removed all my valuables, and several times a day I strolled by Pepin to make sure no one had forced entry. 

But I never checked the license plate.

So someone somewhere has a nice souvenir of Washington State.  I was still suspicious of the Grease Monkey.  The question is, was the plate still on when I set out from San Miguel that morning?  One would think that when I put my backpack into the trunk and was standing right there behind the car, I would have noticed it missing.  But it was early, I’m notoriously unobservant, and as much as I wanted to fly back to the Grease Monkey in a persecuting rage I was in a situation where it probably WASN’T them, and anyway I couldn’t prove it.

Fortunately I carry a spare license plate at the bottom of my trunk, so I fished it out and screwed it on, though of course it lacks my registration tags.  Now I’ll have to call WSDOT and see if I can get some replacement stickers sent to me—God knows where—and in the meantime I’ll have to rehearse my story for the cops when I get pulled over and have show them my registration. 

At any rate, despite being all aboil with frustration, self-reproach and the sense of violation, I HAD paid to park, so I bloody well went to the Museo Regional.  Querétaro seemed an ordinary big Mexican city, whose rings of smoking industrial sprawl cosset a touristy downtown square with shops, a few grand stone buildings, and side streets paved in red brick.  The museum began with some 7,000-year-old clay figures and bowls, and proceeded in sophistication room by room through Mexico’s history, in other words through the accumulating record of invasions, liberations, revolutions and bloodshed.  There were enormous oil paintings of cavalry battles, portraits of bygone minor statesmen with superfine coats and worried expressions, soldiers’ uniforms and medals, crinkly pages from various constiututions, many images of Benito Juarez with his big dark eyes and strong flat nose, an etching of Maximilian facing the firing squad, a black iron engine from the Porfiriato.  I was still in a distracted and foul mood, rebuffed by the plaques in Spanish, and I knew just enough of the history to be depressed by the futility. 

But they did have the actual desk at which the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, ending the Mexican-American war with the theft of half the country’s land by the United States.

It seemed an appropriate place to linger.