The Mayor of Villa de Los Robles Has a Good Poker Face by Rocio Anica
When they told me my grandfather had ditched the States to be a mayor of a village in Mexico, I knew I had to go.
Mijo, they said, don’t. Por favor. There is no longer a six-degree separation between the violence and people like us. Look at any branch in the family tree, and you’ll see a leaf in mourning.
But I had missed my chance to get to know Flavio while he was here. What was to blame for this, I was told, was my selfishness in leaving the house when I turned seventeen to study books and drink fancy drinks and chase women.
So, when I heard that Flavio had given up the dream to live in a place that wasn’t on any map that I knew of, that he got paid the equivalent of twenty American dollars a month to stroll this village with full authority, and he wore a white linen suit every day as his mayoral uniform to spend his time playing poker, I knew I had to see it for myself.
He had left years ago, I guess. I had assumed all this time he was still roaming the States, visiting relatives here, visiting old friends there, all such nobodies to me as he. How do you miss a person who was never around?
Only reason his autumnal years came up in conversation is that someone mentioned they’d heard from a friend of a friend that Flavio was looking to buy a gun to defend his village. This had been last Christmas when my father and uncles sat around foldout tables, steam wafting off the sugarcane ponche in mugs, and I had said, how come I never heard about this?
And someone replied, you never asked.
Six months later, I bought my plane ticket, and my family relented, saying, Raul, just don’t tell them you’re vegetarian. They’ll kick you out of Mexico. In pieces.
That’s what’s real about Mexicans. They have a sense of humor about every fucking thing except their breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
The only person who didn’t trip when she heard that I was going home was my cousin, Constanza.
“Actually,” she said, “I’m going with you.”
My cousin, Coz, was the family rash, the black sheep, persona non grata about 95% of the time. Coz didn’t do drugs or steal from her employers, like some other members of our family. No, Coz and I shared the following things: a set of grandparents, pleasant memories of the same childhood home where we had lived elbow-to-elbow with most of my dad’s side of the family, a love of long-distance running, and a prestigious alma mater. We were the only ones in our family to go to school. Because of that, Coz had a high-perk job, an apartment all to herself in Los Angeles, great clothes, entertaining stories about interesting people, a passport, and a Facebook account to prove this all true.
But Coz had the loudest mouth. And, while usually Mexicans pretend not to love their loud women, the kinds of stuff that came out of her feminist, vegan, atheist, human-rights mouth incensed the shit out of everyone, even our sweet great-aunt who didn’t know what was going on half of the time.
Mainly though, it was the unabashed way that she remained unmarried that made it all right to gossip behind her back, to purposefully invite her last-minute to family events, and to politely dismiss her within her presence. It killed her. I almost wish she did do drugs or steal cars so that people would know what to do with her.
“Nope,” she snapped when I started to protest. “I basically already bought my ticket. Your girl told me the details already. I’ll meet you at the airport in D.F. Don’t leave for Villa without me.”
On the day of my flight, my father offered to drive me to LAX. At breakfast with everyone at my grandma’s, I had taken notes on all the familia that I was going to meet for the first time, storing necessary phone numbers in case of an emergency, and writing down directions to my grandfather’s house. I said no, because I wanted silence, but I told him I intended to drive myself and store my car at a parking garage near the airport for the week. There was nothing worse than waiting for a ride home after a long trip.
But my father had insisted.
He gripped the steering wheel the whole way there. “You know,” he said, “this isn’t like it was back when your mother and I were little. You hear about that they kidnapped an American Marine?”
I shook my head, even though I had.
“He was visiting his family. Down there at the family ranch,” he pleaded at the freeway ahead, brow furrowed heavy under the notion that the son of a Mexican could be killed by Mexicans.
“Dad,” I said, “It’s fine. Mexico’s always been complicated.”
He shot me a look. “I’m not talking about Mexico. I’m talking about desperate people.”
Yeah, well, you taught me that Mexico is desperate people, I thought in reply, but I swallowed it before it could fly out of my mouth, and I looked out the passenger window at the neat white lines on the road all around us, shooting past us like white meteors barely missing us in their impartial, terrible trajectory.
—
A few hours waiting for Coz’s flight to land, I finished a book on globalization, ate three bags of M&Ms, dicked around on my laptop at the Starbucks near our gate, and booked a rental car to make the trip through Guerrero’s multifarious landscape.
When Coz cleared customs, I made my way over to her. I felt out of place among all the working professionals and jet-setting tourists walking past me. I was used to wearing suede lace-ups and cashmere sweaters and leather watches, but the only way my mother would let me walk out of the house that morning was if I agreed to wear some old clothes of mine she still had around, my ratty crewneck and the baggy shorts that I used to wear whenever I needed to clean her gutters. “If you wear what you normally wear,” she had said, “you’ll be a walking target.” Never mind that it was her fault I was this way. Never mind that staying in D.F. was as complicated as staying in America’s most neglected cities, but in her eyes, I needed to keep my head low and keep my wallet light. It would be better if I didn’t use my wallet at all.
“And don’t open your mouth,” she admonished. “Your Spanish stinks like a bad perfume.”
Of course, I humored her. I couldn’t imagine needing anything besides bug spray. But standing around in that busy airport, in those clothes, I felt invisible. Less than that. Non-existent. No woman turned her head when I walked by.
When Coz saw me, she laughed.
“Don’t even start,” I said.
“You look like you peaked in high school,” she said as she waved away my offer to help her with her luggage.
“Yeah,” I said. “Well, Mom was all ‘no poorly lit places, no eye contact, stay alert, and don’t get into any moving vehicles, no matter what.’ Ridiculous.”
Coz snickered. “Yeah, welcome to being a woman.”
—
In the car, Coz and I got to talking.
“I’m thinking about proposing,” I said.
Coz raised an eyebrow, a laugh ruffling beneath her groomed features. She didn’t say anything.
I opened my hands with a shrug, as if to ask her if that was the extent of her reaction.
“Okay,” she said. “So. What. You’re proposing to your designated driver.”
“Nice,” I said. “That’s nice.”
She shook her head. “I’ll never understand how you got a med student at Stanford, of all places, to think you’re the best thing to have ever happened to her. She doesn’t drink, she doesn’t party, she’s never been to a strip club which I find really fascinating because strip clubs are where you live, and she really seems to want to have children. Your children.”
There were apricot-colored smears in the distant sky by the time we rolled into Villa de Los Robles. Miles of jacaranda bushes lined the sides of the highway, and after hours of patchwork-like hills, verdant in spots and velvety brown in others, we were eager to stretch our legs.
My father had made the arrangements: Constanza would be staying with our Aunt Delia and her family, and I would stay with my grandfather and great-grandfather. It was unusual for two aging men with seventeen children between the two of them to live alone in a house without women or children, but that’s how it was.
My great-grandfather’s story is that after his wife died, he swore never to replace her, and he kept his word. Nestor was likely the only man in Mexico to have never looked at another woman after he buried my great-grandma.
Their son, Flavio, was different. That man produced two families in Mexico and brought them both over to America, one at a time, without any one of us finding out until long after. An entire side-family—his mujer, their daughter, their son, and the suegra—kept like a dirty card collection to enjoy at will and shared with only a select few.
When she found out, my grandmother didn’t confront him. She merely grabbed a map, closed her eyes, and plopped a finger down on her future city of residence. The finger landed in Wyoming, so she tried again until she landed in Texas. Like any properly angry woman, she waited patiently for a weekend when my grandfather left the house to drink his paycheck away, and she took only what mattered.
In Texas, she said, “This way, I’ll never run into his woman and his kids in the grocery store or the DMV,” as if Southern California were a pueblo named Coincidence.
My grandfather didn’t care when he discovered my grandmother was gone for good. He remained in Orange County for a long while, until one day, out of the blue, he bought a one-way ticket south. This is what I finally discovered last Christmas; that he had left, and that on his way to catch his homeward flight, Flavio had allegedly said to my father, who was chauffeuring him to the airport: “Fuck them all, even you.”
Coz and I pulled up a rocky, dusty path, our rental car’s staccato rotation worrying me a great deal, to the address my father had given. By address, I mean a rusty chain-link gate. It was the only fence on the road. We were the only car to be seen for stretches. In various yards were the skeletal remains of former houses and foreign cars manufactured last century. The only other movement came from afar where an old man came from around a corner, shuffling along but with a spry posture, weighed down by canvas sacks, one on each shoulder.
Coz and I sat in the car.
My grandfather’s house was pure cinderblock. Lean, sturdy, without flourish, like most of the houses we’d passed since we had left the airport. The windows of my grandfather’s house were pane-less, with patterned bed sheets or plywood instead of glass to separate my solitary predecessors from the elements. The hat my grandfather’s house wore was made of corrugated metal.
“Delia lives on the other side of town,” I said, finally, to break our quiet awe that we were finally here, where our family came from.
“This isn’t even a town,” Coz said. “But I’ll walk over after we say hello.”
It was getting dark, but I knew she didn’t want to hear it. One power line ran through the unpaved town between the scattered houses organized around family crops. There were no streetlights. And yet, Coz would still walk. If she had decided that that was what she was going to do.
We didn’t move. We simply nodded at each other, quietly marveling at the unpaved expanse under the dry air. “I can’t believe our dads grew up here,” Coz said before stepping out of the car.
We knocked on the thin front door, and almost immediately, my grandfather was standing before us.
He sized us up with needle-point pupils, his mustache more silvery than I had last remembered. The eyes focused on Coz, then he said, “Mija.” He embraced her. He was skinnier than my father. He was not wearing a white linen suit.
To me, he nodded, not exactly avoiding my gaze but not holding it either.
He waved us in.
In the small, cluttered space, three men, all of about my grandfather’s age sat around a round dining room table, holding their dealt playing cards close, eyeing us before going back to the rectangles in their hands and sorting through their meanings. Neither one of them stood up when we said hello, including our great-grandfather: Nestor, who sat in the corner, nodding his welcome. One sinewy, liver-spotted hand rested on his knee.
None spoke, but the men did seem very interested to see us.
Flavio offered us a seat at the table by sweeping his hand broadly toward his guests and their stations around his dining table. We waited before sitting down.
I used that time to inspect their living quarters, which looked like how I remember my grandmother had kept her home, right down to the religious bric-a-brac and books and old-school TV set. I was disconcerted not by how it reminded me of things I hadn’t realized I had forgotten, but by how a person’s belongings could tell a hundred different stories, all of them true.
Coz was intently watching the actions around the table. When my grandfather’s friend, Paco, eventually folded, Coz immediately started dealing the cards out for another round. My grandfather turned to me as she distributed the cards around to ask if I could help her shuffle the deck.
I could feel Coz’s blood coagulate. “No, abuelo, I got it,” she said, and my grandfather turned to her. He asked her if she also had any money to lose.
It was times like these that made me wish Coz had an internal radio frequency that I could tune into and speak through, but of course she does whatever she wants. All four men nodded their approval in their own ways, and Coz dealt me in.
One of the men coughed a lot. He coughed as he asked me how our flight went, and what we were doing in Villa de Los Robles.
My grandfather answered for both of us. He said, “Raul is dying. He wanted to see me and Nestor one last time before—well, you know.”
Coz’s face stiffened only slightly, but her hand remained fluid as she distributed the last round. I don’t know what I was doing with my face.
The men looked uncomfortable and muttered polite wishes and concern. One of them politely enquired as to what I was dying of.
My grandfather said, “He doesn’t want to talk about it.”
There were no more questions after that, especially once I started to win every hand without having to bluff once.
“You really are the most blessed in the family,” my grandfather said without irony.
Coz folded.
Nestor, still sitting in the corner, asked if anyone wanted mezcal, to which my grandfather replied with, “No,” before holding his cup out. Nestor shuffled by to pour a hefty splash for each of us into chipped ceramic mugs.
The conversation lagged like that, with long silences between coughs and compulsory throat-clearing. Then the mezcal started to hit the men. The rest of the night transpired under simultaneous conversations, one in Spanish, one in purely English, and another in a dialect of northern Guerrero. I watched my grandfather closely. He was someone who never smiled, whose children did not resemble him in demeanor except in height and around the eyebrows. Coz and I—tempered by the haunting absence of noise from cars and sirens back home, along with the reality of the outhouse and garden hose that functioned as both sink faucet and shower—watched with sober interest as the men slipped out of their Spanish and into a more roomier dialect, code-switching between their rural, nasal Spanish and a dialect like wet clay squeezed between clean hands. I felt stupid that I didn’t know it, didn’t know what was going on, didn’t know who these people were.
Coz interrupted my thoughts by asking me to lend her some of the money I had just won, and when I glanced up to reply, I could feel five sets of eyes boring into mine.
“You have a terrible poker face,” Flavio said gleefully as I handed over some of my winnings to Coz.
Everyone laughed. I frowned.
“You see?” Flavio added off my frown, and everyone laughed some more.
“Hey, I’m winning,” I said.
My grandfather said, “You don’t stay a winner if you can’t hide your emotions.”
“So, Abuelo,” I said. “How is it being the mayor of Villa de Los Robles?”
When there came no reply, I glanced up from my cards to find my grandfather staring at me. Something had illuminated behind his black-hole pupils, and, in reply to both questions, he stood up and offered everyone more mezcal. From a couple of jugs of water, he poured us water as well, then sipped his water at length, before sitting back down.
Coz and I exchanged glances.
“I know that you have an apartment near the beach,” he said to Coz in Spanish. In English, he added, “That you have a very rich boyfriend who buys you nice things.” Reverting back to Spanish, he said, “When the nieces here in Cuernavaca get in trouble or about to get into it, we talk about you. How nice it is for you to have a life where you haven’t been in serious trouble.”
Coz raised her eyebrows because none of those things were very true, or at least they hadn’t been true in a very long time.
“By the way,” he said to me in English. “Maybe it’s time to start losing here. You’ve been lucky. But that’s it.”
Coz and I exchanged glances again, which caused my grandfather to chuckle. It was a laugh like money falling into a copper bowl, it was louder and brighter than expected, and he said, “You kids. You live at your mother’s tit. You wouldn’t hold in a standoff. So American. So very American.
“But I’m still glad to see you,” he said, laughing when he saw the looks on our faces. “I am very glad to see you. Let’s keep playing.”
—
The next morning, I awoke, on a couch in a closet-like space behind the main room, from my grandfather kicking my shoulder lightly with the knob of his knee.
“Want some coffee?” he asked, sipping his own.
“Of course he does,” Nestor answered him, already bringing me a cup. “He lost all his money.” It was the most beautiful smell, and I could even see it, the steam off the coffee mug backlit by the morning light through the window. Nestor, whose deep wrinkles were set by the perpetual smile playing on his lips, looked like an apparition, and it wasn’t just because my head was spinning and he held a paternal look of concern. I realized right then that Flavio, who was nothing like Nestor, probably took after people I could only conjure in dreams.
I took the mug, groaning as I sat up, one hand rubbing my eyes, feeling the gravity of that heavy anchor chained to the bottom of a fully-finished bottle of mezcal dropped to the depths of a drinking man’s void. I thanked him, eyes closed. I was trying to remember something about something, but the smell of instant coffee was bringing me back to the days when Coz and I were children. Olfactory. How we were always scampering around the legs of tables and young mothers sipping cafe con leche, how Coz and I were always watching gossip unfold high above us in those days, long before being the cause of it.
I asked what time it was, and Nestor clamped a hand down on my shoulder instead of answering before he shuffled off toward the front door.
Coz bounced in carrying a clear plastic bag full of pan dulce. Without speaking, we moved back to the table to take our coffee and bread in peace. A peach glow emitted through the bed sheet draped up by rope. There was the occasional melody of a bird chirping right outside the bed sheet. We stayed like that for a while.
I don’t know why I interrupted that comfortable silence. Maybe because I was still in clothes from the day before, wrinkled and uncomfortably warm. Maybe it was the fact that my teeth, furry and slimy, did not feel like my teeth. Or that I two thousand miles away from my espresso-machine and breakfast nook, the one with the maple-oak floor and wainscotting and I missed my girlfriend who would have been naked under my sateen sheets.
Whatever my reasons, I found myself saying to Nestor, “Why isn’t your other family here? Your other woman.”
Flavio didn’t have the light-hearted manner of using his features to emphasize what he wasn’t saying as Nestor did. No. My grandfather slowly turned his head, trying to read me perhaps, and not a single facial muscle or hair on his peppered mustache oved. I could tell he was holding his breath.
“You want a chance to win your money back?” he said at last, reaching for his deck of cards.
I answered that I didn’t know. Nestor stood and placed his hand on my shoulder, saying, “Come with me, son.”
Coz stood up, implicitly agreeing to follow Nestor.
For being such an old man, Nestor kept a brisker pace than we expected. He took us through the dirt path sloping downward toward where neighboring houses started to be placed closer together, and fences grew smaller in perimeter the further we went, until we stopped right at the edge of the city square. My mind was still swaddled by digested liquor, still laying on a dusty pillow far behind me, and it was this that kept me from cracking jokes and asking Nestor questions. But what kind? There were too many. I wonder what would have come to light if I had allowed the questions to live outside of me.
We stopped in front of a small cemetery. Nestor swung the gate open, held it open. We stepped past fifteen or twenty freshly-dug plots, but I didn’t recognize any of the names. Some were entirely without markers.
Nestor stopped in a far corner. He gestured, somberly, reverently, at a concrete slab headstone with etched curlicues above the text. It was our great-grandmother’s name.
“Did you know,” Nestor began, “that growing up, your father helped me feed the whole family off a plot of land not too far from here? It was a bad ejido. Not very many people used it. It had some rocks, but he and I would go out and clear the soil and plant the vegetables far apart so they could grow. That was the only way we could get anything to grow in that damn soil.”
Coz obediently said, “No, I didn’t know that.”
“That’s right,” Nestor said. “Year-round, he helped me plant and grow and harvest, and that’s how we ate. All my life, that was the food we ate. We had no choice. Otherwise, we couldn’t eat. Your grandfather made sure we ate.”
For some reason, I liked that this clashed with what I’d heard.
Nestor continued, “But one day, we heard that we would have to buy the seeds. Just like that. After hundreds of years of collecting and reusing the seeds. Can you believe that? We had been using the seeds my great-grandfather and his own father and his father had used. But not anymore.”
Coz started up, shaking her head and cursing. Every time she heard shit like this, I could see the motor in her skull, converting anger into ideas and ideas back into anger.
She fell silent when Nestor began to speak again. He leaned his weight with one palm onto the headstone and said, “Then, just as they told us they would, they had seeds that would be useless to us after one season. And you know what, that scared me. But Flavio had just had his first baby.” Nestor pointed at Coz and said, “Your dad.
“But Flavio was even more scared. I remember it clearly, because I had never seen him scared as an adult. Only as a kid.”
Nestor was an old man, and I didn’t want to rush his story, but I thought I could sense the ending coming from a mile away. I said, “Why did you stay here in Mexico?”
Nestor touched a headstone, and Coz said, “I understand.”
Then Nestor showed us two plots down, and they were even more beautiful than my great-grandmother’s.
“Here,” Nestor said, “is who you were asking about, Raul. That’s where they are.” Coz and I looked at the names and then at each other. This was something that was news to us.
In a moment of intense clarity, Nestor pointed a finger at me and said, “He’s never going to tell you the truth about anything. So, stop asking him. He doesn’t think he owes anything to anybody.”
Coz said, “Why?”
I said, “Because, Coz. Jesus. Some things people just don’t want to discuss.”
Coz gave me an intense look, like she couldn’t believe what I had just said.
Nestor continued his story, and thankfully kept to specifics, pointing out the grave sites of people he knew long ago, talking about how the weather wasn’t quite like it used to be. I thought more about the irony of the seeds; I mean, how was that for debating ideas about debt? If my ancestors had had any money in the first place, they wouldn’t have been dependent on farming for their food. Then, all of a sudden, they owed something to someone? Simply for needing the fruit that, in truth, belonged only to the earth?
There were infinite ways to take and take and keep taking a man’s land away.
—
Later, under a tree shielding us from the white sun, Coz dragged out a foldout table so we could sit outside. This was the only part of my trip where I felt prepared, because I was the only one with bug spray. The sounds of insects and birds multiplied as the day grew warmer.
At first, it was just the two of us. In her chair, Coz slowly stretched her legs and put her sunglasses atop her head so she could massage her temples.
“You know, the craziest thing,” Coz said after a while. “Delia says that he actually could become mayor if he wanted to. People just want to feel safe.”
“Why lie about it though?”
She shook her head.
I sat there, looking around at chicken-coop ruins and hacked oak stumps, at sagging chain link and piles of broken concrete, and then, at Coz. Then I looked at all the rows of gorgeous corn standing in formation at the back of the lot and the rows of emerald and ruby chilies dangling off thick vines and the neighbors walking in the distance and the brilliant glints of sunlight off waxy leaves and fronds.
I said, “I feel like shit.” I smacked a fly away, or tried to.
“Because you’re seeing the ghosts of Christmas future?” she asked.
I must have been doing something with my face that made her cock her head to the side, her eyes absorbing something. A small piece of light through a tree bounced off her black hair, disappearing and reappearing again.
Then she peered off into a distance where the oak and coffeeberry trees stood like silent guards watching us, watching time pass. “Did you know that the other night I went on a date with some asshole whose family is also from Guerrero, and he told me the only reason my family doesn’t listen to me, doesn’t care about me, is that I don’t have a man of my own?” she said.
She turned to me. “He said this, to my face, like it was some gift to tell me this. And he still thought he was getting laid after that.”
She scoffed but her eyes were humorless, cutting. She muttered, “Don’t feel like shit. You’re not a piece of shit.”
After a moment, in the lowest voice, she added, “Just try harder. There’s still time.”
Then Nestor and Flavio joined us, and we let go. By now, it was clear that my grandfather had a low tolerance for the obvious and the mundane and that which he didn’t understand. So, he controlled the conversation, and I could see, here and there, the spool of words rotating in his mind, when something snagged, when the wheel was so fast it ceased appearing as it really was. I realized my grandfather had the mind of a bitter poet, spinning sense of the absurd in an empty town square of an underappreciated place.
So, I asked him about how the soil was. I asked him about the rainfall and tilling and seeds. The cartels were slowly spreading into the most rural areas, sniffing out newer pockets to dip into, newer corners for cover. Newer uses for the already used-up. The few brave voices making protest noises were silenced in the dark.
People just wanted to feel safe.
Rocio Anica is a Chicana with a BA from the University of Southern California and an MFA in Fiction from Cornell University. She has chapbooks forthcoming in 2027, and is presently working on novel-length satirical picaresques.
25 September 2026
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