Huipiles: I bought the traditional embroidered blouses and wondered who had worn them. Why did she have to give them up and where is she now?

I started wearing huipiles the summer before the big earthquake hit Mexico City. 1985. I was traveling with my friend and publisher, Norma Alarcon, first to the Mexican capital, then on a bus ride to Oaxaca, and finally to Chiapas on mountain roads so reckless and wicked, they made you instantly devout.

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Before this trip, I don't think I'd ever traveled to Mexico without my familia. Usually, I was accompanied by my mother and father, even as an adult. This isn't as strange as it sounds. Mexicans are clannish and accustomed to traveling with family until the day they die.

To tell you the truth, I've always been terrified of traveling alone in Mexico, the way only pochas can be terrified. Not because we know too little about this country we are visiting, but because as Mexicans from the U.S. side, we know too much. (But that's another story.)

Norma was researching the writer Rosario Castellanos, who was from Chiapas, and that was why we traveled so far south, almost to the Guatemalan border. Me, I had a little grant from the Illinois Arts Council and a book to finish. There was money in my jean pockets, purpose in my heart and my buddy Norma to travel with.

I was homesick for a house of my own. I'd rented one in Greece a few years before, and that was where I'd finished my first book. Now I had to finish a book of poetry, and Norma's press, Third Woman, was impatient to publish it. So it was with this idea of renting a house and borrowing a typewriter that I tagged along with her.

But Chiapas isn't Greece. It's mountain cold and damp, even in the summer, and one of the poorest regions of Mexico. We entered not only another country, but another time. Founded before Plymouth Rock, San Cristobal de las Casas is a town of stout churches, cobbled streets and markets filled with the most humble members of humanity--the club-footed, the barefooted, the hare lipped; citizens from another century.