Personal Narrative: Actopan, Hidalgo, A Mexican City

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Actopan, Hidalgo, is a big town or a small city, depending on the point of view, is located 125 kilometers away from Mexico City and 37 from Pachuca, the state’s capital. It is a Municipal head close to Tornacustla, on the way to Tula, and famous for its former convent and its thermal watered lagoons. The town’s entrance couldn’t be less colorful, there’s a huge banner in the middle of the freeway which announces: “Welcome to Actopan: City of the Convent and the Barbacoa.” It figures.
In the highway before turning to enter the town, you can see the summit of one of the hills that surround the region, too colossal monoliths that are known as “The Fryers”. They are really two stone figures that from the distance look like to human figures covered
Many times I stood for my mother or siblings but that represented an unacceptable provocation to him and then invariably I ended beaten up in the yard, splashed in blood and kicked in the ribs.
The jesting at school was humiliating; there was always a child who had seen me on the ground being beaten by my father or a neighbor who had heard the haunting cries. For that reason it was me who had to beat the other kids up, we were involved in pitched battles where I tried at all cost to preserve my pride; the self-esteem of a seven-year-old kid.
That was the man who tended me a helping hand that day and opened the doors of his home so I could take refuge in Actopan. Obviously, it didn’t seem to be the best or the happier option.
However, the violence in my childhood, my father’s aggressiveness, and the college battles meant nothing to me at the end. Compared to the ancestral fear, to the unbroken panic of that which marked forever my existence, and from which I have never spoken about, just with him, my father; an unpronounceable fear.
There I was again, the doors of the place that had been my home; back in
For example, there were strange lizards that were called “cuijas” and which had the amazing ability to become transparent. It was gross to see their bowels when they turned that way. They might have thought they could escape from humans and other predators. Everyone found them nasty by the way. Also filled with showiness the “azotadores”; black and hairy worms with long antennas along their bodies crowned by a yellow dot from which drained a viscous liquid that was toxic to the skin. There were also crows, of solid dark eyes; Stray dogs, rabies included; mules that pulled collecting garbage carts; cows that wiggled their tails and multicolored rabbits, that still have a special place in my memories. All in all, beings that my mind had forgotten and which the present rescued for my