Marc Valdez Weblog: "Better Call Saul" - Season 2, episode 6, "Bali Ha'i"

Interesting episode!

From the movie of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "South Pacific":

A few impressions....

I was impressed with the helados shop (called El Griego Guinador, actually Paletería Michoacana de Paquimé, 6500 Zuni Road SE, with its stunning mural of Paquimé, the largest of the Indian ruins at Casas Grandes, in northern Chihuahua).

There is a mystical unity between Paquimé and the New Mexico Ancestral Puebloan ruins of Chaco Canyon and Aztec. All three ruins span a distance of 400 miles, but are located within half a mile straight north-south of each other (and nearly includes some of the Mimbres ruins in the Gila watershed), an axis which an archaeologist named Stephen Lekson has dubbed the Chaco Meridian. Lekson has forcefully argued since the 1990s that the Meridian can't possibly be an accident, but required great effort and very careful design. The Chaco Meridian reflects religious impulses that live on amongst today's Pueblo Indians. Lekson argues severe drought dislodged the ruling elite from Chaco Canyon in the 12th Century, and forced them to move first to Aztec, then later, for reasons unclear, to Paquimé. The debate among archaeologists continues.

Since 1840, New Mexico has looked east-west for inspiration, to the East and West coasts, symbolized by the great railroads, but the north-south axis not only predates the east-west axis, but was formalized by the Ancestral Puebloans 700 years ago, and due to the lay of the mountains and the Rio Grande River, is actually baked into the landscape. Since the rise of illegal immigration in the early 80’s (driven by Mexico’s high birth rate in the 60’s), the collapse of Mexico’s Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in 1989, and the rise of the drug cartels since then, the north-south axis is reemerging as a primal fact in New Mexican life, a point that was driven home by the appearance of the Cousins in last night's episode.

Bali Ha’i is sung in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “South Pacific” by the fiercely-entrepreneurial Bloody Mary. Quoting from Wikipedia, author James Michener “used the tranquil, hazy image of the smoothly sloping island on the horizon to represent a not-so-distant but always unattainable place of innocence and happiness.” In New Mexico terms, in that respect, not that much different than Corrales.

I also sensed danger with Dale the engineer. He didn’t look or act anything like an engineer, even a civil engineer. Engineers – even engineers on the make - wear cargo pants and Metallica T-Shirts, not casual business wear. If Kim and Jimmy cash that check, there will be trouble.

Photos by Nancy Lucía López: