Gregoria

Gregoria is a town on the road through Mexico where the travelers’ passage briefly becomes a stay. Its significance lies in the encounters that interrupt their haste toward Mexico City: Victor brings them into contact with his family and hometown, and leads them to a dance hall where music, dancing, and local spectators turn a visit into a communal celebration. The departure is affectionate but final for the moment, leaving the town as a vivid episode of welcome along a journey defined by motion.

Setting and Approach

Gregoria appears after the road has carried the travelers through the mountains toward Monterrey and onward across a sunbaked landscape. The route is not merely connective scenery: the surrounding country gives the town its striking position within the journey, as the travelers move between desert, mountains, plateau, and settlement. Gregoria is where their progress toward Mexico City pauses for an encounter that changes the pace of the trip.

As the car enters town, the narration is also turning over a large historical vision of the people of Mexico and the endurance of marginalized communities. Those thoughts accompany the arrival, but the scene soon becomes concrete and particular: a gas station, a boy named Victor, the offer of a windshield shade, and an impulsive joke that opens the way to the evening’s events. The town is thus first encountered not through a formal description but through a human exchange.

Victor and the Invitation

At the gas station near Gregoria, Victor approaches carrying an enormous windshield shade and offers it for sixty pesos. When the travelers joke that they would rather buy a young woman, Victor responds that he can find them girls, though not in the heat of the day. The exchange begins as a practical roadside encounter, but his eagerness turns it into an invitation to see more of the town.

Victor joins the travelers in the car and takes them beyond town along a rutted dirt road to his family’s house, a small adobe dwelling at the edge of cactus flats. Men lounge in the yard; Victor identifies his brothers, mother, and sister, explaining that he is married and lives downtown. His family and home puncture the travelers’ broad, romantic ideas about Mexico with a particular domestic setting and a host who is at once playful and proud.

The visit also brings the travelers face to face with Victor’s baby. They try to soothe the crying child, while Victor explains that the baby is not sad but simply cries. His barefoot wife waits anxiously in the doorway to take the child back. The moment is small and unceremonious, but it gives the travelers’ visit a dimension beyond spectacle: they have been welcomed into a household, among people with family obligations and ordinary tenderness.

The Dance Hall and the Town’s Celebration

Victor directs the travelers to a whorehouse in town, a substantial stucco building with a dance floor, a bar, and small cubicles opening off the central space. Two policemen stand by the windows and remain there throughout the visit. At the travelers’ request, the proprietor quickly obtains records, mostly by Perez Prado, and plays mambo over a loudspeaker. The music carries out into the street; townspeople gather at the windows to watch the Americans dancing with the women.

The dance hall becomes a public event rather than a private diversion. The travelers are not hidden away: the crowd and the policemen remain visible witnesses, while the music makes their revelry audible across the neighborhood. The scene’s energy depends on that openness, on the contrast between the travelers’ exuberant dancing and the townspeople’s casual observation. Gregoria is not simply a setting for the visitors’ escapade; its residents form the audience and social surroundings that give the episode its local character.

When the group is ready to leave, they have to go back for Stan, who has stayed behind and wants to begin again with the women arriving for the night shift. Dean and Sal drag him out. Stan’s profuse farewells—to the women, police, crowds, and children—are met with laughter and friendly responses. Dean pays the policemen, shakes their hands, and bows. As the car prepares to depart, the women gather around it to say goodbye; Venezuela, who has been woken for the farewell, weeps. The departure carries the emotional afterglow of the celebration, even as the travelers know the tears are not simply for them.

Bathhouse, Departure, and Significance

Victor’s hospitality continues after the dance hall. He directs the travelers to an American-style bathhouse on the highway, about a mile outside town. The place combines showers and a swimming pool with a children’s park whose swings and broken-down merry-go-round seem incongruous beside the ordinary bathhouse. In the fading red sunlight, that mixture strikes the travelers as strange and beautiful. Sal and Stan take cold showers and come out refreshed; Dean instead walks arm in arm with Victor, talking with him and lingering over their conversation as their time together runs short.

Victor is sad that the travelers must leave and asks whether they will return to Gregoria to see him. Dean says they will and even promises to take Victor back to the United States if he wants to go. Victor hesitates: he has a wife and child and no money. The farewell therefore turns on a real difference in circumstance, not just on the travelers’ affection. Dean’s promise expresses the intimacy he has formed with Victor, while Victor’s response makes clear that departure and travel do not carry the same freedom for everyone.

The car leaves Gregoria with the celebration behind it, but the town’s farewell resists the idea that the journey is only a sequence of places to pass through. Music follows the travelers for a few blocks; Victor remains behind with his family and the children of the sad park. Gregoria’s place in the narrative rests on this brief conjunction of motion and attachment: a road stop opens into welcome, shared pleasure, and a promise, then closes with the travelers moving on and their host staying where his responsibilities lie.