This is a story that could begin with, "Once upon a time there was a little town in Mexico, surrounded by beautiful tropical mountains and obsessed with the music of the common people."
But this is about a real town, with real people that I know, and I don't want to imply that many of them don't still live lives that are far from a fairly tale. And I'm about to say that their lives were better before they learned about satellite dishes and video games and many other things that so many of them still can't have.
In this town, little boys (and some girls) have grown up for generations viewing music as their ticket to a better life. The town has produced so many successful bands that I'm sure if I tried to name them all, I'd leave out one of the most successful.
The serious point here is that these kids grow up extra-confident with music. They're sure they can do it because they know other kids who were just as poor as themselves and made it big.
It's exactly like kids growing up in ghettos to the north viewing basketball as their ticket. They know it can be done because they know of other kids like them who did it.
That seems like such a simple thing: Knowing you can do it because other people just like you did it before you. Having a role model. So simple and basic, and yet increasingly rare in today's world, I think.
Not so many years ago, one of the little boys in this town had nothing in the world but his mother. Of the many poor people in town, they were perhaps the poorest.
They went through a period where they had nothing to sell on market day but a few bunches of radishes. They'd had only a few pesos to invest, and so they bought seeds to grow the quickest crop available -- radishes would begin a return on their investment after only three weeks.
The little boy's mother thought it was a miracle that every radish always sold -- every single time.
But she accepted this miracle as a matter of course because she sincerely believed that God would help her with the only task she had assigned herself in this life -- raising her son with dignity.
On the other hand, the townspeople occasionally had informal meetings:
"OK, then, today if it looks like she'll have radishes that aren't going to sell, Lupita Apodaca will buy them. Next time, somebody from my family will buy them, and then it's Soledad Jimenez's turn, then Maria de los Santos, and then we'll get together again."
The real "miracle of the radishes" was that this single mother was so esteemed by her neighbors that they conspired to make sure she continued to succeed in the eyes of her son.
You couldn't make up a story that's more descriptive of the Mexican people as I remember them.
There simply is no more enterprising group of people on earth, and they do it in the face of a social structure that's designed to make sure the wealth stays where it's always been and the poor never have anything but each other to rely on.
Nowadays, the little boy who once helped his mother carry a few bunches of radishes to sell on the street has built a different life for the family: He has sold a million CDs.
He built his mother a big house, but she never needed it. There's a fancy car in the garage and her son pays one of the neighbors to drive her wherever she needs to go, but she still lives a simple life.
On market days, she especially likes to walk down to the plaza and visit every stall, encouraging every vendor.
She probably remembers the glory days -- when she and her little boy had nothing but a few radishes, and still they were the richest people in this marketplace.
We taught a generation of Mexican kids to want all kinds of junk they couldn't have, and now we get all self-righteous because some of them turned to selling drugs in order to get what we taught them to want.
I'm sorry, but not every child gets a role model like the radish vendor provided for one little boy.
So we taught them to want all the things they can't have; is that supposed to be better than a penniless woman who taught her son that he COULD succeed when all they could afford was a handful of radish seeds?
I'm sorry, amigo -- you'll have to explain that one to me.