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Carlin, Dan. “Little Shop of ‘Miracles.’” The Arizona Republic. 27 Aug. 2004: E1, E2.

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Little shop of ‘miracles’

 

Milagro buyers, store owner find good fortune in Latino charms

 

By Dan Carlin

 

            Robert Bitto runs an unusual store for an extraordinary clientele.

            Many of his customers hug him when they enter his shop, buy him presents on his birthday and invite him out for dinner throughout the week.

            They do so because Bitto is a friend, but also because he and his central Phoenix shop, Sueños Latin American Imports, have altered their lives in profound ways.

            “I meet the most interesting people here,” says Bitto, 36.

            “This stuff really opens people,” he says, gesturing to the kaleidoscopic collection of arts, crafts and religious tokens that fills the walls and covers the floor of his store. “I hear a lot of stories about what’s happened in connection with the things I sell here. You have to wonder what’s going on.”

            Bitto sells milagros (Spanish for “miracles”), rustic, metal charms shaped like body parts, animals and various allegorical subjects that are said to possess supernatural powers.

            Sometimes he sells them in bulk over the Internet, but mostly he delivers them one by one over the counter at Sueños, his bright yellow store on Seventh Avenue. The business has connected him to the curious culture of milagros, drawing him into the lives of the characters who shop there.

           

Finding comfort

 

On a recent afternoon, Cecelia Larson, a grave-looking woman with a tousle of dark hair, comes into the store with an ordinary request.

“My sister is having eye surgery tomorrow,” she says. “I want to put a candle and a milagro by her bedside to help protect her during the procedure.”

Bitto nods and sifts through a wicker basket on his counter filled with different milagros – pistols, horses, livers, lungs. After a few moments, he finds what he’s looking for and extracts a glittering metal eye form the pile.

He presents it to Larson for her approval, then slips the object into a small, yellow envelope and places it on the counter. Larson covers it with a protective and smiles slightly, as if suddenly reassured.

Many of Bitto’s clients are middle-aged Mexican-American women, but they are also young mothers, U.S. Marines, pagans, devout Catholics, elderly Anglo-Americans and teens, all joined by a belief in the power of milagros.

Bitto often hears how his milagros helped a couple to conceive or saved a customer from a debilitating illness or protected a loved one in danger.

Customers at Sueños speak freely about divorces and family problems, illnesses and tragedies. Many of them stop by the store simply because a visit makes them feel better.

“You just feel comfortable here,” says Jeanette Sinohui, a Sueños customer since 1999. “You can just come in a say hello, then turn around and leave without buying anything.”

 

Something to believe in

 

            Walking into the brightly colored interior of the store is a calming experience. Water trickles from a fountain in the center of the store while tiny mariachi or norteño music pipes in softly over the stereo.

            The orange wall of Sueños’ interior glow with the colors of the art and crafts Bitto has collected from all over Latin America – shiny ceramic chickens from Mexico, checkered quilts from Peru, delicate paper roses from Chile.

            One corner is covered with dozens of crosses of all sizes, made from Brazilian driftwood, Mexican bottle caps, plastic, silver and everything else imaginable.

            Sinohui says she comes in to see Bitto at least twice a month because it “lightens my day.”

            And she buys milagros for herself and her friends because of what they’ve done for her in the past.

            “As you go through life and medical things happen, (milagros) give you something you can believe in, that you can hold in your hand,” she explains.

            Bitto isn’t sure what to think when he hears stories of the milagros’ power. A self-declared fallen Catholic, he grew up without the cultural experiences of most of his customers (his father is an Italian immigrant, his mother is descended form 17^th century Dutch and French settlers.)

            “I’m not a believer and I’m not a non-believer,” he says. “If the supernatural rears its head, I’ll look at it.”

            Plenty of Sueños customers cast a similarly skeptical eye on the more esoteric products sold in the shop.

            Karen Perry, a former lawyer, shops at Sueños to furnish her Scottsdale home and her condo in Rocky Point.

            When asked about milagros and the religious items in the store, Perry lowers her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “There are a few things that are a little scary to me.”

 

Bad times, good times

 

            Bitto says he started Sueños to fill a niche for unique goods. After five years of working as an international accountant for American Express, Bitto considered getting a doctorate in anthropology.

            Plan B was to open a Latin American imports store with the contacts he’d built over the years. Through six months of studying in Mexico and years of traveling around Southern America, Bitto had gathered the names of artisans throughout Latin America, thinking they might be useful some day.

            He quit his job in 1997 and opened Sueños in a storefront at Camelback Road and Central Avenue. Two years later business outgrew the space, and he moved to Seventh Avenue.

            In a business as emotional as Bitto’s, store traffic tends to fluctuate on the mood of the country. When things are bad, business is good, and he says there has been a revival in milagros in the last few years.

            Marion Oettinger Jr., curator of Latin American art and interim director of the San Antonia Museum, says milagros have always reflected the concerns of the Southwestern Hispanic society.

            “They’re more than just objects,” Oettinger says. “They’re also a part of a cultural complex, and they can tell us a lot about the people who use them.”

            A few other stores in Arizona and around the West cater to the rising interest, selling milagros and crosses, but he familial atmosphere at Sueños draws customers from all over the state, and Bitto has even made friends around the world through Internet sales.

            And while stores like Casa del Corazon in Encinitas, Calif., or Milagros Gallery in Sonoma, Calif., stock milagros for collectors, Bitto attracts a working-class Mexican-American clientele. Most of the milagros at Sueños cost 95 cents each, or $28.95 for a bog of 100.

            Sometimes Bitto wonders if Sueños is worth the trouble. Prostitutes stroll the street on cooler days, and some mornings he has to kick drunks off the stoop of his shop.

            In January he was robbed, tied up in a backroom until a neighbor discovered him.

            “At that point, sales weren’t very good, and the robbery just made things worse,” Bitto says. “I came in one day and just yelled at the top of my lungs, ‘I hate this place!’”

            After word spread of the robbery, one customer offered Bitto two counseling sessions with a therapist.

            Bitto declined, but the kindness of the gesture made him realize that Sueños was much more than a store.

            “Whenever I think of closing this place down, I think of the impact on peoples’ lives, in the countries where I buy the stuff and here, and I can’t do it.”

TALES FROM THE JUNGLES OF CENTRAL AMERICA:  WAS “THE OLD GERMAN” REALLY A NAZI?

                Far from the jewel-encrusted elephants of the Raj, where Queen Victoria was styled “Empress of India,” there existed a colonial backwater where nothing of consequence occurred.  People in London who were eager to celebrate the fact that “we hold a vaster empire than has been” had ignored British Honduras, later renamed Belize, and left the people who lived there pretty much to their own devices.  A society developed in this tiny chunk of Central America comprised of shipwrecked English pirates, runaway slaves, Mexican refugees, and other assorted scalawags and miscreants, all under the protection of the British Crown, at least nominally.  I had the opportunity to spend 19 unforgettable days in Belize back in 1998.

                Starting my imports business was always “Plan B” in The Great Plan of my life.  “Plan A” was to ditch Corporate America and go back to school to get a PhD in Anthropology with a special concentration in Archaeology emphasizing the ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica.  By the late 1990s I had taken the entrance exams and some classes to get me going in the right direction but I lacked any sort of field experience.  So, in the beginning of 1998 I signed up to be a volunteer at an excavation of a Classic Maya site called Blue Creek which was sponsored by a university in Texas.  I would be down “in country” for a few weeks to help on the dig and to learn everything I could about archaeology in context.  I don’t think I had been more excited about anything ever before.

                The site of Blue Creek, near the “town” of Blue Creek, is located in the northwestern corner of Belize, just a few miles from the Mexican border.  I’m hoping it hasn’t changed much, but when I was there that part of the world was pretty raw.  The area was a dense and humid jungle with intermittent clearings of green pastures and farmhouses courtesy of the Mennonites, a religious group which had moved to British Honduras in the late 1950s from the prairie provinces of Canada.  Originally from Central Europe, these straw-hatted, straw-haired people seemed out of place in the Central American jungle, speaking a form of 17^th Century German and maintaining their Central European folkways.  Because of the proximity of the town to our camp, we had Mennonite cooks and a Mennonite washerwoman.  I will never forget Margaret, the bespectacled and stout bonnet-wearing cook fixing heavy German breakfasts for us daily.  Was I in Latin America?

                The expedition sometimes hired people from another local town called San Felipe to help with the digging.  The people of that town and of some of the scattered settlements in that region were descendants of refugees of the Caste War, a conflict between European Mexicans and the indigenous Maya that lasted throughout most of the latter half of the 19^th Century.  The refugees were mostly ethnic Maya and spoke Spanish and some English (required in school because English is the national language of Belize).  They identified more with Mexico, listening to Mexican music, reading Mexican magazines, etc.  As an aside, of all the places in Latin America, these people are the only ones outside of New Mexico I’ve found who refer to themselves as “Spanish.”  And I include my home state of New Mexico as a part of Latin America.  As one of my sociology professors at UNM once said, “I must say in all sincerity that Latin America begins at the Río San Juan.”  So, in this area, the “Spanish” had been there the longest of any of the contemporary peoples.

                Our transportation in Belize from the camp to the dig and to the towns was in the form of old pickup trucks that took a beating on the lumpy dirt roads of the backcountry.  We would ride in the back, and I have never been so jolted in vehicles in all my life.  Our daily routine would take us to a place in the road near San Felipe to pick up a few workers.  Usually there were two younger guys, Ricky and Milardo, who were eager for work, mostly because the archaeological field work was easy compared to working for the Mennonites or cutting sugar cane all day on the plantations near Orange Walk.  Because I knew Spanish I got to know the workers pretty well and we talked at length on the road and in the field. 

Every day on the road out to the ruins we passed an overgrown compound set away from the road but visible through the jungle.  It had high walls and these walls were covered in vines and a tangle of other plants.  The place looked almost abandoned.  I asked Ricky what this place was.

“The Old German lives there,” he said.

“Who is he?” I asked.  “A Mennonite?”

“No,” Ricky said, “He moved here before the Mennonites got here.  Maybe about 10 years before the Mennonites.”

                I thought, why would a German man move to the middle of nowhere in the mid-1940s?   I wanted to find out his story so I began to ask around. 

                In our free time we would wander into “town,” and would take some of our meals at a place we nicknamed “The Taco Burger” run by a middle-aged Mennonite woman named Judy.  Next to Judy’s place was a small general store run by Judy’s younger cousin Helena.  Helena was pretty talkative and I always chatted with her when I went in there to buy things (to this day I still have cloth I used for face rags that I bought in her store).  I asked Helena about The Old German and she told me that it was not in her nature to gossip, but the man kept mostly to himself and only interacted with the townspeople on rare occasions.  She told me that the town was going to have a bake sale in the next few days and he would probably be there because he always attended such events.

The Mennonite community had the bake sale in what was considered the “core” of Blue Creek Village, a grouping of farmhouses and outbuildings which looked like a piece of rural Pennsylvania that had been dropped out of the Central American sky like Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz.  While I was disappointed that I did NOT see Pennsylvania Dutch shoo-fly pie among the baked goodies, I did catch glimpse of The Old German.

He was of average height and very fit for a man in his 70s.  He had silver/white hair parted and combed nicely.  He wore contemporary clothing and was clearly not a Mennonite.  Was I staring at him?  His brown eyes met mine and he turned away like a shy person.  I felt no desire to approach him.  I thought, whatever brought him to such a forsaken place was his own business.   As difficult as it was, I put my curiosity on the shelf and enjoyed the bake sale.

Whenever I think of the many things that happened in Belize, I always think of The Old German.  Who was he and why was he there?  Of course, in my mind, he had fled Europe because he was a Nazi and he was leaving behind a checkered past.  Was he a prison camp guard?  Was he Eva Braun’s gynecologist?  What treasures of the Third Reich were housed in his jungle compound?  For years I entertained these questions.  Perhaps, though, this man was just an ordinary citizen whose family was killed, and wanting to forget the horrible events of the war he went as far away as he could to try to escape his awful memories and build a new life.  I am thinking that now this man would be in his early 90s if he is still alive.  The Old German will always be one of my life’s big question marks.  As a curious person, it is difficult for me not to know the real story.