Wake-Up Call

A few days ago I was grocery shopping in Commercial Mexicana, Guanajuato's main supermarket. When I got to the checkout, the cashier informed me that there was a sale on wine, and I could actually buy three for the price of two. Yes, I said, I'd like that, and she asked another employee to get me a third.

After she ran up my purchases, I checked my receipt. Not infrequently I find discrepancies, although they're usually my error in misreading the price. This time, the yogurt price was considerably higher than usual, by about 4 pesos, or 40 cents. I asked the cashier if I could leave one bag on the counter, while I checked a price. I took my daypack, including wallet, with me.

At the dairy counter, I noticed another 3/2 sign, and realized I could get 3 yogurts for 2. Hadn't seen it before. I picked up another yogurt to add to the two I had, and was headed back to the cashier's when I saw a long line. Oh dear. This being Mexico, I thought, I will probably have to go through the whole line again, and perhaps have to return the previous two yogurts and repurchase them as part of a threesome. I might even have to get the refund at another line, then stand in line at the regular cashier's all over again to buy the yogurts as a set. Rules! Who needs them? So very quickly, I opened the zipper of my daypack and thrust the yogurt in. When I reached the counter, I picked up my other shopping bag, nodded to the cashier, and was heading towards the exit, when...

I was apprehended by a security guard. Oh God! What was I thinking? There are mirrors all over the place. Politely, he said, "you have a yogurt in your backpack."

I said, "You're right. I'm sorry," and told him the truth: saw the 3/2 sign belatedly, didn't want to stand in line, didn't think I was really being dishonest, etc., etc.

To my amazement, he nodded, said, "OK," and I left the store, trembling, kicking myself, wondering if I would be recognized again there, treated as suspicious, watched.

........

Later I told two of my Spanish teachers about the incident. Both of them laughed and made light of it. But they agreed, I was treated like royalty. If either of them had done this, a guard would have been upon them in a heartbeat, treating them roughly, scolding them, requiring them to open their whole bag of groceries. They might even have been handcuffed. I shivered, listening, not just at what I barely avoided, but by the sinister contrast between what locals would undergo, and what happened to me.

I have a long history of feeling above the rules. Many rules are stupid, I tell myself. I am very aware of that perspective I hold, and feel less and less comfortable with it, but I don't find it entirely easy to change. I've cultivated it for years, and in situations like the supermarket, I almost instinctively defy the rules.

But this attitude has implications that are more blatant here in Mexico. Why was I able to ignore the rules at Commercial? Because I'm privileged. I got off lightly because of being white and gringa.

I'm privileged in the U.S., too, but it's even easier there to not notice. When was the last time I was profiled? When was the last time I noticed I had never been profiled?

Intellectually I recoil from a sense of privilege. It's against everything I like to think I stand for. I abhor the class system; I believe in equality and justice.

Yet I often forget I am part of that class system, though I don't think of myself that way. The fact that I'm blind to my position of privilege is, itself, a sign of that very privilege.

I am different here. I'm in a different category. I rarely think about it, but I am. The incident was a wake-up call.

Home? My Life Question

My father, a retired Foreign Service Officer, was recently interviewed as part of an Oral History project, and during the interview he was asked how his children looked back on the diplomatic lifestyle they were involuntarily part of. He emailed my sisters and me, asking how we saw it now: gain or loss?

This is the gist of what I said:

I'm often asked that question, and I always say, absolutely, gain. I doubt I'd be embarking on a life in Mexico had I grown up in Florence, S.C. (near where my dad was born and raised), or even Bethesda, Maryland, where I lived during junior high school. There were losses, of course. Moving from a small, intimate school in Quito to a sophisticated metropolitan junior high outside Washington D.C. was a hugely difficult shift, and I wasn't prepared at all, not that there was much he and my mother could have done to prepare me. The fact that I went to 7 schools between ages 13 and 18 left me with insecurities that dogged me for years.

Today, even as I am making a home in Mexico, I do wonder where 'home' is. But I notice a lot of people I meet who seem very confident about home aren't particularly interesting to me. I'm far more attracted to people who have had to adapt to differentness in environment and culture and language.

The world is teeming with people who have to invent their own definition of home. Every part of the world has its refugees, immigrants, displaced people. I am nothing like a political or economic refugee, and I would never pretend to be. But I am drawn to people like them. And I often feel more comfortable with them than with the people who lived in one place and developed roots.

The Poetry of Rooftops

A rainbow before the rain? Who am I to argue with loveliness? Still. I thought a rainbow didn't herald rain, but announced its glory after. I'm sitting on my favorite perch, the step up to our room on the roof, the Sky Room. Gray heavy masses hover over chariot-like bundles of cumulus. Horns. Dogs. Distant music. Is "the environment" always as right here, in front of you, around you, to your left, to your right, above you, as it is in Guanajuato? I don't think so. I think that's one reason people move to Guanajuato--there's something muffled about many of the places we leave behind.

Dark sinewy lines thread through the breastlike curves of the clouds, swimming rapidly like sperm. What will the clouds do next? Are they alive, these clouds? Not by conventional definition. Yet they move, change, join, separate, are born, die. Meiosis in action. Isn't that life?

To my left, the chain link fence, filled with green plastic sheeting, that our neighbors built for reasons we've never understood. To my right, T-shirts, sheets, pillow cases swing on clotheslines. The poetry of rooftops. Ever since my boarding school days, when I'd find solace in the sanctuary of the St. Mary's School fire escape, gazing at the tops of houses in Raleigh, N.C., I've loved rooftops. So did my buddy Francie from "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn."

Suddenly, without warning, the peal of church bells. They stop as soon as they start. And the threat--or is it the promise?--of rain.

Rock music and roosters co-habitate.

There are plenty of laws in Mexico, but they seem an abstraction, less about impacting daily life than do the laws in the States, like, say, zoning, or no smoking. You can play music as loud as you want here, and no one cares. Why would they? People breathe music here. Early one Christmas morning in the late 90s, Barry and I hiked from the nearest village, where we had spent Christmas Eve drinking tea with our pension owner, to the national park in Michoacan where the famous monarch butterflies gather after their long flight south from Canada. We walked in the early morning stillness, the silence interrupted only by birdsong. I felt like one of the Wise Men, soon to come upon my jewel. Suddenly an artillery of radio sounds blared out of a farm. We jumped, wanting to hide from the assault. The screaming announcer's voice followed us for half a mile before fading.

The thing about immediacy is, you don't get to pick and choose. You get it all, the sweet and the shit.

Between the moment when I was gazing out at the dusky world, and when I glanced down to scribble on my journal page, the evening lights went on.

God, may I be open to this smelly, earthy, lusty sensuality. May it steep into my worrying, restless, busy mind and rest me. May I be one with this coarse, beautiful world,

The gray sperm lines have merged with the breasts. And the rainbow, it went off to find another pot of gold.

The Bicyclist

A couple of days ago, I climbed La Serena, one of the hills around town. When I reached the cross at the top (there's always a cross on top!), I saw a lone figure perched in front of the cross, legs dangling off the painted white tabletop structure the cross sits on, mountain bike parked nearby.

I was racing against the last few seconds to touch the cross before my personal midnight hour. "I won!" I crowed in Spanish. He looked at me curiously. "I'm competing with myself to see if I can reach my goal before the deadline I assigned myself," I explained.

He laughed. I climbed up onto the platform and before long we were talking about his route up, my route up, my timing, his timing, where he got his bike, and how much bikes cost in Mexico ($1,000 for the high-tech mountain bikes you need on these rough, steep dirt tracks).

He--Diego--was born in the home in Guanajuato where his parents still live. Even in 1977, the year of his birth, babies were still born at home, though he told me most babies nowadays are born in the hospital. His grandmother was the midwife. I told him my birth story about being born in a car.

Now, he is embarking on his second Licensiada (B.A.) in English. (Studying for a second B.A. seems to happen often here. I think it's a way of avoiding the job market, which is notoriously discouraging). He told me he had an 11-year-old daughter, an ex-wife who worked at the University of Guanajuato, and a mother-in-law who also did.

"Is it awkward running into them?" I asked. No, he said, he got along with all of them. The next day, a Sunday, he would pick up his daughter from his ex's and take her to the park.

I told him I understood that single Mexican fathers often lost touch with their children. "Yes, it's true," he said. "It's a bad situation, and the children pay for it. The courts should automatically deduct child support because fathers won't pay it voluntarily."

"Was your daughter planned?"

"No," he said ruefully. "I was 19, my ex was 18. We were so young."

"It is hard for me to understand, even though it happens in my country too, when young people don't use birth control. It's so sad. Their choices are so limited, especially the woman's."

"Yes," he agreed. "It's the influence of the church, the family, the government. We are changing, but very slowly."

It was getting dark and I had some steep sections to negotiate, so I said goodbye, thinking as I hopped across a few rocks how I have often have this kind of conversation with women in Mexico--but rarely with an intelligent, friendly young man. Looking back up, I saw him climbing onto his bike, and gave him a wave.

Homework Assignments

My teacher, Chely, gives great homework assignments. She hands me a list of idioms I have to learn, with the requirement not to look them up in the dictionary but to ask a person. This is a great tool for breaking the conversational ice, a device I could have used a week ago, when I was sitting in an audience of women waiting to hear a speaker on breast cancer. I couldn't get past, "Do you come to these talks often?"

So, last week I approached a guy sitting on a bench in the Jardin (the town square), named Jose. I learned a bunch of expressions using the word "pelo" (hair). "No tengo ni un pelo de tonta"-- "can't fool me" and "por un pelito"--"within a hairline"). Then Jose and I kept on talking about his unemployment, about the Americans who come and go, about where I was from in the U.S. As with most Mexicans I've met, he knew the names of many U.S. states, and knew there was both a Washington, DC, and a state of Washington (both of which are places I've lived). I believe Mexicans are well-informed for two reasons: one, many have family members scattered around the States, and two, generally people outside the U.S. know more about our country than Americans do about theirs.

Meanwhile, I also helped Chely. She was getting ready for her orals to obtain her degree in Teaching Foreign Languages (she speaks and can teach Spanish, English and Japanese). Since all three of the professors evaluating her were American, she asked for my feedback on her presentation skills. We went through her English-language PowerPoint presentation analyzing organization, structure, and delivery. I made suggestions on clearer linkages between concepts, reminded her to look at her audience and not at the slides, and suggested that SHE let the professors know when and how she would respond to questions (rather than just letting it happen).

In the last slide, she had a line that started, "Teachers should..." I suggested rewording it to take out the "should." As written, it sounded moralistic, which is a common and accepted tone in Mexico, but not in the States. My point of view is that many Americans don't like language that is over-directive.

She sailed through her orals, winning unanimous acclaim from all three professors. Yippee! I'm thrilled I was able to help her feel more confident, as I know she feels helping me master Spanish.