Notes on my first decade with Mexico.

Year One


My first conscious act upon arriving in the Mexico City airport for the first time is to lock myself in a bathroom stall and cry.

I am twenty, a college sophomore on a study abroad trip, wearing a Grateful Dead shirt and Birkenstocks and a green bandana over my hair. And the idea of not seeing my boyfriend for three whole months terrifies me. I honestly think I won’t make it.

I finish crying and return to the gate, where I pretend to be asleep until we get on our flight to Merida. Later, I’ll remember nothing of the flight. What I will remember is stepping off the plane into the night of another country. The heat, and a smell of…differentness, of who-knows-what, of possibilities, of something-as-yet-unimaginable. I breathe deep and whatever it-is-rushes into my nose and lungs and heart.

Year Two

One year ago, I was writing in my journal “Hasta la vista, Mexico!” and counting the minutes until I could go home. Already I’m back, this time with my brother in tow. We step out of the airport into a gray Mexico City afternoon, and I crow, “It smells like Mexico!”

My brother, four years younger and infinitely more practical, says, “All cities smell like this.” But that can’t be true.

We go to Pachuca, because the guidebooks make it sound cool. It’s really not, and I spend the entire first night hyperventilating and missing my boyfriend.

But the next morning, I’m up early and walk alone down a busy street that I will one day come to know well. The sun is just coming over the hills and rooftops: that soft, lemony light, with an edge of diesel exhaust. The high-heeled, sticky-haired office workers, the hunched old ladies in their embroidered gingham aprons, the strutting teenagers in school uniforms, the little girls in shiny patent leather shoes, and me.

Year Three

My life is a mess, so I buy a bikini, take a week off from being a nanny and cheating girlfriend, and meet my friend Joanne in Cancun. Cancun-whoo-hoo-spring-break isn’t the point; Mexico is. We spend the first night in a hostel and take the first morning bus to Tulum.

On the second day we decide to search for a cenote: where the underground rivers that flow beneath the thin limestone shelf of the peninsula rise to the surface. We’d read about one—you were supposed to be able to take a bus, but there aren’t any buses running.

I stop a woman on the street and ask for directions. A shy toddler peeks at us from behind her legs. She explains how to get a taxi to the cenote, and how much we should be charged. I tell her, “Gracias, muy amable”—thank you, very nice of you—and feel crazed with happiness: that I tossed off that “muy amable” like, I think, a native speaker, that we’ve understood each other, that this Mexican woman and I are smiling at each other. I wish I could follow her home.

Later, I dangle my feet in the clear water of the cenote as Joanne swims around the dark edges where the water fades into shadow. Tiny ghost-colored fish nibble at my toes and I’m glad that, even though I have to go back and do something about my life, some tiny part of me will stay swimming here.

Year Four

I’ve just spent a month in Oaxaca, drunk on Mexico: unable to sleep night after night because, ohmygod tomorrow when I wake up I get to be in Mexico! Bad things happened to me during that month, but they slid right off. Especially because every other night there was a call for me: this guy—this man—I met on the bus from Mexico City. He took me to his cousin’s wedding. He didn’t kiss me, and I was both glad and sad about that. He went back to Pachuca. He kept calling. Invited me to visit him.

So here I am, in his little turquoise rental house Pachuca—the city the guidebooks tricked my brother and I into visiting a couple years ago. It’s late, I’ve been on a bus all day. Out the window, the sparkle of street lamps all the way down into the valley. I sit in his one chair and we make happy, awkward conversation. He shows me to the bed, careful to point out the blankets he’s folded on the floor for himself.

The next night, and the night after that, we share the bed. And then I have to leave.

I’ll be back, a few months later, convinced that it’s The Last Time, that It Can’t Work, I’m Just Here to Say Goodbye. When we visit Ibis’s parents on the Oaxaca coast, I’ll stand looking at the reflection of the moon in the water tank and telling myself that I can never belong here, even as I long to. I’ll try as hard as I can not to fall in love too much, and fail. I’ll leave anyway, and immediately regret it.

Year Five

I stay away.

Sometimes, though, at night, I run through it: the flight to Mexico City, the trek through the airport to the bus terminal, the Estrella Blanca bus to Pachuca, the taxi from the bus station to downtown, the bus up the hill to La Reforma, the walk up past the playing fields, a left, a sharp right on the little rutted dirt path, and then I’d be there: the funny little turquoise house where Ibis still lives.

“I could,” I think, clutching the Virgin of Guadalupe pendant I wear to remind me. “I could get there. I could still go.”

I almost go, once. I even buy a plane ticket, but I don’t use it. I don’t go, but I don’t forget, either.

Year Six

It’s been a long time. More than a year. I’m a little stunned that Ibis is still single, that he even wanted to see me after all this time--though we’d never lost touch.

Now I’m up on the roof of the turquoise house with a blanket, trying to sleep off my cold, letting the sun soak into my bones. Ibis is working. I drift in and out of sleep, listening to roosters crow, ranchero music swing, the gas truck blast its scratchy “Gas Im-per-i-al,” the neighbor shriek for her daughter: “Baaaaaarrbaaaaaarraaaaaa!” Behind my eyelids, sunbursts and rose petals and stars. This time, I know I’ll be back.

Year Seven

At the beginning of our summer together, on the bus on the way to Salina Cruz to visit his parents, Ibis asked me to marry him. Here at the house where he grew up, in the green hammock, I told him, finally, yes. Now it’s the end of the summer, we’re back in Salina Cruz, it’s raining a warm soaking rain, and I’m curled up on the bed with hideous cramps. But I’m happy through the pain, looking around the bedroom, listening, clutching Ibis’s hand.

The huge wedding portrait of Ibis’s parents—faded, but you can still see how funny and young they look: his father, slightly dazed; his mother, scared and determined. The crucifix, the Virgin of Guadalupe, the watery turquoise walls of the bedroom, the smell of caldo de pollo, the buzz of Ibis’s mother’s sewing machine, the velvet of Pedro Infante’s voice on the radio, the pat of the rain on the roof, Ibis’s hand in mine. I think, “This is how it’s going to be.”

Year Eight
A blizzard of white confetti. Blonde Meghan and black-haired Montserrat throwing rose petals. Even my mom dancing—even my dad dancing. Ibis’s mom crying and cooking and crying and laughing. Ibis’s nephew—our nephew—shrieking for his mamá. Everybody eating and eating and eating.

A couple hours into the party it starts to rain. I hear El Ingeniero Jesus tell my dad, slowly and loudly, “La lluvia. Es. Buena. La lluvia. Es. Vida.” Rain is good. Rain is life.

Joanne and my brother drinking tequila with Ibis’s cousins. My friend Christa dancing with Ibis’s friend Gina. People we don’t even know wishing us well.

Late that night we walk my tipsy cousin up to his hotel room, and then run across the empty Zocalo, laughing. The white skirt of my dress flying. Stars. A man selling roses—“A rose for the bride?” We don’t have any money on us, but it doesn’t matter. There are stars and there are roses, and we see them.

Year Nine

We leave Pachuca for good and move in to our Oaxaca house in July. We paint the outside with the beautiful orange-brown earth of the yard, the inside butter yellow and moss green and the turquoise of the cenote in the Yucatan where I once let tiny fish nibble my toes.

We plant trees and pull up the grass. Against our will, we acquire a puppy, and then he dies and we cry for a week. Then, again against our will, we acquire another one.

I want to get out and double dig the garden and build a chicken coop, but I’m seven months pregnant and it’s unbelievably hot. I do what I can. One day I’m cutting dead leaves from the banana trees and I kill a scorpion with my machete. I’m thrilled by how hardcore that sounds, especially considering that I’m pregnant: “I killed a scorpion with a machete.”

Our baby will be born at home, in September, on the feast day of San Jeronimo, the patron saint of our new town. Later, when we get to know them, our neighbors will say we should have named him Jeronimo. We’ll name him Isaias. He’ll be a native of this place.

Year Ten

Whenever I go to California for a visit, I surprise people by kissing their cheeks in greeting—what always used to startle me, those first years in Mexico, has become reflex. Sometimes my English comes out with a Spanish accent, which I know people think is an affectation, but honestly just happens. Isaias, beginning to talk, says “mamama,” “papapa,” “dog,” “hi,” “adios,” and “muh" for either more or más—we’re not sure which one he’s trying for, but his meaning is clear.

The magic has worn off, a little. For all that I’ve acculturated, sometimes I still feel strange and outside of things—now in an annoyed, shouldn’t-I-be-on-the-inside-by-now kind of way, no longer in the oooh-how-exotic way of those first years. Sometimes Ibis and I argue about such ridiculous things, I’m embarrassed to even give an example.

But then: we’re just sitting at the gas station eating commercial ice cream bars and showing Isaias the trucks. We could be anywhere; it’s such a mundane moment, such a generic location. Later we’ll go home, past fields of corn and beans and alfalfa, Zapotec ruins, casitas de lamina and casitas de adobe, and we’ll water our little trees, collect the eggs, play soccer with the neighbor kids. We’re at the gas station, but we’re here, together, in Mexico.

There’s no one I’d rather be with. There’s no place I’d rather be.

Dia de Campo

That's Isaias frolicking in the alfalfa and catching ladybugs with his frenemy Nancy and her big sister Rosy.

That's one of those moments when I feel like we're totally doing the right thing for him--for all three of us--in living where we live.     

That's me feeling a little envious of my own kid, me wanting to be two feet tall and rolling around in the alfalfa.

Sometimes.

Sometimes it feels like too much, or not enough: too many things that can go wrong, not enough help. 

Last week, the pump stopped working again, and then when the guy came to fix it, he dropped it in the well. 

Last night, the ants (not the leaf-cutters, not the huge bitey red ones, not the viciously bitey teeny-tiny don't-see-em-until-they're-biting-the-shit-out-of-your-toes ones, but the red and black ones that don't travel in a proper, antly line, so you can't tell where they're coming from or where they're going) started making a nest in our bed. 

I haven't had a coherent thought in about a year. 

Ibis hasn't had a weekend in about a year. 

Just for instance. 

And sometimes I want to give up.  Rent.  Live someplace with normal ants.  And no scorpions.  Have time to myself, and municipal water.   

And then:

And:

And I get through another day, and can't believe my luck. 

Learning to Walk in Oaxaca

Isaias begins walking as we’re helping our friends Herminio and Berta with an activity I’ve never had occasion to learn the word for in English: desgranando maiz, stripping the hard kernels of dried corn off the cobs. 

Read the rest at The Traveler's Notebook

Anonymous, noticed, known.

As of today, I love my uniform.




I didn’t bother to change before Ibis dropped me off downtown, so I’ve been rushing around Oaxaca in my white polo shirt, bright yellow sweater vest, gray skirt, white tights, black shoes. It's ugly, but it’s the same uniform the kids I teach wear, similar to the uniforms anyone who attends school, public or private, anywhere in Mexico wears.



And it’s amazing: wearing the uniform, I fit in. I walked up and down the Zocalo twice and not one of the restaurant hawkers offered me a menu. Nobody tried to sell me ANYTHING. I walked into the fabric store and no one gave me the who-do-you-think-you-are once-over. In my uniform, I’m as anonymous here in Oaxaca as I am in California, and I’ve missed my anonymity at times.



I don’t REALLY think I look 16 anymore, but that’s the magic of the uniform: no one is looking that closely. I’m just another uniformed schoolgirl, or some sort of official person, and my coloring must be just a genetic accident, because clearly I belong and am not worth thinking about. It’s delightful.



Of course that doesn’t work in our little town, but I realized the other day that, while I’m not anonymous there—I still get plenty of funny looks—I’m becoming a regular part of the place. I’m becoming known, rather than merely noticed.



I walk into the market and I greet the vendors by name, and joke with them, and we ask about each other’s families. I walk by the hardware store and often Herminio is there, swinging in or out of the delivery truck, and shouts me a greeting, or Don Sergio waves and smiles from the shadows just inside.



And people I don’t even recognize greet Isaias when he’s riding on my back, or ask where he is if he’s not.

We just celebrated his first birthday. He was born at home, at 2:30 a.m. on the Festival of San Jeronimo, the patron saint of our town. When the first fireworks went off that morning, we were so dazed and sleepy and thrilled that we thought they were for him.

Whether he decides it means anything to him or not, he’s one person who will always know where he’s from.

The Cousins

Isaias is crawling around the yard like a lizard—grass, gravel, concrete, hot coals: it’s all the same to him, as long as he’s moving.




His cousin Matias, three months older, has never sat in the grass before; his mother would gladly enclose him in a sterile plastic bubble until puberty, were it socially acceptable. He stays where I put him down, plucking one blade at a time, examining each one carefully before handing it to me and then plucking another.



When I see, out of the corner of my eye, that my sister-in-law has come out of the house, I brace myself for a comment about all the hidden dangers in the grass: bitey ants, venomous spiders, angry scorpions, lurking allergens, all manner of germy unidentifiable stuff that could possibly, maybe, find its way into her child’s mouth.



Instead, I hear her tell someone this: “It’s fine for Isaias to crawl around in the burning sun; he could use some color. But mine is just going to get even darker than he already is.”



The late afternoon light is slanty, sweet, and warm. Maty and Isai are both beautiful babies, with their abuelita’s stick-out ears to mark them as cousins.



I stroke Maty’s silky-straight black hair. He hands me another blade of grass, his eyes wide with wonder.



***



The other day I was evesdropping on some of my fellow expats in the library.

One of them was talking about how she lived in Mexico City for nine months (she kept repeating that she had lived there for NINE MONTHS as though that particular period of time had some wonderful significance in this context) and what a revelation it was to look around a metro car and realize that she was the only white person in sight.



“It’s such an important experience for us to have,” she said, “being a minority, and we can’t have that experience in the U.S.”



The others all nodded seriously and agreed and began swapping how-living-in-Mexico-helped-me-understand-discrimination stories.



I rolled my eyes into my magazine and left before she could say something like, “Nine months! Isn’t that funny? And it’s like, at the end of that time, I had GIVEN BIRTH to my TRUE SELF!” and make me puke all over the periodicals.



Someone is not paying attention, not during NINE MONTHS in Mexico, not the U.S. Being white in Mexico is not the same as being black, or Mexican, in the United States.  Not at all.

Yes, there are people in Mexico who hate white people on sight. But make no mistake, rich and powerful people in Mexico are, by and large, white. Or beige, at their most colorful. Not brown. Most famously attractive celebrities in Mexico are white. Try to find a brown person on Mexican TV who is not playing the role of the maid, or being interviewed as a victim of some tragedy…go ahead and try.



Being hated because you are assumed to be rich and powerful and attractive—or being fawned over for the same reason—is a very different experience from that of minorities in the U.S.



Ibis and I worry about Isaias and Matias for that reason. They are cousins. They are family. But how can we keep the color of their skin from coming between them, in this place, in this time? Can it be done?



***

Walking downtown last week with Isaias on my back, I spotted an American tourist sneaking a photo of an indigenous woman’s pudgy cheeked baby.



What would happen, I wondered, if I told her: hey, my baby’s authentically Mexican, too. Half Zapotec. Born right here in Oaxaca. Want to see his birth certificate? Why don’t you take a picture of him?



She wouldn’t have wanted to. A blue-eyed, curly-haired, white baby is…well, a little person. Nobody wants a picture of some person they don’t even know. A black-haired, black-eyed, brown baby wrapped in a woven shawl is anonymous. Scenery.



Isaias and Matias. I would give anything to know for certain that they’ll both be okay.

Living in the Gaps

Since we’ve lived here in our little town, people have occasionally mistaken me—as an obvious forgeiner—for a volunteer at nearby permaculture farm. Once I’ve cleared that up, I’m usually treated to a comment of some degree of snarkiness about the project. The most recent one: “I hear they’re charging in euros, now. [Disgusted snort.]”

So I was curious about just what was going on at this experiment in sustainable living that has generated such—maybe not antipathy, but certainly annoyance—in its immediate neighbors. Last week I busted out my somewhat half-assed journalistic credentials and scheduled an interview. A malodorous but very polite Spanish volunteer showed me around.

I have two degrees in environmental studies; in theory I agreed with everything Spanish dude had to say, and there’s no denying that this farm is a beautiful place. But, yes, I found myself getting more and more annoyed with my host as the morning progressed.

For one: he danced around all the hard questions—like, how sustainable can this place be if it has no ties to the surrounding community? Like, how do you justify traveling halfway across the world in order to be ecological? Like, if you’re telling me that money is evil and we should do away with it, why are you selling organic veggies to fancy Oaxaca City restaurants…for money?

I know they’re hard questions, and he could easily have thrown some of them back at me, and I wouldn’t have had answers for him. But he didn’t even seem to consider them hard questions; he was treading around in the Land of The Best You Can Do with his eyes on Mount Ideal, refusing to recognize that he is nowhere near the summit.

So that was part of it: the smugness, the I-don’t-debase-my-body-with-chemical-deodorants, I-don’t-touch-money-on-a-daily-basis, I-work-the-LAND attitude, when, hello, you FLEW here on a PLANE with a ticket that you purchased with money, and someone at some point had some money on them when they purchased this huge piece of land and build all these gorgeous ecological houses and meeting halls.

As for my neighbors, I think the money question is part of their beef with these guys: when you’re struggling to make ends meet, there’s nothing more annoying than people who have more money than you ever will going around talking about how money is evil.

And lots of elements of the project looked familiar to me—because I’ve seen them in my neighbors’ yards. They just don’t call it permaculture—it’s just common sense to reuse bald tires if you have some lying around and you need to make a retaining wall or an outdoor staircase, to use cracked water bottles as planters, to have a composting toilet when there’s no sewer system to connect to, to raise a few laying hens on your kitchen scraps, to collect rainwater.

So that’s sort of annoying too: to have someone come in from outside, start doing the things you’ve always been doing, but turn it into a tourist attraction and profitable business (but money is evil) while you get by as best as you can, and at the same time tell you that you’re farming WRONG, on the plot of land your family has been farming for generations.

So I keep thinking about the gaps: the gap between the Ideal and The Best You Can Do; the gap between the permaculturists and the neighbors. It seems like that’s where we’re living right now, in the gaps. The other day I was driving around Oaxaca after working my day job (more about THAT later), looking for a parking space so I could return my library books before picking Ibis up from HIS day job, and wishing I were in my garden…and thinking about just how far we are from the ideal, but also how necessary what we’re doing right now is—namely, earning some of that evil stuff so we can exchange it for necessary goods and services.

And thinking about our ideal, which falls somewhere in the gap between the neighbors (who for all their recycled tires, have disturbingly few qualms about dumping poisons on bugs and rodents of all kinds), and the permaculturists (who for all their beautiful eco-design, are kind of elitist and insufferable).

When I told Ibis all this, about gaps, something metaphorical got lost in the translation to Spanish, so I put it to him like this: we’re down here in the valley, and the ideal is up there (here I pointed out the window to the mountains). And to get to the mountain maybe we have to cross a river. And maybe we’re not really all that interested in boating, in and of itself, but we have to concentrate on what we’re doing, where we really are, or we could capsize. When we get to the other side, the mountain will still be there.

He said: you better go write that down.