shayne - august 3, 2009
Sometime around the age of 19, I decided that I was only attracted to women with dark eyes, and I’ve been that way ever since. No questions, no explanations. Everyone has their personal quirks.
Several years later I went to a movie theatre and saw
Desperado, one of the most gratuitously violent and yet goofiest and delightful films I’d ever seen… I’m easily entertained, I guess. Now, despite that, were Salma Hayek to possess a big, irresistibly beautiful and heavenly pair of… blue eyes, then most likely upon hitting the restroom after the film, I would have stood there at the urinal, thinking nothing more about life than the tiles on the wall directly in front of me, like observing land distribution six miles below from the window of a plane, while my eyes went red and teared up with the indescribable joy of relieving myself.
Instead, I left the theatre with only one thought: I have GOT to learn Spanish someday. By the time I reached home, however, that thought had faded significantly as my eyes were truly going red and tearing up trying not to piss myself. I was so busy thinking about this hot Mexican mamacita and our Spanish speaking future niños that a trip to the restroom upon leaving the movies had never occurred to me.
Several more years later, a woman who could pass for the aforementioned actress, though only at the briefest of glances, started at the company where I worked. I was about 27, no college degree, and worked around 70 hours a week, literally, as I had already been doing for six years. At this company I did shipping and receiving. I liked it, because it gave me a chance to get around the plant and chat with a lot of people, including this new one who I learned was from Mexico. Attractive as she was, after getting to know her a little I found her a bit conservative to be my type. Nonetheless, there was something intriguing that drew me to her, even though I had no clue really as to what the hell to talk to her about. So I asked her to teach me some Spanish.
I had been telling myself for some time that I could easily learn a foreign language, and what better way to put myself to the test? That’s what I told her, quite matter-of-factly, when she expressed a natural doubt in my sincerity. I told her I could master Spanish in two months, and before she could finish laughing I convinced her to give me a sentence to learn for the next day and that I would show her.
“ESTÁ LLOVIENDO AFUERA”, she wrote on a post-it note. My attempt to read it sounded so hopelessly gringo that she didn’t even bother to hide her disappointment and said that to be able to stomach helping me, I was going to have to make a much greater effort to pronounce correctly. Well, I wasn’t going to have her thinking I could be intimidated, neither by her nor by this tiny phrase… how impressive would that have been? So I stayed there a couple of moments as she showed me the details until I could say “It’s raining outside” in Spanish with a good (enough) Mexican accent.
And what about this trying to impress her? A bit cheesy, eh? Wrong. It turned out to be a very reliable and invaluable source of motivation that turned every free minute into a flurry of research. That same day after work I went to the bookstore and bought a couple of Spanish grammar books, examining while there what I could about Mexico in general. I wanted to impress her by going a step further and approaching her the next day with anything I could learn overnight on my own. For me it was a pastime from the very beginning. I had met and overcome various challenges in life, but at that moment I was bored and sought something new.
It was the summer of 1999. I knew absolutely nothing of Mexico other than it bordered the U.S. I didn’t need to know anything. I lived in Kansas, far from the border where Mexico just wasn’t an important aspect of everyday life. You can say that sounds ignorant or offensive, but let’s be honest. When you get here to Mexico, you’ll find that Guatemala doesn’t exactly top the list of anyone’s concerns either, regardless of education level.
Kansas City around this time, however, was hosting an ever growing number of Hispanics. There were several factors pushing this evolution, though none of them was completely clear to me at the time. I just knew that my company was gradually bringing on more and more immigrants, mostly from Mexico and Central America, and mostly who couldn’t speak English. This fact alone presented me with an opportunity to receive a far more fruitful education than I’ve ever acquired from a university, and I was ready and willing to exploit it. For one, I never would have learned Spanish had I studied it in school. With these people, many whom I befriended, my desire and necessity to communicate with them pushed me to pick it up very quickly. My prediction of two months, however, turned out to be just as ridiculously laughable as it sounded.
Though I had no time to go to school in those days, I had basically three academic interests: history, philosophy, and social/political analysis, all the big moneymakers. Although not an expert in any one of these fields, I was particularly fascinated with the importance that everyone placed on race, be it in politics, social structures, or the general culture. I found it all to be incredibly stupid, yet virtually inescapable; a true reality founded upon a false belief that race is important.
I discovered several months into my Spanish adventure a weekly newspaper that catered to the “Hispanic community”. I looked for it every week because all of the articles were written in both Spanish and English, although the content was chock full of all this racial importance crap that always made my blood boil a bit. Habitually commenting about how the gringos didn’t understand ‘them’ and their history, it sought to foment a pride that was purely Hispanic pride. Far from feeling threatened by this, I saw it as a mentality that would hold more Hispanics back than it helped. The editors often would try to persuade readers to support a political candidate based nothing more than on the fact that he was Hispanic; “like us… and so he understands ‘our’ problems…”
These kinds of issues became the topic of many a conversation I would have, in the best Spanish I could do, with my Mexican and Central American friends at work. I didn’t embrace these immigrants for the novelty that they were foreigners or because I championed a ‘diversity’ of skin colors and cultures. We were just hard workers that worked together in the same company and the chemistry functioned. Sometimes the discussions became quite heated, and I would ask them why they didn’t just go back home, if it was so bad in the states as they made it sound. “For crying out loud,” I would say, “would you vote for any candidate in Mexico on the argument that he was Hispanic just like you?”
However the discussions turned out, I was always left wanting to go investigate. My experience had been that many Americans talked about their own country in ways that I often found to be not particularly true. When Mexicans spoke of the difficult lives they had faced at home and how it was not possible to get ahead, I wanted to know why, and to know more about Mexico in general, so that I wouldn’t just blindly take things at face value or agree with any given perspective. Anyone can throw together the typical “Mexico is a country very rich in culture and natural resources, but with a very corrupt government” argument. The fact that it’s true doesn’t make it useful in coming to understand anything. I tried studying Mexican history, but it quickly became tedious, having no perspective of the present to connect it to.
In January of 2001, I had a three or four-day weekend and decided simply to go. One of the Mexicans I became friends with at work was from Mexico City and had gone back a year or so earlier. I called her a couple of weeks in advance to see what she thought about a brief intrusion into her daily affairs. She spoke no English and when she was in Kansas I had to use an electronic translater for almost every word, so she was quite surprised and I felt very proud that I could now carry on a conversation over the phone; moreover, she was just as enthusiastic about the visit as I was.
I had never been out of the country before. I bought a plane ticket the day before I left, without mentioning to anyone where I was going. Back then it wasn’t necessary to have a passport for Mexico. A driver’s license and copy of birth certificate would suffice. I was to be back in just three days. Although I was essentially to be a tourist, I wanted nothing to do with that. Tourism is fine, but it typically represents an escape from the real world. I wanted to absorb it, in all its splendid ugliness; be one of the animals in the zoo, so to speak, rather than the person outside with the camera. I went by myself of course and everyone I was with there spoke only Spanish. In addition, my friend and her cousin were natives of Mexico City, so I would be seeing things that most tourists never get to see.
First day out we’re in her cousin’s volkswagen bug, and it breaks down, just… somewhere in the meandering urban wilderness. My friend and I had to push it twelve blocks to a mechanic, past what looked like a warehouse, inside of which was a butcher table stacked sky high with putrefying de-feathered chickens. My lungs were burning, and I was close to vomiting from the smell of chicken massacre. My friend feared that I would decide to go back home then and there, but I loved it. I really did. I felt I was digging into real life in the real world and getting my hands dirty, and it was energizing; well, physical labor just does that for me. If I had to choose between a dead-end job loading trucks and a dead-end office job, no doubt Í’d rather be a hotdog on a forklift than some weenie in a cubicle.
So that was my first taste of Mexico, a city of 20 some odd million people, give or take four or five million… imagine being the poor bastard who has to keep count of that. We actually covered a lot of ground that weekend, seeing various Aztec ruins, museums and taco stands, as well as some really ugly parts. I found that the Coca Cola really does taste different (better), it’s not just a myth. Though I knew little about the country, I was able to correctly perceive that this somewhat orderly chaos that we gringos call Mexico City was hardly a reflection of Mexico by and large; something often reiterated to me by my Mexican co-workers when I returned.
Later in 2001 I was finally able to quit one of my two jobs and start school. I eventually majored in Political Science and International Studies, and chose a minor in Latin American Studies. I was pretty excited about this in the beginning, because I really wanted to learn a great deal. Unfortunately, I was already too far invested in the venture before it occurred to me that the mediocre liberal arts degree I was pursuing was more concentrated on teaching young people how to learn than the actual learning itself. I was spending a small fortune to sit around with a bunch of kids whose only preocupations besides being kings of the world were getting wasted, getting laid, and getting some slip of paper that supposedly assures job providers that they’re finally equipped to learn something in life; perfectly fine things for a kid to be concerned about, don’t get me wrong, but hardly something I was thrilled and proud to be paying real money for.
I thought that school would push me to excel and advance intellectually, but after four years all I had gotten out of it was good grades, something truly of minimal importance to me. In 2005, just three semesters from finishing my degrees, I decided to study two of them (1 year) in Mexico. Until this time I had only visited the country on several occasions. I’d been to Guadalajara a couple of times and chose a university there. I would now be living there, and without the slightest fear of the unknown... I’m laughing at what I just wrote… it’s not like I was going to freakin’ Zimbabwe. The fact of the matter was that to continue another year down the disappointing scholarly path that I had come to know all too well would have been the far scarier and more dreadful decision. Yes, it was going to cost more money, and I would have to take out loans to do it, but I reasoned that I just might get a real education, given that for me this would be a more “hands-on” experience. If I learned anything of value from school, it is to be wary of any educational adventure that gives you tests and more tests without ever putting you personally to the test. Liberal Arts, anyone?
That was four years ago, and I’m still here in Guadalajara receiving my superior education. My definition of ‘superior’ here is anything that’s independent from school. After finishing two semesters here in a private university that reminded me more of a daycare center than anything else, I could not simply go back home empty handed. Holding my nose, I finished my last semester here, and was thus done with school. Just over the horizon was a mountain of school loans to pay, though I had no intention of returning to the U.S. anytime soon. I was going to have to make a living down here, making more money than most people here do. But that’s the challenge I was prepared to face. Actually such challenges are the most refreshing thing about returning to real world education. I found work here, making at best half of what I made loading trucks back home. But when people ask me why I don’t go back to the states and make much better money, I explain to them that this is what I want. I’m paying for my false education with the peanuts I’m earning from my real education.
That’s why I came here; not to flee the U.S. or live in a different climate, but to learn what I can about Mexico. I want to understand the politics, the history, the economy, the social structures, the common and not so common ideas and behaviors, and be a part of it all on a daily basis so I can observe first-hand how it all interweaves. I feel just as comfortable here as back home, though the two places are quite distinct. I may eventually go back to the states, I might not. Perhaps I’ll later live in another country altogether, or maybe I’ll stay here forever. I’ve never looked at this experience as an escape or an attempt to find myself. It may not be clear to me where I’m going, but I know exactly where I am.
The purpose of this blog is to share a bit of that daily experience with anyone interested (surely there’s someone), and also to relate to those not living in Mexico what they can expect should they decide to stay here awhile. In turn, I hope to improve my ability to put observations and ideas into writing. The point of this particular post isn’t its autobiographic nature; rather, it’s to allow the reader to know what got the writer here, and therefore perhaps better understand the perspective behind the commentary. What it will not look like is a travel guide, with hotel and restaurant listings, and descriptions of mariachi serenades and colorfully dressed folk dancers.
Someone will likely be offended at some point. I’m not concerned. Your sensitivity is your own responsibility. It will appear at times that I’m critical of Mexican culture, and prompt some to wonder why I continue to stay here. My answer would be that I live here. I can only hope that any reader sometimes questions and criticizes things around where he or she lives. I love Mexico, and I love the U.S. Hell, I might even love Zimbabwe if I wind up there someday. Observing the culture around me and calling it into question from time to time has been one of my favorite toys to play with since childhood. I hope you will enjoy reading about it as much as I enjoy being here.
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