Domestic Decadence and a Much-Needed Helping Hand

I’ve been gone so long that I don’t know where to begin! I know, the key to successful blogging is updating regularly. However, if you’re one of my friends, I probably haven’t spoken to you since March, either. I haven’t showered since March (ok, that’s not true). But I have been earth-shatteringly busy. The culprit is grad school. So here it is, mid-May, and I don’t even have time to be blogging right now. But here I am.

In the past two months, my parents came to Guadalajara and met Paco and Canelo. We had a good time, although my translating and tour guide skills were put to the test. I would have written a whole blog post about this, with some thoughts about showing my parents the unfamiliar land I have decided to live in, and about language differences and how we overcame them, but the moment has passed. Let’s just leave it at this: we ate a lot of ice cream, Dad tried mezcal (liquor similar to tequila)  for the first time, Paco tried gin for the first time.

Although class and homework have pretty much dominated my time, I’ve also been on three required field trips. It’s not as fun as it sounds, and in fact, losing entire weekends devoted to “reading the landscape” and sitting in a van only added to my stress. But I have seen a lot more of Jalisco, the state where we live. Maybe when the semester ends, I’ll write about the trips.

Instead, the long-overdue blog post is about cockroaches. First, let me explain the title.

I’ve been reminded recently that in Spanish, “decadencia” means “decline or decay,” what “decadence” technically means in English. But I grew up hearing “decadence” associated with chocolate cake, or a fudge sundae. It’s a restaurant menu word. Anyway, in our case, “decadence” applies to the apartment only in the bad way.

The busier Paco and I got with our studies, the messier the apartment got. Two full time students? Who will take care of the house? After some inner ethical wrestling, I came to the conclusion that we needed to outsource. That is, hire someone to clean our humble abode. My reluctance came from the following association: paying someone to clean the house twice a month=having a maid=feudal lifestyle, oppressing serfs, etc. However, the hygienic state of the apartment was also approximating that of feudal times, back when people really did bathe once a year. So we decided to post an ad online.

I had never hired anyone before, so I tried to compose an ad that would convey that we didn’t have much money, that we really needed help, and that we needed someone responsible. In return, we would also be responsible and grateful. Looking back, we don’t sound like the most attractive employers. But soon after, Doña Patricia called and offered her services.

The morning she was scheduled to arrive, I felt very nervous. How was I supposed to tell someone what to do? Or act like a boss? I’m 22. Paco and I made a sort of half hearted list of tasks for her. When Doña Patricia arrived, I sheepishly handed her the list. She said, “ok, honey.” Then she went into the kitchen and started working her magic.

Two hours later, the apartment and patio were cleaner than they had ever been. Working on her own, Doña Patricia is faster, more efficient, and more thorough than Paco and I are working together. We pay her what she asked for, which is affordable for us. So it’s been significantly less filthy around here.

However, since our apartment is dingy and sort of old, it seems like it can’t really ever be completely clean. Case in point: we realized that the cockroaches that we found dead on the tile floor in the mornings were emerging from the shower drain, which doesn’t have an attached filter. Canelo, Cockroach Hunter, had also realized this, and he kept a nightly vigil on the bathmat waiting for his cockroach “playmates” to come out. We bought a plastic drain filter, but Canelo routinely removes it from the drain.

Paco, a devoted dad to our crazy kitten, said to me, “maybe we should just leave the filter off so Canelo can play with the cockroaches. He’s all alone in the apartment and doesn’t interact with any living creatures beside us.” I was not moved. Yeah, sorry Canelo. Cockroaches do not belong in our apartment. You’ll have to make do with the 20 million flies, which you also catch and eat.

Anyway, other than the mosquito problem, and the sweltering heat, and my homework, everything is great!

Standing out, messing up, talking differently, crashing into tree branches

I’ve mentioned before that I strive to blend in here and convince people that I’m Mexican. I’ve also mentioned that everyone laughs when I say this: why would anyone expect a pale, blue-eyed girl speaking accented Spanish to be Mexican? I think what I’ve hoped is that my accent would, one day, be so subtle that I could fool people. Being impatient, I wanted this to be true already. It’s not.

I’m starting to realize, if not completely accept, that I am at all moments a foreigner and my accent will not go away. I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past few days after a strange series of events that all confirmed that my efforts to blend in, have not been very successful.

Last week in class, a professor corrected a mistake I made when speaking–the first time I’ve been corrected, though it was probably the millionth mistake on my part. The error dealt with vocabulary usage. I wanted to say that something was “shocking,” so I used what I thought to be the equivalent word in Spanish, chocante. The professor informed me that chocante does mean “shocking” in Spain, but here in Mexico it means “grating, irritating.” Deep down, I want to be corrected–making mistakes without even realizing it would not help me improve my skills. But not-so-deep-down, I just don’t want to make mistakes at all, and being publicly corrected embarrassed me. As the professor explained the nuances of chocante, I tried to figure out what to do with my face–smile? nod attentively? appear remorseful? I opted to smile. I could feel everyone looking at me and imagined them all wondering whether I was embarrassed.

Then this past weekend when we were at the beach, I was waiting for Paco outside a public shower. I was still in my beach attire. Two people nearby were talking, and when I accidentally bumped my head on a tree branch, the man nearby said, “¡Aguas!” which means “watch out.” Immediately after, he said in English, “careful!” And my reaction, instant and uncontrolled, was to say in Spanish, “Hey, I speak Spanish. Don’t talk to me in English!” I felt really angry, and I wasn’t sure why.

Finally, yesterday I was in my yoga class, and my teacher asked us all to introduce ourselves to the other students. As I spoke, one of the other students said to the teacher, “I love the way she talks.” I laughed (didn’t know what else to do) and finished my introduction.

Anyway, these three events have got me doing a lot of thinking. The shame I felt at being corrected in class comes from being in denial. I am going to make mistakes, and the people who take the trouble to correct me are doing me a favor. I certainly won’t ever forget how to use chocante! If I don’t expect that I’m going to speak perfectly, since I won’t, then I don’t think being corrected will feel like such an affront, since I already know, rationally, that it is meant to help me.

My unexplained outburst at the public shower–I think there were two things going on. The first is that it confirmed my failure to blend in, since the man assumed (correctly!) that I was American. I don’t like people judging me based on my appearance (who does?), but this poor fellow was not making an outrageous assumption: there are a lot of Americans at the beach. There was absolutely no reason for me to take offense.  I am the one American at the beach who isn’t happy to find an English-speaking Mexican when on vacation.

The second dynamic in this situation is one that I haven’t really talked about here on the blog, but let’s just say that the California-style friendliness I was raised to use with strangers, is interpreted differently outside of California. Here, at least with men, is sometimes mistaken for flirtation or interest. So after some misunderstandings in the past, I’ve tended to be extremely guarded, what seems cold to me, with men I don’t know when I’m alone. Even when it is completely harmless (like warning me about the tree branch I had just crashed into), I tend to feel threatened and become defensive. So I think that might have something to do with lashing out–feeling uncomfortable. Beyond just learning the verbal language of another country, there is a whole other language of gestures, expectations, looks and understandings that are also not native to me, and they won’t ever be, though I will get more adept at understanding them as time goes on. It’s been less than a year since I moved here, after all.

And when my yoga-mate said she loved the way I talk, it suddenly hit me: my accent and peculiar way of expressing myself are not necessarily linguistic defects. They just make me “that girl with an accent.” I don’t know why I never compared my situation before to the international students I went to college with, whose accents and funny ways of saying things endeared them to the rest of us. The fact that I am not Mexican, don’t talk like a Mexican and don’t appear to be Mexican are just quirks that identify me in this society, but my background is not a problem in and of itself.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to latch on to calling myself “just another gringa in Mexico!” or walk around with an American flag on my teeshirt. But I’m going to try to cultivate the new social role for myself as the “intriguing foreigner” instead of pretending to be Mexican. If my accent entertains people, that’s great. Since I started learning Spanish at the age of 18, it’s unlikely I could ever lose my accent anyway.

It’s hard to be the different one. I neatly avoided being  so obviously and radically different for most of life. But once you’ve been “the only ____ in the room,” when circumstances change, you can be a much more sensitive member of the majority. And learning to love being different, well, that is a new goal for this Existential Migrant.

An almost disastrous beach adventure

As poor, overtired graduate students, Paco and I talk a lot more about traveling than we actually travel. But with a three-day weekend built into the calendar, and lots of harrying on my part, we managed to get our things together, and we planned an escape to the beach. The destination: Manzanillo, Colima.

Traveling in Mexico, for the most part, happens by bus. Flying is faster, of course, but it’s relatively more expensive than it is in the  United States. Also, the buses here are timely, and quite comfortable: they’re luxury buses, really (not Greyhound). Since Guadalajara is a city of regional and national importance, you can get to many other cities in just a few hours.

We made the journey to the terminal, bought our tickets, and in just a few hours we had arrived in Manzanillo. It was already dark, and we took a taxi through the winding main boulevard to reach the inexpensive hotel that I’d found online.

From my history classes, I knew that Manzanillo was an important port city. But I didn’t realize that it was ONLY a port. We drove past lots of industrial, metal, and big port structures that I couldn’t possibly identify for you. When we pulled up at the hotel, I was surprised–wasn’t it supposed to be close to the beach?

We walked into the hotel, which featured wall-to-wall, pallid blue tiles, cracked and uneven. At a table that appeared to be the “hotel reception” sat an elderly woman, asleep with her mouth open and her lips stretched over her gums and teeth. Her cheeks were impossibly gaunt, and her skin was yellow and waxy, and frankly, I wasn’t sure if she was still among the living. A man with a mullet attended to us, very slowly, and we made our way up two flights of stairs to a small, decaying but clean room.

“Ooh, TV,” said Paco, who immediately flopped on the bed and grabbed the remote control. Despair began to set in. “Are we going to go walk around?” I asked with unmasked irritation. “Explore what?” Paco replied, already mesmerized by the television. “I need to eat dinner,” I demanded.

The next hour played out like any funny-from-the-outside scene of a couple traveling and arguing. The port, sinister and haunted under the yellow light of the streetlamps, felt like some sort of muggy purgatory. We turned onto a side street hoping to find something appetizing, but only a few dingy taco stands seemed to be open. I pestered Paco to ask a woman for restaurant recommendations. She suggested quite sincerely that we might enjoy the take out from the national grocery store chain. This might have been funny in other circumstances, but it seemed bitter and depressing at the time. We returned to the main street, all hope lost.

No restaurants were open. The railroad, parallel to the water, soon rumbled with an endless cargo train, trapping us between the desolate port and any possible source of dinner on the other side of the shipping containers rolling past. Neither of us spoke.

Our beach vacation was ruined, we were doomed to spend 48 miserable hours in this horrible port. We finally sat down in a restaurant that had seemed overpriced an hour before, but now appeared to be our only viable option. After two tiny, expensive hamburgers and four beers, we started trying to think positively. We asked the waitress where the beach was. “Oh, the beaches are in Santiago,” she said, the next coastal town to the north. “We’re looking for an inexpensive hotel with a beach,” we told her. Apparently, that was the problem: there was no such thing. Beach hotels are expensive. She suggested we take a taxi the next morning to one of the hotels in Santiago, since the beaches are open to everyone. We returned to our hotel and fell asleep hoping that the next day would be more promising.

In the morning, we went downstairs to the hotel’s restaurant to eat breakfast. Bustling through the kitchen was the old woman who’d been asleep and dead-looking the night before. It turned out that she owned the hotel, and was quite capable of running it, and she made our breakfasts, which were delicious. Outside were coconuts on a palm tree and mango trees hosted many noisy birds, and I watched and listened as I drank my fresh orange juice and ate huevos rancheros.

Refueled, we walked past the port, which was now blue and glittering in the morning sun. I pointed out that with the trains and boats, this place was a four-year-old boy’s paradise, at which point Paco mentioned that he was also quite fond of boats and trains.

We asked a taxi driver to take us to a good beach, and for twenty minutes, we drove past big-box stores and strip malls, occasionally glimpsing the blue water in the background. We walked through a tianguis, or weekly market, and saw the same artisan crafts they sell in Guadalajara. Suddenly, I was surrounded by my fellow countrymen, who bargained with and explained things to the sellers much to my amusement.  “Mi amigo, muy grande!” said one well-roasted American, holding out his hands to show just how big.

After weaving our way through the tianguis, the beach emerged, clean, idyllic, perfect. We approached a grouping of large umbrellas and chairs, and a man offered us a seat, and asked if we would like a coconut. Our vacation was saved.

From then on, we ate seafood, drank coconut juice out of the shell, anointed our glasses with sea salt and lime and sipped beer, splashed around in the warm waves, watched families enjoying the beach, and managed not to get sunburned. Even though we couldn’t afford the beachside hotels, with a little extra traveling back and forth, we still got to enjoy a weekend getaway. But I’ve been reminded why I shouldn’t travel without my trusted Lonely Planet guide.

For more pictures, click on the link to the left (the bird!).

About my neighbors

When I return from class, the bus stops on the wrong side of the street. At the stop closest to our apartment, pedestrians cross the street at their own risk, since there is no “walk” sign or predictably safe moment to cross. Not only out of laziness, but also owing to a heightened distaste for “efficiency,” I chose to cross this way rather than waste time and steps by taking the other, longer path across the pedestrian bridge.

There are many pedestrian bridges here: there are more pedestrians, fewer highways, more dangerous, vast boulevards. What I don’t like about them is, again, the inefficiency, the looping back and forth, up and down, just to cross a street! But I am, deep down, risk-averse. So I’ve started to take the high, long road (also because my parents’ disapproval rings in my head, even though they are a thousand miles away and I am purportedly grown up).

All this was just so that I could tell you about the view from the pedestrian bridge: oh, the view! The cars, the polluted sunset, the high rises in the distance, all mediated by the chain-link barrier between me and falling. Sometimes I forget to look out, but I feel masterful when I remember, as though in the six months we’ve lived here this place has become a little bit my own.

On the other side of the bridge is a 7-Eleven, which miraculously smells just like every other convenience store I’ve ever visited: junk food potpourri, a little bit sweet, comforting, makes me want a Snickers bar. They sells donuts (donas) and everything every other little store sells, but at a higher price.

Our neighborhood boasts at least three schools, and we live directly in front of a junior high school. In Mexico, most schools have two shifts: turno matutino y turno vespertino (morning and afternoon shifts). The first group attends class from 7 am to 1 pm, the second group from 1 pm to 7 pm. So at regular intervals, the sidewalks swarm with teenagers, and also with little kids from the nearby kindergarten. Some of our enterprising neighbors set up stands in their front yards at these peak hours, selling candy and fried snacks called chicharrines that are doused with chile and lime.

Though these schools are public, they require students to wear uniforms. It’s been only 10 years since I finished junior high myself, but I already feel so removed from their reality in a way, scandalized at the girls’ short skirts and the boys’ shoving each other around.

The school brings along with it so many sounds: the bells, which ring all day long, and sometimes in the middle of the night if the power went out earlier in the day. At the end of the school day, they play the Mexican national anthem over the loudspeaker, and someone important gives an unintelligible discourse over the PA. At night groups of teenagers congregate in the sort of scuzzy park across the street, and they scream, cackle, and make me feel old.

In fact, we are almost constantly accosted with sensory invasions perpetrated by our neighbors: the boy next door who listens to pop hits from the year 2000 at unbelievable volume, the  other next door neighbor who smokes marijuana several times a day in his backyard, which is directly connected to our backyard, the trucks that pass by loudly selling hot tortillas, tamales,  a new canister of natural gas. Sometimes, these things bother us (loud, bad music especially). But it also seems normal to me–I did live in front of a bar last year.

The truth is, we don’t really know our neighbors, and even in the stores we frequent almost daily, the owners show no sign of knowing us. This has seemed true in all the urban settings I’ve lived in (ok, we’re talking about from 2007 onward). But the familiar faces, though anonymous, do make us feel more natural, more settled where we are.

I didn’t realize how great this tree was until I took a picture of it! (If you’d like to see more photos of the neighborhood, click on the bird to the right).

And now, a Legal Migrant, too!

I’ve written a number of times about my long  quest for an FM-3, the Mexican visa given to foreigners who work, study, or live in Mexico. After going through almost the entire process in November and December, I had to withdraw my application in order to return home for the holidays. When I came back to Jalisco in January, I started over, wiser than last time and more circumspect. Although it didn’t go perfectly this time, I knew how to correct my errors much faster.

Last week, as I fumbled with some official-looking documents waiting for class to start, one of my classmates said to me, “so, are you Mexican yet?” Though an FM-3 doesn’t exactly make you Mexican–it’s a nonimmigrant visa–as of 9:45 this morning, I am now “Mexican”–today, I got my FM-3!

Oh, the joy I felt as I nuzzled my thumb into an ink pad to place my prints on so many papers. I didn’t even care that ID picture used in my visa is more mugshot than anything else. Who cares if I have to renew it in 12 months! It’s mine, and I got it without a lawyer. Also, now that I’m no longer a tourist, I can get my money back from the canceled application from December.

Just a quick update on my legal status–my busy, busy world beckons!

Beyond the binary of Mexico-United States

I realized today that many of my posts tend to boil down migration–the process, the experience–to a duality. I, the American, moved my life to Mexico, and as a result, my world is a constant push-and-pull between two poles: my native culture and language and the adopted language and culture I currently inhabit. It’s a convenient way to break down a complex set of feelings, misunderstandings and contrasts. But migration goes beyond the binary.

First of all, I’m not only an American, I’m also a Californian–I realized this when I went to college in New England. Furthermore, I’m a Silicon Valley-ite (silicon chip?)–I will be irritated if you assume I’m from Los Angeles. National identity isn’t the only one at play, or even the most important to me personally, but it’s the one people tend to assign me when I’m internationally located.

And I tell Americans that I’m in Mexico, but I tell Mexicans that I’m in Guadalajara, or Jalisco. The specificity matters. Our middle-class neighborhood, with its 7-Eleven and highway on its fringes, is worlds away from the highland pueblos where I’ve stayed in Chiapas (Mexico’s southernmost state). Paco, who hails from one of these pueblos, feels like something of a foreigner here in Guadalajara, too.

But what brought about this idea of complicating the binary, in fact, was not these regional and local nuances to how we understand ourselves. It was actually a Valentine’s Day date.

Let me backtrack a little. Just a year ago, on Valentine’s Day 2009, I was still in college and Paco was in Chiapas. We celebrated by reading the love letters we’d oh-so-old-fashioned-ly mailed each other, and staring at our respective fiancé/e’s faces on our laptops, thanks to the miracle of Skype. So this year, happily living at the same address, we were excited to celebrate the day with a little more pizazz. Our goal: see some live music. We looked up some potential locations, got dressed up, and discovered that BOTH of the bars we’d planned on turned out not to exist.

After doing our part to contribute to the wallets of three different taxi drivers, we ended up back where we had begun our trek, in the Colonia Americana–the ritzy neighborhood where the U.S. Consulate makes its home. We opted to have dinner at an Indian restaurant called Goa.

Another explanation needed: I am crazy about Indian food, and I’ve had a lot of good Indian food in my time (since I’m from the Silicon Valley, home to many immigrants from the Indian subcontinent). Paco, on the other hand, had never had Indian food before.

I have to admit, I was a little skeptical when we sat down. Was this going to be “authentic”?–although, never having been to India myself, I’d have to make this judgment based on the Indian food of the South Bay. Reading the menu was at once familiar and strange, seeing the names I knew “dal makni,” “palak paneer,” “mango lassi” followed by explanations in Spanish. I was paralyzed at how to ask for the dish labeled “butter chicken” on the menu: should I try to pronounce the English words in a Spanish accent? I opted to ask for “pollo de mantequilla,” to which the waiter said, “boo-ter chee-ken?”

I picked some of my favorite things for Paco to try them. Everything tasted good, but it all was just a little–different. And to me, different in a way that made me homesick. The samosas were bathed in a sweetish sauce, but I wanted them to arrive plain, ready for me to dip them in cilantro/mint chutney. The naan was just a little too thin, and a little too crispy. The mango lassi was just a little too heavy on the cardamom. And when we ordered mango kulfi for dessert, it arrived garnished with chocolate syrup, whipped cream and a cherry. I’m not opposed to anything with sugar in it, but it just didn’t seem right to combine something as exotic as mango kulfi with Hershey’s. I will say that I relish any opportunity to eat a maraschino cherry.

While we waited for these dishes to appear, Paco and I stared at the many decorations–the restaurant was positively covered in Indian handicrafts. We liked them, but I told Paco, “you know, I have never been to an Indian restaurant that was this decorated.” Thinking aloud, I mused that a Mexican dining in an Indian restaurant has certain expectations–of exotic, unfamiliar food. The decorations become part of the culinary journey, transporting you away from the usual. But in the Silicon Valley, most Indian restaurants are frequented primarily by Indians. They don’t need a folkloric Indian decor to appreciate the food, and the food isn’t exotic at all–it’s comforting.

And my expectations for what Indian food should be–where do those fall in spectra of accuracy or authenticity? Long before I learned Spanish or became interested in Mexico, I was in contact with Indian culture on a daily basis–through family friends and my classmates. Some of my dearest friends are Indian. So a less-than-fluffy naan stands out to me.

It’s even hard for me to talk about Indian things here in Mexico due to a simple translation quirk: the translation for “Indian” is hindú, that is, Hindu. I think this is because here, indio invariably refers to a Native/indigenous Mexican, although the term is not only scandalously incorrect but also often pejorative. So it’s not convenient to refer to Indians from India as “indios.” But for me, calling Indians from India “Hindus” just seems wrong. Hinduism is a religion, not a nationality, and in fact, it’s a religion that not all Indians practice. Talking about Hindu food (comida hindú) doesn’t sound right, but that’s what Indian food is called here.

Seeing the way another culture–Mexican culture, to speak in very general terms–condenses and interprets other cultures makes me wonder about the lenses and shorthands I use, without thinking twice, for cultures I learned about in the U.S. context. In Mexico, chino (Chinese) is a nickname given to people with “Asian features,” and it’s also a frequently used substitute for “Asian.” Both of these uses smart of racism to me. But who knows how many Taiwanese silently take offense to being labeled Chinese? Yet the distinction is often optional in U.S. parlance.

I don’t consider myself an expert on any culture, including the one I was raised in (and I wouldn’t even know what to call that culture, if it has a name). Maybe one day I’ll visit India, try “real” Indian food and find myself disappointed that it’s not Silicon Valley-style Indian food! But if we can recognize migration as a non-linear journey–not just from country A to country B, but a constant, whirring, spiraling transit among infinite mindsets and languages and moralities–we can leave “authenticity” aside as a figment of our imagination. Not even a very useful figment. We can pursue, futilely but doggedly, the endless realm of nuance–to learn of local particulars and forget about national-level generalizations.

I briefly emerge from a universe of photocopies

to write a blog post!

Oh, it’s Saturday night. I hope most people my age have better plans for the night than reading for the next week’s classes. But for me, it’s the only viable plan if I’m going to get to get things done.

I’m a little sad to report that probably, for the next year at least, a true chronicle of my recent adventures will be summed up as “reading, interspersed with bus rides and going to class.” So, when I pretend that I actually have time to be blogging, I’m going to try to talk about other things.

Last weekend, Paco and I emerged from our ever-dirtier apartment, where our ever-naughtier kitten mauls us and seeks his vendetta against my unwitting highlighter, and we went to the Parque Agua Azul, just south of downtown Guadalajara. The park, admittedly geared toward families, featured a cactus garden, an aviary, an amphitheater, a butterfly zone, a glass pyramid greenhouse for orchids, and most important for me, it was outside and featured very little written material that I was expected to process.

In the amphitheater, we came upon some sort of city-run cultural event, an amateur dance-theater sort of production. It was very informal and attended mostly by the preschool set with parents in tow.

These same preschoolers oohed and aahed in the aviary, as enormous parrots and other unidentifiable birds passed over our heads. The butterfly zone didn’t offer much of interest: although the exhibit in the entrance featured many very bright, pretty, and dead butterflies pinned to a display board, the living ones inside the zone all looked like moths to me.

The sunshine soon turned to blinding white clouds, and then it began to drizzle. Paco and I headed into downtown Guadalajara and ate at a funny little diner with impossibly grandfatherly waiters. We bought some new fabric to get curtains made for our front window, and then we returned home to sleep and study.

If you’d like to see more pictures of this and other adventures, please click the green bird on the side of the post to visit my Picasa site.

Well, my photocopies (and SEVERAL books) await me.

The Existential Student

Well, now that I’m officially a grad student, I feel saddled with some universal, but weighty problems that probably afflict most people foolish enough to enter 17th grade and beyond:

“I have so much reading.”

“What will I write my thesis about?”

“What do you mean, we have to read all this by tomorrow?”

“I have so much reading.”

“Why am I doing this?”

“I am a waste of space engaging in self-indulgent, superfluous mind games.”

Except that we’ve learned in the past week that space, like time, is a dimension, not a void to be occupied. To be more academically correct, I should say that I’m wasting the place I occupy, or I’m not making good use of my spaciality.

The fourteen students in Boot Camp have been reduced to ten, four men and six women. I’m the youngest, the only foreigner, and the only student who didn’t attend college in Guadalajara. I’m also woefully unsure of what I’m going to write my master’s thesis on. My main challenges so far have been sitting still for many hours during our long and numerous classes, and not getting offended by professors’ oblique comments that, at least to me, seem to betray an utter skepticism of my Spanish linguistic skills. During an admittedly theoretical, abstract conversation in class, one professor turned to me and said, “You’ve got a look on your face, Rachel. Are you able to follow the discussion?”

Internally, I writhed. Externally, I smiled and said that I was doing fine, which was true–comprehension is not my biggest problem. Being able to eloquently express my own ideas is significantly more challenging. But I was perplexed, and my pride slighted, by the implication that I wasn’t understanding what was going on. I’m hoping that the professor is only overly solicitous and not actually disdainful of me.

We have six classes, and a total of 19.5 hours of classroom time each week, plus a required guest speaker presentation to attend twice a month. The hours are like high school, the reading load is, well, like grad school. The classes are: Theory of History, Theory of the Region, Literature of Jalisco, Art in Society, Regional Geography, and Sources and Methods.

Though this sounds pretty unappealing, the mood so far has been generally jovial, most of the professors approachable if rather sure of themselves, and my classmates are helpful and friendly.

Although I’d like to reflect and analyze more, I actually do have reading to do. Although, I’m starting to see that I will perpetually “have reading to do” for…the next 2+ years, at least. It’s not a bad state to be in, but it does cut blog entries short.

Back in Jalisco, and going back to school!

The Existential Migrant is back from vacation! I returned to Guadalajara last week after a shockingly easy trip: a direct flight from Oakland, California gets me to Guadalajara in 3.5 hours. I couldn’t believe I could be riding through suburban Bay Area streets and passing by dusty, industrial neighborhoods in Guadalajara, all in the same day, and that none of the contrast surprised me. It seems that the transition between the United States and Mexico is getting easier–or more normal. I know that whatever language I’m switching into will feel funny at first, but that it will get better. I know how it feels to drive my dad’s sedan and shop at Trader Joe’s, and I know how it feels to get on the Guadalajara city bus and zone out on a hard plastic seat. Both modes of transportation seem standard to me.

But leaving Paco to go to California, and leaving my family to go to Guadalajara, both feel a little wrong. When I go “home,” I’m also leaving “home.” Feeling comfortable and loved in two places is a blessing, but it also divides me. I feel more or less at ease when I’m in one place or the other, but the movement between them always hurts. Especially difficult is accepting reduced communication: when Paco is at his parents’ house, I can’t call him or email him. He has to go into town to use an internet café to write to me. And of course, I couldn’t really check in with the cat while he stayed at the kennel.

While I was in California, I adamantly refused to eat anything Mexican: particularly, no tortillas and no black beans. On my first night back, my parents took me to eat Indian food–I reached nirvana with the taste of pakora in my mouth. I ate everything that was hard to find in Mexico–goat cheese, blueberry muffins, hummus–and cooked for hours in my parents’ well-equipped kitchen.

I relished brushing my teeth with tap water. I pondered the sound of my voice in English–was it different? The family’s artificial Christmas tree, covered in funny ornaments we’ve had forever, made me smile every morning when I rose, at least an hour before everyone else (still on Central Time). I read the San José Mercury News for nostalgia’s sake, since it’s a dying local paper. I watched two entire seasons of Mad Men. After a week or two, speaking Spanish seemed so foreign, so remote, and I wondered if I’d forgot it entirely.

I thought a lot about Paco, and what it would be like if he were with me in California. He would have so much to learn–dozens of Christmas carols, infinite cultural references, and of course, the English language. Worse, with my family’s tendency toward word humor and the disproportionate number of English teachers in our gene pool, we all speak a rather unusual form of English: changing accents at whim, interjecting archaic vocabulary that came up in a Scrabble match, with many inside word jokes. All this, uttered at the fastest possible comprehensible speed. I imagine any English language learner feeling pretty overwhelmed.

And in fact, I have an idea about how it feels to be thrown to the linguistic wolves in your adopted tongue. I remember the first time I visited Paco’s family in the summer of 2007. I could not understand a single word his father said. Feeling like the kid missing all the dirty jokes, I carefully listened to everyone’s funny stories only to find the punchline a slur of meaningless syllables. But it did get better with time. Lots of jokes still go over my head, but I laugh extra loud when I do get them. I can understand Paco’s father much better. Also helpful was becoming more familiar with the cultural context: it’s easier to fill in the gaps from what I didn’t understand when I can make an educated guess based on the norms of everyday life.

Truth to be told, I do still feel a little rusty in Spanish, but I know that I’ll be back in the swing of things soon. I found out this afternoon that I’ll be starting classes next Monday for my master’s program: I made it past boot camp! So there will be more tales of classroom woes, and the student visa saga will continue, but I’m so happy to be a bona-fide student again.

I hope everyone enjoyed the end of 2009, and I extend a Feliz Año (Happy New Year) to all my readers!

Undocumented College Students and the American Dream

A few days ago, this article appeared in the New York Times. Rigoberto Padilla, a Chicago area college student and undocumented immigrant, generated publicity after being arrested for DUI and driving without a license–a charge that led to an deportation order. He came to the United States as a 6-year-old. It’s not a unique case: a few years ago, a classmate passed around a petition in my Spanish class to prevent deportation for an undocumented college student, arrested at the bus station when he couldn’t prove his citizenship.

Many people, even those who favor strict immigration policies, find these deportation orders senseless. The kids didn’t choose to come to the United States without papers–their parents did. They were raised in U.S. culture and speak English with an American accent. Deportation seems illogical, even cruel. According to the article, “Roy Beck, the executive director of NumbersUSA, a group that has staunchly opposed a legal path for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, said in an interview that he could support legal status for some young immigrant students.”

I think this tells us a lot about how we define “being American,” and also about how undocumented/illegal migration is philosophically ambiguous. “If you spend your formative years in the United States, you have a right to stay” seems to be the premise that makes us balk at deporting these students. “If you’re a child, it’s not your fault to have migrated illegally” is the other assumption.

But are we ready to place blame on those who chose to immigrate without papers? Indeed, crossing the border without papers is breaking a law. But most illegal activities correspond with some ethical wrongdoing. People who murder or steal are condemned not so much for doing something illegal, as for doing something that we consider morally wrong. The laws are in place to enforce that ethical belief. For many of us, crossing the border just doesn’t evoke the same moral reprehension.

Undocumented college students are, in a way, the success stories of undocumented immigration: they made it past obstacles of poverty, language difference, legal status, etc. into the respectability of higher education. With their degrees, we imagine them becoming professionals, fluent in both their native and adopted cultural norms. It’s easy to sympathize with them because they fit so neatly into the grand narrative of the American Dream: economic ascent as validation of national belonging. “Making it” makes you American.

But for the undocumented students who didn’t make it through high school, or crossed the border as preteens to start work, who didn’t learn English, or who decided to come here as adults–the American Dream isn’t so neatly reaffirmed. For those who don’t thrive in the ways that mainstream America values–assimilating and advancing–no crowd rallies to stop deportations.  Are they criminals, or are they simply doing their jobs? Do we deport them because they call into question the legitimacy of our beloved American Dream?

I strongly support the right of these undocumented students to seek an education. I only hope that we are not constructing a tiny elite of “good illegal immigrants” only to dismiss, denigrate and deport those who do not fit our ideals of a “true” American.