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.

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.

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.

Learning to write good (in Spanish!) with my bootcamp “frendos”

Our recent addition to the Boot Camp schedule is Advanced Writing, an intensive workshop-style class. The teachers want us to write concisely, clearly, and concretely, in Spanish, of course. Spanish grammar, though much more reliable and more often logical than English grammar, so easily becomes a wordy, convoluted mess when trying to explain something complex. This grammar, paired with the over-reliance on jargon and pretentious stock phrases that taints academic texts in all languages, makes bad writing in Spanish just as incomprehensible as bad writing in English.

Of course, I’m at a serious disadvantage in any writing situation here because my native language is English, not Spanish. My vocabulary is smaller, my grammatical instincts less certain. Yesterday, the teachers told us to use verbs related to carpentry, listed on the board, in a short paragraph. I didn’t know the meaning of half of the verbs on the chart! We never had a “carpentry vocab unit” when I took Spanish in college–and as long as topic doesn’t come up often, it’s easy to never learn whole sets of words that are irrelevant to my daily life. As I attempted the exercise, I realized that all the words I did know, I had learned from Paco as we fixed up our apartment in August–sanding shelves, using the screwdriver, painting the walls. You do something, you learn the words for the tools you use. “Can you hand me that thing? You know, the stick thing with the rolly-thing on the end?” doesn’t get the point across nearly so well as asking for the paint roller (rodillo, for those of you keeping score).

On the other hand, I have an enormous advantage when trying to write in Spanish–I don’t have all those bad habits picked up over years of schooling in a language. The Spanish equivalents of phrases like “heretofore” or “as such” or “be that as it may,” phrases that slow down a sentence and add little meaning, don’t even occur to me when I’m writing. Their uselessness is precisely why they aren’t on my radar. Every phrase I use in Spanish is deliberate because I produce it consciously.

Grammatical topics are especially bizarre to encounter in this setting. Many of my classmates are extremely confused by passive voice, for example, and they can’t identify it or produce it accurately. But for me, it’s very easy–it was only a few years ago that I was in Spanish class explicitly being  taught how to form passive voice (bonus point if you caught the passive voice in this sentence!). Hearing the professors enjoin us not to use the passive voice, so soon after having learned it, is amusing. I got the grammatical foundations in Spanish before ever approximating anything like fluid speech. No Spanish grammar is innate to me: it’s all patterns, rules, and memorization that are sort of natural, but only enough to help me talk faster.

The entire course of a lifetime of learning how to write in English, starting simple (elementary school), learning complexity and structure (junior high and high school), then unlearning confusing flourishes and rigidity (college)–it’s all happening so fast in Spanish! The Spanish transitional phrases I so dutifully looked up and proudly added to my essays just a year ago, like “consequently” and “nevertheless” and “in conclusion,” are turning out to be only crutches, clichés and redundancies that I’m supposed to avoid. My classmates insert these phrases out  a habit they now have to break. I inserted them with pride!

But more than my classmates, I can question the necessity of phrases and constructions in Spanish because they aren’t natural to me. Familiar, perhaps, but nothing is sacred in a language that only occasionally appears in my dreams.  Of course, that lack of an “ear” leads me astray, too, when I write or edit. Though much of this class’s content reminds me of lessons in English grammar long since burned into my brain (thanks, Mom!), I incorrectly identified a “misplaced modifier” in last night’s class–turns out that in Spanish, you CAN put modifiers next to things they don’t modify. I felt stupid afterward for having prefaced my wrong comment with “well, in English it’s like this, so I wondered…” Or maybe I just don’t like being wrong (pretty sure I don’t like being wrong, actually).

My classmates tell me that their English class is hard, that English is hard, that I’m lucky not to have to take English. I have a hard time feeling sorry for them because they get to speak their native language all day long, unlike me! I know exactly what their struggle is, but I also know that if they’d had opportunities like I did for immersion, they’d be doing better and like it more. Of course, I also have the ultimate motivation: my fiancé speaks Spanish. Even with all that, it’s still difficult.

I have many hopes for this master’s program (#1: get accepted!). But the challenge of being intellectual, academic, theoretical and comprehensible in another language–that is something I’d like to achieve, and I think the rigor of a master’s program could guide me toward that goal.

Meanwhile, I’m going to write off my deficiencies as entertainment for the rest of the class. Today, the class elected me to read aloud a text in Spanish called “Anglicismos” (English-isms).  It phonetically tried to approximate English using pronunciation suggested by the Spanish spelling: a Spanish speaker’s rendering of the sound of English. Needless to say, it was extremely difficult to sound out English in Spanish, and the attempt about broke my brain. I also could not stop laughing after reading aloud the word “frendo” which no one else found particularly funny. This happened after I thought I’d successfully avoided the teacher’s pointing hand to make me read aloud–I should have gone for the actual Spanish selections while I had the chance. But I’m fine with humor at my own expense. It’s the only kind of humor I generate, so I’ll take what I can get.

“Here come the new chickens”

As I walked into the small research institute where I’m beginning M.A. Boot Camp, someone called out to a professor entering ahead of me, “the new chickens are already here.” She was referring to the new students who, like me, had made it past the preliminary selection rounds and now had to make it through the pre-Master’s course to gain full admission. Fowl-like, we entered a classroom, avoided eye contact, and waited for something to happen. Then our first teacher walked into the door. The subject? English.

I was feeling extraordinarily nervous of how I would explain that I was actually a native English speaker and might not need English classes. I hadn’t said anything yet, so no one knew that I wasn’t Mexican. The teacher asked us to say what our undergrad degrees were in and what our level of English was. The teacher called out my middle name, and I said, “no, it’s Rachel.” “Oh,” she answered, “it says Ranchel here on the paper.” I said that I had a degree in Latin American Studies and I was from California, and my native language was English. “Oh,” said the teacher, “well, I’ll find out if you actually have to take this course.” But first, I had to take a section of the TOEFL, just to prove that I really didn’t need a brush up in English reading comprehension.

I finished the test a good half an hour before my classmates. It was pretty easy, but not that much easier than reading comprehension on the SAT or GRE. Later, the teacher told me that she had indeed gotten permission to excuse me from the class, and that she’d graded my exam. “Well, you did miss two,” she explained, “but I’ll write you a letter saying that you have English proficiency.” I nodded. This means that I am spared from 6 hours of class each week during boot camp, which is definitely a good thing.

But it was such an emotionally confusing series of events. I felt embarrassed to be a native speaker, and then I felt indignant that I had to take a test of English as a Foreign Language administered by someone who isn’t a native speaker herself. I certainly didn’t put up any fuss, but it seemed silly, and since the rest of the classes will be conducted in Spanish–not my native language–and I’ll always be at a disadvantage, it would be nice if people trusted that there was a language I actually do speak fluently and without a foreign accent. But it’s also not necessary to take it personally: I think that it’s more that there isn’t a bureaucratic protocol for dealing with foreign students, so the professors don’t really know what to do with me and my different background. Even knowing that, I still didn’t like feeling singled out and different on the first day of school.

After English class, we had a 3 hour long class on research methods. We spent about two hours talking about everyone’s projects, and then an hour talking about how to cite sources. I can’t sit in class for more than two hours without becoming absolutely desperate to escape, and I was starving, so the discussion on where to put hyphens, what to underline, how to list multiple authors, and other fascinating intricacies of the Bibliography, was pretty much lost on me. Fervently hoping that no one would ask me any questions or otherwise detain me as I left the classroom, I raced to the store, bought a pack of cookies, and introduced Almighty Sugar into my bloodstream as I rode the bus back home.

Before classes started, I had expressed my doubts about the program to Paco. In September, I went to another program’s boot camp for three days, and I hated it so much that I never went back. He said, “you expect things here to be the same as what you’re used to, but they aren’t going to be. If you want to learn about education in Mexico, doing a Master’s program here is a good way to learn.” I think this makes a great deal of sense. But if I miss the way things worked in college, is that because I can’t adjust to a different country’s way of doing things? Is it a sign of ra-ra pro-Americanism? If I can’t sit through five straight hours of class, is it because I’m too impatient, or because two hour lectures were the longest classes given in college?

Seeing my limitations laid bare, struggling to coax initiative or motivation out of myself, and grappling with uncertainty about what I want to be doing–according to Paco, “this is just what happens after college.”  I always thought that I wasn’t going to be one of those lost souls with a B.A.! Never say never.

I told Paco that the most fun part of the day had been the children’s puppet show I saw in the city’s main plaza while killing time before classes started. I talked about the laughing schoolkids, the colorful puppets, the funny skits. “Maybe you should watch puppet shows instead of getting a Master’s,” he teased me. “Or maybe I should sign up for elementary school instead of grad school,” I added.

If you understand Spanish, check out this little documentary on the puppet theater group I saw: