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).

Thinking green in Mexico

Almost no one here uses dryers–it’s so warm most of the year that drying clothes on the line is a much more affordable option. I love seeing how clothes dry. My first summer in Mexico, when I was staying in a rural community, I washed my clothes by hand, hung them out on the line, and eagerly checked them every 20 minutes to monitor their progress as solar energy did its job. It seemed so magical. Clothesline drying  also means that you have to keep tabs on the weather and plan your time well so that the clothes will have enough time in the sun to dry, forcing you to adapt to nature’s whims and be aware of the natural world around you.

I was shocked to read in the New York Times a few weeks ago that in the United States, some communities actually ban clotheslines since they are, apparently, an eyesore. I think clothes drying on the line can look beautiful, and even when they don’t, I can’t see them being particularly visually offensive. In other coverage on the topic, readers commented that you save a significant amount of electricity by line drying, and that clotheslines are standard practice around the world, from Italy to India.

Readers also noted that the absence of dryers in poor countries has much more to do with not being able to afford a dryer than consciously giving it up to be more environmentally friendly. The only dryer I’ve ever seen in Mexico belonged to the wealthy family who sold us the fancy used washer.

Using public transportation, too, is good for reducing carbon emissions, but most folks who ride the bus do so because they cannot afford a car. Paco and I fall in this category. As much as I love the bus, a car is extremely helpful when buying groceries or traveling across town, and we will probably buy a car as soon as we can afford it. Like others with limited income, we’re being environmentally friendly now out of necessity.

In Mexico, sodas are cheapest when purchased in a glass bottle, which must be returned to the vendor. Beer is also sold in recyclable bottles. If you don’t bring an empty bottle when you purchase a full one, you have to pay a deposit. In these cases, there is a financial incentive to recycle because plastic bottles or non-returnable glass bottles are more expensive. But the corporations selling these beverages have realized the advertising possibilities of environmentalism. There’s a sign in our neighborhood, provided by the soda company, that reads, “Take care of your children’s future. Buy soda in reusable bottles.” Alternatively, you could protect your children’s future by not buying soda for them. Health concerns aside, this advertisement assumes that caring for the earth could be a selling point. Frankly, I have seen little evidence that the environment is very high priority among middle and lower class Mexicans. There are many other, more immediate threats to stability and health that come first.

I grew up with recycling trucks collecting our bottles, cans, and newspapers every week. We collected our trash in a city-provided receptacle that was emptied every Thursday by a mechanical claw that dumped the garbage into the truck bed. But here, trucks come by several days a week, announcing their presence with a bell ringer walking down the sidewalk ahead. Most people don’t actually have trashcans, so when they hear the bell, they emerge sleepily (ok, maybe that’s just me) out onto the street with stuffed plastic grocery bags of smelly garbage. There is no recycling, and the garbage collectors won’t take yard waste unless you bribe them. The truck doesn’t have a mechanical claw. It isn’t easy to process leaves, glass, or paper in a responsible way if you don’t have money or a car.

What is cheap is often very disposable. Styrofoam is everywhere, and food vendors often serve food on melamine plates that are covered with a plastic bag–makes washing easier, I guess. Environmentalism hasn’t really become part of the cultural landscape. Even the Mexican Environmental Green Party, whose logo is a toucan, was known mostly for their calls to instate the death penalty (unclear if the toucan was in favor of this platform).

For someone like me, educated in the hyper-green 1990s Bay Area and the 2000s liberal college environments, tossing a plastic bottle into a garbage can makes me cringe, and I compulsively shut off lights. We sewed reusable lunch bags in elementary school to promote trash-free lunchs, and in college, we got nonstop emails about recycling and turning off the fridge over break. This education created a set of guilt triggers within me that compel me to engage in certain rituals of environmentalism. As I write, this guilt is asking me to go turn off the light in the living room, where no one is currently sitting.

But I wonder how much these rituals of care are merely obsessive, symbolic acts that arise more from habit and training than actual awareness of how my actions care for the earth. In the age of “Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!” (a mantra of the California schoolchild, along with “Drop, cover, and hold!”), I also grew up with Zip-Loc bags–pieces of plastic to be used once and thrown away. I realized during my second summer in Mexico that no one here uses them. Why? They simply are not affordable for most Mexicans, nor for me. I’d sooner spend my 30-40 pesos on a few liters of milk, or a few kilos of tortillas, than on Zip-Locs.

I also wouldn’t buy a dryer, since it’s two months’ rent. The more I delve into the habits and sensibilities of thriftiness, I see how limited income makes people get the most out of their resources–conveniently, to the benefit of the environment. Unless, of course, we’re talking about the affordable styrofoam, or the cheaper, if more toxic, cleaning product.

And the cleverness people manifest in attempting to save money does not fail to surprise me. The previous tenant of our apartment worked for the CFE, or Federal Electricity Commission. All CFE employees are exempt from paying electricity bills, so there’s no incentive at all to save energy. Making the most of this perk, the previous tenant re-rigged the boiler to use electricity, rather than gas, to heat the water. We’re in the process of repairing the 20-year-old boiler to function with gas once again.

Right now, the clothes hanging on the line have been outside for almost two days, since they are under the roof of the patio and the weaker fall sunlight isn’t doing the trick. I could see how one could get lured into buying a dryer, if the money was there. Convenience makes it hard for the wealthy to be motivated to be environmentally friendly, and money makes it hard for the poor to make expensive yet “green” product or lifestyle choices. I’m still trying to understand what factors, beyond economics and guilt, play into our environmental habits. Is Mexico greener than the U.S. because it is poorer? Or does U.S. wealth facilitate greenness? And where do I fit into that picture, raised on Trader Joe’s and Zip-Loc?