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!).