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.

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.

Us versus the Instituto Nacional de Migración, or How do you say “Bah Humbug” in Spanish?

I am in California now. I left Guadalajara early yesterday morning, almost exactly six months after I arrived. I’ll be heading back in a few weeks, but I think I’m still qualified to blog in the meantime. Part of being a migrant is the occasional trip to the home country, seeing what feels the same and what feels different.

I almost didn’t get to return to the United States. Since my last blog, my visa adventures went from frustrating to heartbreaking. On Monday, I went to the office again, this time with Paco, to turn in the last set of paperwork and payments for the student visa, and with my application for permission to leave the country while everything was being processed. Paco and I waited to speak with a licenciado (person with a college degree) so that I could make sure all my complications would be resolved. We watched as an older American man, cursing in English about the bureaucracy, waited with his lawyer. The lawyer apparently knew one of the licenciados, and he made this clear by a sort of “don’t you know who I am?” routine. The trick worked: they were seen immediately. I seethed and shot these rank pullers dirty looks. I really wanted to say a little too loudly, “I guess I should hire a lawyer if I don’t want to wait!”

When it came to be my turn (an hour later), Paco and I went into the office and sat down at the licenciado’s desk. As I explained my situation, the licenciado informed me, “you can’t leave the country.” My voice started to waver as I inarticulately tried to ask another question. Then the licenciado eventually added, “you can only leave if you withdraw the entire visa application process.” So either I was not going to be able to go to the States and see my family, or I was going to lose all of the money, trips, frustration and time I’d dedicated to getting the student visa. Faced with this decision, I started to cry–not just a little. As I was sobbing and blubbering, Paco tried to jump in and rescue me. The licenciado was clearly unmoved. Another woman in the office offered her advice.

“The problem is that you foreigners think you can just come in here and apply for a visa without knowing anything. Then you think you can leave the country whenever you want without asking us. You have to inform yourself. I empathize with your situation,” she told me sternly. I didn’t believe her professed empathy.

Through my tears, I responded, “look, I’m not making these mistakes because of cultural arrogance. It’s because of ignorance. There’s no information on the website, and nobody told me about these restrictions when I started the process.”

“The law says that ignorance does not excuse you from punishment when you break the law,” she said, and I kept crying. Later, I wished that I had said, “Ok, but if you actually want people to follow your laws, you might want to tell us what they are.” I’m sure this wouldn’t have helped at all, so I guess it’s better than I was unable to form a coherent and snarky rejoinder.

“Some people hire lawyers to help them,” she began. I interrupted, “If I were rich, I’d hire a lawyer too!”, and Paco sent me a telepathic message to shut up before we got kicked out of the office.

I didn’t know what to do, but unable to face not seeing my family, and realizing that changing my flight would be more expensive that paying the fees again (though not by much), I agreed to cancel the process. This meant more paperwork to fill out, and there were more obstacles in the way to authorize my departure. When another unfriendly bureaucrat started telling us that it would be impossible to give me the document I needed to leave the country, I started crying again, this time in front of everyone in the waiting room. It was horribly embarrassing, and I would have been sunk if I hadn’t had Paco there as my advocate. He talked when I could only whimper, and he told everyone “thank you” when I was too angry to express gratitude.

It would have saved me time, money, and emotional well-being if I had never set foot in the office at all. I could have stayed on my tourist visa and started the process in January if I were accepted into the master’s program. I thought a lot about what the woman had said to me: was it arrogance that made me think I could do this without asking? She said that I should have consulted with one of the licenciados before even beginning the process. But I realized that when I first visited, I didn’t even know that there were such people or that you could ask for help. There are no pamphlets, no guidelines, and every person tells you something different, and often the next person you talk informs you that the previous one was wrong, but now it’s your problem.

It wasn’t a total failure, because I did leave the country. When I return, I’ll be issued the same tourist visa after filling a form out on the plane, and then I’ll try again for the student visa. I dread dragging myself back to that office, especially since I made such a scene. I cry easily, but not often in public. Now I’ll have to face all the bureaucrats again, watch the people with lawyers get the VIP treatment, and make the same photocopies and the same payments all over again.

Paco and I were talking about the difference between Mexican and U.S. bureaucracy. I likened it to the difference between torture and a quick death. When Paco applied for a visa, it was a brief, horrific and unfair “no, and don’t ask again.” It was expensive, and it was over in two hours. On the other hand, I made so many visits, talked to so many people, dealt with errors, organized papers, and jumped through multiple hoops only to also get a “no,” but unlike Paco, I can try again (Paco won’t be issued a visa until he has a “strong tie” to Mexico, which we think means “earns a big salary in Mexico”). I think both systems are stacked against people without a lot of money and without legal help.

When I think about couples that are from the same town, or even the same country, I feel like everything must be so easy for them: they have the same native language! They don’t need to visas or passports to meet each others’ families! The sting of these barriers flares up when we go against bureaucracy without success. Back in California, I sit in my childhood home, and I feel Paco’s absence acutely. He’s not here only because of an unfair system that doesn’t see us or our situation. Even though our families have given us our blessing to love someone from a different country, our governments have not.

I know that there were officials who did care and showed concern when they saw me crying: not everyone sees me as just another cow among endless cattle to be processed (turned into hamburgers?). I also know that Paco will someday be eligible for other, non-tourist visas that will likely be more successful. Getting what you need out of a bureaucracy requires persistence and patience (and money), and giving up is the only way to really fail.

I talked about California. “I really do want to see that bridge,” he said. “What bridge?” “You know, that famous one.” “El puente portón dorado?” I offered, “the Golden Gate Bridge?” “But the bridge isn’t golden, it’s red,” he protested. I’d never really thought about that. “I guess it’s kind of an orange-red,” I suggested. “You can call yellow things golden, but not red,” Paco told me. As a little girl, I’d thought the same thing about goldfish. “I’d like a picture of us on that bridge,” he said.

I know we’ll take that picture one day, but I wish it were sooner.

Conquistadores, Coffee and Student Visas

I find it comforting, strangely, to be bogged down with papers and reading in December–it feels normal to me. The cycle of newness, stress, projects, sudden ends–the semester way of life. Of course, it all happened so quickly in this pre-Master’s boot camp.

It’s not over yet, but I’m in the final stretch. I’ve been learning about things I wouldn’t seek out on my own, but the information will help me be a better researcher, I hope. The theory and philosophy behind “social science” isn’t riveting, but it also is something I’d never really pondered until now. I wrote an essay last week about a Spanish conquistador who wreaked havoc on Western Mexico in the 1530s, based on a colonial-era account of his adventures. Although it was hard to understand (imagine reading 16th century English…in Spanish!), it reminded me of why I love history so much: the detective aspect, and the idiosyncrasies that make you feel connected to people who died centuries ago. In the colonial text I mentioned–a letter to the King of Spain–the final sentence read, “Everything I say here is true, and to prove so, I sign my name here.” And the below, the editor comments “[There is no signature].” So we actually don’t know who wrote the letter! How mysterious, strange and wonderful! Of course, besides the geeky pleasure of history, there’s also the uncovering of horrors. The conquistador in question tended to torture and kill, both indigenous people and his fellow Spaniards.

I still have three more essays to write: a book review, to be crafted in perfect, succinct prose to prove that I listened in Advanced Writing; an interpretation of a document–I picked a speech given by an indigenous student at a ceremony a few years ago; and a comparison of various theories and approaches to social science (I plan to write this one hyped up on coffee, pretending that I care).

Besides academic endeavors and sitting around not accomplishing things, I’ve been in the process of getting a student visa. So far, I’ve been to the National Institute of Migration (the government office where these things happen) a total of four times. The first time, I got the information about what paperwork I needed to file–it wasn’t online. The second time, I turned in the paperwork. The third time, I returned to pick up the visa, but I was given a letter saying that the bank statements I’d provided weren’t in my name. Except they were. So I waited for two hours to speak with an official, who agreed with me that the statements were indeed in my name, and told me to come back the following day, Friday, to pick up my visa. I went on Monday instead to give them a little more time, but I was informed that the document still wasn’t ready. Since it’s about a 45 minute bus ride to reach the office, I was pretty unhappy about this, especially since the delay was in no way caused by an error of mine. I hope that the fifth visit will finally yield a visa. It seems particularly unfair that Paco and I, as a couple, have to wrangle with two different countries and their bureaucracies! But as Paco reminds me, they ARE going to give me the visa. That’s the difference.

The Migration office is an interesting place, though. I don’t see foreigners very often in my day-to-day wanderings, but there are plenty to be found at the Migration office. I saw a group of blond Mormons (telltale short sleeve dress shirts), and American businessmen. A young, pregnant woman, apparently East Asian, listened to her Mexican lawyer ramble. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I noticed his gold chain, white socks, brown loafers, pale blue jeans, and his mouth, chewing gum as if the pace of his jaw could expedite the bureaucracy.

One benefit of making the trek to downtown Guadalajara is the Café Estancia. It has Wifi and a place to plug in my laptop, so I can write in my favorite work environment: caffeine fueled, consuming something with sugar, not tempted by the distractions of home, the cat, or other people. It’s not quite the same as my favorite American coffee shops–no weird music or muffins (instead, they serve “brawnies”–brownies!).  There’s a poster on the wall that says “Una mujer es como una buena taza de café: la primera vez que se toma, no deja dormir.”  I think I preferred the bizarre local art that adorned my usual haunts in the States. Still, it helps me revive the glory days of college, the mornings and afternoons spent in coffee shops writing my senior essay.

Unfortunately for me, I can’t continue this blog post, since I actually have to write those essays I mentioned. Luckily for you, your reading ends here!

Acción de Gracias

This is my second Thanksgiving in Mexico. Last year, desperately missing Paco, I trekked to the Newark Airport in the wee, small hours of the morning, and while the whole wide world was fast asleep, I sat awake and thought about how excited I was. It was one of those trips you only make when you’re in love–rationally excessive, emotionally vital.

Last year, I made a small-scale Thanksgiving dinner for Paco, his brother and his sister-in-law. I roasted a chicken instead of a turkey. Actually, we prepared the chicken, stuffed rosemary between the skin and the meat (the smell made me think of the rosemary bushes back home in California), and took the chicken to the neighbor’s house, where there was an oven. A bag of dried cranberries turned into cranberry sauce through the magic of reconstitution and warm water. I attempted mashed potatoes for the first time, with somewhat gluey results. I sauteed green beans. We drank cheap wine, and there was no pumpkin pie–it’s hard to make without pumpkins (or their canned incarnations) around. Paco was wearing the new scarf my mom had knit for him, and his sister-in-law snapped pictures of me trying to carve a chicken. It was a quiet meal, the food palatable, but not great, and cranberries were the star of the evening (they aren’t well-known or widely available in Mexico).

It wasn’t right. For my Mexican family, it was an interesting glimpse into American traditions, executed in the haphazard form you’d expect from a cook in her early 20s, lacking in the ways you’d expect without the standard cornucopia of T-day ingredients. But they don’t know what it means, or how it feels, because it isn’t their holiday. In the United States, Thanksgiving is a national consensus: we all stop everything for it. It’s about panic in the kitchen, actually using the sugar bowl that ordinarily collects dust in the cupboard, and the annual re-remembering that I don’t really like roasted turkey.

This year, there won’t even be a surrogate chicken to stand in for the other fowl I don’t even like. I have class this afternoon because it’s a regular Thursday here. But it feels like Thanksgiving to me, because I’ve foolishly read all the newspaper articles online about the horrible relative holiday horror stories, the recipe collections, the sales of heritage turkeys, the travel crunch. It’s all irrelevant.

In my mind, I wake up to the winter California sunshine I love so much, and I walk across the cold floors and say “Happy Thanksgiving” to my parents like it means “good morning,” just because it’s funny when we’re semiconscious and the feast is still hours away. I would make a pumpkin pie with the great recipe I found a few years ago, and I would wonder which color sweater to pick to best evoke the fall. There would be so many stories to tell, the best ones always being Dad’s, which he sneakily saves up for gatherings with the largest and most eager audiences. We would try to remember who is vegetarian, who is lactose intolerant, who doesn’t like chocolate, who wants decaf. Failing, we explain that the vegan is now vegetarian, the dairyphobe brought her Lactaid pills, and everyone eats what they can, which is more than enough.

I knew this would happen when I chose to leave the United States–that certain universal understandings, like to set aside this unremarkable Thursday too close to Christmas as a national pause and feast, would not be universal in another country. No holiday is universal. But that doesn’t make it hurt less, that taste of pumpkin pie is a distant memory and my family and friends are walking those cold floors in that winter sunshine, ready to take their places at the table when late afternoon comes.

Thanksgiving, so hard to say in Spanish, translates to “Acción de gracias,” the action of thanks. Even without the food and the company, I am grateful. I am thankful to know that there will be room at the table when I come back for Thanksgiving, because there is always room, even if we sit so close together we could share napkins across our laps.

The shape of a Saturday

Paco had to go to campus today to work on a programming project with his classmates, leaving me with the day to do other things. After I realized that I hadn’t picked up a copy of an article I needed for class, I decided to get the reading photocopied. The research institute is located in downtown Zapopan, a suburb of Guadalajara. I hopped on the bus, irritated to see a kid sitting with his legs up on the seat next to him while others were standing up. Bad manners. At the next stop, a young man with a guitar got on and began to strum–nothing unusual around here. As he strummed, he talked about this song that he had composed, and he philosophized about why we needed to smile, and appreciate other people, and other things I wasn’t really paying attention to. Once he finished talking, he played a few more chords and opened his mouth to sing.

I don’t have enough musical knowledge to say exactly how off-key he was, but this young troubadour’s voice was so dissonant with the perfectly reasonable chords he was playing, that it was almost unlistenable. Obviously, I didn’t know what the tune of his original song was SUPPOSED to be, but I’m sure that whatever he was singing was not what he imagined in his head. It took all my energy not to crack up–after all that build up and philosophy, he was off tune! I looked around to see if anyone else had a pained look or sympathetic upward head movement to psychically influence his pitch. I seemed to be the only one on the verge of hilarity.

When he finished the first song, he thankfully returned to speaking to explain his next number. “We’re going to do a survey,” he said, “what is the thing that is least important to you? Well, if you can think of it and name it, then it is important to you, isn’t it? So this is a song about when we try to forget things.” He launched into another cringe-eliciting vocal display, and I got off the bus before I could hear his pitch for the few coins in our pocket. I imagined that this might be a good scene in the novel I hope to write someday.

After I got my copies made, I decided to get a much-needed cup of coffee. There were a group of high school students eating and making noise in the café, in that way that high school students do, maybe trying to get the most satisfaction out of unsupervised moments, or maybe because freedom is still so new and thrilling that it has to be enjoyed at high volume. The waiter took my order for an Americano (you can’t get brewed coffee in Mexican coffee shops, so an Americano is the next best option).

When he returned with the coffee, he asked me, “you’re not from here, are you?” I affirmed that I was not, and I heard myself say very defensively, “why?” “No reason,” he assured me. “Where you from?” he asked. “California,” I answered. “So you’re a tourist,” he said. “No,” I said, not smiling. “You live here?” he continued. I nodded, surprised at how unfriendly I was being. Having awkwardly but effectively ended the conversation, he retreated to the safety of the bar, and I focused on my unusually bitter Americano (symbolic?) and the book I was reading.

I felt a little bad as I scowled into my book, still wearing my sunglasses. Nothing the waiter had said or asked was all that out of the ordinary, and certainly not offensive. It’s not strange to ask people with accents where they are from. I wished that I’d been a little more friendly. But it also reminded me why it’s hard not to be in my country, where I wouldn’t be of any particular interest at any given coffee shop, where I don’t have to walk around waiting to be asked to explain myself. In the places I’ve lived in the United States, there is so much diversity that you’d have to be an alien to seem really different. There is much more diversity in Mexico than people realize, but it’s not a place where you hear many foreign accents. The only other accent I’ve heard here, besides my own, belongs to the man who sells Chinese food in the market, which he announces in Spanish with a Chinese accent. I grew up EXPECTING to hear accents from my friends’ parents, from nurses and doctors, from cashiers and hair stylists. The first time I heard an American accent coming from the speaker at a fast food drive through, I was 18, and I was shocked.

Anyway, I told the cashier to keep the change when I paid, and I went home.

Oh, so you moved to Mexico…

When I decided that, despite being unblessed by the gods of grant money, I was moving to Mexico after I graduated from college, people weren’t exactly surprised. After all, this spring my fellow seniors dubbed me the person “most likely to visit Mexico an inordinate number of times.” I didn’t realize that many people knew where I was spending all of my breaks, but evidently word got around.

Deciding to move to another country was actually pretty easy, in a way–I wanted to move to be with to my fiancé, Paco, who is Mexican, and I also wanted to spend more time living in Mexico before applying to grad school. But as the swine flu updates started to scare me and friends solidified their new plans, the fact that I was setting off into the great unknown became a little more unsettling.

I flew to Guadalajara in June, traveling on a cheap one-way ticket on a little plane–that’s the only effect of swine flu I’ve experienced so far. Since then, I’ve been doing what some might call a “gap year,” but it’s hardly a backpacking adventure. Unlike past trips to Mexico that hinged upon a research project or the short visits to see Paco during school breaks, I came with no agenda. I’m not a tourist, and not even a traveler–I moved here. I’m a migrant. Thus, the blog’s title.

So what does it mean to be an American (or, as they say here, norteamericana) here in Mexico? A lot of folks from the United States that travel in Latin America have embraced the epithet “gringo” (or “gringa,” for women) as a way of acknowledging their status as an outsider. Whether the term “gringo” is a slur or not depends on the context, and also on the country. I hear people use the term frequently, but it’s only been applied to me a few times. Personally, I don’t like it, probably because I go to great (and likely futile) lengths not to seem foreign, and my goal is to be mistaken for a Mexican.

What is interesting to me is that Americans find this goal completely laughable: I am the sort of white person who is so pale that I can’t ever get a tan, and I have blue eyes. In the United States, those traits are completely at odds with our image of a Mexican. But in fact, there are Mexicans with mostly European ancestry who do look more like me. They certainly aren’t in the majority, but the point is that here in Mexico, whiteness is not incompatible with being Mexican. That leaves my accent as my main obstacle to blending in.

The constant exercise of wondering whether I’ve “passed,” planning what words I will say in advance so that I won’t mess up the grammar, burning with shame when people start supplementing their speech with hand gestures–these games of assimilation are at times entertaining, more often humbling, occasionally terrifying. It takes me days to work up the courage to make a phone call in Spanish. I suppose I could embrace my foreignness and not worry about being different. After all, I am not Mexican. And in the U.S. context, I’m no fan of the “melting pot” model which asks all immigrants to abandon their home cultures in favor of streamlining into the white American culture. Why do I ask myself to assimilate?

I think it has something to do with being from the United States, in fact. I feel that being boldly and proudly American would be too pushy, or too brash. Knowing that I can enter Mexico by buying a plane ticket and filling out a short form on the plane, while Mexicans must cross deserts or navigate the visa bureaucracy to enter my country, I cannot deny the power dynamic that exists between these neighboring nations. Unfortunately, I also cannot help being part of it: here, I have access to jobs and privileges that ordinary Mexicans don’t have, in their own country. Speaking English and having light skin automatically vault me to the upper echelons of Mexican society. But the truth is that Paco and I live a pretty humble middle class existence. We ride the city bus, hunt for bargains, and keep things simple. I’m unemployed, and Paco’s in graduate school, so there really isn’t much money to spend.

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