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).

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.