Domestic Decadence and a Much-Needed Helping Hand

I’ve been gone so long that I don’t know where to begin! I know, the key to successful blogging is updating regularly. However, if you’re one of my friends, I probably haven’t spoken to you since March, either. I haven’t showered since March (ok, that’s not true). But I have been earth-shatteringly busy. The culprit is grad school. So here it is, mid-May, and I don’t even have time to be blogging right now. But here I am.

In the past two months, my parents came to Guadalajara and met Paco and Canelo. We had a good time, although my translating and tour guide skills were put to the test. I would have written a whole blog post about this, with some thoughts about showing my parents the unfamiliar land I have decided to live in, and about language differences and how we overcame them, but the moment has passed. Let’s just leave it at this: we ate a lot of ice cream, Dad tried mezcal (liquor similar to tequila)  for the first time, Paco tried gin for the first time.

Although class and homework have pretty much dominated my time, I’ve also been on three required field trips. It’s not as fun as it sounds, and in fact, losing entire weekends devoted to “reading the landscape” and sitting in a van only added to my stress. But I have seen a lot more of Jalisco, the state where we live. Maybe when the semester ends, I’ll write about the trips.

Instead, the long-overdue blog post is about cockroaches. First, let me explain the title.

I’ve been reminded recently that in Spanish, “decadencia” means “decline or decay,” what “decadence” technically means in English. But I grew up hearing “decadence” associated with chocolate cake, or a fudge sundae. It’s a restaurant menu word. Anyway, in our case, “decadence” applies to the apartment only in the bad way.

The busier Paco and I got with our studies, the messier the apartment got. Two full time students? Who will take care of the house? After some inner ethical wrestling, I came to the conclusion that we needed to outsource. That is, hire someone to clean our humble abode. My reluctance came from the following association: paying someone to clean the house twice a month=having a maid=feudal lifestyle, oppressing serfs, etc. However, the hygienic state of the apartment was also approximating that of feudal times, back when people really did bathe once a year. So we decided to post an ad online.

I had never hired anyone before, so I tried to compose an ad that would convey that we didn’t have much money, that we really needed help, and that we needed someone responsible. In return, we would also be responsible and grateful. Looking back, we don’t sound like the most attractive employers. But soon after, Doña Patricia called and offered her services.

The morning she was scheduled to arrive, I felt very nervous. How was I supposed to tell someone what to do? Or act like a boss? I’m 22. Paco and I made a sort of half hearted list of tasks for her. When Doña Patricia arrived, I sheepishly handed her the list. She said, “ok, honey.” Then she went into the kitchen and started working her magic.

Two hours later, the apartment and patio were cleaner than they had ever been. Working on her own, Doña Patricia is faster, more efficient, and more thorough than Paco and I are working together. We pay her what she asked for, which is affordable for us. So it’s been significantly less filthy around here.

However, since our apartment is dingy and sort of old, it seems like it can’t really ever be completely clean. Case in point: we realized that the cockroaches that we found dead on the tile floor in the mornings were emerging from the shower drain, which doesn’t have an attached filter. Canelo, Cockroach Hunter, had also realized this, and he kept a nightly vigil on the bathmat waiting for his cockroach “playmates” to come out. We bought a plastic drain filter, but Canelo routinely removes it from the drain.

Paco, a devoted dad to our crazy kitten, said to me, “maybe we should just leave the filter off so Canelo can play with the cockroaches. He’s all alone in the apartment and doesn’t interact with any living creatures beside us.” I was not moved. Yeah, sorry Canelo. Cockroaches do not belong in our apartment. You’ll have to make do with the 20 million flies, which you also catch and eat.

Anyway, other than the mosquito problem, and the sweltering heat, and my homework, everything is great!

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).

Life is a lentil…

Either you take it, or you leave it.

That bit of wisdom was written in Sharpie on a metal utility cover in downtown Guadalajara. I don’t really know what it means, but I like lentils, and I like life, so I guess I thought it would be a good way to start this entry.

Besides leaving my country, family and friends behind when I moved here, I also left school: apparently, once you’ve graduated, college is actually over. This is my first autumn without a back-to-school since I was about 2 feet tall. In the absence of school or work,  I’ve taken up another profession–stay-at-home fiancée. Less well known than the stay-at-home mom, my occupation involves reading the New York Times online, drinking a lot of coffee, and considering the possibility of cleaning some part of the apartment. Canelo likes to help by walking on the keyboard, attacking anything that moves, and engaging me in protracted conversations consisting of meows.

This wasn’t what I had envisioned doing before I moved here. I expected to dive into a more concrete research project that would help me learn more about Mexico. But actually, keeping the apartment running puts me in the same position as the many women who live in my neighborhood. I’m learning a lot while getting groceries! Though I haven’t been brave enough to strike up a conversation with my neighbors so far, the little intricacies of domestic life shape my days, too. I wanted to share some of these experiences, and today, it’s all about food.

Keeping the kitchen stocked is a much more complicated endeavor than it is in the United States, mainly because the “supermarket” as we know it, doesn’t really exist here. The closest substitute would be Walmart, or one of a few chains of Mexican megastores. But these places can be very expensive, and their produce is terrifying. The best option for fruits and vegetables is the tianguis: the weekly market set up in different neighborhoods on different days of the week. I’d hesitate to call it a “farmer’s market,” which tends to be a more upscale institution in the United States. The tianguis features fresh produce, tacos, pirated CDs, cheap kitchen supplies, makeup, and garage-sale type “crud,” as my dad would say. The sellers are pretty vocal, making it a cacophony of “Delicious ice cream! Delicious ice cream!” “Tomatoes, come get your tomatoes!” “Come on over, friend!” “What can we get for you, güerita?” (güerita means “light skinned girl,” and that’s what most people call me here).

The problem with the tianguis is that it’s not always there, and it doesn’t have everything. I buy cereal, milk, and juice at the nearby pharmacy. And then of course, there’s the tiendita: the corner store, for last minute purchases. It is pretty convenient to live next door to a tiendita.

Tortillas, the most important food in the Mexican diet, are available at the tienditas, in tortillerías, or from trucks that circle around at lunch time (2-4 pm) announcing on a loudspeaker, “Hot tortillas, directly to your house, we also have dough.” For Paco, a meal isn’t a meal unless it has tortillas. I love tortillas, but sometimes they seem a little excessive: do we really need to eat them with pasta? I think often about how they are equivalent to baguettes in France, or rice in Asia: a staple. All these cultures have developed dishes to use their staple after it’s passed its prime: croutons, fried rice, and tostadas (fried tortillas). Growing up in the United States, I expect variety in my carbohydrates, from bread, to pasta, to rice, to potatoes. Of course, Mexicans eat all of these things, too, but the tortilla reigns supreme.

One of my favorite ways to use old tortillas is to make chilaquiles, a traditional breakfast dish. Old tortillas are first fried, and then cooked in a puree of tomatoes and onions. Once soft, they are served with shredded chicken or hardboiled or fried egg. With a few slices of onion and a little bit of cheese and sour cream on top, it’s a very filling and satisfying meal. Interestingly, it’s also the dish I ordered at the restaurant on the night I met Paco, and I learned to make them by watching his mother (she’s a fantastic cook).

I mentioned earlier that food at Walmart can be expensive, but I think this needs some more explanation. Overall, food in Mexico is quite inexpensive–if it’s domestically produced. That is, Mexican sodas, tortillas, snack foods, restaurant fare are all cheap by American standards. Foods produced by American companies for the Mexican market cost the same as they do in the States, but that makes them expensive by comparison. For example, a loaf of Wonder Bread costs about the same as 2 or 2.5 kilos of tortillas–you get a lot more bang for your peso if you buy local products.

As you may have read, I miss goat cheese. Goat cheese is actually available here, but for the 50 pesos I would spend on it, I could get a steak dinner and a soda at a restaurant. This comparison also makes it hard for me to justify buying a bottle of wine or a bag of chocolate chips. Of course, in the United States, these didn’t seem like unreasonable purchases, since everything is pretty expensive.

So even though I’ve chosen to give up some favorite foods in hopes of saving money, there are so many wonderful and new things here to try that I hardly feel deprived. One of my favorites is nopales: cactus leaves. At the market, vendors cut off the spikes, and they can be sautéed with other vegetables, roasted dry on a griddle, or incorporated fresh into a smoothie. Another new discovery is huitlacoche, a fungus that grows on ears of corn that is actually edible (U.S. farmers call it “corn smut”). It’s considered a delicacy here, and it tastes like a smoky mushroom. It is mindblowing to have avocados and limes so available and so cheap–I won’t even tell you how cheap.

I’m considering starting an online recipe file with some of the dishes I’ve mentioned here: let me know if that sounds interesting to you. Meanwhile, I’m going to go make a cactus smoothie.