Beyond the binary of Mexico-United States

I realized today that many of my posts tend to boil down migration–the process, the experience–to a duality. I, the American, moved my life to Mexico, and as a result, my world is a constant push-and-pull between two poles: my native culture and language and the adopted language and culture I currently inhabit. It’s a convenient way to break down a complex set of feelings, misunderstandings and contrasts. But migration goes beyond the binary.

First of all, I’m not only an American, I’m also a Californian–I realized this when I went to college in New England. Furthermore, I’m a Silicon Valley-ite (silicon chip?)–I will be irritated if you assume I’m from Los Angeles. National identity isn’t the only one at play, or even the most important to me personally, but it’s the one people tend to assign me when I’m internationally located.

And I tell Americans that I’m in Mexico, but I tell Mexicans that I’m in Guadalajara, or Jalisco. The specificity matters. Our middle-class neighborhood, with its 7-Eleven and highway on its fringes, is worlds away from the highland pueblos where I’ve stayed in Chiapas (Mexico’s southernmost state). Paco, who hails from one of these pueblos, feels like something of a foreigner here in Guadalajara, too.

But what brought about this idea of complicating the binary, in fact, was not these regional and local nuances to how we understand ourselves. It was actually a Valentine’s Day date.

Let me backtrack a little. Just a year ago, on Valentine’s Day 2009, I was still in college and Paco was in Chiapas. We celebrated by reading the love letters we’d oh-so-old-fashioned-ly mailed each other, and staring at our respective fiancé/e’s faces on our laptops, thanks to the miracle of Skype. So this year, happily living at the same address, we were excited to celebrate the day with a little more pizazz. Our goal: see some live music. We looked up some potential locations, got dressed up, and discovered that BOTH of the bars we’d planned on turned out not to exist.

After doing our part to contribute to the wallets of three different taxi drivers, we ended up back where we had begun our trek, in the Colonia Americana–the ritzy neighborhood where the U.S. Consulate makes its home. We opted to have dinner at an Indian restaurant called Goa.

Another explanation needed: I am crazy about Indian food, and I’ve had a lot of good Indian food in my time (since I’m from the Silicon Valley, home to many immigrants from the Indian subcontinent). Paco, on the other hand, had never had Indian food before.

I have to admit, I was a little skeptical when we sat down. Was this going to be “authentic”?–although, never having been to India myself, I’d have to make this judgment based on the Indian food of the South Bay. Reading the menu was at once familiar and strange, seeing the names I knew “dal makni,” “palak paneer,” “mango lassi” followed by explanations in Spanish. I was paralyzed at how to ask for the dish labeled “butter chicken” on the menu: should I try to pronounce the English words in a Spanish accent? I opted to ask for “pollo de mantequilla,” to which the waiter said, “boo-ter chee-ken?”

I picked some of my favorite things for Paco to try them. Everything tasted good, but it all was just a little–different. And to me, different in a way that made me homesick. The samosas were bathed in a sweetish sauce, but I wanted them to arrive plain, ready for me to dip them in cilantro/mint chutney. The naan was just a little too thin, and a little too crispy. The mango lassi was just a little too heavy on the cardamom. And when we ordered mango kulfi for dessert, it arrived garnished with chocolate syrup, whipped cream and a cherry. I’m not opposed to anything with sugar in it, but it just didn’t seem right to combine something as exotic as mango kulfi with Hershey’s. I will say that I relish any opportunity to eat a maraschino cherry.

While we waited for these dishes to appear, Paco and I stared at the many decorations–the restaurant was positively covered in Indian handicrafts. We liked them, but I told Paco, “you know, I have never been to an Indian restaurant that was this decorated.” Thinking aloud, I mused that a Mexican dining in an Indian restaurant has certain expectations–of exotic, unfamiliar food. The decorations become part of the culinary journey, transporting you away from the usual. But in the Silicon Valley, most Indian restaurants are frequented primarily by Indians. They don’t need a folkloric Indian decor to appreciate the food, and the food isn’t exotic at all–it’s comforting.

And my expectations for what Indian food should be–where do those fall in spectra of accuracy or authenticity? Long before I learned Spanish or became interested in Mexico, I was in contact with Indian culture on a daily basis–through family friends and my classmates. Some of my dearest friends are Indian. So a less-than-fluffy naan stands out to me.

It’s even hard for me to talk about Indian things here in Mexico due to a simple translation quirk: the translation for “Indian” is hindú, that is, Hindu. I think this is because here, indio invariably refers to a Native/indigenous Mexican, although the term is not only scandalously incorrect but also often pejorative. So it’s not convenient to refer to Indians from India as “indios.” But for me, calling Indians from India “Hindus” just seems wrong. Hinduism is a religion, not a nationality, and in fact, it’s a religion that not all Indians practice. Talking about Hindu food (comida hindú) doesn’t sound right, but that’s what Indian food is called here.

Seeing the way another culture–Mexican culture, to speak in very general terms–condenses and interprets other cultures makes me wonder about the lenses and shorthands I use, without thinking twice, for cultures I learned about in the U.S. context. In Mexico, chino (Chinese) is a nickname given to people with “Asian features,” and it’s also a frequently used substitute for “Asian.” Both of these uses smart of racism to me. But who knows how many Taiwanese silently take offense to being labeled Chinese? Yet the distinction is often optional in U.S. parlance.

I don’t consider myself an expert on any culture, including the one I was raised in (and I wouldn’t even know what to call that culture, if it has a name). Maybe one day I’ll visit India, try “real” Indian food and find myself disappointed that it’s not Silicon Valley-style Indian food! But if we can recognize migration as a non-linear journey–not just from country A to country B, but a constant, whirring, spiraling transit among infinite mindsets and languages and moralities–we can leave “authenticity” aside as a figment of our imagination. Not even a very useful figment. We can pursue, futilely but doggedly, the endless realm of nuance–to learn of local particulars and forget about national-level generalizations.

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.

Anticipating the Hallowed Cusp of October-November

I started learning Spanish in January 2006. Like most Spanish students, along with grammar and vocabulary, we learned about various tidbits of Latin American cultures. If you’ve ever seen a foreign language textbook, you’d recognize that little box of text–the one that you skipped over while you were studying for the exam. But I always liked the little tidbits (it’s like Wikipedia on paper!). At some point during that first semester, we had to do a presentation on one snippet of culture in the Spanish-speaking world. I picked Día de los Muertos, Mexico’s Day of the Dead. Maybe this was the beginning of my interest in Mexico, now that I think about it. I should also admit that the holiday wasn’t entirely new to me: my little sister Sophi, who had so wisely started studying Spanish in elementary school, had made something called pan de muertos for her classmates. This eggy, orange-flavored bread was delicious. “Dead bread” merited further exploration.

With my extremely limited knowledge of Spanish, I struggled to write sentences to accompany my PowerPoint slides about Day of the Dead. I learned a necromancer’s set of words: skull, coffin, tomb, offering. My professor’s comments after the presentation fell along the lines of “bizarro is not a word in Spanish” and other corrections of missteps in the pursuit of fluency. But more important were the images in my mind of marigolds, jolly skeletons and morbid, sugary creations. I dreamed of spending Day of the Dead in Mexico, but the dream was a remote and vague one.

I often fantasize of being able to convert my current self into an apparition to haunt past versions of me. Sometimes, it’s to give the younger me a little comfort: “Don’t worry, 10 year old Rachel, you will crack 5 feet one day.” But I particularly enjoy the juicy possibility of shocking these past selves with the unpredictable events that came after. For example: just a few months before I began studying Spanish, I announced that I would, in fact, NEVER study Spanish since it would interfere with my years of dedication to French. In my fantasy, the current me in the form of a spirit, invisible to everyone but my former self, breezes in, and with terrible icy breath, I whisper in young Rachel’s ear, “you will fall in love in Spanish. You will move to Mexico.” Young Rachel is shocked, but fearing accusations of madness, can say nothing.

It’s overwhelming to realize my current life is so incongruous with my past visions of the future. Point being, when I made that halting, “bizarro” presentation three and a half years ago, how could I have  dreamed of spending Day of the Dead in Mexico like this: not as a visitor, but as a resident.  I knew I wanted to see the decorated altars and eat as much Dead Bread as possible, but speaking coherent Spanish seemed impossible back then, and much less likely, that I would be living with a mostly-only-Spanish-speaker.

But strange as it is to be here if I get too existential, the impending arrival of Día de los Muertos is something I’ve been looking forward to. Still, I feel that it’s almost been sneaking up on me. Since Paco and I are new in town, we aren’t really sure about how it’s celebrated here, and we don’t know many people here yet to ask. For this reason, we took advantage of the chance to consult our taxi driver friend, Gerónimo, about Day of the Dead here in Guadalajara.

“Oh, we barely celebrate it,” he lamented, “Halloween has taken over. To the point that kids go around to people’s houses asking for candy. It’s sad, because we have so many cultures here in Mexico. Why pick something from the U.S. culture?”

My heart broke in the backseat of the taxi. I think Halloween is a fine holiday, but I’ve done it many times, from my days as a bumblebee in preschool, to a UPS package in third grade, to the cringe-inducing “sexy cat” of high school (cats don’t wear short black dresses or excessive eyeliner). More recent embarrassment ensued from a college Halloween when I went to the dining hall for breakfast–dressed as an elf. Shortly thereafter I realized that once you are no longer in grade school, costumes to be worn only for parties. Last year, my Halloween was merely a preamble to Day of the Dead: I was La Catrina, a Victorian skeleton woman that’s part of the traditional Day of the Dead iconography (fabulous makeup thanks to my dear friend Eliza). I was ready to experience the real thing!

In fact, what I’ve seen so far is a fascinating intermixing of Halloween and Day of the Dead. The traditional papel picado (Mexican art of fine papercutting) that depicts scenes of skeletons now has a black and orange color scheme. Stores are filled with plastic pumpkins and other Halloween decorations, which I then see displayed side-by-side with cutouts of skeleton mariachi bands. The nursery has stocked up on marigolds, the traditional flower for Día de los Muertos, and my beloved Pan de muertos is on sale, and so are ghoulish costumes and bras with bat-print fabric.

The two holidays have much in common–skeletons, sugar, autumn–that facilitate the syncretism of U.S. and Mexican traditions. But they are different in tone. Halloween, for all the ghosts and ghouls and plastic tombstones, is about as much about death as a birthday is about birth: the gritty content of the symbolized life event is so stylized that it’s hardly emotionally powerful. That is, a kid in a white sheet has nothing to do with the eerie breeze you felt in the cemetery when you visited the grave of someone you loved. Halloween is a farce, an exaggeration, and there’s comfort in that.

Gerónimo, the taxi driver, said to us, “We Mexicans laugh at death.” Paco added, “it’s just another part of life.”  The spirit of humor and lightheartedness accompanies Day of the Dead: the skeletons are whimsical, not menacing or covered in cartoony rotten flesh like their American counterparts. At the same time, death is far more real and relevant in the Mexican holiday, for deceased relatives are deliberately and specifically remembered, honored, and celebrated. It’s a party, and it’s about death in the most concrete terms.

In the United States, it’s impossible to have a party about death that isn’t Death caricatured and removed (that is, Halloween). Americans, myself include, don’t laugh at death. We fear it, we obsess over it, we do everything we can to prevent it as if we had more than the smallest measure of control over the inevitable end of life. I think this is, in a way, very natural, given our instinct to survive. I also wouldn’t want to give people the idea that Mexicans shrug or giggle when a loved one dies. But perhaps traditions like Day of the Dead make it easier to experience grief without fear. Knowing that when you are gone, your family will put your picture on display and make offerings of your favorite foods, while drinking and spending time together, makes death seem more natural and less remote. Or, knowing that you will be remembered helps you accept your mortality without bitterness.

If I boil this down to two distinct messages, I’d put it like this: Halloween says, “Death is scary,” and it makes this palatable by the corollary “but it isn’t real.” Day of the Dead’s insistence in celebrating life and death, both real and both ripe for humor. I am very curious to see how these ideas interact when the cusp of October and November arrives.