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!

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.

Learning to write good (in Spanish!) with my bootcamp “frendos”

Our recent addition to the Boot Camp schedule is Advanced Writing, an intensive workshop-style class. The teachers want us to write concisely, clearly, and concretely, in Spanish, of course. Spanish grammar, though much more reliable and more often logical than English grammar, so easily becomes a wordy, convoluted mess when trying to explain something complex. This grammar, paired with the over-reliance on jargon and pretentious stock phrases that taints academic texts in all languages, makes bad writing in Spanish just as incomprehensible as bad writing in English.

Of course, I’m at a serious disadvantage in any writing situation here because my native language is English, not Spanish. My vocabulary is smaller, my grammatical instincts less certain. Yesterday, the teachers told us to use verbs related to carpentry, listed on the board, in a short paragraph. I didn’t know the meaning of half of the verbs on the chart! We never had a “carpentry vocab unit” when I took Spanish in college–and as long as topic doesn’t come up often, it’s easy to never learn whole sets of words that are irrelevant to my daily life. As I attempted the exercise, I realized that all the words I did know, I had learned from Paco as we fixed up our apartment in August–sanding shelves, using the screwdriver, painting the walls. You do something, you learn the words for the tools you use. “Can you hand me that thing? You know, the stick thing with the rolly-thing on the end?” doesn’t get the point across nearly so well as asking for the paint roller (rodillo, for those of you keeping score).

On the other hand, I have an enormous advantage when trying to write in Spanish–I don’t have all those bad habits picked up over years of schooling in a language. The Spanish equivalents of phrases like “heretofore” or “as such” or “be that as it may,” phrases that slow down a sentence and add little meaning, don’t even occur to me when I’m writing. Their uselessness is precisely why they aren’t on my radar. Every phrase I use in Spanish is deliberate because I produce it consciously.

Grammatical topics are especially bizarre to encounter in this setting. Many of my classmates are extremely confused by passive voice, for example, and they can’t identify it or produce it accurately. But for me, it’s very easy–it was only a few years ago that I was in Spanish class explicitly being  taught how to form passive voice (bonus point if you caught the passive voice in this sentence!). Hearing the professors enjoin us not to use the passive voice, so soon after having learned it, is amusing. I got the grammatical foundations in Spanish before ever approximating anything like fluid speech. No Spanish grammar is innate to me: it’s all patterns, rules, and memorization that are sort of natural, but only enough to help me talk faster.

The entire course of a lifetime of learning how to write in English, starting simple (elementary school), learning complexity and structure (junior high and high school), then unlearning confusing flourishes and rigidity (college)–it’s all happening so fast in Spanish! The Spanish transitional phrases I so dutifully looked up and proudly added to my essays just a year ago, like “consequently” and “nevertheless” and “in conclusion,” are turning out to be only crutches, clichés and redundancies that I’m supposed to avoid. My classmates insert these phrases out  a habit they now have to break. I inserted them with pride!

But more than my classmates, I can question the necessity of phrases and constructions in Spanish because they aren’t natural to me. Familiar, perhaps, but nothing is sacred in a language that only occasionally appears in my dreams.  Of course, that lack of an “ear” leads me astray, too, when I write or edit. Though much of this class’s content reminds me of lessons in English grammar long since burned into my brain (thanks, Mom!), I incorrectly identified a “misplaced modifier” in last night’s class–turns out that in Spanish, you CAN put modifiers next to things they don’t modify. I felt stupid afterward for having prefaced my wrong comment with “well, in English it’s like this, so I wondered…” Or maybe I just don’t like being wrong (pretty sure I don’t like being wrong, actually).

My classmates tell me that their English class is hard, that English is hard, that I’m lucky not to have to take English. I have a hard time feeling sorry for them because they get to speak their native language all day long, unlike me! I know exactly what their struggle is, but I also know that if they’d had opportunities like I did for immersion, they’d be doing better and like it more. Of course, I also have the ultimate motivation: my fiancé speaks Spanish. Even with all that, it’s still difficult.

I have many hopes for this master’s program (#1: get accepted!). But the challenge of being intellectual, academic, theoretical and comprehensible in another language–that is something I’d like to achieve, and I think the rigor of a master’s program could guide me toward that goal.

Meanwhile, I’m going to write off my deficiencies as entertainment for the rest of the class. Today, the class elected me to read aloud a text in Spanish called “Anglicismos” (English-isms).  It phonetically tried to approximate English using pronunciation suggested by the Spanish spelling: a Spanish speaker’s rendering of the sound of English. Needless to say, it was extremely difficult to sound out English in Spanish, and the attempt about broke my brain. I also could not stop laughing after reading aloud the word “frendo” which no one else found particularly funny. This happened after I thought I’d successfully avoided the teacher’s pointing hand to make me read aloud–I should have gone for the actual Spanish selections while I had the chance. But I’m fine with humor at my own expense. It’s the only kind of humor I generate, so I’ll take what I can get.