Or: The Things we Trade
I am surrounded by Mexicans.
Thousands of them. Multiple generations. Old women with tightly wrapped, salty gray buns perched on their heads, simple black skirts down to their ankles; husbands and wives with painted babies in one hand, six-packs of Tecate in the other; teenagers gender segregated, the boys lurking and thick like thieves; trombones and trumpets and pounding drums; wire-frame bulls with spinning horns and tails, propelled by bottle rockets, carried on the shoulders of those in possession of higher levels of risk or machismo or, most likely, both. Many are painted like cartoon skeletons, some are costumed. In front of me, a demon in a grotesque mask has constructed giant bat wings that expand, violently, with the pull of a string; behind me, a man with plastic devil horns protruding from his head, black hair slicked back, his mouth a flame thrower upon the assistance of an aerosol can and cheap lighter. But for wooden stilts, he is entirely dipped in red, a Mexican Achilles.
It is Day of the Dead, and I am in Oaxaca, the beating heart, so to speak, of the Mexico-wide Dia de los Muertos corpus. Few nations are as festive as Mexico, and where death is normally a somber affair, Mexicans – the indigenous populations in particular – consider such melancholia an affront to the departed. Instead, remembering the deceased is a celebration, and celebrate they do. Day of the Dead is a mash up of cultures, the traditional worldview of Aztecs and Toltecs and other pre-Columbian Nahuan people modified by Catholicism imported from Spain, and where the Catholic-American Jesus of my youth looks condescendingly down from his crucifix, shaming me for nothing other than simply being alive, after a week of watching these celebrations I fully expect Catholic-Mexican Jesus to say guero, toss me up a beer.
*****
Mexico is, if I stretch the truth, home turf. My history begins at a crossroads in the San Bernardino Valley of southeastern Arizona, the Sonoran Desert to the west and the Chihuahuan to the east, the dusty American copper town of Douglas to the north of the US-Mexico border and, just to the south of it, Agua Prieta – a town named not for water dirtied by mining refuse, but because the indigenous Ópatas watered their animals there, leaving behind a muddy mess. My Irish-American mother, in the throes of labor, made my Mexican father drive us north across the US border to ensure I was a native-born son, a gratuitous trip given her own American citizenship. Destiny often cloaks bad information.
I lived the first eighteen months of my life in the small Mexican city of Cananea with my mother, older sister, and biological father.[1] The marriage was short, and though ties with the Mexican side of my family were all but severed for most of the next two decades, the gravitational pull has endured.[2] Excepting the 460-ish miles between Juarez and Ciudad Acuña, I’ve eaten in nearly every border town from Tijuana to Matamoros. I’ve absorbed the sun in the seaside beaches of Cabo San Lucas and Zihuatanejo, sipped coffee in the laureled parque principals of Guanajuato and San Miguel, walked the thriving metropolis of Mexico City, and took an astonishingly beautiful but equally ill-advised train trip aboard El Chepe from Chihuahua, over the Sierra Madres, through the Barrancas del Cobre, and ending in the small town of Los Mochis in the northern part of the infamous-then-and-now state of Sinaloa. I harbor an unrealistic belief that invisible Mexican DNA somehow camouflages visible Irish skin, allowing me to blend in as a vacationing Chilango rather than what I am: just another escapist gringo[3] from north of the border. But I never leave Mexico ready to go home, and in some ways, I suppose, I return south in search of what might have been.
This time, I have come to Oaxaca as reset. Mexico is salve to my chronic affliction to better define who I am regardless (it is fifty per cent of me, after all), but more recently, as possible cure to a more acute need to unfuck myself. I am mired. I have found myself unmoored where I thought I was permanently anchored: five years ago I was falsely accused of sexual assault.[4], [5] It was, in the parlance, a Significant Emotional Event, and one that revealed me to be pervious when I thought I was mostly im.[6] In Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kalk argues that trauma changes us fundamentally and physiologically (duh). The essential sentiment here is that trauma persists in all sorts of insidious ways, to include an elemental desire to go “home” in reaction to adversity, even if that “home” is a root cause of the trauma itself, and that understanding it as such can help to change the body back to its pre-traumatic form. Which is how, in some ways, I view Mexico. Though it is not the source of my trauma, and I spent little of my formative life here (and none of it memorable), it is my beginning, and the specter of it is ever-present. It bookends the first eighteen years of my life, marks the beginning of the end of the first important relationship of my adulthood, and now the middle, perhaps, of the second. But in Mexico I’m anonymous, and the country itself remains securely, and seemingly perpetually, in shambles. It is not lost on me that she is also perpetually falsely accused. Surely Mexico can sympathize.
Our vision of travel abroad frequently lacks precision. We can differentiate within our own country and culture – Boston is obviously not Birmingham, Boulder, or Burning Man – but America typically evokes a solo image in those who have not yet been here. The aerial towers of Manhattan perhaps, or the excess of Hollywood or the audacity of Las Vegas or the brittle utopia of Disneyland. But more than likely it is the singular but enduring spirit and optimism of the American West, where all is possible if you’re willing to put your back into it. For those who have grit, who work hard and take risks, who ingest the mantra of the “American Dream”. In America, persistence and confidence trump even stupidity. It may be naïve, but it works because we say so. Perception becomes reality.
Similarly naïve is our vision of Mexico. Though the two nations have much in common – both are vast countries with a diverse population and geography, troubled histories of invasion and subjugation of indigenous peoples, inspirational stories of rebellion and perseverance, heroic tales of the rise, fall, and rise again of national icons – our portrait of Mexico is not one of optimism and confidence, but of conflict and corruption. Perception does become reality, and fairly or not, Mexico is the bogeyman in our North American closet. They bring us our drugs, our cheap labor, our border violence, our tight-skirted jezebels and swarthy cinematic villainy hell-bent on defiling the American dream. But supply feeds demand, and history is not monochromatic, and Mexico fits this image no more than does an infallible America. If your fear relegates your forays south to the pampered and filtered seaside resorts, you deserve the vulgarity of the wet t-shirt contests, fishbowl margaritas, vomitous undergrads, and kowtowing, eminently forgettable waitstaff who await you. Better to buy American; give your money and dignity to a South Florida Johnny Rockets. But if you want better food, and better music, and the best-shittiest beer in the world, and you’re comfortable being just a little uncomfortable, then head south of the border.
My history begins in Mexico, but my history’s history, like many half-Mexicans, begins elsewhere: Spain. Before it was an empire it was an ebb and flow of kingdoms, but by the mid-1400s Spain consisted largely of the Christian crowns of Castile and Aragon and remnants of the Moorish Nasrid Dynasty located near Spain’s southern coast. The two Christian kingdoms united under the marriage of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand II, and in 1492 – a big year for the western world – the “last sigh of the Moor” was breathed when Boabdil, Abu Abdallah Muhammad XII, Sultan of the Emirate of al-Andulus, the last Muslim King of Spain, relinquished his capital city of Granada.[7] Just a few months later, a persistent, carpet-bagging Ligurian convinced the Spanish royals, after two years of lobbying, to fund his quest to reach Asia not by heading east, but west. Cristòffa Cómbo in his native tongue – Cristoforo Colombo in Italian, Cristóbal Colón in Spanish, and Christopher Columbus[8] to you and me – first approached England, then Portugal (twice), France, Genoa, and Venice before finally securing funding from King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. The queen, keeper of the Royal Purse, first sent Columbus packing yet again, but Ferdinand, after some discussion, convinced Isabella to take a chance. As legend has it he then personally tracked down Columbus, brooding yet again on the road home, to deliver the good news. On August 3rd, 1492, Columbus finally set sail; he landed in the Bahamas just two months later. In March of 1493, victorious in discovery if not yet in riches, he returned to Spain, leaving behind 40 men on the island of Hispaniola.
If history were a shopping spree, Columbus’s return to Spain would be Black Friday, and those waiting outside Best Buy’s doors at 4am were the young men of the state of Extremadura. Bordering Portugal (home of perhaps history’s greatest sailors), the region was impoverished but seemed to infuse its name – “extremely hard” in English – upon its denizens. The most famous conquistadors were from here: Vasco Núñez de Balboa, Hernando de Soto, Francisco Pizarro, and Hernán Cortés all originated in Extremadura, claimed parts of the New World for Spain as well as themselves, and elevated Spain into an empire while destroying, by cunning, violence, and virus, entire civilizations.
Of all the conquistadors, Hernán Cortés was perhaps the most ruthless. Of lesser nobility but also lesser wealth, Cortés left home at nineteen for Hispaniola to seek his riches in the new world. He spent a few years in Cuba, earning enough money and status to captain an expedition to the mainland of Mexico, arriving in 1519, most likely landing at Chalchihuecan beach in the modern-day city of Heroica Veracruz. He immediately took possession of the land in King Charles’s name, and as consolation gave the surely bewildered locals long-sleeved cotton camisas from Spain. A country for a shirt. Such is the story of all the hemisphere’s indigenous peoples, and the remainder of the Spaniards’ time in Mexico rings familiar: Cortés ignored an order to return to Cuba, burned his own boats in the harbor when he heard whispers of mutiny and retreat, and took on a brilliant and beautiful Nahuan mistress (never mind the likely rape, slavery, and sex-trafficking; for la Malinche’s perceived traitorous role in the defeat of the Aztecs, she remains despised even today). In addition to cotton shirts, Cortés and his men brought horses, and guns, and Jesus – installing crosses and images of “Our Lady” to replace Moctezuma’s idols to Tezcatlipoca and Huichilobos – and shed plenty of Aztec blood in the name of gold, King Charles, and the contemporary version of colonialism. Just two years after his arrival on the Mexican mainland, Cortés conquered the capital city of Tenochtitlán and defeated, for good, the Aztec empire.
For his successes Cortés was bestowed the title of Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca, despite never setting foot in the state. If he had headed to Oaxaca, he might have taken the path I did from Mexico City: east to Puebla and beyond, then south towards Tehuacán, avoiding the Trans-Mexican volcanic belt – the Sierra Madre Occidental – and continuing on to Oaxaca, approaching the valley from the northwest, the city center at the north end, the small artist’s barrio of Xochimilco to the north of that, where I find an apartment for about $300 a month, the only as-yet-unrevealed downsides being the cockroach or two I kill daily and what sounds like an active silver mine on the other side of my bedroom wall. There is a church nearby, and a graveyard, with all its affiliated Dias de los Muertos noises, and cobblestone streets providing foundation for an urban minefield of unattended dog shit and the whoosh click whoosh click of handlooms and bread vendors on foot and moped, announcing their locale with a mellifluous cadenza of ellll PANNNN, and cafés with beans sourced from just over the mountains and, though I initially came here to be alone, my 23 year-old nephew is on his way to join me.
*****
History is malleable. Memories change, and what we witness is not even always truth. The strongest memories occur when an event, or the perception of it, coincides with emotion; physiologically speaking, neurons interact with other neurons in a synapse and release a neurotransmitter. Whether those synapses have a particularly strong connection – when an event and the perception of it meet with violence – helps determine the strength of the memory, its resonance dependent upon how often those neurons are reactivated, or how often that violent interaction is reenacted.
For example: In August of 1995 I was a twenty-four year old soldier stationed in South Korea and at the tail end of an exhausting one-year tour. As self-reward, a friend and I took a 10-day holiday to Thailand, where I grew an extraordinarily lame soul patch,[9] drank too much, and delighted in, courtesy of a London grammar school teacher, my first experience with the inscrutable self-deprecation that is British humor. In the early morning hours of August 3rd in Phuket, Thailand, I learned that my first siskid[10] was born in Nevada, but because we are centers of our own universe, my oldest nephew’s history begins not with him, but with me. Thailand plus first exposure to British humor plus birth of eldest siskid is, apparently, a particularly strong synapse (the violent collision of event and emotion), and that I get to tell my nephew exactly where I was and what I was doing when he was born means those particular neurons, from that place and time, are reactivated, at a minimum, every year on the second of August. I take great pleasure in re-sharing, annually, the details of this gift with him, and the best indicator of my pending dementia will be not when it appears I believe I’m telling him his origin story for the first time – I treat it no other way – but when I forget to tell him at all.
It is difficult to view him as anything other than a small object to hurl into the air, to regale with Army stories, or, in a most peaceful of memories, as one end of a game of long-toss, me in the middle, his younger brother the antipode. Yet now here he sits, wispy blonde sandlot of a beard, young mannish, across from me on the top floor of a Oaxacan cinder block house, barking dogs and fireworks and pre-Dias de los Muertos trombone-laden parades interlacing his nascent riff on the brilliance of Camus. An hour earlier he disembarked the ADO bus from Mexico City late but with a look of subdued pleasure typically reserved for lottery wins and first kisses. He is, in many ways, exactly the young man you would have predicted he would become. His sensitivity and conscientiousness as a kid has found traction as a young adult, and he not only emotionally shoulders the responsibility for the world’s ills and injustices, but has apparently determined that a personal sartorial style of “hobo grandpa” might somehow offer personal penance, weathered moccasin slippers and a heavy wool, roll neck Native American print cardigan a modern-day hair shirt. He refuses to buy anything new and has a shameful reluctance to bargain, yet still shows up with three travel bags, two of them surely lifted, under concealment of darkness and the neurocognitive effects of marijuana, from a Goodwill donations drop-off. I chalk his laissez-faire attitude towards planning, packing, and efficiency up to millennialism rather than conscious intention, and, in short, am ecstatic to see him here. Solitude is cool, but traveling with a nephew less than half your age is cooler.
He is a recent college graduate and current irresolute. Though he has professional goals, they are months down the road, and he is now more like a beach bum without beach; snow bum with neither snow nor mountain. Which is a good place to be. But where my nephew came for adventure and protraction, I came to Oaxaca as latest attempt at the aforementioned life reassessment. Over the last several years, I have learned a few things – both about myself and about others – that I thought I knew but really didn’t. Like chemistry, I understood the equations (sort of), but couldn’t quite internalize the process. Adversity was a world I thought I knew, but in truth had been more of an outside observer. And much like traveling, you never really know a place until you live there for a while. Now I’ve lived there for a while, and though the happiness line on my life’s bar graph has generally trended up, the TJ-promised Pursuit of Happiness has proven more elusive[11]: In the previous several months I have quit a job, quit a professional partnership and changed a personal one, and intentionally dislocated from any permanent address. The intent was to strip myself of all distractions and accouterments in order to better focus on the jing in my qi,[12] but an ex-girlfriend – part-time muse and full-time confidant – has offered up the alternative explanation that I actually like being sad. This is not ridiculous. Humans certainly introspect, but rarely do we take time when we’re kicking ass to revel in it. We’re far more likely to wallow in our sadness, and to do so solitarily.[13] Cortés traded a country for a shirt; here I am trading adversity for seclusion.
However difficult it may be to refind purpose and happiness, negotiating a foreign country has always been easy, and is quite often when I feel in my element. Comfortable being uncomfortable. But learning Spanish is a different story, and it is a task at which I am resoundingly successful in failing. I wasted two years of lessons in high school, and could easily blame the Nevada public school system,[14] or the social Petri dish that is high school in general, but the fact is that failure was due purely to an insecurity in how really bad I was at learning what might have been my native tongue. No one likes to be perceived as dumb when apathetic seems so much nobler. With maturity and confidence comes the acknowledgement that both can be true; I am here in Oaxaca regardless, and I swear to dedicate myself anew.
I start my mornings at the A.M. café, a local coffee shop favored by tourists and language teachers, where I swap greetings with Ricardo the barista, my Spanish never improving but our handshake gradually more elaborate. I take my coffee to go, and walk the several blocks to the Instituto Cultural for my Spanish lessons, passing navy and white-uniformed kids walking to school; smoke-belching city busses; sidewalk-driving motorcycles; and lurid, exceptional graffiti of all genres, influenced by politics and irony and indigenous art and, surely, Banksy. The language school is on the sprawling compound of an old colonial estate, and though I see students of all ages and ethnicities, five of my eight classmates are older women, all from the Seattle area and unknown to one another. They bring cookies to class, take copious notes, and make no attempt at mimicking a Mexican accent. They all have innocuous enough sounding reasons for being here, and though they profess to be living their best lives, traveling the world with or without husbands or partners, I find their stories too convenient, and imagine them instead as drug mules, their “I’m retired!” exhortations savvy cover for what they are: carriers of Mexican black tar heroin[15] headed for the Pacific Northwest, where they will make the notoriously sedate Emerald City downright comatose. I create backstories for each, individual specialties and nicknames reflective of their preferred methods of violence, la aguja de tejer and la masa de pastel and la pellizcadora, all founding members of the upstart Pelos Azules gang and third only to the Sinaloa and Jalisco Nueva Generación cartels as most feared and with a wider reach.[16]
After class I walk the streets of Oaxaca City, a grid of cobblestones and parks and wide streets with narrow alleys and high walls and sprawling churches, quiet interiors in direct contrast to the boisterous exteriors of tourists, and street vendors, and indigenous buskers, the men often sleeping off hangovers while dirty children rotely squeeze and expand accordions behind an empty cup ready to collect loose pesos. There are weddings and comparsas[17] seemingly daily, and occasionally it is difficult to determine if they are one or the other, both loud and festive and musical, a riot of colors. I see one wedding – I think – led by giant-headed, 15-foot tall papier mâché bride and groom, closely followed by a coterie of dancing Mexican women in differently colored pastel dresses, all conservative but one, her with smile ignited and shimmying hips and a leg slit so high the mesmerized bystanders[18] focus on her and not the actual newlyweds, and if Oaxacan brides toss their bouquets, my money is on this girl in lime green. I am always perplexed at the sensuality of Mexico, home of the second most Catholics in the world, and Oaxaca does nothing to reduce my curiosity. Though it is famous for its festivals, food, and mezcal, I think “City of Necking Teenagers” must surely be the city’s slogan.[19] Parts of Oaxaca’s streets are connected by narrow arteries that open up into small squares, then disappear again on the other side, and counting the young couples, wearing matching school uniforms and so intertwined I cannot tell where boy stops and girl begins, becomes pastime.
There are several markets in or near the main square. One is dedicated largely to textiles of bedspreads and pillow cases and intricately embroidered shirts and dresses; one to touristy arts and crafts of hammocks, cheap lucha libre masks, and alebrijes, the fantastical and colorful Mexican folk art animals; another seemingly to the local delicacies of fried grasshoppers, piled into great wooden bowls, and stacks of dried maguey worms dangling on threads like fish on a stringer; they move and spin in the breeze, a mobile for baby ogres. But the largest market – Central de Abastos – is on the outskirts of town, and Sundays brings Oaxacans from all over the state selling anything that isn’t permanently affixed to the earth. Like many markets in third-world countries, the U.S. State Department advises I watch out for pickpockets, but it’s unnecessary caution: I intend to fill my bags, not empty them. Mexican markets are flame to my moth and, similarly, I go to them simply because the light is on. Central de Abastos serves as headquarters for furniture factory, fish market, florist, shoemaker, saddler, dressmaker, butcher, baker, produce, pawnshop, potter, mendicant and medicant. I walk the market without goal, directionless, moving more quickly only through the butcher’s aisles, where stinking meat and smoke and flies discourage loitering. By the end, I walk away with a dozen eggs, a pound of skirt steak, tortillas, a pint of honey, a pineapple, a knot of quesillo,[20] and six small avocados, all for less than $6.
The market is ringed with dilapidated and dusty maroon and white taxis, colectivos that make shared runs between Central de Abastos and the towns near Oaxaca; they announce their destinations with elaborately lettered village names scrolled across the top of the windshield. A row of food stalls align the pereferico road outside the market, small trailers with bar seating for four or five, stacks of meat on a vertical spit, slowly rotating around a natural gas flame; the cook expertly shaves off thin slices into a small flour tortilla and adds pineapple squares he slashes from atop of the rotisserie, catching them into the tortilla like a bartender trick from a campy chain restaurant. The gringas, topped with salsa and quesillo, are tacos dopamine, and my nephew and I eat them until we’re too tired to chew with our mouths closed. At night we walk the streets, intermixing with the comparsas and other tourists, watching young kids dancing on tall stilts and listening to trumpets blaring; they are the happiest of instruments, I think, because it must be impossible to play them quietly. We sip artisanal mezcal – a redundancy in Oaxaca if there ever was one – and yes, the hipsters are here. Mezcal is elementally local, and the best is harvested, by hand, either illegally or under restricted permits, from the mountains around Oaxaca, but hipsters have rolled in and made it bougie. The indigenous owner of a local distillery outside the city tells us he drinks about five shots a day, the first as soon as he rolls out of bed, while the bartender at Mezcaleria Los Amantes in the tourist district pours delicately with accompanying grandiloquent narration and tells us that one must drink mezcal “like you kiss.”[21] Regardless, and unlike Colombia’s aguardiente – literally, “fire water” – this shit is tasty.
My nephew leaves after a week, off to Mexico City where he will lose his wallet and identification, and then to Bogota and Cartagena, where in the surrounding jungle he will touch a bird or a cat or a wild pig and contract the local version of salmonella or jungle fever, completing a long thru-hike despite delirium and explosive diarrhea, returning to town on the back of a donkey, triumphant. I am left to deal with the unfucking.
I switch my Spanish lessons from the group setting with the Pelos Azules to one-on-one courses – again, the seclusion – with Manuel, a bespectacled twenty-something Zapotec who rides the bus well over an hour each way in order to attempt to teach me Spanish in a Oaxacan coffee shop. He is bright and motivated, and in between flashcards and oversugared coffee, we talk about the prospects of work other than language instruction that perhaps pays more, or even of living somewhere other than Oaxaca. Manuel is, in any conventional American wisdom, broke. He is married with a child, has no car, no savings, and lives on a small farm with his parents. He survives, in the most literal sense, day by day, and espouses happiness. Though I am not surprised, I press him. Studies have shown that though there is happiness in poverty – as there is in wealth – there is a threshold that corresponds with simple survival. What and when we eat; our labor as it relates to our physical and mental health; whether we’re able to provide for our families; or even to be able to identify a future – preferably bright – all contribute to our ability to be “happy”, whatever that means. I have my own experience with this level of poverty, and believe that not being able to plan for anything beyond the next paycheck alters us physiologically and, most often, detrimentally. But there is a higher limit as well, and the rich certainly experience inadequacies, and unfulfillment, and sadness, and cheating spouses and cancer and shitty children and a lack of purpose. What they don’t experience is a fear of losing a roof over their heads or an uncertainty as to where their next meal is coming from, or whether they should use their last dollars for gas money to get to work or breakfast for their children.
Manuel is undeterred. Money pays for things, he admits, and can buy security, but under no circumstance can it buy happiness. We worship that which we choose; some choose money or fame or time or reputation. Manuel chooses the present. “Purpose and happiness is where I find it.”
*****
The exterior wall between my apartment and the silver mine next to me serves as ad hoc soccer goal, three or four kids kicking a raggedy ball, piles of dog shit no doubt serving as impromptu defenders. An overweight boy is one of the few kids I observe wearing shorts in the temperate Oaxacan weather; he is the only one without a shirt. I think he must fancy himself the last real man in Oaxaca. He also unknowingly teaches me Spanish – gol!, yells a child; no es!, answers the fat kid – and that I can recognize present tense warms me. The past and future are simply simulations in your mind, I think, and the only real thing is the now. The future is pure speculation, and history is rarely true – or at least not the whole truth. For example, I was born in America not as a result of my mother’s heroic attempt to ensure my American citizenship, but simply because the hospitals were better there. She was not thinking of my future, but rather my (at the time) present, and the idea that my immediate vitality might be at risk if I were to be born in a subpar hospital. This is, I think, a good lesson. Perception might be reality, but it doesn’t have to be, and we can’t trade seclusion for clarity, any more than we can trade a country for a shirt. The trades we make are constructions of our own imagination, as are the things we choose to worship.
I choose to worship the present.
[1] Such a clinical way to describe one’s begatter, but what in lieu of? Natural father? Paterfamilias? Perhaps, given my ongoing attempts to learn Spanish and in a nod to Vice President Pence’s glorious display of mailing-it-in code-switching, my padre biológico.
[2] Even in dreams: Though most of mine are Daliesque – a few of the more memorable include switch-hitting dinosaurs fungoing rocks in my direction while I rowed a boat across Lake Shasta; crocodiles swimming backwards while swallowing my friend Ted; and a Bolivian marching band drum-and-fifing Jesus and his entourage up a Greek hillside switchback – some of my dreams are of such lucidity they effect real life. As in: I once dreamed I won the single sculls silver medal for Mexico at the 2004 Summer Olympics. I knew not whether to salute the flag or hold my hand over my heart; regardless, it inspired me to take up the real thing, and yes, you are reading a first-person travel narrative typed by the calloused hands of the Novice Division Champion, single sculls, 2007 Head of the Occoquan.
[3] Where are you from, gringo? Like the ferengis of Ethiopia or the muzungus of Uganda, gringo in Mexico is a ubiquitous term for just about any foreigner, and is not reserved for their neighbors to north. The term is Spanish in origin, and was intended for Greeks (griego); the Spaniards brought it with them to New Spain, where it eventually morphed to ‘gringo.’ Not to worry; much like “Canuck,” it’s not necessarily an insult. But have no doubt – you’ll know when it is.
[4] Such a vicious pairing of words, sexual and assault. No room or time in today’s world for clarification or elaboration, let alone consideration of evidence (or a lack thereof) or truthfulness of an accuser, or even an accused’s answer of “no, I didn’t.” As contrast, note that assault alone has become downright banal: Mayor Pete Buttigieg described President Trump’s draft-avoiding fake injury an “assault on the honor of this country.” Writer Mark Shea called Trump an “assault on common human decency.” The New York Times cited his “assault on climate science.” The watchdog group Common Cause has an entire website based on Trump’s “physical assault of the press.” The Washington Post cites his “assault on democracy,” and Rainforest Rescue blasts his “assault on US National Monuments.” Former CIA Director Mike Hayden wrote an entire book on it, and specifically Trump’s apparent “assault on intelligence.”
[5] No, I didn’t.
[6] Why are we only impervious? Can we not be pervious? Can we not be whelmed? Or plussed, gruntled, or combobulated? When I show mercy, am I not with ruth? Is my full torso not my riff? If I’ve dismembered a limb, can I not remember it? If I work for myself, am I jugated? Can I not be ept with my writing? And don’t get me started on ‘regardless’. Regardless, I love words, and remain fully gusted with the English language.
[7] In what is surely enshrined in the Pantheon of the Most Tiger Momish Things ever Uttered, Abu Abdallah’s mother, seeing him burst into tears upon one last look at his former kingdom, said “you do well, my son, to cry like a woman for what you couldn’t defend like a man.”
[8] Of Italians, Ligurians, and Genoans: Contemporary language refers to Columbus as Italian, but like his “discovery” of America, the truth evolves. Columbus was ostensibly born in Genoa, spoke Ligurian (though wrote almost exclusively in Spanish), and surely referred to himself as Genoese, yet even that is scrutinized – there are theories he was Catalan, Iberian-Jewish, Greek, Portuguese, Polish, Sardinian, Corsican, Norwegian, and – because why not – Scottish.
[9] “Who do we blame for the soul patch?” asks Vox. Indeed, whom do we blame? Despite the unlikely event one’s soul might escape from a leaky chin, a soul patch does not, in fact, patch anything. It’s just a shitty goatee abbreviated, and we’re all to blame.
[10] Why no gender-neutral English word for the child of a sibling? Why be forced to write “my oldest niece or nephew” when sobrino, or neveux, or the delicious but unwieldy geschwisterkinder will do? I propose siskid (or, if you must, brokid. Or sibkid. Or cuzkid).
[11] Important to note that Mr. Jefferson most likely cribbed this sentiment from Epicurus, a Roman philosopher who believed in the importance of living the good life. Despite dying from dysentery and a urinary tract infection (perhaps he led a life just a little too good) Epicurus was Epicurean to the end: “I have written this letter to you on a happy day to me, which is also the last day of my life. For I have been attacked by a painful inability to urinate, and also dysentery, so violent that nothing can be added to the violence of my sufferings. But the cheerfulness of my mind, which comes from the recollection of all my philosophical contemplation, counterbalances all these afflictions.”
[12] The New World Encyclopedia has a more straightforward fix: move about 20 minutes a day, feed my body correctly, practice yoga or meditation, and to do something I “really enjoy every day!” Seems easy.
[13] Original sin isn’t disobedience but loneliness, and God is patient zero: Adam and Eve left his company for the forbidden fruit of knowledge, and he’s been punishing humanity like a petulant child ever since.
[14] College Media Network ranks Nevada’s public school system 46th out of the 50 states; Forbes, 47th; World Atlas, 47th; US News, 45th; and USA Today, dead last at 50. Fortunately, none of these sites ranked the states by percentile, as I don’t totally understand how that works. Because I went to a Nevada public school.
[15] Translated, the Mexican slang for their exported heroin is Mad Libs in reverse: little bomb, pitch, white, pretty, horse, bald, load, meat, tar, scrap, bubble gum, brown, cat, the correct, goat, powder, bark, tiger, white tiger, north tiger, glass, oaf, and “fan of coco”, and if taking heroin makes me feel like I feel when I’m watching the film Coco, I might consider it.
[16] Perhaps the real reason I fail to learn Spanish is a lack of focus.
[17] Essentially, a parade endemic to a specific neighborhood or extended family, with local musicians and honoring the neighborhood or family dead.
[18] It may have been just me.
[19] Distant seconds: City of Low Awnings, City of Dog-shitted Streets, City Where the Early Bus Avoids the Protests.
[20] Oaxacan cheese, or quesillo, tastes like Monterey Jack, looks like mozzarella, handles like string cheese, and was concocted either by the devil or a harried but genius babysitter. See it made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3nG0ef2xYc
[21] My nephew slams his before the bartender is finished with her instruction.
I watch as she quickly cranks out three cityscapes, each with a brightly colored Cuban flag, buildings in varying stages of disrepair, and a more subtly drawn slogan, propaganda either for or against, the choice in the eye of the beholder. She wants everyone to know that the beautiful buildings in Old Havana – her inspiration – are falling down, but she feels stagnated by the times, and everything looks today like it did yesterday like it did fifty years ago. “Nothing is new,” she says. “I think the muse is on vacation.”
The Marcher: In 2003 seventy-five artists, journalists, community organizers and husbands were arrested and jailed for their anti-government activities; sixty-four were released in 2009 on condition that they immediately leave the country. The eleven remaining refused to abandon Cuba, and though they too were eventually released, their struggle continues. For the last thirty-three Sundays, Berta Soler and her Damas de Blancas have met here, outside the Santa Rita de Casia church, where they protest their husband’s imprisonment by making one circuit up la Quinta Avenida to 16th Street and back again, then walk the three blocks to the beach where they are met, violently, by what they say are government employees ordered to confront and beat them. And next Sunday? “We do it again.”
storms above the Straits of Florida occasionally bringing waves so violent they smash against the seawall, flood the road, and drench the buildings beyond it. Upon the wall sits a lonely, solitary figure with not a tourist in sight; a Miami Heat hat on his head and a trombone pressed so tightly against his lips his knuckles turn white. Armando is a professional, he says, but lost several of his teeth to disease – he shows me his dentures – and now is practicing just to get back to where he used to be. He plays three songs, All of Me, Memories, and the last, as I’m walking away, Yesterday, the significance of the last amplified by the supporting band of crashing waves, old cars, and history.
El Combatiente: On December 2, 1956, a twenty-nine year old Fidel Castro and eighty-one other men crash-landed the yacht Granma at Playa las Coloradas and changed Cuba forever. Francisco was eventually there too, a young man tired of Ferdinand Batista’s thuggery and wanting change. Of the twenty-four men in his small unit, twenty are still alive today, on the 59th Anniversary of Castro’s landing. Now Francisco sits on the sidewalk outside his house in the Miramar neighborhood of Havana, where he meticulously scrawls out orders for his wife’s pan con perro, pan con mayonesa, and pan con croquetas and unsuccessfully cajoles her, twenty-five years his junior, into posing for a photograph. ¡Vive Cuba!
planted so sparsely and randomly intermixed with the lush, natural vegetation that he has to hold the plants in his hands before I can see them. An “hola” and a smile turns into a forty-five minute discussion on family, farming, hurricanes, coffee (Brazilian is the best but he’s willing to change his mind), tourists, sons and pants – the former of which he has three; the latter, one. “Farming is hard and I wish I had more money. But I have this view every day.”
