“As a single and childless woman,
you’re an oddity. They don’t know what to do with you,” said Elizabeth, a new
friend and client who’d lived and worked in Mexico for eight years. She regaled
me with stories of her alienation, even working with the good guys in
reproductive health, even in Mexico City, despite her fluency in Spanish. "Until I got married and had kids. Then, miraculously, I got some respect."
How could I know that the very
untethered state that allowed me to wander off for two years to be of service
would doom me?
I was a mala mujer down
to the core. I lived alone in my apartment on Diaz and I bought wine at the Bodega
Aurerra (Mexican Walmart) and I used tampons, which you could only get in
boxes of 10, available only from behind the pharmacy counter, on the upper
shelf, out of harm’s way, where a sales associate had to retrieve them for you.
God knows what manner of shameful behavior was going on behind my closed
apartment door.
According to Octavio Paz, the
ambassador, poet, and Nobel Prize winner for his renowned book of essays, The
Labyrinth of Solitude, “the mala mujer – the ‘bad woman’ – is almost
always accompanied by the idea of aggressive activity. She is not passive like
the ‘self-denying mother,’ the ‘waiting sweetheart,’ the hermetic idol: she
comes and goes, she looks for me and then leaves them. Her extreme
mobility…renders her invulnerable. Activity and immodesty unite to petrify her
soul.” (Labyrinth)
Wow! I read his piece on Mexican Masks
over and over, intrigued, mind-boggled, referring back frequently to my
highlights and margin notes that bloodied the pages. But I could not, at the
time, see how I how was fighting the unspoken label to curry favor with my
counterparts and, in doing so, was losing me. I was too close to it. And if I
had seen and acknowledged the kind of discrimination thwarting me at every
turn, I would have had to surrender, take a Peace Corps ET (Early Termination),
and head back across the border where I belonged.
Perhaps this was why, despite
my ambivalence about being home those first weeks and months of my Returned PCV
status, a cauldron of profound elation, at moments, was bubbling inside me.
I remember the first night I
ventured up to Mount Pleasant Street for a glass of wine at the local watering
hole. Glass of wine. Even the words filled me with a sense of
other-worldly appreciation as I stepped in the door as was met with a rush of
body warmth and din of merriment. I sat tall in my stool, like a big girl, as
the bartender came right over and laid a coaster before me. I was
mesmerized by the lengthy, laminated list of possibilities, Pinot, Merlot,
Riojo.
I couldn’t possibly decide; so
Will the bartender recommended the Rhone and gave me a taste before filling my
glass to the rim. It was a late winter in Washington, and every time the
door opened, a waft of frigid air swept in and gave me a shiver of exhilaration
down to my frozen toes. After two and a half years in a desert, I felt profound
thanks for the bone-chilling cold.
As I sipped my ruby wine,
taking in bombardment of English chatter, a waiter suddenly appeared a flatiron
pan held high over his head. He lowered it and lit a Bic lighter to it and the
pan exploded into flames. The entire establishment erupted in applause; cheese
flambé was cause for celebration in Mount Pleasant, USA. My eyes must have been
popping out of my head as the waiter set the bubbling halloumi on the
bar because the couple next to me smiled and offered me a bite.
At El Fenix, my local watering hole
in Rioverde, other than Rita’s brightness and the merry mariachi music whining
over the sound system, a solemnity pervaded, a sense that those of us there,
sipping our cervezas and michaladas (only beer-based drinks
served), were hiding our sins from the rest of the world, behind the smoke
colored glass. We were the scorned ones. And I would not have been welcomed if
it hadn’t been for the fact that the owner and bartender was a woman and fast
becoming my best friend.
Now talk about a mala mujer.
Rita was not only single and childless, but a cantina owner on top of it,
serving up the diablo’s brew, and Dios only knew what else. But
she didn’t care what they thought. She’d lived through the death of her father
at age 12 and abandonment of her mother at 15. Left to raise her four younger
sisters, she crossed the border, worked as a domestic, and sent the money back
home. Even then the neighbors in her community cursed the Garcia girls: You’ll all grow up to be bunch of putas.
They did not. They learned how to survive the small town fires. Pueblo
pequeno, infierno grande.
Once I found Rita, and she found me,
we did not let go. I became her protection – because “Nobody gonna touch
me when I have the gringa by my side.” And she became mine, because nobody
would or could explain the inner workings of the pueblito and make me
feel better for feeling so useless as Rita. Suddenly I felt not so alone.
So can you see I’m only just
beginning to understand all this? To survive my time in Mexico I had to stuff
the fears down and put on my Mexican mask and carry-on. My ingrained American
optimism, in the face of challenges, also served, or it suckered me.
A year and a half after I left
Rioverde my friend Rita risked life and limb to cross over the border again. It
took her three months and close to 10,000 dollars, money saved up for El Fenix
and her sister’s house-cleaning business in Dallas going into the hands of the narcos,
not just dealing in drugs anymore, but much more lucratively, in people.
On her journey she was jailed twice, and the final time held in a motel room
with 12 other migrants for weeks until the coyotes decided it was her turn,
until her sister was so desperate that she would agree to a doubling of the fee
upon drop-off or never see her sister again.
That’s how bad Rioverde was for
single women.
As my writing partner, Julie
Gabrieli, put it on a recent check-in call, “We’re good at talking about the
lipstick, but what about the pig? There’s only so much you can do if you
are forced into a system that is fundamentally broken.”
What IS ‘The Story of Sustainability
from South of the Border,’ really? I’ve been getting closer to the truth,
moving away from my initial yearning to make it a story with a happy ending and,
thus, justify my 2 years and 3 months’ investment in PCMX at the peak of my
career.
But underneath it all I’m still
blaming myself. I was the demanding exijente gringa, pushing for change
when they weren’t ready, not honoring the cultural norms, fighting the paternalism
ineffectively, and even deeper, bringing my history and baggage of issues with
the ‘father’ inappropriately into my Mexico service. "Life is a fight and
I am alone."
I don’t want to put lipstick
on a pig, and I don’t want to be a whiner. I want to share the truth of the
experience: the good, bad and beautiful. I want to discuss the darkness
of the culture and the experience and also the light. Because there was
light.
I stuck it out and met Angelica and the Zama
Mamas and we did something together that was pretty extraordinary. I
don’t know if it was sustainable. I have not been in touch with
them. I’ve been too afraid to find out. I stuck it out and met Rita
and made a friend for life. And I cannot say I wasn’t at least an indirect
influence on her decision to cross the border and make a more sustainable and
happy life for herself with her sister on this side of the border. I stuck it
out and met Professor Fernando Nino and had the opportunity to teach his
engineering students about sustainability and innovation and open their eyes to
what’s possible.
But mostly I stuck it out. Now coming
on four years since the completion of my service, I may be just be getting
glimpses of what it all meant.
