You learn who you are in Mexico by knowing who you are not.
“Where are you from?” the cab driver asks as you slide into the backseat of the pine-fresh taxi. Faux leather seats gleam in the brightness of the midday sun. He turns down the volume of the talk radio program he was listening to before you approached. You tell him you are from a small beach community 30 minutes south of Playa del Carmen.
“No, where are you from?”
Your answer is important. If you say you are from Chicago, Toronto, or London, the cab driver knows he can charge you 20 to 50 percent more than a Mexican for the same trip. He thinks you can pay more because most people – those who must earn their daily bread by cleaning up after you and pretending to be cheerful when you ask whether the restaurant has gluten-free tamales – are working. They are not taking gleaming white cabs in the middle of the day to a place dotted with restaurants where you will pay stupid money for a dish of soggy linguine and lobster while a mariachi band half-heartedly plays “La Bamba” too close to your ear.
“North Carolina,” you answer. You were born in Philadelphia and raised in South Jersey but spent the last two decades in the Tar Heel State. You are running away from yourself, but you don’t know yet. You give him the state of the last-known address because it’s easier than sketching the geography of your life in a watercolor of hesitant Spanish as you wait at the light that has changed three times now, but you are no closer to crossing the highway.
The cab driver smiles at you in the rear-view mirror. Now, you have told him the truth. The real negotiation can begin. He switches the radio from the talk radio program to Taylor Swift as a concession to your Americanness. You ask him to return to the talk radio program because you want to know what steps the new President is taking to address the pending gas shortage in Mexico City caused by two ruptures in the pipeline on the same day and threatening to affect the entire country. You are not just another gringa but with brown skin. It’s his move.
Blood Sacrifice
You are not Mexican.
Your Americanness bridles at the notion that you cannot be Mexican by just showing up in the country. In the United States, you can achieve the shallowest sense of belonging by consistently performing superficial displays of conformity.
You are American if you pledge allegiance to the flag. You are American if you pay taxes. If you can pepper your speech with at least 30 years of pop culture references, you are American. You are American if you drink beer. But if you drink craft beer, that makes you a different sort of American.
However, Mexico is different. Mexico requires blood sacrifice, precision, and desire. Imitation is no substitute for the real thing. But who are you to argue? You are not Mexican.
Your opinion about all things Mexican doesn’t count if you are not Mexican. Mexicans will tell you this with a tight, slight smile. You are not allowed to suggest you like green pozole more than red pozole because you think the cilantro, epazote (a kind of tea leaf), and a dash of jalapeño is a better contrast to the thick wooliness of the hominy than the ancho, guajillo or piquin chiles, common ingredients in the red broth.
When you ask about idiosyncratic flecks of personality, such as why your friend Marianne screams, “Viva Mexico!” when making a sharp U-turn in the middle of traffic on a narrow road, she will dismiss the obvious terror in your voice by shrugging, “I’m Mexican.”
While you are “Black” in the United States, you are “American” in all other countries.
You first learned this incontrovertible fact 20 years ago while on assignment in South Africa, writing about post-apartheid health care. You desperately wanted to belong to the race of stoic women with burnished black skin and beautiful voices that rose together in harmony like tributaries of a river.
But when you attempted to learn the nuanced “clicks” of the Xhosa language, your sounds were of a hummingbird, not the deep, sonic rhythm that echoed the ages. The women pitied you because you were robbed of your language and no longer recognized your ancestral voice. You were lovely and shiny but American nonetheless.
Aching for Permanency
You need to understand your desire to be Mexican.
You like yourself exactly as you are. You are a Black American which means you invented cool. Cool oozes from your seductive brown eyes and how your broad lips form in a perfect “o” when you say, “Hola.” You know that your Beyoncé strut turns heads in Tulum, Tallahassee, or Turkey. You have grown into wisdom and grace through trial, triumph, and experience, but you want to be Mexican in the way that white girls wear cornrows and slap base into their voice to “sound Blacker,” whatever that is.
You want to become Mexican because you are lonely. You want to be Mexican because you feel orphaned in the world. You attempt an emotional connection through a Wi-Fi connection. You scroll through social media and like the post where your high school physics teacher shared a photo of the seafood dish he ate on date night at a chain restaurant in your hometown. Your like conceals your disdain for chain restaurants. You are a stranger to the longings of your own heart.
You want to become Mexican because you ache for permanency. Mexico survived war, colonization, independence, shattering earthquakes and economies, gas shortages, corrupt governments, and drug cartels. Death, a constant companion since your mother’s death, peeks over your shoulder, taps its watch, and says, “Tempus fugit, motherfucker.”
You wept when you saw the Mexican countryside for the first time.
You were assigned to report on U.S. migration’s impact on small Mexican towns and cities. You marveled at how the mountains rose out of the earth like fresh, baked bread. You inhaled the verdant, pungent aroma of the wide, spacious land through the windows of the chartered bus that chauffeured you, trailing clouds of black smoke.
You laughed through tears when you tasted tortillas made by the woman with the wrinkled, brown hands and a gap-toothed grin that mirrored your own. Until tasting her tortilla topped with chicken, peppers, and onion, you didn’t know what unconditional love tasted like. Eating the tortilla underneath the shade of a bending tree in the Mexican countryside, you vowed that someday you would live here.
It took 15 years that convulsed with divorce, professional triumphs, defeat, stinging heartbreak, and death, but you know you are here in Mexico. You traded the dusty heartland of Mexico with which you first fell in love for the Caribbean coast of Mexico.
You had not meant to betray your first love, but the combination of turquoise water and powdery-white sand set against a backdrop of lush, green jungle was too much for you to resist. You sold nearly all your possessions. You gave away your beloved cat. You dusted off the Spanish you learned while studying abroad 25 years ago in Seville, Spain. You moved to Mexico only to discover you are not Mexican.
Be a Lioness
Like a skeptical mother-in-law, Mexico tested you to see if you were worthy.
Mexico has seen the likes of you. Smiling Americans are a dime a dozen. You are cheap and can be easily bought by the slightest gesture of friendliness in a foreign land. Mexico knows better. She teased the idea of you living in a spacious beachfront condo where your first sight each morning was the undulating sea, only to see you leave the condo after ten days because your intrusive, American landlord was bat shit crazy. Mexico tested your mettle by forcing you to live in a vodka distillery in the jungle with scorpions and threats of prowling jaguars. One by one, your trusted clients, people you have known and served for years, suddenly abandon you.
You contemplate returning to your home country. You yearn for consistent hot showers and your favorite hazelnut coffee creamer. While calculating your next steps, you sort through your closest friends’ character, temperament, and geographical location to see who might have a spare bedroom or couch you could sleep on for a few months. You mentally compose the sad yet hopeful Facebook post where you explain to your friends, acquaintances, and high school physics teacher that while some dreams are deferred, others, like moving to Mexico, were never meant to be. But then, on a warm Tuesday in November, the citizens of your home country elected an orange dictator.
The election of the madman and the firehose of racism he unleashes traps you. You know that you can never go home again. The President and the forces that led to his election continue multiplying and spreading like a parasitic infection.
You should know.
You had five parasitic infections within your first six months in Mexico. Now you know how to take care of yourself when there’s no one around, you don’t have a car, and you pray every five minutes to the toilet god. You cannot go home to the United States and have no home in Mexico. What do you do?
“If you want to live in Mexico, you must be a lioness,” said your friend, Sophia, one of three local shamans, all of which you know.
You think being a lioness is a matter of puffing up your ego. But Mexico teaches you humility and patience.
When standing in line, you stifle your American impatience and amuse yourself by people-watching. While your car is in the shop for three months waiting to be fixed, you navigate the small cities and towns along the 25 miles of coast by walking and taking public transportation.
You learn the taxi drivers’ names and faces. You observe which day the money truck replenishes your local ATM. You calculate how far you must walk from the bus stop to your favorite seaside sushi restaurant with the breathtaking ocean view and delightful service. You have learned how to live as a canny lioness. But you are still not Mexican.