April 26, 2022:
Just like with anything, anywhere, the more you learn, the less you know. The same can be said of languages, countries and, well, life itself.
I like to travel because it reminds me how small I am and how big my desire is. This time, I went to Mexico with company. In fact, I did not even drive. Vicente picked me up at 9:30 and we left for the border. I packed my workout clothes, my passport, and naturally a chair.
Vicente is a native Spanish speaker who grew up in Oregon and lives in Phoenix, now. He prefers to speak to me in Spanish and I prefer to understand everything.. and most of the time, I do. But the things I say back often come out wrong: I said apoyativo (translating from supportive) the other day, and well, he looked at me and said: “that’s not a word.” Not to mention it sounded like I was talking about poultry (you know.. pollo?).
I was embarrassed and the reason is because: I am a Spanish TEACHER. Not only am I a Spanish teacher, many of my students are fluent Spanish SPEAKERS. And here I am, translating words from English to Spanish and while I can come up with many…. I speak like a running dishwasher sometimes. You know the dishes are in there, and they might be clean, but you can’t eat off of them.
One thing I regret is being a Spanish teacher.
I mean, imagine how we scoff at English speakers who make mistakes, or struggle with pronunciation, and speak it as a second, third or fourth language. We do have a culture of linguistic dominance because English is the international language. But we laugh at “foreign” accents without so much as understanding the struggle (the monolingual among us). At least, that’s what I remember growing up: making fun of foreign accents, thinking of them as playful, silly or dumb.
But I digress. I rode to Mexico with Vicente and he showed me where to get a travel permit. I want to go there this summer. I want to drive to Mexico, by myself, to see it. That is what I want. Yes, I thought about flying but I don’t want to. How will I get around when I get there?
I wrote that post on April 26, 2022, and I left it in the drafts. I didn’t see what this post was worth posting for. But now I do, so I continued writing it from a year later. From right now.
Driving to Mexico, from what used to be Mexico (Arizona), is an experience. But so is dating.
But so is life.
And driving with a man who used to be your man, but is now simply a man, from what used to be Mexico to what is actual Mexico, well, one should bring a passport.
Vicente wears REI. Vicente exclusively wears REI. I personally would not be caught on the top of Everest in REI unless I found it at Goodwill, or from the thrifting palace for the impatient: eBay.
-It’s so comfortable- he says in English.
-Okay, pues- I let a hand linger out of the top of the slightly opened window of his VW Golf.
What comes at too great a cost to me is staying at my high school.
I have worked there for less than one school year, if you consider that the 2020-2021 school year was governed by the Zoomiverse, it’s only slightly less than one school year. So I just found a job in Phoenix, and I am leaving my life after Guatemala and now after grad school.
And one of many things that they don’t teach you in Grad School is that the skills you need to teach students with unstable lives are not the same skills you need to teach the other populations. They serve up the same steaming hot dish of expectations for all teachers, all schools and all districts, no matter the circumstance of the lives of the students.
So you get your first job at a hard school to work, because the turnover is higher, and then you leave. Or maybe you don’t. But I will. And then I used my sick days to go to Mexico.
And the thing about Vicente is that he is the most unassuming and generous person I know. And he is also likely to ghost me. Vicente travels for work, or at least he has been, but he says he is going to leave that job. But even if he doesn’t leave that job, he is still likely to ghost me.
Vicente is a man of kind, aloof in-the-momentness. And I am a woman of planned, thoughtful and measured love. The kind I think about giving to people before I give it to them. Vicente sees a dying owl on the sidewalk and drops everything to save it.
Vicente’s English is better than my Spanish, he’s been speaking it for years. But my Spanish is… well, Vicente has helped me so much. With him, I don’t feel nearly as timid as I do with other Spanish speakers. But the thing is, we both have marked accents in our second tongues. But we try. Like I said, Vicente’s been speaking English since he was 18. And me? When I was 18, I was learning how to speak college. In the last 5 years, I’ve been chewing on Spanish.
It is important for me to tell you all of this because the first time I went to Hermosillo, I went alone. I had ideas in my head because one of my best friends grew up there. She also lets me practice my Spanish with her, though we always seem to land in English because we have so much to say about teaching, which is another language all its own. And Spanish is slower for me.
Anyway, I thought I knew what Hermosillo would feel like because I used to live in Guatemala. At least subconsciously I had the same expectations. Hermosillo is not a destination, and neither was the pueblo in Sololá. Hermosillo is a nice place, and so was Santa Clara, but people don’t book flights to these places unless their heart is already there. And when I went to Hermosillo alone, yes, I felt the difference. I felt that I didn’t fit in. But this time with Vicente navigating everything, and explaining to me “reasons why,” well, I really felt like an outsider.
And Hermosillo isn’t like Guatemala at all: not the Guatemala I knew, which was warm and friendly and open. This Mexico, this small little picture of a country full of pictures, this one little moment of Mexico was nothing like what I expected.
Vicente’s very comfort with the culture, even driving through the streets, was a totally different experience when it was laid out next to mine.
And I don’t know how to describe it, except that the parallels I draw in my life experience are always going to limit me, whether it’s comparing one school to the next, or one partner to another, or the life you are living vs. the life you could have lived.
But what I do know is that the pictures don’t capture it: they don’t capture what I feel like when I can’t run in Hermosillo (Mexico). I couldn’t find flat roads and I almost tripped or hit my face too many times, or found the firulais. But then, the chuchos almost ate me in Santa Clara (Guatemala) too. Vicente knew what food to order, where to submit and exchange permits, and to keep extra pesos on him.
I still have spare quetzales somewhere in my stuff. I need to bring them back to Guatemala and spend them. Or maybe I just need to let go of things like saved quetzales, illusions about dating, or how it feels to see Mexico with a friend who exposes how foreign you are.