I'm Back from MexicoSeasonal Affective Disorder's kicking in

Mexico was so weird. I can't explain it. I was on this magical adventure complete with a new language and lots of new people to talk to. Indios. Artists. Travelers who never really go back to where they came from, and keep moving from place to place. I studied Spanish and would chat aimlessly with anyone in a language that wasn't mine, then babbled endlessly with other English-speakers about all the newness.

Round about the 20th of Febuary (my birthday, and generally the height of SAD season for me) I broke down. My mother came to Mexico and we fought, as we often do, and I was on the streets of Oaxaca with nothing. My resolve to learn and discover and see Mexico with veiled eyes fell apart. I tried my best to keep my eyes shut and they just opened, sadly, showing me things I wish I hadn't seen. Suddenly, I saw what a corrupt and almost medieval place Mexico can be. My friend Zane Fischer showed up and handed me a $50 bill so I could keep on keepin' on, and then BanaMex refused to take my bill at fair exchange rates because my bill, representational of the stablest currency in the world, was slightly torn at the top corner. I was stuck. I sold my bill at five pesos on the dollar and sold some of my folk art just to get a bus back to the beach, where my friends were. I was indignant, frankly, and still am - as I shouted at the bank manager, "This is a country where you can't get potable water out of the tap and you won't take a torn bill? Your priorities are FUCKED UP!"

Suddenly, Mexico seemed raw, harsh, untamed, and ludicrous. I had formulated a thesis question before I left about foreign (particularly American) investment in Mexico - did it create opportunity or was it simple exploitation? I quickly came to the conclusion that without foreign investment from American companies, Mexico would simply be a corrupt, unprogressive, impoverished state where there's no living wage, no child labor laws, and an utter lack of meaningful feminist presence - as well as an ignorant mess of machismo that I already find appalling in my own country, much less in a foreign tongue.

For the first time in my life, colonialism made sense. I kid you not. Suddenly, I no longer saw missionaries and Columbus and Cortez and the rest as simply ignorant cultural imperialists - I could actually SEE THEIR SIDE that perhaps someone had to come into all this disorder and give these people a little direction. It no longer seemed like a simple case of hegemony - when you watch a country BURN ITS TRASH (including plastic) in open-air fires everywhere and when you find that many of the eco-environmental projects going on are there mostly as the result of foreign investment and initiative - when you watch, as I did, a six-year-old girl being forced to work the streets selling useless trinkets while her head is hot with fever and she's sporting a pile of chicken pox -

I found her brother and told him he had to take her home. He shrugged. A teenager, fine, fuck him. I FOUND THE PARENTS. The parents said, "She has to work." My friend and translator Hector told me that only the boy goes to school because it's better for them for her to work. He asked me why I even cared. I told him I found it utterly appalling that only me, the imperialist consumer cultural capitalist pig from America, thought a six-year-old girl shouldn't have to work with a fever. "In my country," I said, with something approaching pride, "there are authorities who'd call this child abuse and THEY'D BE FUCKING RIGHT."

I began to hear stories about the election in June, about how PRI was skimming dough off every fund to finance its national and gubernatorial elections. I sat on the Zocolo in Oaxaca City which was recently refurbished to exclude street food vendors, meaning Starbuck's-sized prices for a cup of coffee, a sanitized "plaza" that is presumably more "turistica friendly" and watched policemen with machine guns and nasty attitudes push "undesirable" vendors away. I saw a student protest over the privatization of education bring forth close to a hundred cops in riot gear simply because they were protesting on the Zocolo - which with the new renovation was declared a "protest-free zone" which included the relocation of government offices to another location.

Oaxaca City had a thriving arts scene, but I couldn't stay as long as I wanted to, in part because of the Banamex bank fiasco, and I beat it back to the beach. There, in Puerto Escondido, was Mexico's most redeeming quality - the water, and every moment I spent time in it was another moment where I wasn't thinking about the sad realities of the "paradise" that surrounded me. I was in a place where "working people" worked in stores like MexPipe where the price of a pair of surf shorts was 400 pesos ($40), an amount of money I wouldn't spend in the US of A on a pair of shorts, working full-time for 750 ($75) to 900 ($90) pesos a week. Honestly - people who worked in American-owned shops MADE MORE MONEY than Mexican-owned businesses, according to my informal polling, and in the markets I found prices to be quite comparable to US prices for things - sure, the fruit and the fish was fresher and sweeter, but penny for penny, prices were about the same, and people made SO MUCH LESS.

Teaching English: Too Much Fun

At some point, the kids around my building got sick of me practicing my Spanish on them all the tmie, and asked me to teach them English. Seemed a fair trade, and without question, every last one of them wanted to go to the US. "Why?" I'd say. "You could open a lemonade stand in Puerto Escondido and make more money than most people in the states," (it's damn near true) but the entrepreneurial vibe isn't innate in poor people most of the time - they want a job because it seems secure or something, and yet considering the CRAZY RISKS involved in getting across the border...seems like a lemonade stand makes a lot more sense. If people were *really* concerned about the future of Mexico, they'd quit harping on the suckiness of the Maquiladora District and they'd fight for programs that teach tourist workers in Mexico how to speak basic English (and maybe a little German and French, too) and teach people the ins and outs of starting their own businesses, IMHO.

I am not a human being - I am a walking dollar sign

One day, towards the end of my stay, my mother decided she wanted to rent a car and drive to Chachaua, a lagoon inside the largest national park in Mexico, only an hour away. Since she needed me to do the driving, I was to meet her at 8:30 in the morning at the Budget Rent-A-Car, which the Internet said was located at the Posada Real, the most expensive hotel in the city and waaaaay the hell over on the other side of town from where I was, which was La Punta, the Point, aka "the beginner's surf beach." I was living in a hammock on the beach for $3.50 a night in utter bliss, asleep by midnight, up by 7am to the sounds of brewing Nescafe and dreadlocked hippies waxing their boards.

I was up by 7am, had a coffee, took a quick swim, then made my way over to my favorite beach cafe. I had made friends with the owner-senora there one day when two gringos walked on their pina colada bill, and I played diplomat to avoid an international incident. She got her dough, the police weren't called, and then she asked for English lessons, which I happily gave. She said she felt like if she knew English, people wouldn't try to take advantage of her, and I agreed.

Her husband drove a taxi, so I went there first to see if he was available - it was a 45 peso drive to that part of town, and I'd rather give it to him than some stranger. Yes, he was there. Why was I going to Posada Real? To rent a car, I said, with no idea of the sad strange can of worms my words would open up.

She had a car to rent. I explained we already had a car, rented over the Internet. She kept insisting I should rent her car. Her Spanish became more rapid and intense. After awhile, I pretended I didn't understand, and craned my neck around looking for her husband and his taxi. I told her I needed to go. She walked off - and returned with her entire family in tow, including the brother-in-law who used to live in LA and had good English.

He was there to explain to me that I needed to rent their car. We were to negotiate a price. They offered at 700 pesos a day - I explained to him that our car was 350 pesos a day, from the Internet, that it was mother's deal anyway, and I was simply going to meet her. By the time it was all said and done, she was very upset and wouldn't speak to me - a scenario that continued for the rest of my stay.

I was now running late. I arrived at the Posada Real. At this point, my Spanish was more or less good enough to be able to say, "I am to meet my mother here, an older woman, who was to rent a car from this place." My mother was nowhere in sight. Had she been there already and rented a car? No one could say - however, they had a car for me to rent, right there. I tried to explain that a car had already been rented - had an older woman been here to rent a car? No one could say - but they had a car right here I could rent. I was in no position to rent a car, I was there to sign some paperwork. I asked the manager to call me a cab.

"Where are you from?" he said, in what sounded like perfect English. At last, I thought, and asked him if he could ask the others if my mom had been there. He nodded, then asked me if I wanted to rent a car. Christ. And where was I staying? At Buena Onda, at La Punta, I replied, and he said,

"I have lots for sale at La Punta. Very nice place to live. Here is my card."

The cab arrived and I took it to a friend's who spoke Spanish.

"I am not a human being," I said. "I am a walking dollar sign."

He laughed at my story, and we got into his car and drove around looking for my mother, at my hotel, at her hotel, and finally, he suggested that we go back to the Posada Real and see if his Spanish could unroot whether or not my mother had been there and if she'd already rented a car.

We arrived - and there she was. "They told me you had been here and were coming back." Had you been here before, I asked. "Yes - and the car rental place is right up the street. I told them to ask you to meet me there."

I retell this story because there were just so many times when I felt like I was deliberately given misinformation in the blind hope that I would rent or buy something that I didn't actually need. In the case of the Posada Real (the most expensive hotel in PE, owned by Best Western, and presumably not instructed to fleece tourists at every opportunity) I could've cared less - I didn't know these people. But in the case of my friends at the beach cafe - the steadfast refusal to hear the reality of the situation, to continue to try and rent me a car even when they had a proper translation, and then the utter refusal of the senora to talk to me again because I had offended her by not renting her car...

If it didn't have a beach - I'm certain no one would bother. I wouldn't.