Monday, August 24, 2009
Neighbors
While I was at the beach with my friend Warren this past week, I read Mexican Days, an insightful travelogue of sorts written by Tony Cohan. In a way, the book is a sequel to On Mexican Time, the must-read-if-you-live-here account of his move, two decades ago, from New York to San Miguel. Naturally, I loved the references, in both books, to my adopted home town, and enjoyed puzzling out the real identities of characters and locations he references. But his new book intrigued me every bit as much because most of the places he visits are places I too have visited over the past two years, and it was fun to see how his observations and reactions dovetailed, for the most part, with my own.
As a recent expat, (whatever that is), I found his insights about the relationship between my current and former homes especially interesting... and worth sharing.
The Aeromexico flight vaulted over the dry northern states, then westward toward the darkening horizon line of the Pacific... The plane was filled with Mexicans returning to work in the States or to visit relatives for Christmas. Somewhere below us stretched the vast, porous frontera, with its yawning expanses of desert, prairie and mountains. Geography is fate, I thought. Imagine England and all of North Africa -- Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt -- sharing a common, unguarded border. Across this mythical demarcation running from Tijuana/San Diego all the way to Matamoros/Brownsville on the Caribbean, two deeply different societies gaze at each other, imagine each other, imitate each other, visit each other, resent each other, violate each other, and penetrate each other in every way imaginable. Labor and drugs and music and food flow north; money and hip-hop and merchandise and retirees flow south...
This great intercambio, involving countless millions of people and billions of dollars, often illicit, also showers hard-won blessings: a man who gets paid three dollars a day back home can make twelve an hour en el otro lado and wire a good portion of it home by Western Union -- and in one of Mexico's countless poor, stacked colonias of unsurfaced brick and cement, electricity blooms, food appears on family tables, new school or football uniforms are purchased, and a student enters the university on the hill.
Living in the crosshairs of this cultural shift, I am both expression and instrument of it: double resident, hence double agent, in the service of both sides and neither. Spiritual migrant, permanent gringo, riding the tidal currents that surge across this semipermeable membrane, la frontera.
As a recent expat, (whatever that is), I found his insights about the relationship between my current and former homes especially interesting... and worth sharing.
The Aeromexico flight vaulted over the dry northern states, then westward toward the darkening horizon line of the Pacific... The plane was filled with Mexicans returning to work in the States or to visit relatives for Christmas. Somewhere below us stretched the vast, porous frontera, with its yawning expanses of desert, prairie and mountains. Geography is fate, I thought. Imagine England and all of North Africa -- Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt -- sharing a common, unguarded border. Across this mythical demarcation running from Tijuana/San Diego all the way to Matamoros/Brownsville on the Caribbean, two deeply different societies gaze at each other, imagine each other, imitate each other, visit each other, resent each other, violate each other, and penetrate each other in every way imaginable. Labor and drugs and music and food flow north; money and hip-hop and merchandise and retirees flow south...
This great intercambio, involving countless millions of people and billions of dollars, often illicit, also showers hard-won blessings: a man who gets paid three dollars a day back home can make twelve an hour en el otro lado and wire a good portion of it home by Western Union -- and in one of Mexico's countless poor, stacked colonias of unsurfaced brick and cement, electricity blooms, food appears on family tables, new school or football uniforms are purchased, and a student enters the university on the hill.
Living in the crosshairs of this cultural shift, I am both expression and instrument of it: double resident, hence double agent, in the service of both sides and neither. Spiritual migrant, permanent gringo, riding the tidal currents that surge across this semipermeable membrane, la frontera.
# posted by goots @ 4:21 PM 
