Living in our corner of Mexico is really different from living in the United States. It’s really foreign, the ubiquity of Coca Cola notwithstanding. After six years here, I still feel foreign and I know I always will. That´s not a bad thing. And it doesn’t mean people are cold to us or ignore us or don’t include us. It just means that there are real cultural differences between the people who were brought up here and us. The longer I’m here, the more comfortable I feel, but sometimes the less I feel I know and understand. I was thinking recently about Donna Leon, an American, who writes mysteries with a Venetian hero. I think she’s lived in Venice longer than we’ve lived here, but I would really be reluctant to pretend to plumb the minds and hearts of our Mexican friends and neighbors, to make them the main protaganists at any rate, as she does, and I’m not sure that will change. It’s not that people of different cultures don’t grow close and loving – they marry each other, for crying out loud, and stay married. It’s just that I keep becoming aware of all the different angles people see the world from.
Foreigners notice pretty quickly that Mexicans tend to be courteous and helpful. Sales people are rarely rude; even police asking for a mordita are often polite about it. At this point in my life here,I know it’s not because Mexicans are wishy-washy nice. More I think it has to do with the importance of treating each other with respect pretty much no matter what the circumstances for the sake of all concerned. When I first came my New York City instincts got me in trouble for loudly insulting a civil servant when he wasn’t providing the service I thought he was supposed to provide. I can immediately tell when I’ve gone too far. People’s face muscles move downward into a stiff, stern position. They straighten their backs. They tell you (or they told me) they’re going to call the police, and lo and behold a policeman appears, rifle in hand.
Americans tend to dwell on respect and disrespect, too. But in the US, in some situations at least you’d be a wuss if you didn’t go for the jugular and expect such treatment in return. Oh yeah? Oh yeah. Look at US politics: it thrives on insults. It thrives on dividing people into enemy factions.
In Mexico, in public, I rarely hear raised voices. I´ve been aware of people being angry at each other, but it’s always expressed quietly. This quiet anger can seem pretty powerful to me.
Octavio Paz addresses the issue of respect in his book, The Labyrinth of Solitude, which he wrote in the 1950s. While Mexico and Mexicans have changed since then, at least in some places his observations seem on target. At least around here, in public, people do not come out charging: they seem relatively passive. Contained would probably be a better word. Yet Paz would say that it is a fundamental defensiveness against insult rather than an acceptance of it. People don’t insult because they don’t want to be insulted. Often it seems to us Gringos that they tell you what you want to hear. Primarily I think this is because they don’t want to get into a brouhaha. “Of course I can get done by Saturday,” vs. “Well Saturday would be too hard.” “But I need it by Saturday.” “Maybe you could find someone else.” “But I hired you…..” at which point the conversation can descend into insults. The trick is to figure out when something will be done by Saturday and when it won’t. And there are clues.
Anyway, Paz argues that Mexicans withdraw into solitude by their absence of confrontation. And it’s interesting to note that while Mexico is a noisy country, Mexicans themselves are pretty quiet. Noise, like the noise of the first bus at 530am, the noise of street vendors touting their wares over loudspeakers, the gong of a metal stick against gas containers as the gas delivery trucks rumble by, the call of the cacahuate man, the radios with speakers directed out windows, and especially the cohetes, the rockets that people set off for any number of reasons: to tell people it’s time to get up and go somewhere, to celebrate parts of mases, just to make general noise in the midst of celebrations. Just for fun. But people are quiet. You can go to a party usually set up in the street with giant speakers blaring out music and people dancing, but the PEOPLE are quiet.
People are also quiet-private-about their grief although the ceremonies aren’t private. I’ve described velarias. The living room is filled with flowers and an altar and the coffin. People pour in with offerings and sit for awhile and eat and talk, but there is no crying, none that I’ve seen. That may happen in private, but not in public. When I lived in Uganda, deaths were the time of wailing and crying and rending clothes and ululating. Here when someone conveys sad news – the neighbor telling us her husband had a stroke, ‘I´m so sorry,’ I say. ‘Ni modo,’ she responds. And that is that for the moment. When Jim’s siblings died, we would tell people what had happened, ‘Ni modo,’ they’d say. Their faces would convey sympathy, but there would be no gasps of ‘how awful.’ Rather they say, ´Sadly, that’s the way it goes.’
Paz talks about the need to protect oneself with this approach. I also think (as does he) that it has to do with the fact that Mexicans are much more aware of the fragility of life, the closeness with which disaster lurks, the speed with which a good living can turn to dust, their powerlessness to change this. And so we must also consider, in looking at how we see Mexicans, why we see them the way we do and how they see us. Next post (or soon) I’d like to talk about some of this, again with the lens of Octavio Paz as a starting point.