Xmas Hunting Experience

We woke up Christmas morning and began attempting to decipher exactly what grandpa wanted to do that day.  A lucid 83 years old and ex-politician, he certainly could have been more clear about his plans and desires.  His nephew had heard him mention something, an aunt and uncle agreed, Brenda’s dad contributed his concurrence; unfortunately it was all the same one-word clue: “doves”. 

Gradually, a mini-legend formed—I’m not sure who planted the seed—that there was some place in the surrounding mountains, some unknown sanctuary, where doves were aplenty.  People began to agree that they had all heard of it at some point in the past.  Maybe he wanted to go see them… or hunt them?  I began to picture some sort of majestic cliff face where we would arrive after a drive along secret mountain roads, and be engulfed in flocking, swirling, cooing Mother Nature. 

As morning wore on to afternoon, the legend remained a legend and the plan evolved into driving out to grandpa’s sugarcane ranch (a huge vast thicket of impenetrable sugarcane bounded by dirt roads and irrigation ditches) to hunt doves.  The men began to prepare:  disassembled pistol in its little suitcase, .22 rifle in a zippered leather sheaf, shotgun with a throw rug wrapped around it, all loaded into a minivan from the early 90’s.  We were 6; five ranch-raised Mexicans—grandpa, son, son-in-law, two nephews—plus a gringo.  I did my best to silently feign the appearance that I too was raised on a ranch, that I had possibly killed and eaten (or at least harvested) a majority of my meals, that I believed sunrise-to-sunset backbreaking work was the only way to make a living, that my earliest memory as a child was of firing a gun—and striking my target.  I also tried not to bite my fingernails on the way over. 

At one point they asked me how many doves I thought we should bring home.  I think I revealed myself as a novice when I replied that since doves are quite small we would probably need two apiece, so that’s 12, and then if we happen to kill more we can share them with the family. 

For the record, 83-year-old grandpa is STILL a prizewinning pistolero.  Apparently he enters this citywide contest every year and shames the latest generation of cocky young guns.  I personally saw his trophies from last year.  His specialty is a contest where they put live chickens, bound by ropes that are tied to posts in the ground, which serve as targets at certain distances.  As the story goes, grandpa then comes home with a whole bundle of dead chickens, drops them on the ground at the women’s feet, and mumbles something like “we eat at seven-thirty”.

So that’s the set-up.  I can summarize the whole dove-hunting experience in one sentence: we didn’t even SEE one, not one damn dove. 

However, birds galore.  At one point one of the cousins shot one out of a tree just for the hell of it.  I ran to it and watched it flounder around for a while, picked it up and inspected it; it appeared that it would continue to fight for survival for some time.  We left it where it fell, declaring a guilty man’s justification for the senseless killing: since something’s going to come along and eat it, it really isn’t that bad.  Feeling like I too could now kill with a clear conscience, I took up the shotgun and decided that I’d give my mark a sporting chance and try to pick a bird out of the air, hit one in mid-flight.  After multiple do-or-die moments in which the safety was on or some other thing got locked up (etc) I finally fired erratically at what appeared to be a swallow swooping low over the sugarcane.  For the record, I’m 99% I didn’t even come close to hitting it, but I nevertheless returned with the news that I may have killed a bird but there was just no way of knowing since it would have fallen into the untraversable sugarcane.

The real hunting began on the ride home. 

A feeling of unsuccessfulness hung heavy as we piled into the minivan for the ride home, in which we would drive mostly along dirt roads that border irrigation canals, much like those in the delta farmland of California.  The discomfort of failure meant that we naturally had the windows down; the desire to redeem ourselves conceived a complementary and growing desire to kill something—anything; and as it was now late afternoon, these black, somewhat evil-looking iguanas had come out of their burrows to sun themselves.  The first one we saw was on our side of the drainage ditch and a mere 6 feet from grandpa’s passenger side window.  He hurriedly opened his little pistol suitcase, assembled, loaded, aimed, and fired point blank out the van window.  There’s no doubt that he hit it, but his bullet was merciful and allowed the iguana to at least scurry back into his hole.  The next one we saw was a bit farther away, and on the driver’s side.  Luckily our driver, Brenda’s cousin, preferred to drive with a shotgun over his lap in place of a seatbelt.  This made it quite easy for him to park, take aim, and fire (again from within the car); despite my resolution to appear manly, I jumped when the shotgun discharged about 2 feet from my face.  This time our prey died more or less instantly if you don’t count the ten minutes of reptilian, involuntary twitching.  I put the moving carcass in a plastic bag and returned it to the minivan where we gleefully discussed how we were going to cook it and eat it.  Images of the show “Eaten Alive” began flashing through my mind, where a first-world traveler either eats third-world food or some undercooked wild animal and finds out years down the line that a whole plethora of parasites have been feasting on his insides ever since.  I played along, honestly curious about exactly how this would go down, but determined that wild iguana flesh was not going to come anywhere near my mouth.  We never cooked it, never even touched it after returning home.  I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the iguana carcass is rotting away, still in the grocery bag that’s hanging from the tree in the middle of grandpa’s courtyard.

Engaged, part 1: Cohabitation

This one might get a little sappy, but I feel like it’s a topic that deserves some discussion.  And some explaining.  Exactly seven months after meeting Brenda on the beaches of Mazatlan, and exactly three months after embarking south of the border in a Toyota Corolla packed to the gills, I made the seemingly drastic decision to put an end to all these little adventures and commit to a lifelong one.  Yes this included a knee on the ground and a (modest) diamond ring.  For those who are curious, I chose to actually “pop the question” in English, as I’m not 100% exactly what to say in Spanish and didn’t want it to sound weird.  I figure as a general rule you probably don’t want to sound like a foreign fuck in the moment you ask a girl to marry you.

Naturally, many factors, thoughts, feelings, decisions, events led up to this point.  The first two major events would have to have been falling in love and moving to Mexico.  The next was a change in the living situation.  Without getting too gossipy, let’s just say mom has some issues (don’t we all?) which flare up from time to time and occasionally last for more than just a day or two.  The incredibly long story short is that she “threw Brenda out”.  I use quotes because this usually means absolutely nothing—dad intervenes, Brenda stays, mom cools down, but this time dad said “she crossed the line.  Go”.  I was woken up at midnight as Brenda snuggled up next to me. 

Her sister was next to follow—mom was on a roll—and she stayed in the extra bedroom the following night.  Within 36 hours, the quick fix (i.e. mom learns her lesson and everything goes back to normal) became more and more of a long-term commitment, and an irreversible one at that.  I came to this realization when they started moving the clothes over, carload after carload—it really hit me when the carload of just shoes arrived.  Before you begin to think that a family with a ton of clothes must be pretty well off, keep in mind that a) the girls have not been growing for quite some time, b) Mexicans keep even the most worn-out belongings until they are absolutely unusable—and then they try to sell them, c) knock-off clothing is cheap as hell down here. 

So the girls were here to stay.  Bilingual Three’s Company.  We got cable, we got internet, we started shopping for three, I cleaned more.  Then things took an even more unexpected turn.  Dad met a similar fate two weeks later and soon he and the two girls were sleeping on the king-sized bed in the guest bedroom.  With dad’s presence we had to attempt this charade that Brenda and I had never so much as napped next to one another.  Through mere observation and rudimentary deduction skills, he quickly figured out the sleeping arrangement prior to his arrival. 

I should mention that it had always been one of Brenda’s cherished principles that she would never live with a boyfriend, i.e. the first night she would share a living space with a guy would be her wedding night and he would be her husband.  Strong Catholic beliefs play a large role in what some might call “old-fashioned” values, but another factor is that Mexican culture says that you only get one shot.  If you live with a guy and it doesn’t work out, you’ll forever wear the mark of the beast and no other decent guy will want you.  Obviously, I was delighted to have her staying, for however long, but still acknowledged and respected the bittersweet circumstances that made this blessing possible.  And in this case, Brenda used her one shot wisely. 

From a distance, I watched as each member of the family secretly hoped or assumed that things would go back to normal but gradually made decisions that made a return back to the normalcy of the last 25 years less and less possible.  This also slowed things down.  As long as the hope of a quick reversal lived on, why would they go looking for a new place?  And once they began renting a new place, why would they bother moving furniture over or buying a fridge?  Yes, these things did finally happen, but Brenda really had to ride people’s asses to get it done.  We began to refer to dad and sister as "the kids", as we were putting quite a bit of effort (happily) into caring for them.

And as for Brenda, as the moment approached in which she would have to give up the beauty of cohabitation with the love of her life, she finally mustered up the cajones to talk to dad and explain what SHE wanted.  And I think he was speaking from the heart when he replied that she’s an adult, he knows that she puts great consideration into everything she decides and therefore would not tell her no, he doesn’t think she’ll ever meet a better man who will respect and care for her more, and he thinks that one day we’ll probably get married (she didn’t know this, but he and I had already had “the talk”).

Living together continues to be an incredibly beautiful thing.  Brenda works 9 hours a day and makes the same salary as I do working 4 hours per day, so in the mornings we carpool most of the way and I pick her up from work 3 days a week.  In the couple free hours I have in the late morning I play housewife: cook, clean, make lunches, hit the farmer's markets, all the while listening to fiscally-conservative talk radio.  We recently bought a dining room table together (regularly about $425 for $160 out the door, wooden with 6 chairs included, and last weekend we decorated a Xmas tree that now resides in our living room.  The extra bedroom is once again unused.

Extorted

Another milestone for an American immigrant in Mexico, on the way back from Vallarta I was extorted.  Textbook.  Highway robbery (literally).  Only clichés come to mind because that’s what this was. 

For some background, it was a one-lane-each-way highway along the coast.  Speed limit is usually about 55 mph, and occasionally you pass through “towns” where it looks like a gas station gave birth to a convenience store from which sprung a service center all of which provided a nucleus for the construction of a few residential cement shacks, etc, and the posted speed limit significantly drops for a few hundred meters.  Perfect for a speed trap.  The difference is, in America they choose to pull you over based on a recorded and factual speed; here in Mexico they hunt you down based on the fact that you look like you have money but have no ties to neither the government nor narcotrafficking, then they pull you over and invent whatever the hell they want because no one will ever be able to prove it. 

Although I was trembling with anger, I remained calm and polite.  I mean, at least he had the tact to pretend that he was doing his job (sometimes they pull you over and say “how much do you have?”… if it’s not enough, they hold your precious documentation hostage while you make a run to the ATM).  I held firm to my previous training: force him to write you a ticket cuz those California plates make it totally worthless (not to mention we were in a different Mexican state as well).  However, this puerco had caught on, probably due to the fact that he patrols so close to gringo-ridden Puerto Vallarta, and told me that yes, he was going to write me a ticket AND he was going to confiscate my license until the ticket was paid.  I’m fairly certain they don’t have the right to do this.  Think about the technical implications of this had we decided to abide by the law:

First, we would have to call a tow truck to haul my car off the highway as there would no longer be a licensed driver in our party.  Second, it was a Sunday; obviously all government offices were closed so forget about paying the ticket that day.  So we would have to tow our car to a hotel, call our bosses and ask for Monday off, and wait til the next day to pay the ticket.  As you can see, he was just playing the game… and he one-upped us.  Speaking of government laziness, if you thought government employees in the US had a loathsome work ethic try getting something done in Mexico.  A typical government office might only be open four hours a day, and public sector employees not only get to celebrate all national holidays but most Catholic holidays as well.  The good thing about the US is that government workers get to retire at 50 and continue to receive inflated checks for their achievements in doing the bare minimum until the day they die; I’m not sure what the pension packages are like south of the border but there’s no way they compare.

So now the cop has my license and my driving permit papers and tells me he’s going to go back to his car to write the ticket.  This is my cue to palm some bills and go start the negotiation.  I decided to start the bidding at 100 pesos ($8 USD) and strolled over to the patrol car with bribe in hand.  There was no more point in pretending that my Spanish wasn’t really up to par, so I laid it out to him clearly and fluently: "obviously, I don’t want to leave here without my license and don’t want to have to return to another state just to pay a ticket, and you, sir, probably want to get on with your day and make a little extra money.  Let me give you 100 pesos so we can both leave here satisfied?"  Something like that.  He pretended not to understand and took out a little penal code book that states that a speeding ticket should cost between 10 and 20 days of the daily minimum wage.  The daily minimum wage… wait for it… is 54 pesos (about $4) PER DAY.  He also warned me that it could cost even more depending on how he noted my “recorded” speed. 

Now I got angry and did my best to show it as little as possible.  "Yeah, but I’m not a typical gringo.  I didn’t come down here with a shitload of dollars to throw around like all the other gringos you pull over.  I work, and I earn pesos, not dollars, just like you and just like any other Mexican.  Sometimes I teach all day for as little as 200 or 300 pesos-- (a white lie that he did not believe),-- so 100 pesos is a lot of money for me.  And sure, a ticket might cost me as much as 1,500 pesos, but you know what?  You’re not going to see one peso out of those 1,500.  All of it goes straight to the government and not one single peso will end up in your hand.  I know you want to earn-- (yes, I used the word “earn”)-- some money for yourself, and you know I want to leave with my license and without a ticket.  How about 200."  He nodded, and I walked back to the car to get another 100 pesos.  When I paid him, in order to feign trust, I decided not to demand that we do a “one, two, three… switch!” kind of exchange like you sometimes see in a run-of-the-mill action comedy movie.  I handed him the 200 pesos and gave him the opportunity to cherish being an asshole just one more time.  He began to fulfill his end of the deal, but then in mid-reach he retracted my papers and pretended to inspect them one last time, forcing me to sweat for 10 more seconds.  No, I did not thank him when it was all said and done. 

I’m not sure what you guys think about this experience.  A lot of you are probably thinking “200 pesos?  Isn’t that just a piddly $16 dollars?”.  But we were pissed.  Fuming for the next hour.  Those 200 pesos represent 2 hours in the classroom and at least another hour of commute time.  I recently saw a Mexican movie about narcotrafficking in which corrupt police officers are murdered but not before significant torture occurs, and I found myself dreaming of a similar fate for my own corrupt cop.  

Dinero

Gavin recently did the math for me (not a direct quote)…

So you work about 20 hours a week, make $10/hr at best, and spend another 10 hours driving between classes and home.  Logan, that’s $6.67 per hour!  Can’t you find something more lucrative?

The sad reality is, when you account for gas it comes out to be even less.

Working for pennies in the 3^rd world drives a guy to contemplate the economic value of his time, the purpose of working at all, and to constantly compare prices here vs. prices there, all the while converting between two currencies (“divide by 10 and subtract 20%”… i.e. 100 pesos = $8 USD… the reverse would be “multiply by 10 and add a quarter”).

Sure, from an American point of view I’m working for next to nothing.  Less than minimum wage.  Pathetic.  In order to accept such a drastic change in salary, I’ve spent the last two months attempting to put things into perspective.  One perspective is that if I work 20 hours a week, make just under $800/month, and live carefully, I can get by.  To save everyone the mental and emotional turmoil that my constant perspective calculations involve, I’ll sum it up here for y’all:

-I pay $240 per month for a two bedroom, 1.5 bathroom 2-story house.  In Berkeley I was paying over 3 times that for a 100 square-foot room (hey, you pay a premium for kick-ass roommates). 

-A well-educated professional can hope to make about 20,000 pesos ($1,600 USD) per month. 

-Jobs that require neither education nor experience (i.e. cashier at a little store) pay 100 pesos ($8 USD) per day.

-Day laborers (construction, road work) work for as little as $4 USD per day, possibly even less. 

Now the question of “why work at all?” grows even stronger.  If you’re working for $4 per day you can barely even cover the bus ride to and from.  The answer is that you also earn rights to government support in the form of healthcare, loans, and vouchers.  To all workers, public and private, the government provides nationalized healthcare for the employee as well as his family, and also guarantees a loan (no- or very low-interest, I believe) to facilitate the purchase of a home.  Once the school gives me something like 25 hours per week, I’ll be eligible for these same rights. 

So the employer of that worker who takes home $4 per day might actually be paying $20 per day, but 80% goes to el gobierno in order to pay for healthcare for a big Catholic family of god-knows-how-many.  I’m still trying to figure out the voucher thing.  Apparently many companies will decide to give their employees vouchers for gasoline or food, subsidized partly by the government and partly by the employer, on top of their contracted salaries.  Brenda couldn’t quite explain it to me; she just knows it exists.  And since I have trouble believing in outright altruism, I don’t yet understand how this can be beneficial to both paying parties (govt and employer).  Will look into it. 

Continuing with the theme of financial perspective, let’s talk prices.  There’s a huge discrepancy between the prices of various products; the more primary a good, the more 3^rd world the price:

-3 lbs of tomatoes, $1.

-Bananas: $0.25 per lb.

-Tortillas: <$1/ lb.

-Over 2 lbs of dry beans for $1.

-A bus ride costs less than $0.50

-A pack of made-in-Mexico Marlboros costs $2.25

-Meat and dairy aren’t AS cheap; milk runs about $2.50 per gallon and cheap beef about $2.50 per pound. 

-A dozen quality roses, less than $5.

-Services, obviously, are incredibly cheap as well.  For less than 30 bucks a mechanic made the smashed-up front of my car look almost as good as new. 

-12 sandwich-sized rolls, $1.

-2 lbs of limes, $1.

Then there are products that carry exactly the same price as in the US, even though folks here make about 25% of an American salary or less:

-Little netbook laptops cost $300 to $400 dollars.

-I can guarantee that any Apple product costs the same or more over here.

-Gasoline is just under $3 per gallon.

-Yesterday I paid $3 for a stick of deodorant.

-A pack of Trident gum and a two-liter Coke both cost about $1.20.

And then there’s pirata.  Pirated goods.  Knock-offs.

-We used to rent DVDs for $1.60 per night; now we go downtown and buy a copy of the damn movie for $1.25.

-You can take a textbook to these paper/Xerox stores and the next day they give you a spiral-bound copy for about 7 cents per page.  More than half of my students acquire their text books in this way. 

-“Namebrand” clothing can also be found at incredibly cheap prices if you know where to look.  Shirts, jeans, even shoes.  The shirts are totally convincing and 3 “Abercrombie”-esque etc T-shirts usually cost maybe $10; the jeans, upon donning them, reveal themselves as not having been produced with the expert craftsmanship of Mr. Levi himself; and the shoes I’m told fall apart pretty quickly.  

Fitting In

A quickie.

A friend of mine owns a little “cowboy wear” (sombreros, saddles, belts, boots, etc) shop in a pueblo on the outskirts of Guadalajara, close to one of the businesses (circuitboard/electronics company called Flextronics, previously Selectron) where I give a class some mornings.  For perspective, the shop can’t be more than 100 square feet.  In order to beat traffic I decided to pay her a visit yesterday. 

Got to talking to a 13 year old kid that spends his afternoons there for lack of a better thing to do.  He claims that he also goes to school.  We chatted for a good hour.  I guess his family owns some horses and gives tours of the surrounding countryside, and he promised to take me around next time I’m in town… I’m still trying to determine if this is a real promise or a Mexican courtesy promise. 

A shipment of cowboy hats arrived and we tore into the box and began sorting them all out and trying them on.  I put on a wide-brimmed feaux-leather sombrero and the kid stared at me for a second, laughed, and declared “You look like a foreigner!  Wait, are you from here?”  Hilarious and flattering.  I guess I’m gradually fitting in, starting with ignorant country children and hoping to one day deceive the rest of the nation as well.

Small Business

Dad’s a veterinarian of 26 years and over time has upgraded his location from utter slums to his current office, situated on prime real estate between the local church and market.  Despite gradual improvements in locale, I get the impression that upgrades to his equipment have occurred at a much slower rate, if at all.  The majority of his business is house calls, so he spends most of the day passing between home and office (4 blocks apart), receiving and running errands from mom, eating and napping from 2 to 4 as is the Mexican way, all the while anticipating phone calls from clients. 

When he’s at his small office, he is guaranteed to be sitting outside, probably due to the smell of animal filth that has at this point thoroughly saturated every fabric of the place.  But there is also very poor lighting which, if you could stand the smell, might also cause you to prefer to be outdoors.  On the inside, there’s an old wooden desk and a plant; a divider separates front from back behind which you’ll find a metal table, a couple cages in the corner of various sizes, and that’s about it.  It appears that all of his tools and supplies fit into one of two carrying cases.  The only semblance of beauty in the place are the four framed photos on the wall, captured and framed by photographer extraordinaire Trish Linderman, of an iguana, a donkey, a parrot, and a pair of elephants, respectively.  The donkey gets at least as much attention as the other three combined. 

Prior to arriving here for good, Brenda and her dad has both individually more-or-less boasted about the fact that dad doesn’t pay income taxes.  Apparently four or five years ago an auditor came by the office and dad basically told him: “You’re right.  I haven’t been paying taxes nor do I keep very thorough records [I think he actually does], but come in and take a look around.  Do you see clients?  Do you see evidence of prosperity?  Does it look like I make more than the bare minimum to survive?”.  The auditor, seeing the bare and (in my American opinion) filthy office, and not realizing that a large majority of his business consists of house calls, was content with that explanation. 

HOWEVER, just recently the Mexican government has been really pushing to root out non-paying business owners like Brenda’s dad, as well as those who engage in more unofficial and under-the-table type businesses (food sold from houses, various services, people who make a career out of flea markets, etc); if you’re prosperous, or rather if you have a little left over after you feed your family, then you’d better share with the government.  And rightfully so.  I’m coming to realize that in some respects the Mexican government offers comprehensive social services.  Medicine is one that stands out.  There are cheap, government-owned hospitals that are covered by social security; any worker in Mexico plus their family is entitled to some level of health care.  But they also respect the other side of the coin and demand more of the Mexican people.  A law was recently passed that says that obese teachers and parents with obese children can be fined.  Will continue to investigate.

An auditor recently came to dad’s office and basically told him “you’re busted and it’s time to pay up”.  Dad was freaked.  I watched him grow clearly more and more worried over the course of the week as he waited for his appointment.  The damage?  He had to pay a fine of 4,500 pesos (less than $400 dollars) to cover the last FIVE years, and from now on he has to pay 100 pesos ($8 dollars) per month.  I explained to him what I think he already knew… that mathematically he lucked out.  

"Mexicanada" defined

We Americans utilize the phrase “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.  And when something finally DOES break, our hard-earned dollars, or our “Obama money”, or both, provide us with the convenience and liberty to choose between a repair or simply purchasing a new one.  There happens to be a little-known third option which may be a foreign concept to most Americans: dealing with it.  Because the first two choices cost money, Mexican salaries usually render repair or replacement impossible, leaving my slightly-tanner countrymen forced to simply deal with it when something falters.  I think a more appropriate saying would be “if you can make it work, it never even broke in the first place”. 

And this philosophy gives birth to the mexicanada.

While a literal translation of the word mexicanada would have to be something like “mexicanized”, mexicanada is slang for “jerry-rigged” (or if you’re from the Central Valley maybe you said “okie-rigged” as a kid), something quickly thrown together, something that shouldn’t work but does, certainly something that doesn’t operate exactly as it was constructed or intended to. 

Some examples:

--Brenda can’t remember the last time the bathroom door at her house closed completely.  Possibly never in her life.  Instead, there’s an old-fashioned metal iron on the floor of her bathroom that you have to butt up against the door when you do your business.  And this still doesn’t close it ALL the way so no matter what anyone in the living room hears everything.

--Their toilet seat had plastic-coated cushioning on it once.  If I had to guess I would say about a decade ago.  Now the cushioning has worn away so much that you end up sitting on some sort of checkerboard honeycomb matrix instead.  Melanie attested to it actually hurting.  But hey, as long as it separates your ass from the toilet water it’s still doing its job.  I took her mom out one afternoon and after hours of looking for the exact shape and color I splurged on the $14 heavier-duty model.

--One of Brenda’s friends has to take out her earring and use the post to poke somewhere in order to turn on her iPod.  (On that note, ANY mp3 player down here is called an “iPod”, even the lightest-weight little stick that takes a AAA battery and displays only Chinese characters)

--Brenda gave me the CD player that she used at her old job.  The volume knob broke off long ago and volume was then adjusted using a pencil or, again, an earring.  At this point it has been poked and prodded so much that it’s useless to me. 

--Recently a friend asked me to take a picture for her.  The whole time I had to hold the battery casing closed in order to operate the damn camera.  As soon as I relaxed my grip to hand it back to her the camera shut off.

--A neighbor lady picks guavas from her tree outside using a mangled little fork that she fastened onto the end of a ~9-foot pole.

--This one is more ingenuity than mexicanada… Brenda’s sister spilled red wine all over her black and white blouse.  I imagine most of us would have forfeited it to Goodwill or even the trash.  However, with the help of bleach she now has a brown and really really bright white striped blouse. 

Hopefully this more or less explains the title… Vida Mexicanada.