High on Mexico’s Southern Highlands
“We last left our heroes Karyssa and Nick in Ciudad Valles of San Lois Potosi with the ever pertinent question of Where to next? And howww will they get there? And in god’s name, what will. they. see?! Only time will say. But one thing is for certain! With the power of friendship, no obstacle can’t be overcome!”
(I’m watching anime again, so, imagine a very dramatic narrator. (Also, the joke in anime is that literally everything can be solved through “the power of friendship” (side glances to Hunter X Hunter)))
Okay, with that hanging there – Let’s begin!
Right now (Feb 8) we are in Xilitla (still in the state of San Luis Potosi). We wanted to see the Cave of Swallows, Tamul Waterfall, and Edward James’ Surrealist Garden, which is all right around here-ish. Butttt, they’re all closed due to Covid. Which, as always, is understandable, but a bummer
On our way back down a mountainous road to see the Tamul waterfall, we found this super cute and delicious food stop that was operating outside of this woman’s house. It was the first time that someone has tried to have a conversation with me despite my limited Spanish (but to be fair, that might be because this was the first time that I tried to have a conversation in Spanish… soooo). Regardless, it was pretty fantastic. I didn’t understand everything she said, but I got the general idea.
Nick says that he understands people more now too, and that he feels like he can communicate his needs better. So, all positives! And praises (once again) to Roman and Javier from the Spanish Experience Center in Guanajuato! Miss them.
And we miss Emily and Kike, our friends from La Paz. </3 I suppose we miss everyone, to be honest, and having friends to hang out with.
In any case, our Spanish is improving – slowly, but surely.
We got here two nights ago and basicallyyyy, all I did yesterday was call home and catch up with the fam and sleep or watch anime. Nick, meanwhile, can’t stay still for more than .05 seconds, so he was out and about walking around the hood, though he did get to watch the Superbowl with commentary en espanol. (He’s also had a case of the galloping trots for two days now, if you must know.)
Today we checked out this pretty frigging neat waterfall (Cascada Comales). It wasn’t neat due to the amount of water rushing over, rather it was how the land it flowed over was formed. Like… the rock was shaped like a half of a monstrously large bullet. All along it were just these gaps in the earth and along/in these gaps was moss and vines. Really gorgeous.
The first thing it made me think of was a volcano or a ridiculously huge hollowed out tree. But, those descriptions just weren’t quite right. And really, I can’t think of how else to describe this thing. But, it’s dope.
On the walk home I was determined to see a bird that Nick had spotted yesterday. We’ve been hearing its calls for a while, and have been wondering what kind of bird made such calls as it’s rather distinct.
It took a while, but sure enough Nick found the Montezuma Oropendola, which is a mostly black bird. It has yellow on the underside of its tail, one white dot on either side of its face, and an orange beak. But what really makes this bird special, as I was stating earlier, is its song. It’s so wild and weird sounding; indeed, birders remark that there’s no other bird that makes a sound quite like it.
Their nests are remarkable as well, to me. They hang from branches and remind me of giant balls of spanish moss. Apparently, there is one dominant male per each flock and he has to satisfy 10-20 females.
There’s another cute bird we saw called the Great Kiskadee…it’s adorbs, as was the hummingbird we found while looking for more of the Montezuma Oropendoia.
This whole area is a reserve called the Sierra Gorda and spans the states of San Luis Potosi, Hidalgo and Queretaro, where we are now. The Sierra Gorda is part of the larger Sierra Madre Oriental which, along with its Occidental sister, forms the spine of Mexico, while not particularly high at 3-4,000m, it’s clima frio makes van-life here south of the Tropic of Cancer comfortable.
While the center of Sierra Gorda is packed full of lush vegetation and jungle, its northern, western, and southern outskirts are desert. It’s constant rise and fall makes for a barrier of rain from the Gulf Coast that sits within and to the east. This area is also famous for its deep caves, many of which we tried to see but were closed.
On the 9th we boondocked on a street in one-street town called Huajales in order to walk to the nearby Cueva de los Riscos, but it was dark by the time we got to the riverbed at the bottom of the canyon, and the dogs were beat, so we resolved to try again in the morning, which is when we noticed a banner proclaiming that this whole town was closed to tourists due to Covid. Naturally, we opted out of trying the hike again and left.
The road into the popular lake in Jalpan de Serra, further up Hwy 120, was barricaded and guarded, so we are actually running low on accessible boondocking lugares (places).
Gladly the Cascada El Chuveje was open, and the huge Mexican sycamore trees lining its ponds were a nice break from the juniper, white cedar, and pines dominating this area.
Speaking of which, there’s a pine we’re unfamiliar with here, whose longleaf-long needles droop straight down. We think it’s the Jelecote pine, aka the Weeping pine.
It’s pretty wild to see the needles giving way to gravity. The Jelecote Pine is native only to Mexico, but it has since been sold to other countries for its quick-growing wood. Alas, much like the Eucalyptus in the US and the Monterey pine in Africa, the Jelecote pine is now an invasive species in the countries it’s sold to.
We didn’t see any of the green parrots the place is known for, sadly.
Pinal de Amoles was the next main town down 120 and we stopped for lunch, walked around, and found a bar with wild-west-style swinging half-doors where a woman showed us the bar’s papers from 1907!
She was sweet, and muy amable (very nice), but like many small traders here, she had no cambio (change), and we always seem to have massive notes from an ATM so had to go a bigger store to buy stuff just to get change.
On our walk we checked out the town’s mirador, or view, and then found the amazing hillside setting of Cabanas 5 Pinos, and resolved to pay the steep charge to stay there, despite the fact that the manager seemed by all accounts–his wife’s, his young son’s–to be a borracho.
The view was pretty nice though
Today, the 11th, we went to a top-ten destination on K’s list: Puente de Dios, here as described by google:
The descent to the Escanela river is approximately 17 km from Pinal de Amoles, on the left hand side if you are heading to Jalpan de Serra. Although it is only 5 km from the deviation to reach the lowest part where there are shops and bathrooms, the road is complicated since it is a dirt road with very sharp curves. If you do not have an all-terrain vehicle, it is best to hire a specialized service to do this tour, which is definitely worth it. When you reach the lower part, you will discover the river with crystal clear waters. Walking along the banks of the Escanela (in some parts you will have to enter it) you reach the Angostura Canyon (approx. 20 minutes) and after a while you arrive at what they call Puente de Dios that combines a cave with a fall of water. Really a beautiful place.
Shout out to the van, a Dodge Ram Promaster if ever there was one, who is still pleading for a brake job and tire rotation, but never really complains.
“Crystal clear waters” es verdad; the first unpolluted (or should I say not-obviously polluted) river we’ve encountered in MX. But for real, google omits the best parts, like the rock vaginas…
…and our guia, Euerudio, and the facts that they permitted dogs in such a special place. We tipped him twice the amount of admission, as even that was only $5US and represented two hours out of his life, even if his English was as bad as our Espanol.
Plummeting out of the Sierra Gorda on Hwys 120 and 100, we re-entered the desert around Bernal, and gave up trying to find an I-Overlander site and instead opted for an AirBnB. We plan on conquering La Pena de Bernal manana.
Well, we have the dogs as our excuse, but didn’t quite make it to the top of the nearly 500m rock. We conquered laundry, ok? But as that took all afternoon, we booked another night in a cheaper room here at out AirBnB resort. No TV, but as we couldn’t get the TV in last night’s room to work, we figure no loss. The climb was muy facile, with patches that reminded Daisy of Red Rocks, Las Vegas, so a little exposure. We ate at a rooftop restaurant–Tierraciello–with a great view of the monolith.
Afterwards, walking the dogs through the quiet town–muy tranquillo–we ran into Antonio walking his dogs, for the second time in as many days. He is a Panamanian who speaks great English and besides advising us on how to cross his homeland, encouraged us to check out nearby Tequisquiapan…
…and here we are, boondocking by the shore of small, shallow, and slightly smelly lake. It’s such a cute pueblocito, especially given that it’s a sabado (Saturday) market day.
We got to hear some good news from a past housemate, former student from a million years ago–the only person in the world I know who owns a peyote cactus, an un-cut one, I can assure you–and really good mate who is coming to the Yucatan in a couple of months. So we’re now trying to shift plans to see him there on the way back north and home. We’re so homesick, and the happy stresses of travelling may be building up.
Sin embargo (however) it’s Valentine’s Day, as evidenced by all the kids selling roses at every topes, and we feel better knowing that our loved ones are with their loved ones, Hannah and Molly especially, and hope all of you are with yours too. (If you can’t be, keep in mind that the day is a complete capitalist confabulation, best consigned to the dust-bins of history.)
Today marks two months in Mexico, even if it feels like six, as time and duration separate completely when you travel.
In any case, we spent it listening to Duolingo podcasts and driving down HWY 85, a top-class quota (or toll-road) past the famous Toltec statues and pyramid at Tula (cerrado para pandemia – closed due to the pandemic), through the pueblo mejor (best town) of Pachuca, with its muralled barrio (neighborhood), massive bull-fighting ring and futbol universidad, and over the hills to the famously cute pueblocito of Mineral del Chico (cerrado para pandemia).
The scenery is magnificent, the weather cool, and we’re so happy to be here, together. (Never have I seen tropical bromeliads clinging to pine trees, and a pair of vermillion flycatchers did what they do as I filled my cat-hole this am…I did register then with I-Naturalist, even though I neglected to do so for the really awesome species we saw last week.)
This is obviously a popular spot for couples and young families from Pechuca to spend a domingo (Sunday), and we are beyond fortunate to be able to share it with them.
Given that we couldn’t get to our iOverlander site on the outskirts of the historic mining town in the midst of the National Park that shares its name, we parked at a popular trailhead and walked most of the way out to a well-regarded mirador (view), only to be told that it too was cerrado para pandemia!
WTF?
Now we’re resigned to boondocking here for el noche, at a trailhead in the forest, even though it’s still busy and the anxiety of being woken by blue lights of the Policia Municipal is not conducive to sleep.
Also, we found a thistle for Karyssa’s niece
(Update: we had to leave the Parque, and are now at a loud-ass pull-out on a major road. Grrr.)
Last night was kinda rough. We thought we’d be left alone at the trailhead in Parque El Chico after everyone left, but a park worker came by after dark to tell us the park was closed, so we bounced back to the main road and parked in a wide pullout with a sign to El Oyamel next to it. Luckily the road is little trafficked so we slept ok.
This morning, we went back into the park to the very trailhead we were kicked out of, determined to see the mirador El Cuervo.
This morning we walked a couple of miles to a beautiful overlook high above the alpine village of the much-discussed Mineral del Chico, and after finding the Prismas Basalticos covid-closed. It’s a private resort built around a giant’s-causeway-like formation of basalt columns that we were excited to see.
We consoled ourselves with some awesome salsa verde enchiladas con pollo for our comida in a roadside place near Huasca de Ocampo, and then decided to retreat to here, instead of getting closer to la ciudad. Country living and pueblocitos suit van life best, and we’re leery of approaching even Puebla, let alone MXDF.
We’re at a spot listed on iOverlander that is an expansive lot used by autobuses both public and private; so far, so good.
Tonight’s Pueblo Magico is Mineral del Monte, and I’d say that it stretches the magical tag (pero yo no se (I don’t know) how the designation is earned, only that pueblos brag on the year that they earned it). We are still in Hidalgo state, still an hour or two north of Mexico City, slowly ambling towards Peubla, our next big stop and perhaps another course en espanol.
Now (Feb 16) we’re parked amid pine trees in between smoking volcano Popocatepetl and dormant yet dramatic Volcan Iztaccihuatl in a Parque Nacional that shares their name.
At over 5000m (El Popo is almost 18,000′) these are among the highest peaks in Mexico, and the air is thin enough to give me a headache. The whole mountain is smoking, even while the strong winds try to clear it. An unreal sight to behold, for real. We can clearly see where the tree line ends and the purple rock begins, though can’t yet locate a trail to approach it.
Getting here wasn’t easy. We descended from the hills of Hidalgo, crossed the congested valley of Mexico, stopping at Teotihuacan along the way–closed due to Covid, obviously, but we could see the tops of the Temples of the Sun and Moon from the two Puertas that we tried–and then crawled over the Paso of Cortes on the road to Cholula.
Once the pavement ended in the Parque, it took us an hour to go 15k, though we didn’t believe Google maps when it said so. The main road up to “El Popo,” was closed, with a bunch of municipal and estato police sitting around. As we’ve heard of corrupt cops in this area, we were kind of on edge, but nothing happened. Mexico’s bad safety record continues to prove false. It’s cold, but as our fam and friends back home are freezing, we can’t complain, and lit a fire for them.
We spent this am transfixed by Popocatepetl’s burps and belches, which Nick believes follow upon artillery-like booms, though Karyssa is skeptical of any link. (She was right, it turns out.) From the missing peak of the classic cinder-cone, there were two huge cloud-bursts in a row just now, and we wondered for a second are we safe here!
We were so impressed by the volcano, that Karyssa insisted on cleaning the back window so she could adequately see it when she woke up.
As an aside, Nick is really enjoying “The Savage Detectives,” a one-of-a-kind novel by Mexico’s own Arturo Bolano (where that “n” should have a fadde stroke over it). It follows a bunch of poets in MXDF from the late 60’s to the 90’s, but it’s really a reflection on the value of writing and the arts; it would be post-modernist, self-referential crap, except that it’s hilarious, raunchy, and rapidly paced. It came out in 1998, took many prizes, and yet unfortunately he has since passed.
We both enjoyed “Permanent Record” by Edward Snowden, but it left Nick unconvinced as to why he had to out the pentagon to the press in the particular way he did. We both would support a full pardon of him, however.
We loved last night’s spot so much we came back, after failing to find a trailhead up Volcan Iztaccihuatl; the road was closed due to covid, it seems.
We walked to a small cascada, poked around for foodstuffs, but are back in the quiet splendor of the volcano. Altitude definitely made itself felt today, as we were slugs of a sort. Tomorrow is Cholula and maybe Puebla.
We heart Cholula, basically a western suburb of big and loud Puebla, which we love in its own way too.
We got an airbnb in Cholula and tried to access its famous pyramid, the biggest in the world by some measures! There are something like 8k of tunnels beneath the hill that now supports a gaudy yellow iglesia (or church). Some of the Olmec ruins are uncovered and look like Teotihuacan, which makes sense as they were allies in the pre-classic period, which lasted roughly from 800BCE (that is, before the common or our era) to 300BCE, and both declined rapidly around 700AD. Take a second to process these dates; they suggest that this place had a city of a million inhabitants exactly when Athens had 100,000!
We ate delicious food at CusCusCus, una muy especial restaurante.
Then it was onto Puebla, and a whole different scene…one only 30 mins away. While historically critical–the battle of Cinco de Mayo took place here, for one thing–and almost as culturally sophisticated and urbane as Guadalajara, it’s really loud and busy.
It has a reputation among van-lifers as being risky for bandits–side mirror thieves?–and crooked cops. But, as per usual, that hasn’t been our experience. We were woken, twice, by security guards and municipal police, but they only wanted to check on us. Admittedly, we were in a very “exposed” spot in the main municipal park and didn’t try to talk to them earlier on. We moved to a quieter park also listed on iOverlander and finally got some sleep. It’s amazing how quiet the streets are at night here. Everyone seems to hunker down, except the police and the cartel, claro.
Once again we ate amazing food for very little money, especially a five-types-of-mole tasting and a very attentive waiter at El Mural de Los Poblanos. Due to Covid, beer and alcohol sales are only permitted from Monday through Wednesday, which is freaking insane, if you ask me. Luckily the doorman at the high-rise our airbnb is located in did me a solid: he took my suggestion of “mas propina para cerveza” seriously and has a brother in another pueblo who drives a taxi and who will drop off a six-pack in an hour for a fee of $200MX. Mexican entrepreneurial spirit!
Puebla was designed from its inception in 1531 as the ideal city for Spaniards in the Americas, one, that is, that wasn’t built on indigenous sites and with European standards in mind. It was (is) linked to Veracruz on the coast and both became the most important cities in New Spain for most of its history. The perfect grid-like street pattern emanating from a central zocalo remain, and were copied widely, even in Philly.
Today, Feb 20, we had the tires rotated on the van, and the brakes checked–for $50MX, or $2.50US!–while we wandered the artisanal market, mostly featuring Pueblan Talavera (it’s got a protected designation of origin, OK?) pottery and ceramic tiles of every description. Dirt cheap, but what are gonna do with it on the van? In fact, the only “expensive” article here in Mexico, in the cities anyway, is lodging and we hate paying $60US for this Airbnb, but we didn’t want to deal with street-parking again, and left it too late in the day to make it out of the valley and its congestion. We feel the need to plan every day’s drive carefully, so as to be off the roads by dark; this may be the biggest challenge of van life south of the border (though, we often end up driving in the dark anyway).
The 8-story building we’re in offers a view of El Popo, but the smog depresses us out of sharing a picture. We walked to the Zocalo to see a weekend “video mapping” projection on the Baroque Catedral de Puebla, but apparently it has been covid-cancelled, aunque (although) we still had a great night, waiting for our pizza at a take-out place and talking to locals who loved on our perritas. (Dogs are a traveler’s best friend, no doubt.) Can we stress the fact that we’ve felt safer walking the streets of this major city in Mexico than we would walking those of any major city outside of it?
Our next major destination is Oaxaca, and more mole.
On the way there, however, down Hwy 150, we noticed how close we were coming to the highest peak in Mexico, Citlaltepetl, and having been to the second and third highest already, we couldn’t pass by without paying a visit.
Also called the Pico de Orizaba, it’s surrounded in a national park and covered in snow above and behind us. We had to get over some gnarly roads to get to this iOverlander spot, at 12,000m, which is on the road to a radio-telescope and observatory on a mountain next to Citla.’ It’s cold and quiet, just what we needed after Puebla. Although, there was a terrible burning/chemical smell coming from the battery we guess. That’s a bit unsettling.
HOLY SHIT; we’ve lost our rear license plate! WTF?? It may have been stolen, or tampered with, or its two screws may have simply vibrated out!! Here’s the story: Two or so days ago we noticed one of the specialty, “security,” screws Nick bought to discourage theft, was loose and almost all of the way out.
Instead of fixing the issue then, by freaking riveting the plate to the van, Nick, for some reason–in a hurry to get somewhere in Puebla, maybe, just pushed the loose screw back into place, assuming the other one would do the job until they had time to deal with it. And, even though Karyssa was the one who first spotted the issue, she didn’t think of it again after either.
Well, the next time we parked for the night was miles up this nasty road up Citlaltepetl. We woke up, lounged around for a while, continued the drive up the mountain to a trailhead, went for a hike, farted around for a while, and finally Karyssa noticed that we’d lost the plate, leaving us only the copy we ordered off of the internet for the front of the van.
We plan on reporting it stolen and trying to send that report to FL for a real replacement. In the meantime, will every municipal, state, and federal policia pull us over to ask about the card-board plate we stuck in its place?
(Update from Oaxaca: we were so nervous about approaching the authorities about this, but they were totally chill, and helpful, and for $120MX, received some sort of permit.)
One of us is not sure that we want to do this, public posting of our travels during Covid anymore. Maybe we turn private for now? The other of us cynically adds that our blog is basically private anyway, as how many people do we really think read it?
This has and will continue to be for our future selves, as we look back on these years, desperately clinging on to every memory we can while knowing that with every new memory, another, slightly older one breaks down little by little. Hence, the blog.
To be fair, I’ve (Karyssa) always had a – perhaps extreme – fear of forgetting things. When I was in high school, I’d fill notebook after notebook with the most mundane information – literally complete with time-stamps or guesses of what time I did things. I was constantly keeping track of my every movement. I never went far without it, except when out for a run. I never read it afterward, so it was ultimately pointless.
While that obsession might have resurfaced (along with that tinge of anxiety), I take pride in the fact that it isn’t remotely as bad as it used to be. Not to mention, this isn’t nearly as mundane as middle school or high school. Even more, I find myself looking back on our blogs already, as a source of warmth and happiness whenever I get down.
It’s February 24th, and we’re off to Monte Alban, the only part of Oaxaca that will look the same as when Nick came here whilst in college.
One of the earliest cities in Mesoamerica, Monte Alban was the pre-eminent Zapotec center for about a millenium on either side of the Holy Christ’s One of A Kind Manifestation–JK; from around 500 BCE to 500 AD, ok?–and was the origin of the first written language and calendar in the Americas. Most of the site remains unexplored, and two recent “sismos” or earthquakes have actually aided archaeological efforts. The city was largely abandoned by the time the Spanish arrived, though the Mixtec occupied it towards the end. Our guide, Julio, did a terrific job of explaining the context in which the city of 20,000 emerged by 100 BCE, prospered, and rather suddenly quit.
About 80 surrounding villages contributed to the construction of a kind of platform to speak to the gods, the construction of which took generations. (Julio pushed back against the view that the city was built here for defensive purposes, but I’ve since read that it was walled for at least some of its history. Yo no se.)
The mere flattening of the main ridge overlooking a very fertile set of valleys took about 100 years, archaeologists reckon, and this is before the construction of the five temples to the orientations of the earth–north, south, east, west, and center–as well as smaller temples to other deities, and an astronomical observatory, etc.
This observatory blew my mind. It is oriented along with the usual and key celestial dates; NBD, right?; though Julio showed a recent pic he took inside of a foot-wide ray of sunlight that was (is) allowed to pierce the top of a fifty-foot-high “pyramid” and illuminate a stone at its center for about fifteen minutes on two days per year, days that marked the start and end of the rainy season.
It reminded me of Newgrange, Ireland. Beyond that, the observatory is apparently aligned with a series of other signposts–some of them observatories in their own right–that compose a network not unlike the one we’ve already been exposed to in the Southwest US.
The amount of wood required to cook the lime and ceramics involved in Monte Alban’s construction meant massive deforestation, which may have contributed to the drought that seems to have ended its predominance somewhere between 700 and 800 AD, when, I dunno, f-ing Charlemagne was doing EU shit that everyone has heard about. FU, and the eurocentric horse you rode in on.
In any case, the main plaza between these buildings was mostly reserved for public stuff like markets, and the land surrounding the sacred temples was used for houses of the elite, who buried their loved ones under their floors. The 170 tombs so far explored here have included the richest and most spectacularly decorated outside of Egypt, but the museums housing the artifacts are closed.
No one went to hell until the Spanish got here, says Julio, and the Zapotecs are called “the people of the clouds” for their belief that the souls of the departed went to hang with the clouds, though (in the sweetest story ever told) the souls of ninos (less than dos annos, Julio says) get to go hang off the branches of some sort of tree that leaked breast-milk and where they would await their reincarnation!? Other souls got re-incarnated, but no one is all bad and deserving of hell…until the catholics arrived. (Is Julio slightly bitter? Yo no se. Should he be? Si, claro)
One last thing that Julio impressed upon me was the fact that these peoples, these beliefs, and these languages have not been lost to history, but survive all around Oaxaca. Zapotec is the primary lingo of a majority of those in the hilltop pueblos here, as is Nahuatl, and three others I forget.
Richard Blanton, Gary Feinman, Stephen Kowalewski, and Linda Nicholas, in their very academic but awesome, if prolly out of date, “Ancient Oaxaca” (Cambridge UP, 1999, with a hat tip to Julio) zero in on the fact that Monte Alban represents one of the few cases of a “primary” or indigenous growth of a state society or “civilization” that isn’t a case of domination or settlement from without.
It’s organization shows a much more complex level than existed here heretofore, and the population in the valley of Oaxaca grew from 2,000 to 50,000 in the formative period from 550-100 BCE–the city of Monte Alban itself, perched on a hill miles kilometers away from water and crops, housed about 25,000 at its peak, which occurred a few hundred years before the arrival of the Spanish–though people had been farming this large valley since at least 1,500 BCE. (Teotihuacan had a pop’ of 150,000 at about this time, fyi.)
They use it as a case in defining civilization and of addressing the philosophical question of why statism?
To boil down their complicated answer: it might be that a few of the relatively well-off folks in the surrounding villages convinced all or most of their neighbors that worshipping a divine force responsible for rain–actually, a “lightning-clouds-rain” cycle type of thing called “Cocijo”–would benefit all, and (by the way) worshipping works best on top of a freakin’ pyramid on top of this useless hill that we, by the by, first have to level!
Muy interessante, no?
2 Marzo, 2021 finds us two days in to a five day curso en espanol (course) at the exhausting “Spanish Immersion School” in Oaxaca but we may survive with the really helpful Karen and Elvira as nuestras maestras (our teachers). Karen is hilarious, en serio (for real (or seriously – she says this a lot! Jajaja!), and Elvira is serious, pero vale la pena (it’s worth it), y ambos son muy agradables (and both are very kind). Que padre! (Awesome!) (Just using phrases at this point! XD) Muchas gracias, for real!
It’s now 6 de Marzo (March). Nick has written most of this blog, but I’d like to add an observation about being in Oaxaca after not having been in a tourist-y spot for a while now. And this really shocked me when I felt it, but I was so relieved to see white people.
It was as if I had been feeling so tense with suspicion of “these non-white people” (said in ominous voice) that seeing someone with my same pigment just made me feel as if a weight had been lifted off me. At least, that was my first reflection.
There are two thoughts I have on this.
One, it meant we didn’t stick out as much. Never have I wished so much for my skin to be darker, to blend in. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve fancied the idea of having darker skin, as it is the irrationality of social pressures that dictate white people are more attractive the darker/tanner they are and non-white people are more attractive the lighter they are.
But now, I feel like we stick out like sore thumbs. And the desire for darker skin is to a different degree of darkness and a different degree of desire. Everyone stares at us when we enter a town. Children have literally run away from us. It’s unnerving and can be heart-breaking. And it’s a constant spot light on how we don’t belong.
It feels as if my skin has betrayed me.
But at least I’m not as white as Nick, honestly. People don’t even try to speak Spanish if they know English, once they see him.
Granted, these moments of wishing for darker skin are fleeting and superficial, usually when we first get out of the car after having been comfortable with just Nick and me. Eventually the effect of having eyes on us becomes less heavy.
Two, white is associated with the US. Or, at the very least, the English language (as is black, notably – I also get very excited to see black people and am often disappointed when I realize that just because they’re black doesn’t mean they speak English (duh, Karyssa, ya eejit)). This is also true when we see anyone of Asian decent or, honestly, just anyone who doesn’t look a shade of Mexicano.
Diversity, I suppose, is a reminder of home and familiarity. But it’s also a hope for someone who can understand us easily, our basic politics, our beliefs, our fears, and our challenges of navigating a foreign country.
I appreciate this experience and wonder if the first reflection is similar to what minorities feel in the US. It makes me reflect a lot more on what minorities must experience in our country and not just in a statistical/study based way of “Black people are x times more likely to experience y; Native Americans are x times more likely to experience y; Asian, Hispanics, Middle Easterners, etc.” but in an exploration of feelings and the way that others see them might effect they way one might see oneself.
And at least we’re in a foreign country. Getting that reaction in my own country would just break me. Plus, I’m exhausted by it, and we’ve been in Mexico only 2 (almost 3) months. Imagine being made to feel like an “other” in your own country, your whole life.
And it made me have a newfound respect for immigrants who migrate to our country without knowing English. I mean, I always assumed immigrants in general must have it rough and be pretty badass. But now it’s been put into perspective.
They have to find work and a place to live without even knowing how to adequately communicate. They’ve left everything familiar and known for something new and confusing. They’re constantly unsure if they’re getting screwed over and, even if they thought they were, they couldn’t argue about it. Day in and day out. I know I keep saying this, but it’s exhausting. And people do this all the time, and they stay! like the rest of their lives in the US, if they can.
People really are amazing.
Nosotros son preoccupado, claro, y lo siento para llegando tarde (we are busy, of course, and I’m sorry for arriving late), pero (but) Puerto Escondido on Oaxaca’s pacific coast is next up, and we’ll be in touch next from Chaipas, si Dios quiere.
The latest clog in the plans is that our battery is dead, but also it might not be. We’ll see what happens… we were planning on leaving tomorrow for San Jose de Progreso to see if we can’t find some psychedelics on the way to Puerto Escondido. Wish us luck!