We are on the road again, this time heading north, back to the high desert of Northern New Mexico, again. We do consider Mexico home too. After all, I have lived here for months at a time, off and on ever since those college days in the 1960s. Yes, parts of Mexico can be dangerous, but so can Albuquerque, Los Angeles, and Milwaukee, among many other places I need not mention.
I worked for many years right across the freeway from Compton, California; I knew the people and was not afraid. Many of my students were from Compton. At a graduation ceremony a few years before I retired from teaching, the daughter of one of my former students introduced herself. “My mother was one of your students; she used to talk about how much you helped her.” That felt good!
Once I was shocked when a middle-aged professional from the South Bay told me he worked in Compton but would never go there at night. Well, too many “people who think that they are white,” (Baldwin, The Fire Next Time) are embedded in that kind of mental separation. Since fear so often breeds anger and aggression, it is not surprising that the object of fear is so often perceived as a threat, which it actually might become.
Heading Home Can Be an Adventure, Not just a Drive
I remember ‘the year of the COVID’ quite well. Just when we were about to head north at the end of March 2020, the pandemic hit worldwide. The Mexican government shut down much, as did many others. With about two thousand miles to go, we had made reservations at several hotels along the way, places we had stayed many times before where the people knew us.
One of our favorites is a little bed and breakfast hotel near the beach in the old colonial center of Mazatlán. The rooms are each decorated with a different legendary Mexican theme; one is dedicated to the famous wife of Diego Rivera, the great muralist. Frida Kahlo was an acclaimed accomplished painter herself and quite a controversial figure. Her self-portraits, with those big eyebrows, are iconic and have been copied endlessly by many artists as an expression of free spirited women everywhere.
A long road trip can be stressful when roadblocks consisting of white-coated men with forehead-temperature measuring devices and surgical masks, accompanied by uniformed teenagers with aging machine guns, determine your fate. On the way into Mazatlán at an army checkpoint, the soldier asked, “¿A donde van ustedes?” When I replied, “Mazatlán,” he said “¡No puedes ir allí! Está cerrado a los viajeros.” But we are on our way to the U.S.” I replied in my broken Spanish. “Oh, está bien. ¡Adelante! Que te vaya bien.”
Culture Clash
I remember as a child watching an ‘educational’ film in some class in elementary school, which depicted life in Latin America. I loved the Spanish colonial architecture right away, and I remember lots of bougainvillea. I’m not sure, but I think the film was about Argentina. Anyway, I also remember wondering how people so far away were able to live, how they could have electricity and automobiles, etc. on what seemed the other side of the world. The U.S., or perhaps Southern California as far as I knew it, was the center of the universe, from which all good things came. Did we send them all that, or did they develop it all by themselves. Strange the way kids sometimes think.
Why did I think that people so far away would not have all the things we had in Southern California? Somehow, I had been given the impression by my own culture that ‘they’ were inferior to ‘us.’ I suspect that film was patronizing, but I probably was too young to understand. Yet, here were these images of what seemed a wonderful life so far away.
I grew up in San Gabriel, a working class suburb of Los Angeles, only a couple of blocks north of the old Spanish San Gabriel mission, another site of great architectural beauty. I remember carving a likeness of it in a big bar of soap for an assignment in elementary school.
Mexico had always been part of California in my vision of the world. Later I would learn that Southern California had once been part of Mexico, as a result of having been part of the original Spanish colonies, along with what are now several other southwestern states in the U.S. I have been at home here so many times for so long, borders you say?
I remember in my freshman year of college, reading about the issue of national borders, travel, and migration, and wondering why any of it was necessary. Why not give everyone a passport to everywhere and be done with it? Freedom to travel was a strong value for me before I ever traveled beyond my home town.
Well, I grew older and more aware of international politics. Not only do cultures clash, but so do political hierarchies and their armed agents, their military forces. Living one’s life in any country is one thing; political boundaries are quite another.
Home Again, Again
I’m not home again yet, although I have not quite left home for that road trip home—we leave in an hour or so. I have sometimes imagined myself as a ‘citizen of the world,’ at home everywhere I go, but governments will have none of that, even though the people I meet are as welcoming as if I were coming home. I am what the authorities say I am, at least to the extent that my passport documents my ‘identity.’ I have felt at home in many places, but, I guess, home is mostly about where you are from.
On the other hand, I can remember sitting on a rock in some high mountain backpacking trip, looking at the ground, the rocks, and the native flora, and having the distinct feeling that this is where I belong. But, after all, I was sitting on a rock, an integral part of the history of planet Earth, my home. I felt that way hiking along the some cliffs on Catalina Island at age 12, looking down at the surf crashing into the rocks below.
I get that same feeling of being in the right place as I sail in a Colgate-26 out into Bahía Banderas from La Cruz, or when sailing a J-30 across those twenty-six miles from Cabrillo Marina to Catalina Island. Ever since he wrote the book back in the 1970s, I have always remembered Baba Ram Das’ admonition, “Be Here Now.”
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 