The third territory
On belonging, living between Mexico and the U.S., and raising a Mexican-American daughter (PLUS A BIG ANNOUNCEMENT!)
In eleven days, we are moving back to Oaxaca, Mexico, for a season.
In honor of this transition, I’m publishing here an essay I wrote several years ago for The Kenyon Review, about the birth of my daughter, belonging, and living between cultures.
I’m really excited about the work I’ll bring you from Oaxaca.
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And now, the essay:
My baby was born with a full head of black hair. I marveled at her, in shock after twelve hours of natural childbirth, running my hands over her tiny fingers and feet. I stared into the black pools of her eyes.
My first thought as a mother was that she looked nothing like me; after all these months of connectedness, my body building hers, she startled with her individuality.
Our blood mingled in the throbbing umbilical cord and yet she was simultaneously foreign: part me and part her own person, part Mexican and part Ohioan, born into a liminal space, which, through her birth, I finally called home.
Jorge phoned his mother at her house in the Sierra of Oaxaca, connecting our hospital room in Columbus, Ohio–with its daffodil brightness, its large glass-paned windows, its fancy equipment, its waxy sandwich wrappers scattered around a huge birthing tub–with a tin-and-cement casa in the piney mountains.
In Ohio, rain was streaming silently down the clear panes. In Mexico, I imagined it was hot and dry in mid-afternoon, under sharp sunlight and crystalline blue sky. His parents were on their patio, ripping tortillas into strips, sipping café de olla.
“Ya nació, y es morenita!" Jorge announced. She was born, and she's brown!
Through the phone came little burbles of excitement and happiness. She was in fact reddish-brown, the color of a kidney bean and then, when washed, a velvety burgundy. Jorge was thrilled at her brownness, which he sees as an attribute of profundity and toughness and myth.
I was also thrilled, proud of her for this distinction and at the same time disarmed by it–from the very beginning, it was clear that she would belong to Mexico in a way I never would. She would carry in her veins a history intricately woven with mine but not mine to claim or own, not embodied in my hair and skin.
She would carry in her darkness a history of my people oppressing hers, and of hers rising up, in fiesta or protest, against mine. This made me nervous: not because I fear or disapprove of this resistance, but because it was a part of her and her past that on a certain elemental level would forever be unknowable to me; antagonistic, even, to me.
Yet she brought me closer to it than ever: in a way, she infused my blood with sangre mexicana, and like the recipient of a blood transfusion or someone carrying another person's kidney or liver, I could sense this foreignness within me, myself possessed of it in a more intimate way than ever before.
It was as if it had flushed back into my body through the cord that bound us, but whereas it was her lifeblood, in me it was still a separate entity.
It seemed not to bestow on me belonging so much as responsibility. I could not pretend to be outside of Mexican culture so easily anymore, could not unburden myself of implication or obligation, could not subscribe so easily to the dichotomies of tourists and expats, could neither worship nor disdain in the same way.
I was in one sense liberated from the tired struggles of belonging; I no longer had a choice. Belonging or not belonging, I would have to show up over the course of the years, in much the same way that I did not have a choice about whether or not to mother: I pulled the tiny jeans off the wriggling legs, I pressed small warm body to breast.
Mexico became not other but a third territory, between foreign and local, between home and not-home.
I was neither outsider nor native: was this, I wondered, belonging, after all this time?
Not a clubby feeling like that of expats swapping kidnapping stories over mezcal, not a warm sense of acknowledgment like getting nods from the same artists and waiters at the same bars over the years, not any distinctive inclusion. Rather, the absence of a clear other to set oneself apart from.
I first arrived in Mexico in 2004, on a $250 round-trip flight I'd purchased on a whim during spring break my senior year of college. I had studied abroad in Europe but never been to the developing world. I wanted to go alone. Graduation was only a few months away, and beyond its precipice I could sense my nascent identity, just waiting for me to go hunt it down.
I arrived at 1 am. The authorized taxi driver drove me into the center of the city, stopped near the Zócalo, and repeated "peligroso," which, not speaking a word of Spanish, I thought meant "beautiful." “Si, si,” I agreed. My hostel was nowhere in sight.
I was babbling-friendly in the way of over-exuberant gringos, sitting there waiting, until, confused, I finally fished out the Lonely Planet and pointed at the address of another hostel. He began driving again.
Ten minutes passed, fifteen, circling through the city. Gradually, as neon and concrete swirled by in the darkness, the magnitude of what might happen became clear to me. I shouted, “Stop!”
I opened the door and threatened to jump out while we were still moving. The taxista braked and cornered me outside the car, asking for money; I gave him $20. Somehow I found a hotel, where I sat at 3 a.m. sobbing in Mexico City's dank chill.
The next morning I woke up, shouldered my backpack, and found my way across the city to my hostel. I went for a café con leche, awed as the waitress–clad in a beige, ‘50s-esque diner uniform–poured coffee from a metal decanter into a glass of foamy milk.
In the Bosque de Chapultepec I took disposable camera pics of teenage boys giving me the victory sign; mangos carved like flowers and impaled on sticks; the flying dancers near the anthropology museum, specks of color and feather against a washed out sky.
I stole up to the Plaza Garibaldi in the early evening in spite of warnings not to go out alone at night, and found pockets of men in spangled rhinestone pants and ten-gallon sombreros, strumming violins while they waited to be whisked off to parties.
My wonder and immediate love for Mexico swelled in direct proportion to the anxiety and fear of my first night there, a dissonance that would set the tone for the next ten years.
Everything I cherished about the country had a flip side alternately irritating, depressing, or dangerous. It is what makes life in Mexico both so meaningful–so charged as to lift me into moments of transcendence– and so intolerable.
In Mexico City on that trip I pushed the limits of safety each night, skirting back to my hostel at the edge of dusk. But one evening atop the Torre Latinoamericano, I couldn't tear myself away from the slow-burning sunset.
I perched at the railing, tracing the city's pink-gray veins to the mountains and their gauze of smog. I was woozy with all the difference, the otherness, and myself pitted against it like a sprinter against the track.
In the hostel a British girl, her feet pressed to the filthy walls in that classic teenage pose of flippancy, had said, "Café con leche is just a latte, after all." I was stunned. It was blasphemy. They were nothing alike! Not even comparable! Nothing in that world had any correlation in this one!
Mexico and the U.S. seemed to me then utterly separate entities, the former firmly in the realm of the foreign and incredible. Not belonging was a thrill and a challenge and a mystery and also a way of seeing: everything was to be noticed, everything learned.
A man sidled up to me. "Hola," he whispered. "Eres un ángel." I froze, staring over the city. I did not look at him.
“Do you speak English?" His own was near flawless, which made him scarier. I said yes.
"I've been watching you," he said. "You're staying at the Hostel Moneda, right?"
I grew nauseous and then, pragmatic. Stay calm. I leaned harder into the railing.
"Do you want me to walk you back?" he asked.
"No," I said. "I'm fine."
"It's not safe," he said. "I'll take you."
"No," I replied. "I'm fine."
"I'll follow you," he insisted. It was a veiled threat I didn't know how to dissimulate. I turned and waited for the elevator. He waited a beat, and took the next one down.
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