Halves of Life, Two Countries
Since I now have lived longer in the US than in Mexico, my connection to my youth and my country has become more palpable.
I spent Labor Day weekend in Guadalajara as part of the jury of the FIL Prize in Romance Languages—on which I will write soon. Throughout the trip I became aware that at some point in 2023, which I have not had the heart to calculate with precision, I will have lived longer in the United States than in Mexico. Although it had been lingering in my head, this feeling intensified last weekend, perhaps as a consequence of being in a city loaded with signifiers of Mexicanness, exacerbated by the “Mes de la Patria” atmosphere leading to Independence Day. Every time I travel back to the US, I feel a strong wish to move back to Mexico due to its cultural richness. I yearn for something concretely impossible because the economic and labor conditions that led to my migration in the first place have not really changed.
I have the luxury of being able to return to the country many times a year, for both personal and professional reasons. Therefore, my relationship to Mexico is not comparable to my compatriots who are denied the benefits of passport privilege and dual citizenship. As a consequence of my enjoying this privilege, I have become a border abolitionist, but this point requires a different, more considered piece of writing. For now, I just mean to say that the constant, increasingly frictionless, back-and-forth over so many years has granted me the ability to experience Mexico in a much richer way than in my youth. My scholarly expertise and my desire to perceive everything when I am in Mexico intensify the affective and intellectual engagement in a way that was not available to me in my late teens and early twenties.
I am a child of a period of turmoil, one that has received the name of “democratic transition,” but can more properly be described as the gradual decline of the one-party rule of the PRI and the inexorable rise of the neoliberalism as the ruling economic paradigm. When I was six years old, the 1985 earthquake rattled the city during the morning commute, September 19, 7:19 AM. Both the apartment we lived in and my the building housing my elementary school were damaged and I could not return to either for months. In the mid-1990s, as the country’s economy nosedived into a mass recession due to the first collapse of neoliberalism’s policies, my mom faced unemployment and we dodged the bullet of homelessness mostly thanks to friends who allowed us to live with them for some periods of time.
As a teenager, I lived for years in the working-class colonias in the northern and southern edges of Mexico City, where my mom’s friends, mostly secretaries, were able to secure dignified housing. At the same time, I commuted for two-and-a-half hours each way to attend a private school that did not kick me out when my mom lost her job because the owner supported me with tuition, uniforms and textbooks. My life throughout my teenage years was the uncanny daily passage between a precarious economic life barely tethered to the comforts of a lower-class barely supported by the disappearing welfare state and its deep contrasts with the upper-middle class space of a good-quality private education. The microbús and the metro were to me liminal spaces that negotiated my navigation through a diversity of class spaces.
My cultural life at the time was defined by these contrasts. In this period, many people in the middle and upper classes identified Mexican national identity and many of its products with the PRI. As NAFTA began to flood Mexico with an unprecedented amount of US culture, we were all seduced by the dream of modernity in English and the promise by then president Carlos Salinas de Gortari of Mexico’s imminent entrance to the first world. There is no doubt that this discourse was class-inflected. If you could afford cable TV, an expensive proposition, you could easily live in this US cultural utopia, replacing telenovelas for sitcoms (from the high-school fantasia of Dawson’s Creek to the bourgeois marriage of Mad About You). MTV brought the promise of escaping the Televisa pop of Lucerito and Kabah for the purportedly more sophisticated music of Rock en tu Idioma (ruled in Mexico by Caifanes and Café Tacvba) and grunge, which my wealthy classmates enjoyed religiously.
Even at our economic bottom, my mom and I aspired to that cultural modernity. She really disliked any Mexican cinema made after the 1950s, although she kept some emotional connection to the Época de Oro films of her childhood. Instead, she developed in the course of her life encyclopedic knowledge about US cinema and television, with some entries allowed for European films. When I went with her to the dilapidated cinemas of the late 1980s and the early 1990s, we would see classic Hollywood films like Ben Hur and Lawrence of Arabia in the Cine Bella Época (now gone and converted into the Fondo de Cultural bookstore in Condesa). Like many children in Mexico, I watched the The Aristocats and The Little Mermaid at the Cine Continental (now demolished and replaced by a Walmart), whose façade was a replica of the Disney castle, excited to buy marzipan fruit from the vendors in the entrance. And thanks to the fact that my mom was friends of the manager of Cine Ópera (now a ruined and abandoned building), I could see films like Terminator in a big screen.
The experience of music was not much different. The Televisa pop stars were wildly popular and many across the social spectrum liked and could sing the complete works of Timbiriche and Fey. But these did not grant you cultural caché. One the one hand, rock en español emerged as a politically progressive and culturally relevant genre, a mixture of rock, ska and traditional Mexican music thriving in underground circles, and consolidating itself as venues like Rockotitlán, broadcasters like MTV and Rock 101, and some forward-looking record labels like Emi brought it to the mainstream. This story is well told in the fourth episodes four and five of Netflix’s Rompan todo.
Music in English, though, carried the promise of modernity. My mom’s station of choice was Radio Universal, a popular station carrying US music from the 60s and 70s. Trying to be cool and modern I was a fan of Radioactivo 98.5 and WFM, whose programming was ruled by the alternative pop and rock coming out of the US in the 1990s: a daily diet of Nirvana, Pearly Jam and Weezer. When I tried very hard, I would be able to listen to Portishead, Massive Attack and Björk, whose knowledge, not common amongst my classmates, I treasured like my secret encyclopedia. I regret to say that, while I enjoyed Rock en tu Idioma quite a bit, the vast majority of my music consumption was in English. This was, of course, a mistake, but I don’t think my younger self, trying to find something to compensate for years of poverty and the desire to be part of that failed promised of modernity from those years, could be blamed for it.
When I moved to the US for graduate school, everything changed. The experience of being a foreigner in the US and the palpable understanding of the lies and failures of the NAFTA years led to an inexorable change in my perspective. I wanted to study comparative literature—and some days I wish I did—but I became a scholar of Mexico. The more I have delved into it, the more I have become a cultural nationalist. I still despise the use of cultural nationalism in authoritarian politics. But I do not think it is a necessary trait of it. There is a lot of emancipatory potential even in the culture that was fostered by the state. As I became deeply acquainted with some of my favorite places, I radically changed my perspective. Los Angeles Azules, a band I refused to hear as a young man, is one of my favorite bands. The Mercado Abelardo L. Rodríguez, which I sometimes visited as a child, became a favorite place when I realized the enormous power of having murals and a theater next to a space designed for food security and sovereignty. The Mexican cinema my mom would not touched turned into the topic that the center of my academic career.
But here is the thing: I remember even songs that I did not know I remembered. When Los Ángeles Azules began their string of collaborations with pop and rock artists in the 2010s—the kind that occupied the media space of the urban middle class—, I could sing every line of songs like “El listón de tu pelo” (which now featured the lead singer of Hello Seahorse! and classical orchestra arrangements). When Jenny and the Mexicats collaborated with Grupo Cañaveral, I could recalled all the lyrics of “Tiene espinas el rosal.” The fact is that I heard those songs all the time. In the hours I spent in microbuses, these songs would be blasted off the speakers almost every day. Don Humberto Pabón’s trademark yelling (which you can hear in the collaboration with Jenny and the Mexicans below) is imprinted in my memory. Not to mention the fact that, living in working class neighborhoods, the nights of Friday and Saturday would be populated with the soundtrack that sonideros curated for the bailes: Bronco, Los Temerarios, La Mafia, and many others banda and cumbia artists. They are all wonderful, and I love the songs. But I denied this love, because I tied them too much to the dire economic situation that exposed me to them. Overcoming this association provided me with a deeper and broader sense of how wonderful and powerful this culture of resistant and defiant joy is, a celebration of constant pride of working people in the face of Mexico’s brutal economic inequality.
Every time I travel to Mexico now, I take it all in, the full breadth of social spaces I navigated as a young boy. My typical day implies eating in a place like Los 3 Reyes, a family barbacoa favored by working and middle class families in a residential neighborhood, an immersion through the streets bristling with vecindades and informal commerce in Tepito, a visit to the rarefied Palacio de Hierro in Polanco and an end-of-the day dinner in the Chinese restaurant at the top of the Ritz Carlton. There is a degree of fantasy to this: few Mexicans can navigate this landscape of economic inequality with ease. But Mexico is all of this and far more, and I needed to leave to understand it in full. Only from the outside, living for years a powerful country that can never match the palpable cultural wealth of Mexico, I could appreciate the gift I was given as one of those who always, from a young age, could experience the totality of the city’s social landscape.
Twenty-two years later after the fateful decision of leaving for good and developing an academic career that I did not even know was possible (and is now nearly impossible for most of those who followed this path), I dream of coming back one day with the knowledge I acquired. But this may be pure melancholy. In any case, I have a debt for my binational privilege, one that I pay teaching Americans to better value the wonderful country next door, the one their country undervalues and sometimes hates. I also pay back, I hope, by giving as much of the knowledge I treasure to the increasing number of Latinx students that come to my classes, particularly the ones who have been denied full access to their heritage and their culture by the prejudices and ignorance of those in charge of their school curriculum. I may only be able to return after retirement. In the meantime, Apple Music carries me sometimes with a playlist called “A Day in Mexico City.” The rotation of songs never fails to trigger a memory, or to show me cultural idea I missed in the last two decades, because I left. Like this song, popping up in the playlist as I finish this post, a permanent fixture of sonidero nights, microbús mornings, and MP3 memories ever since: