Saturday, November 23 2019
“Aim for the sky, but move slowly, enjoying every step along the way. It is all those little steps that make the journey complete.”
- Chanda Kochhar
Colleen likes to talk about Mexico in that we did not have the right frame of reference. We were not ready for it yet. We needed to grow up and travel to other parts of the world before we could actually see it.
We both grew up in New Mexico. Our experience with Latinos was skewed and compromised. Hispanic kids in our high schools often would hang out together to the exclusion of everyone else and white kids were not very welcoming either. Far from it. While there was some cross over socializing, it often did not go very far. It was a world of intolerance. That is how things were commonly in the 1970’s and we never thought anything about it . It was just the way things worked.
We were young, immature, and focused on our needs alone. (and, frankly, stupid)
Furthermore, when we would see Mexican or Central American immigrants they would often speak no English. This fact further isolated them from the community. As I was going around Albuquerque you would see groups of hispanic men hanging around parking lots in the morning waiting for an employer to drive by and hire them for the day often at wages no American would accept. In fact, at wages no teenager would accept.
Later, in the 1980’s I would attend medical school and training in California and almost 1/3 of my patient load would be immigrants who would come across the border just to have a baby. While I looked at them as the burden of caring for a patient with little or no prenatal care, they were often palpably relieved that their unimaginable long ordeal was nearing it’s end.
Our world become colored in shades that did not allow us to see a bigger picture. We did not have a frame of reference to understand or even desire to visit Mexico. Yes, we would both go very briefly to one or more of the resorts here, but that was not really seeing the country or the people. It was more like visiting a protected walled off enclosure that did not allow you to really see the outside world.
There was no internet, no access to other viewpoints unless you went looking for them. We didn’t go looking.
Fast forward to today and our ‘noble president’ has spewed out so much bizarre and hateful rhetoric about our southern neighbor that trying to get a real picture of the country seems impossible. We have constantly been bombarded with tales of roaming armies of cartel thugs ready to pounce at any moment and ‘caravans’ of people invading the United States to take “our jobs” and wreck havoc on our poor citizens.
We were not ready to come here yet. We had much to learn. We would have to leave our country and visit other cultures in order to have the blinders finally start to lift. In the last three years we visited some very poor areas of the world and witnessed people striving for basic needs. We saw the effects of colonial powers as they strip a country of everything of value leaving behind vestigial husks for the local people to try to put together a nation. In many places it was an arduous trek and it is still not finished.
Yet, despite this bleak picture, we witnessed over and over again how similar we are to people everywhere. We all want the same thing - shelter, food, warmth, and a safe place for our children to grow up. We are much more alike than we care to admit. This is true whether you are from the trailer parks of Abilene, Texas (where my family originated), the Cambodians we met struggling to come out of the shadow of the Khmer Rouge. the poor children we saw playing happily in India, or….
in the Central Highlands of Mexico where, after too long, we finally had the courage to visit and see for ourselves what lies beyond our comical president’s “Wall”.
What we found was a beautiful country that often shares more with Europe than the U.S. We saw faded colonial building from the time when the Spanish ruled here. Cobblestone streets ran between charming homes with high walls painted in the colors of the sunset. You could easily imagine you were in Tuscany if not for the cactus and the smell of gordita stands.
Yet, Mexico shares with the United States a history of barbaric treatment of indigenous people. Great civilizations that rivaled Rome once flourished here only to be trampled and destroyed by European, and later, American, invaders.
This is a wondrous land full of magnificent coastlines, mountains, jungles, and high desert. It’s climate is the envy of every single person in Indiana. The people we met during our travels were uniformly kind and generous and, despite the language barrier , would often work with you to communicate. They were not a terrible people bent on taking over the American Southwest as our ‘fearless leader’ rants to everyone. Besides even the most casual reader of history understands that we (America) took what is now the Southwest of the U.S. from them. It is not the other way around.
Most of the people we spoke with have never been to the States and do not have a strong desire to go. They fear they will not be treated well and ‘America is too dangerous’.
We have much to learn. We were finally ready to visit here. We have grown up and Mexico has changed us for the better. Why would we want a wall to obstruct us from such a view and from our neighbors?
So, does Montana really have a “Big Sky”?
Jonathan Zasloff writes where the term originated, “The name came from a book by Alfred Bertram Guthrie Jr., Big Sky, recalled by a Highway Department employee. Mr. Guthrie gave the Highway Department permission to use the name and Montana has been “Big Sky Country” ever since.”
It became an advertising slogan.
Can the sky be bigger in different parts of the world? The short answer is no. It is an illusion. When you have nothing to obstruct the horizon and it is not overcast the sky ‘seems bigger’.
But I know that is not true. I can give a first hand account. I have seen it with my own eyes here in Mexico. When I look up into the fathomless blue skies dominated by towering white thunderhead clouds, the sky is clearly bigger here.
In fact, it goes on forever.
Post script- Today we conclude our trip to Mexico but not our journey. We fly from here to San Francisco to see our son Stephen and see some old friends before returning home.
Episode IX - A new continent - begins in January
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