Carina Schorske -- Mayan Arts and Culture (MXHD)

From Mexico to Marin: Creating Possibility by Finding the Foreign in the Familiar

Who decides what is typical of us? At what point do people begin to hear our names and feel that they can sum us up in three words? She's bohemian. Smart. A dancer. That about says it all. Often, especially for those of us who have lived in the same town all of our lives, our high school years find us feeling pigeon-holed into an identity that we have unconsciously created for ourselves with the aid of family, friends, teachers, and coaches. Life can feel stagnant and predetermined, and we tell ourselves that we can wait until college to change our lives. I love my hometown, I love my friends and family, and in general I am happy with who I am and who others perceive me to be, but sometimes there is no escaping the sense that my life is too small and structured to support the full and vital range of my component qualities. In my normal life, I exercise a smaller range of these traits. At what point does it become unfair to your own development to confine yourself in this manner? At any and every point. My Experiment was an exploration of what truly defines us on the most basic levels and a lesson in the ever-present possibility of change, and of this life.

The very nature of a foreign country whose language you do not speak natively, strips you of the first few layers of normal self-definition: you don't recognize your surroundings, and you can't communicate without really thinking about the structure and substance of what you're about to say. This means that you can't define yourself in relation to the place you're in and your speech is stripped down to a baseline of what is necessary rather than what is habitual or off-the-cuff. For the first few days in Mexico City, and for the first few days of my homestay, the utter newness of the place left me feeling isolated and lost. Without any of my normal reference points, I didn't know how to act or how to convey my complicated feelings and requests in this foreign language. Here is an excerpt from my travel journal after returning from Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul in Mexico City during the orientation:

If only I could rise out of that surreal blue oasis and reclaim the self floating like smog between San Francisco and Mexico City, then recongeal here, familiar but renewed, in an enclave of Frida's teeming garden.

Orientation was difficult only in the sense that we were always doing something. There were so many new smells to absorb--chile verde, sewage, mole, city rain, elotes--and so many new words to decipher. There was no time to assimilate these new things into your being so I always had the sense that my mind was trying to catch up with everything my sense organs had experienced. I didn't have time to think about whether Carina would normally like this or how Carina would probably respond to this situation. Life was moving too quickly.

If orientation was full of surprises, then I can't describe that first week of my homestay. Before I came, I had a facility with Spanish that significantly surpassed some of the other students, but 'facility' is nowhere near fluency and does not include that nonverbal cultural vocabulary that proved to be both most universal and most alien, and ultimately, most transformative. At first, communication was difficult. I'd have to construct a sentence in my head before I said it and my language skills were not refined enough to describe the subtle and complex range of emotion that characterized that first week in Toluca for me. This deliberate, spare use of language left me frustrated and desperate to find an alternate form of communication. As a writer and voracious reader, most of my relationships and pretty much my entire sense of humor revolve around words and wit and conversation. Without this commonality I didn't know how my host sister and I would ever become truly close. What am I if not witty and persuasive? What is intimacy if not a long heart-to-heart over a tub of ice cream?

Even as my Spanish improved, Lucia, Aldo, Tere and I relied on body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice to grasp the subtler dimensions of a conversation. We developed an understanding of each other's nonverbal signals so refined that when I didn't understand what someone was saying, my host sister could repeat the same words to me and I would instantly grasp not only the meaning of what the person had been saying to me but also the spirit in which it had been said. By the end of our three weeks, I hadn't only become close to my family, I had become more intuitive, quicker to sense the emotion behind language, and more sure of what qualities are most fundamental to who I am, in other words, those qualities that do not change in tandem with language or location. In her parting letter, my host mom described me as 'an educated, tender, and warm girl.' No description could have made me feel more understood or less hemmed-in. There was no pretense of having me 'all figured out' based on my 3 favorite albums and my grade in biology. Their understanding of me was pure and raw: the result of an honesty born of necessity. My understanding of their playful and gracious hearts was informed only by action, experience, and only the most economical and straightforward conversation. Here is an excerpt from my journal my last week in Toluca:

We're hanging out behind the counter, late afternoon in my mother's dress shop, when, in typical Toluca fashion, the sky darkens and suddenly the rain and hail bring the sky down to the curb. Aldo (my host brother) and I break out the paints Tere uses for the little flowers that adorn the communion veils. We paint on newspapers and paper towels in almost meditative calm; I paint Golden Gate Bridge upon Golden Gate Bridge, and Aldo paints that red bird burning. Alright, our country can be imperialistic, and besides he's just kidding and trying to open up the tenderer parts of my patriotism. I don't care so I paint the fog that envelops the soft noble peak of the mountain by my house in Marin. He starts to paint Toluca, with the volcano greener than life and some clear river descending slender then surreally WHOOSH it's in front of us huge on the page. I would tease him about his sense of perspective but I suddenly feel how small things do become enormous and inescapable in an almost imperceptible instant. I won't accept the burning bridge (in my private world, bridges are the worst things to burn), but I will take this half-fictional landscape with its riotous river and kindergarten-delicate house. He doesn't want me to have it because it's so ugly. It is ugly but I want it as a memento and as a reminder of the little revelation I underwent with that river. He wants to read this journal and I let him for maybe 15 seconds before my handwriting and my face move him to retrieve his picture from the trash so I can formally refuse it.

So that's how we'd talk about patriotism, and art, and the things we want to give one another.

Having developed this new relationship to language, and ultimately, communication, all of the students in our group were open to a new kind of friendship. The entire foreign experience made being open to one another necessary, a matter of survival. We were each other’s only connection to America and only source of the comfort that can only be transmitted by those who share a common cultural base. Although we had these certain (and crucial) commonalities, for the most part our experiment group came together like a family: not by choice, but by circumstance. We came from drastically different backgrounds and geographically distant places. If I had handpicked students for my group, I wouldn’t necessarily have picked these people. Thank God no one let me choose my group! Because we had never met each other before, we met freed from the limiting influence of reputation. It was like starting over at a new school: every person was a potential friend. I made friends with a small-town Michigan girl who ran her local Christian outreach program and I made friends with a literary Texan who climbed everything that crossed his path, be it pyramid or palm tree. The fact that we needed each other meant that we were more open to being intimate with different kinds of people. There wasn’t really a choice, because in such a small group in such a big, unknown country, we naturally clung together.

As unforeseen difficulties stripped us of our normal pretenses, we saw one another in a light more harsh and more revealing than that of our familiar world. We saw one another exhausted and earnest, sick and intensely active, struggling and triumphant. We saw each other through a second childhood as we learned and grew comfortable with the cultural vocabulary of a new country. We saw each other at our most defeated and drained. In this sense, our friendships were friendships built on our faults, or rather on the bareness of who we are. We had too much to think about and too much to do to have energy for facades. In some ways, the 11 students I lived with for a month, who saw me crying and feverish, exultant and elated, know me in a more essential, or at least a more 'take-her-as-she-comes' way than my local friends and family.

As the trip drew to a close, the idea of returning home was welcome and warm, but felt incredibly narrowing. I didn’t know how I’d possibly integrate everything I had learned about myself and about the world into the familiar framework of my life in California. Mexicans are so effusively warm; Americans can be so distant. I didn’t know how I’d be able to remember vividly the teeming largeness of Mexico, how to the South of us, people live and work and buy tortillas with lunch and eat popcorn with salsa and live without electricity and drive fast and cry and cumbia until 4 in the morning. How could I possibly remember all of that rich material while simultaneously living a life, here, in which I am looking forward rather than backward?

I am home now, and I can’t remember everything. I forget the lyrics to my favorite Mexican pop songs and I don’t remember what my host sister wore the day I left Toluca. It’s difficult to conjure up a memory vivid enough that it evokes a tangible sentiment. Writing to my friends is different than being with them, although I do love how full my mailbox always is now. At first, as I began to lose a tight hold on these memories, I felt like crying over my own unimpressionability. If I don’t have these memories in an intimate way, then what do I have from Mexico? Even though it’s really difficult for me to physically understand (I can, of course, intellectually) that all over the world people are living lives that I don’t take part in, the fact that I did at one time take part in those lives delivered me shaken and wide-eyed on the shores of my own Pacific, imagining my life through their eyes, as some foreign destination in which the world seems chock-full of possibility. San Francisco is for someone as Toluca was for me: a liberation, a wonder, and the kind of challenge that eats at you from the inside then shines out through the holes. So when I returned, with these traveler’s eyes, San Francisco, Marin, the whole bright whirl of hill and street and sea, seemed just as extraordinarily ripe with unexplored things as the rest of the world. I want to hit the home-road and drive out its secrets. Like in Mexico, everyone I see is a potential friend. I read their bodies like foreign signs. My being seems to offer itself up for the shaping, and the increasingly flexible frame of my life is not so slow to expand. Really, it has no choice but to expand.

As I wrote in the last entry of my travel journal, the moment is a fever from which we will never recover. Thank you Mexico, for that gift, and thank you to everyone on the Experiment staff who made that gift possible to receive!