by Kevin Burton
There is a cove that I visit, a path where I meander, to which no one on earth can follow.
I don’t go often, but when I go, I go down deep.
Out of despair from not being able to break into journalism, I decided at 24 to go to live in Mexico. I had just visited that country for two weeks with three friends from college that summer. I “reasoned” that I could be a tour guide or teach English in Mexico.
No matter how you gaze upon it, forward from then or backward now, it was nuts.
It was a tantrum, pure and simple. But there was something God-blessed about that tantrum.
And now, all these years later, there are times when I pine for those days of discovery. I taught my language and learned Spanish with equal measures of gusto. Two sets of words to play with every day. How great is that?
I haven’t kept up with any of the Mexican nationals I knew at that time. And it’s not a time I can share with any of my American friends. They weren’t there. They kind of get it, but not really. It’s a room apart, a comfortable room.
I like it there, a lot. But no one can be there with me.
The day I knew beyond all doubt that I was a baseball fan, not just a Reds/Royals fan, was the day Kirk Gibson hit that game-winning home run in the 1988 World Series for the Dodgers – the hated Dodgers – against Oakland, and the hair on my arms stood up just like everybody else’s.
Similarly, with my Mexican sojourn it was clear that I had become some different dude. This wasn’t me repudiating who I was and had been, but adding something new, forever indivisible from me.
Not one person from my days at the Ohio State School for the Blind would have even considered going to a foreign country to look for work. I mean it wouldn’t have even been a daydream for any of them. “Come on man,” would have been the collective response.
OSSB sent me on a trajectory toward who I am today. But that trajectory sent me through Interlingua School in Puebla, Mexico and I’ve never been the same.
Mexico was intoxicating and infuriating, magical and absurd, sublime and ridiculous. It was a dream or two beyond delicious.
The 80s girl group songs that the Mexican natives I know now giggle at, carry me back into those times. It’s a carpet ride with a soft landing, the kind you don’t feel at all. And there I’ll be, alone, breathing easy.
Look, if Mexico had been all sunshine, lollipops and rainbows for me, I would have stayed, right? But in looking back, the good times, the friendships, the personal challenges, the newness of it all, is what permeates my heart.
All these things are on my mind this week because Monday (Sept. 16) was Independence Day in Mexico.
Cinco de Mayo is way up high on the list of Mexico’s favorite national memories, but it’s not their Independence Day. Cinco was the day a rag-tag Mexican army routed French invaders at Puebla, my adopted Mexican hometown.
Just a fortnight from the Sept. 16 Independence Day celebration, Mexico will on Oct. 1, inaugurate its first female president. This to me, was and is, astonishing. You have never seen such a patriarchal society as Mexico. It was one of the most distasteful differences between my home country and my adopted land. I could not believe Mexico would get to its first female president before the United States would.
President elect Claudia Scheinbaum is a protégé of the wildly popular current president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Those ties overrode Mexico’s long tradition of disenfranchising women. She won in a landslide.
“Claudia Scheinbaum a U.S.-educated scientist-turned-politician, was elected (June 2) as Mexico’s first female president, shattering gender barriers in a country known for a culture of machismo and high rates of violence against women,” wrote the Los Angeles Times.
“In 200 years of the Mexican republic, I have become the first woman president,” she told supporters in her acceptance speech, describing her victory as a win for all women. “I did not arrive alone,” she said. “We all arrived.”
Probably few people are better suited to be an American expat in Mexico than I. But Mexico for me is like childhood, a place I remember fondly but can’t go back to. My wife would hate living in Mexico, so the discussion ends there. If I were elected king of Mexico, I would have to execute my kingly duties from the Royal Mancave in South Central Kansas.
But I can still inhabit that Mexico of the mind, in my solitude, with my Flans tapes and my memories.
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