gringa sings the blues

“Just the facts, ma’am,” encapsulates a US approach to crime; cold, logical, and professional. What happened is indisputable; just fit all the pieces of solid evidence together logically and scientifically and the answer-- the truth-- appears. When my father in law was kidnapped in Mexico I thought, just the facts. Let’s figure out “what happened” and put the perpetrators behind bars. I was about to find out that “what happened” in Mexico isn’t the answer to a systematic search into the crime, but rather a cloudy, evasive and tortuous path through a cultural psyche.

There is a joke that is told in Mexico and it goes like this: There is the CIA, the Scotland Yard and AFI, the Mexican Federal police. They are each given a challenge: a rabbit is let loose and each group is told that will be timed to see how long it takes to track, find and return the rabbit. So, the Scotland Yard takes off and 20 minutes later they return, triumphant with the rabbit in tow. The CIA decides to go next and returns a half an hour later with the rabbit. AFI looks at their successes and scoffs: this is easy. So they set out. The CIA and Scotland Yard sit around waiting. 20 minutes pass, a half an hour, an hour. Hours pass but finally AFI is seen coming close in a pickup truck. AFI officers surround an enormous animal with huge guns. It is an elephant. The elephant is blindfolded and shouting, I am a rabbit! I am a rabbit!

Every joke is funny because there is a kernel of truth encased in otherwise absurd situation. Here in Mexico getting to the bottom of things is not a pursuit that holds much interest for the police—giving a little “push” to the people who are in custody so they tell what the police want to hear is practically protocol. I would never receive a thorough, disinterested investigation because police officers don’t get to the bottom of things through investigation. Why not? I suppose the answer to this question is the purpose of this essay: Culture. Why is a culture one way and not another? I have no easy answer to that question, but I do know that I became intimately aware of the deep differences between me and Mexico. The kidnapping served as the catalytic event that forced me to closely look not only at Mexican culture but also my own.

I am an “extranjera” in Mexico, a stranger. I have lived here five years ever since meeting my husband while working at a local university in Morelia. After getting married, we had two children and began carving a life for ourselves here in the city. Originally from Connecticut, this change has offered one cultural lesson after another.
How to make Mexican food, how to speak Spanish were obvious, but then there are the more subtle lessons: how to say no without saying no, how to get a job through contacts, and how to care for babies in the midst of bizarre superstitions. But I rolled with the differences because, quite frankly, I was in Mexico married to a Mexican. What did I expect? But then this kidnapping happened and required me to look a little deeper at Mexican culture—not just at the superficial differences, but into the deepest corners of the collective consciousness. And I found that I really only began to understand Mexico in the midst of this incredible drama.

The story begins last September. I had just returned to Morelia from a vacation to the States. I began my teaching job and was resuming life as usual. It was Tuesday night, September 12th, 2006. I was 5 months pregnant with my second child and my husband was in his final semester of law school. My father-in-law, Tobias, was getting ready to sponsor a year length’s worth of festivities for the patron saint of his hometown, an honor he waited years to fulfill. We were all looking forward to the coming year. On that warm, September evening, Tobias left the house to inspect a piece of property that he wished to buy and was kidnapped. His abductors demanded 500,000 pesos, an amount roughly equivalent to 50, 000 dollars, for his return. For three days they called demanding the ransom as we scrambled to come up with the money. We negotiated the final sum and agreed to wait for a final phone call that would indicate when and where we were to drop the money. It was Friday. But the phone call never came. We waited. And waited. We still are waiting.

Kidnappings are a frequent, unfortunate occurrence. Michoacan, the state where we reside, has little industry other than drug trafficking, drug laundering, and avocados. Poverty leads to delinquency and desperation. Some—many-- have so little left to lose that they form bands and kidnap for a living. Many people ask why this happened to Tobias. They think he must have been wealthy or connected. Not so. He was a regular middle class working man who was at the wrong place at the wrong time. Or perhaps it was an inside job—many kidnappings are plotted and executed by close friends or even family.

At the time of this writing over a year has passed. The most probable explanation is that Tobias has been murdered. Another, which we must believe, is that he is still alive and for some inexplicable reason the kidnappers still have him. Whether or not we will ever know is an answer that only time will tell. The horrendous waiting that has left us all numb, cheerless and desperate is a condition that will be ameliorated by nothing. The unknown is unbearable.

But since the unknown is intolerable for all—Mexicans, my family in the US—what does culture have to do with it? While my Mexican family was never pleased with the police behavior or the justice system, it wasn’t shocking. “That is just how it is” was the most common explanation. But why? These are infuriating and inconceivable events for an outsider, but consider this: Police budgets are small here in Mexico and the pay for a cop is pitifully small. To supplement one’s income one needs to drag their feet so the family will offer a bit of money. Most officers have minimal education—few have finished any education beyond high school. The budgets are so tight that proper police training in ethics and computers and investigation tactics is practically non-existent.

In the US we behold public servants to an abstract personal integrity, an obligation to society inculcated from a young age. But if that commitment wanes, human nature being as it is, there is also a reward system woven into pay raises, public recognition, and promotions. If I begin as a beat cop I have the opportunity to advance in my career and pay scale by the number of cases I crack, good behavior, etc. So, besides fulfilling my societal duty through good investigation I am also benefiting myself. There is no such system here. To make money a police officer is almost obligated to look for bribes or illegal sidework. And without training or technology to aid my investigation they can’t do their job well anyway. So, lesson number one: bureaucratic structures encourage certain behaviors. In this case, police ineptitude, apathy, and corruption result from a system without internal rewards, little training and pitiful pay.

This is example one of those subtle differences in Mexican culture made clear only through this experience. But I learned a little about my own culture too—or at least my role in US culture. I discussed my feelings of desperation and powerlessness in the face of the police corruption with African-American friends. One commented: now you know how the minority feels about the police in the US. Where I see justice and nifty police work in the US, many people of color see an institution seething with racism and unfairness. Maybe Mexico’s police system has institutionalized corruption whereas the US system has institutionalized racism. Maybe this cultural difference I find in Mexico has a bit to do with confronting my white privilege. I’ve taken enough sociology courses to know that I have it, but I have never had to really face up to what it meant. Being white in Mexico in this situation means nothing. I can’t rely on my physical appearance to get the police to do the “right thing” something that subconsciously I would have expected in the US. Being on the outskirts of this society as a minority is a frustrating space to occupy—a space that many US citizens inhabit in their own country. It’s ironic to be learning about one’s own culture while so deeply steeped in another.

The families of the victim cannot push the cops to do their job without “mordidas” or bribes—and sometimes these are not enough. Regardless of the thousands of pesos you spend, the letters you write, the protests you organize, and the phone calls you make, you are powerless. This forces you to give up your ideas of individual volition and personal responsibility. You must accept the world as it is because you, as an individual, don’t matter and cannot affect change. A US perspective of self is quite different. We wholeheartedly, if not erroneously, believe that we control our future. We have become specialists in controlling every aspect of our lives in the US and it is difficult for us to imagine a true sense of powerlessness over ones environment or future.

In the US I walk into an ice-cream shop and choose from 50 flavors of ice cream, 7 different sizes and 100’s of different combinations of toppings. I control to the minutest detail every part of my ice cream eating event. Buying ice cream in Mexico affords quite a different experience: I choose between vanilla and chocolate in one size. That ice cream eating experience is offered to me as is. I have little autonomy. Now this seems like a ridiculously trite example, but in its simplicity one can see the range of mobility that US citizens exercise compared to Mexicans. We take this for granted. Lesson number two: personal choice is a cultural notion that you must shed in Mexico.

How did Mexico get like this, a friend asked. I wonder if the question shouldn’t be: How did Americans get like this? Our individualistic mindset and controlling nature that perhaps comes with the plethora of options that our advanced economy offers us is, in fact, not the norm if you look at world cultures. But in response to his question—it’s complicated!
I can get mad, cry for justice, and weep salty crocodile tears but this matters not. I don’t matter—I am a nobody. Octavio Paz, one of Mexico’s more fascinating writers and public figures writes, “They (others) simply dissimulate his existence and behave as if he did not exist. They nullify him, cancel him out, turn him into nothingness. It is futile for a Nobody to talk, to publish books, to paint pictures, to stand of his head. Nobody is the blankness of our looks, the pauses in our conversations, the reserve in our silences. …He is an omission, and yet he is forever present.” So, there we are, the people, but we are mysteriously cancelled out. How does one explain this to someone who is not Mexican? Even I cannot fully understand this nullification—but I have experienced it. When Tobias was kidnapped, we didn’t become a special case. Judges, politicians, police and the general public didn’t consider our experience. We blended into the cloudy dark side of the “victim.” And we had no voice, no autonomy, no social or political will. Lesson number two: Independence and self-sufficiency lose meaning in a culture where the individual dissolves into a mass of “nothingness” with no volition.

Maybe this sense of collective meaninglessness that one tacitly feels is the reason for the strong presence of religion and “adevinas” or fortune tellers and the omnipresent Virgin of Guadalupe. I remember my sister’s reaction when I told her that the “vidente” (psychic) told me that Tobias was alive. She paused on the phone and said, “hmmm,” a polite dismissal of someone who never had to resort to tarot card readings to feel something sure. Passing by the housing projects, I understood why there were so many shrines to the virgin of Guadalupe, encased in glass with adorning flowers. An impoverished existence is ameliorated by compassion, love and hope of change as represented by the Virgen. And you do believe in what the “vidente” tells you hoping that she, too, is telling you of positive change soon to come. Whether or not it happens is secondary. They provide the smallest sliver of hope. Living with total desperation is impossible, and hope comes from strange places: justice metted out by a fair God in the next life. In Mexico, there is no real belief in self or hard work or progress to incite change and a better life—these ideas sustain US ideology. The afterlife, spirits, tradition: those are the ideas that can offer us a better life, at least psychologically, in Mexico.

“What happened” is impossible to know. But what I do know is that my father in laws kidnapping provided a whole lesson in culture. I learned, not as a fact, but deeply and intuitively that the bureaucratic structures prevent any real investigation. There is no money, advanced technology or training in the police force. They are paid pitifully and apathy reigns. Two, this is not an individualistic culture in the sense that people really believe they can make a difference or exercise control over their environment. There is a tacit, collective nothingness that one feels here. Nothing gets done, no one can change, I am nobody. And because one feels part of a mass of impotent public a certain kind of fatalism begins to color how one sees life. I cannot demand justice because who am I? So, I find justice in the third cultural difference: religion, the virgin of Guadalupe, spirits, and psychics. They soften a harsh reality that most live through here and provide a belief system that buoys our spirits and offers justice through compassion and consolation.

I will work on a conclusion later. I will continue al rato...