Mexico's a big country, y'all.

Before I actually got on the plane to Phoenix, coming to the border had a flavor of going home. I had studied abroad in central Mexico (Puebla) in the fall semester, and I hoped to get a taste of the country I'd been missing for the past five months. But hey, that's like studying abroad in Arkansas and hoping to get a flash of that experience in Philadelphia. I mean some of it will be the same, but most of it will be a cheese-steaky new experience. 

I first began to realize that I was not in Mexican Kansas anymore with the food. I knew it would be different--to say that Mexico has regional differences would be a gross understatement--but who knew Mexican food could be capped in so much yellow cheese? There was relatively so little dairy in my daily meals Puebla that I came back to the States having just about lost my tolerance to our levels of lactose in general. And the delicious flour tortillas that we've been inhaling this entire trip to the border? Order any taco in Puebla with cheese OR flour tortillas and you've ordered yourself a "gringo taco," right off the menu.

Restaurants here at the border definitely know the double/mixed origins of their clientele, and no matter the fare there's always some sort of house enchilada or at the very least chips and salsa for starters. One cafe we visited in Portal, Arizona had a whole separate menu just for Mexican-style dishes. I kept wondering why we would eat Mexican food every single day until I realized that for people around here, Mexican food is just called "food." It just felt too close to my own culture to realize it.

But what I most see here on the border that I didn't expect is how important it is to be from the border. It's not just important to be Mexican or American, it's so much more defining to be Mexican/American at the border. These people define themselves by the cultures of the borderlands in a way that I do not define myself by the cultures of "the center." The languages and their mixings are unique to this place (not only between English and Spanish, but also between both these languages and those of the original tribes). Your personal use of language (or pointed disuse of language) signals your history in the region and even more specifically your childhood there as well. The use of native symbols and culture has also been impressive to me, being from a state (Arkansas) that has little to no ties to its earlier cultures.

The emphasis on origin, history, and the mixing of border-specific cultures is so strong that our visit to Chicano Park (previously described by a couple of our other lovely bloggers) took me aback. The descriptive "chicano" is a specific reference to Mexican culture at or across the border and has been a re-appropriated adjective of pride for the Chicano civil rights movement (closely tied to the United Farm Workers movement). So there we were, in a park specifically named to be saturated in border culture, and it was full of metaphors and symbols plucked straight out of central Mexico. Mural after mural depicted Aztec/Nahuatl gods and goddesses (like Coatlicue, the Aztec earth and mother goddess pictured below), symbols that Mexico, as a very center-centric country, has adopted as its own.

And yet, these were symbols of Mexico pride, not really border pride. There were few to no depictions of local native symbols, nothing that I could find besides the logo for the United Farm Workers Association that was even very border specific. All the gods and goddesses, symbols, and folk tales represented in each beautiful mural were straight out of my culture class 2,000 miles south. This park seemed to concentrate on what it meant to be Mexican almost more than what it meant to be Mexican in the United States, the latter of which is totally what I thought "Chicano" meant. I didn't think to ask our two local guides to the park while they were actually with us, but I'm really wishing I had. It just goes to show how complicated identity can be, especially combating both assimilation and marginalization at once.

One thing that sounded familiar here at the border was how Mexico and the United States marginalize the border in general. It is not a U.S.-specific reality that the federal government (and pretty much the rest of the country) hyper-stigmatizes and misinterprets the U.S./Mexico border. I got just as many tales of caution from my Mexican family and friends as I did from my American ones, few of them having ever really been to the border at all. Funny how prejudice flows both ways.

Well, this post started out a fun little intracultural comparison, but it seems to have turned into a narrative about complexity. Sort of like this trip. Let's deem this post an elaborate extended metaphor instead of plot-less rambling and call it a wrap.

Border Ladies, over and out.