We spent the rest of the day touring the city and taking photos, but I was anxious to get to the next morning’s street food tour. This would serve as a culinary counterpoint to Pujol and would give us a chance to consider the difference and relative merits of two very different ways to approach Mexican ingredients.
The thing about street food in Mexico is that it’s powered by the people. As we walked out of Pujol, down the street we saw a very impressive-looking but nearly empty restaurant. Just outside the restaurant was a modest carnita stand with a line around the corner, selling tacos as fast as they could prepare them. I realized: If it tastes good, it wins.
The next morning, bouncing from street cart to street cart, Pam and I tried to figure out the culinary influences on the food as we wolfed it down. The carnitas were from Michoacán, where they cook pork, all of it, in pork fat, making an insanely crispy and delicious shredded pork taco that’s then usually covered with cilantro, onions, a slice of pineapple, and salsa. From the Lebanese came tacos al pastor, slow-roasted meat similar to shawarma, but instead of the lamb used in shawarma, using pork that’s covered in Mexican spices. The spices vary, depending on the recipe, but almost always include dried chiles like ancho, cascabel, or guajillo. Then there’s the tamale, corn masa steamed in banana, corn, or avocado leaf and filled with a little cream, mole, or cheese with some chicken or maybe raisins.
In a way this was part of my language education. I knew now that it was not enough to just study out of a book, to perfect your accent, or to write endless essays. You have to fall a little in love with the culture to learn it. In my case, on this day, that meant knowing that carnitas are pork cooked in pork fat, but that they also come in a variety of cuts, that if you just ask for a “carnita, por favor,” they’d give you a mix. But you’re missing out if you don’t know about the other parts of the pig (and yes, they cook them all), including the stomach, calf, leg, testicles, skin, braided intestines, regular intestines, uterus, just meat, ribs, ear, snout, or penis. My favorite was chamorro—leg meat that’s slightly fatty and perfect.
Then, at the next cart, I discovered my newest taco obsession: the tlacoyo. On the Pacific coast, they don’t have these very often, but they’re divine. It’s an oval-shaped taco that’s stuffed, in this case, with cheese, and mine was topped with nopales (strips of grilled cactus that has the consistency of green bell peppers when cooked but tastes milder). I covered it in salsa verde, a green salsa made with tomatillos. So good. I closed my eyes for a second to taste it better.
Mexico City was like a large version of Madrid, but the food alone was enough to make you want to stay. We only had ten days on our road trip to make it as far south as Chiapas, so we couldn’t stay here long. We hit the road again, still a little high on the experience in Mexico City.
Then the trusty Dodge Caravan started to break down. Going around corners, the electric door locks would click on and off, the interior light would flash, and the door chime would go off. Within a few hours it was happening every few minutes. We pulled into a gas station, and I popped the hood.
The guy who had checked our oil when we left Puerto Vallarta had forgotten to replace the oil cap, so there was oil all over the engine. Nothing to be done about that, so I took a look at the fuses. I had no idea how to fix electrical things, but I did know that if you remove the fuse for something, you could effectively shut it off. I removed three fuses based on the little chart: the airbags (ha! we don’t need those), the electric locks, and the interior light. When we turned the car back on, all the annoying things had stopped except the door chime.
I told Pam that I was a genius. She was not convinced. I drove around the parking lot. Ding, ding, ding, chimed the door.
I couldn’t find anything online via my cell phone about which fuse shuts off the door chime, but I did figure out that the door-ajar sensor for the driver’s-side door was setting it off. I read a post online about how to fix that: Remove the door panel and spray it with WD-40. I had neither WD-40 nor any tools, so I took a spare bottle of engine oil from the trunk and a pair of tweezers and tried to oil the lock, the little hook on the inside of the door that grabs the loop on the door frame when it closes. I pushed it down and rotated it and it clicked into place.
Locked. Which was great! Except the door was hanging open still, while the lock was now closed. I tried to unrotate the lock with my tweezers, but it wouldn’t budge. So I couldn’t close my door. I put the fuse for the door locks back in—nothing. The auto locks for my door no longer worked. So I did the best thing I could think of: I slammed the door as hard as possible.
The door bounced back open. I inspected the locking hook that I’d been proud of pushing into position. It was now bent beyond use. The whole thing was totally, utterly screwed.
Then suddenly I was surrounded by five guys who took turns slamming the door as hard as they could to get it to close. I explained what I had done in Spanish, but they focused on showing off their brute strength, slamming my poor busted door over and over again.
Pam looked concerned, but I was too pleased with myself to feel much worry, for I was talking in Spanish about car parts with a bunch of guys who didn’t speak English. The guys and I were having rapid-fire Spanish conversations. I felt as fluent as I had ever felt. Even though I don’t know all the vocabulary for the individual car parts, I understood enough to pick up the new words on the fly.
One of the guys called his friend who was a mechanic. The mechanic showed up driving the most banged-up car I had seen since we left Puerto Vallarta. It wasn’t until he checked out my door that I believed that he was in fact a mechanic—his butt crack was exposed above his pants and it was the most magnificent leathery brown skin I had ever seen. Only a lifetime of having your ass up in the air with ill-fitting jeans would produce such a glorious effect.
The mechanic had the same (brilliant) idea as me, but instead of slamming the door over and over, he had actual tools. So he banged the hell out of my latch with a mallet and pried up the lock until he could then slam the door closed. He told me in Spanish, “Okay, you can get someone to fix this door, later, or you know, you can just never open the door again. Just don’t open it. Ever.”
Okay, sounds good to me. I offered to pay him for his time, the hour of master craftsmanship with a rubber mallet. He asked for 100 pesos, about $7.50. Done.
An hour later, when we got a flat tire, I opened the door. I had totally forgotten. I stopped the car and jumped out, opening the busted door without thinking, and ran to the other side to look at the tire. It was really bad.
I opened the back of the van and pulled out the jack and got to work. It took me about ten minutes of cranking to get the car up, and another ten minutes to wrestle the lug nuts free with Pam’s help, and as I was about to put the new tire on, a police officer drove up.
The officer strode over to us confidently, and asked, “Where are your husbands?”
Hah.
Pam answered him in English, “Our husbands are at home, with the kids.” She smiled.
He looked at her for a beat, decided not to press the issue further, and crouched next to the tire. He cranked the jack up a few times, then tried the tire, but announced that it wasn’t working. I pointed to the back of the jack, saying “mire” (look)—there was still plenty of length for it to go up—but he ignored me and wandered off to his car.
“Pam, I am just going to do it,” I said.
“Do it!” she encouraged me, still holding the lug nuts.
So I started cranking the car up as fast as I could. A few minutes later he came back, shooed me out of the way, and tried the tire again. Oh. It worked. Was that a flash of embarrassment I caught on his face?
No matter, we thanked him and were off again.
• • •
WE SPENT A FEW DAYS high in the mountains in San Cristóbal de las Casas, where it was so cold that we shivered under our blanket
s at night. I called Drew and talked to the kids on video chat, while Pam downloaded her photos and checked e-mail. Then we continued back toward the Pacific coast, planning to loop through Oaxaca on our way back to Puerto Vallarta. I read off the signs in the towns we passed through, translating the Spanish for Pam: “Children have the right to school.” “We love you Chiapas, we’re on your side.” “Keep the streets clean.” There was one sign for a local politician who had just won reelection and had also won a rock through his grinning paper face.
Then, between two towns, we smelled oil. Burning oil. I pulled into a gas station and thankfully knew enough Spanish to work out what was going on. I quickly learned that the word tapón was the simplified expression for the oil plug—and I learned that we didn’t have one. The one that was missing from Puerto Vallarta, the one that kept the oil inside the car, the one I knew we needed to replace but had survived a thousand miles without, well, it was gone. And after a day of driving bumpy roads, we had splashed out nearly all our oil. The engine was hot. The tapón was missing, but even worse, when I revved the engine, the valve that regulated the coolant was spraying gushes of the stuff before it ever reached the engine.
They found a new oil stopper, but for the coolant hose we would need a taller mecánico.
“Do you know one?” I asked the now-familiar group of men who were standing around my steaming engine debating what I should do.
“Sí. Soy mecánico,” one of the men offered.
We followed him to his house, something I wouldn’t normally do, except that since we were in such a small town, it was likely that all the mechanics worked out of their front yards.
The mechanic didn’t have the part, he said, but for 200 pesos, he’d fix it. That was only about $15, but after counting our change, we barely had it. We hadn’t seen an ATM since San Cristóbal and, due to not wanting to carry excessive cash, we were now almost broke.
The fix was a PVC pipe, forced into place. They refilled the coolant for us and closed the hood. It’ll hold, they told me. We have to go to church soon, it’s getting dark. Good-bye.
An hour later, the PVC pipe was broken and all of our brand-new coolant was in the parking lot of a convenience store. We crawled into the next town, Tapachula, with the engine temperature gauge in the red zone. I came up with a plan: Get money from an ATM, leave the car overnight in this lot, take a taxi one hour into the jungle to the coffee plantation where we have reservations, come back in the morning and find a mechanic.
Our taxi driver recommended his dad for the job, speaking to me in a really fast and difficult Spanish accent. He spent the entire drive to the Argovia Finca telling me to trust him, while Pam and I sat in silence. When we arrived, the plantation staff came down to meet us. Pam had texted them about our late arrival, and the marketing director talked to the mechanic in Spanish, telling him imperiously, “These are very important clients. They are journalists from the United States. Please do a good job and not too expensive.” I handed the keys over to the taxi driver to bring to his mechanic father, and we headed up to our rooms to shower. It had been a long day, so after dinner I called Drew and the kids and then we headed straight to bed.
The next day the car didn’t come back. The day after that, the taxi driver and his mechanic father returned, sheepishly, with the fixed minivan, which had also been detailed, repaired, and tuned up. They had to travel to Guatemala, they said, to get car parts. They fixed the valve. And replaced the radiator. In fact, they replaced everything that wasn’t bolted down, from the timing belt to all the tubes and valves. It looked great. I started the car, and it practically purred. This seventeen-year-old beast had never run so well. Great! Where was the bill?
It took him a good fifteen minutes to carefully run through a handwritten invoice of everything they did. It didn’t include line item prices, and he hadn’t told me the total yet. He was stalling. Finally he told me: Thirteen thousand pesos. About $1,000.
That was just slightly higher than the 250 pesos I paid the other mechanic to fix it, and while I appreciated that he’d done such a good job, we’d only paid $1,500 for the car in the first place, and now he wanted almost that much for repairs? Who would put that much money into an old clunker? Then I remembered: The night he dropped me off at the resort, the staff had come out and the marketing director had told him we were three things: important, American, and journalists. Aka, cha-ching!
I spent two hours negotiating the price down, using every trick I knew. I walked away, I came back and made an impassioned plea in Spanish, I asked them to price each item on the list, and I told them I’d only pay for the work I asked for: replacing the one valve. But I realized, too, that they were actually in a bit of trouble. They had purchased parts, hired labor, and they had to cover their expenses. I offered $200, then $250, and then $275. I showed them the contents of my wallet. It seemed demeaning and somehow entitled to engage in this kind of tough negotiation, wearing each other down. It was certainly not in my culture to be so aggressive. Finally the resort owner pulled me aside and tutored me on technique.
“I have an idea,” he said. He was Mexican, and also the manager of a large team of employees. The resort was a working coffee plantation and had as many as two hundred workers in the high season, plus he sold his coffee all over Mexico. I was sure he had plenty of experience with negotiation.
“Tell him he can keep your car, that you won’t pay anything but he can try to sell it himself to get the money back,” he advised.
It was a ploy. I knew it was nearly impossible to legalize an American car in Mexico, but it showed a level of desperation on my part that was rather convincing. They rejected the offer but suddenly were willing to drop the price significantly. They offered $400. I paid it.
We started driving north. And one hour outside Tapachula, on the only highway going north to Oaxaca, we ran into Aduana, the agency that handles vehicle imports. We were stuck in an internal border check. I spent another two hours talking in Spanish, this time with customs officers. They were relentless with questions: The car was in my husband’s name, so where was my husband? If I was really crossing into Mexico from another country, the owner of the car should be there or I should have a notarized letter or something. I didn’t have any of those things.
Thankfully, they let us go. Sort of. They escorted us back onto the highway, sending us back in the direction we just came from. We took our chances of running into them again, and simply chose a different route. Two days later we were finally in Oaxaca.
In Oaxaca we stayed at the lovely Azul hotel, in which each room was decorated by a different Mexican artist. I picked up some mole paste for Drew, took a cooking class with Pam, and declared my road-tested Spanish a success. I was practically floating. I had never been so challenged to use the language before, and if I could make it through all those interactions in Spanish, then I had succeeded. I had argued with a customs officer in Spanish for two hours!
I started out this experiment just wanting to converse in another language. Now I was battling bureaucrats. I was calling it, I told Pam: I was fluent. My Spanish wasn’t perfect, and I would have a lifetime of learning to perfect it, but I could speak with fluidity, I could handle situations where I had to think fast and talk even faster. There’s no finish line in language learning, but this felt like a major milestone: I could make myself understood and I could understand what was said to me. I had gone from dabbling to knowing a language. Maybe even to being bilingual.
Twenty-nine
It was time to leave. Pam and I returned to Puerto Vallarta, and she flew home to Canada. Drew and I had decided to leave Mexico, too. But we didn’t want to move home to the United States. I needed the incentive of living in a foreign culture—a non-English-speaking culture—to keep my bilingualism up. Otherwise I’d do what I did the last time I learned Spanish and returned to the United States: I’d stop speaking it. It would fade. And as for the kids—they would spe
ak Spanish if we enrolled them in bilingual schools, but how long would they keep it up after graduation if it had been only an academic exercise? If we didn’t form our life, our family, our friends, and our community around the new language, was there any point in even learning it? If there was no practical need for the language, it would become nothing but a time-consuming parlor trick that I’d taught my children—impressive, perhaps, but the exact thing I wanted to avoid in the first place. I didn’t want to raise prodigy children solely for the sake of loading up their college applications; I wanted this to be part of their identity. Of our identity.
Without strong family ties in the United States, and to avoid raising bilingual kids in a largely monolingual culture, we knew we wanted to continue living overseas. Spanish seemed like the natural choice for us, but Latin America was so far geographically from the Middle East, and I wasn’t ready to give up my Arabic studies, even if I wasn’t sure it was something my kids needed to learn. We started to look at Spain, which had reasonable residency visa laws. After five years, we could get a permanent residency visa for Spain, and five years after that, we could apply for naturalization and the entire family could get Spanish passports.
That would mean my kids could go to college in the EU or the U.S. We could have the kids in Spanish school and then transfer to an English school for high school, so the kids would be balanced in their Spanish and English, able to write and read at a high level in both languages. I spoke with some friends who grew up as so-called third-culture kids—kids raised outside their parents’ country, belonging neither 100 percent to their parents’ culture nor 100 percent to their new culture—and one of the things I was told by my friend Meriah, who grew up as a missionary kid and still spoke Japanese, was that the faster you can adopt the local culture, the better. It could be isolating to be different from everyone else, so living in a country, like Spain, where we would be comfortable fully adopting the local parenting style, the traditions, the holidays, and so on, would make our children’s childhoods less stressful. Of course Cole and Stella would always have parents who spoke English, but the more we could create a typical Spanish home for them, the better.
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