Affordable holiday options to the Third World!
Mexico’s robust carpe diem mentality is a wonder, the hot blood of the Latino inspirational and devilishly sexy. Marry a Mexican man and you’re marrying your extended families – be ready for elaborate Christmas dinners with aunts you’ve not met before!
In the past five months, my life has centered around the upper middle class neighbourhood of del Valle, where I live in palatial splendour with three fluently multilingual intellectuals, the touristic glory of the Historical Centre, where I have my classes, and the occasional foray for coffee into the artistically posh charm of Coyoacan and the elite shrillness of Polanco. My Mexico, in short, is spacious tree-lined streets, golden angel monuments, and epic urban forests.
Laid against this background, Mexican culture is beyond charming, it’s downright adorable. If you never have to face the reality of life being rather precarious for a lot of the population, how absolutely wonderful is the focus on family and faith. If you never have to know a day without the ability to buy food, how intensely noble is the lack of a consumer culture. The refreshing simplicity of it all, you sigh, thinking wistfully of your consumer debt back home. Imagine putting an intimate knowledge of your extended family over new drapes for the livingroom!
There is, absolutely, a difference in priorities here. I currently am carrying around a comparatively staggering (considering what I earn) debt load because, on moving to Toronto four years ago, it was of the utmost importance to me that I furnish my two-bedroom apartment top to bottom, complete with facilities to comfortably house guests. There was a moment in IKEA, when the realization that I would have to content myself with a cheapo $500 futon rather than a nice $1000 wooden one hit, where I felt hopeless, a consumer loser. For everything else, there’s MasterCard.
The past month, during what I anticipated would be an emotionally trying week, I let most of it go with only nominal and well-ingrained materialistic doubt. It surprised me, actually, how easy it was, considering how important all that stuff had been to me in the first place and how it very nearly stopped me from making this journey. (Kisses to G and James for being my subletting buffer at tremendous personal cost, and to my parents for lining the back wall of their storage locker with the books and music I couldn’t bear to part with even this time around.)
Ostensibly it was to free me to travel, but I do believe it served to just simply free me: no more $500 IKEA futon to anchor me to Toronto. Here I can silver lining my financial situation (precarious, intermittent, unreliable) and label it an opportunity to understand the difference between need and want.
Ah, but see, there I go! That, exactly, is my point:
Oh those noble Mexicans with their $150 a month minimum wage, poor souls! Wouldn’t it be grand if I, wrapped snugly in the knowledge that a) I am earning considerably more than that, and b) I’m only ultimately a well-meaning visitor here and could leave in a second if or when the situation worsened, could learn such an important lesson from them? Won’t I be *such* a better person when I return to the First World with such clear thinking?
It’s the pennies into jars mentality: it doesn’t take much action for the circumstantially fortunate to feel good about ourselves without actually ever having to face the realities for the rest of the world. We can chastise ourselves for naively walking with eyes open into the credit legtrap all we want, but a few dollars to buy a goat for a village in Africa seems to level the playing field: they have goat milk, we can forgive ourselves for wanting a flatscreen television.
In the meantime, we will do everything in our power to reduce the shock factor of the have nots: we will buy lots of silver jewelry because it supports the local artists (and it’s just so darn cheap!), and we will marvel at how clean and well-kept all the cars are, and lament that we will likely never know that level of close family unity. We will give Mexico points in some inane competition against our own porcine culture, elevating their status to “economically poor, but culturally very very rich.” See, we tell ourselves, they don’t have it that bad after all. We can all relax and order another margherita.
But none of this is possible if you actually open yourself to the realities. My roommate – a Mexican national – recently spent a month in another state working with impoverished communities; after the second week, he returned pale and shaken, deeply disturbed not only by the fact of the poverty but by the fact that his country appeared to be doing nothing about it. One of my students, in a previous career incarnation, used to build schools in the same communities; he was never as much charmed by the noble offering of chicken for dinner as horrified that that might be the only meat that family would eat for weeks, maybe months, and that it was being wasted on him. (Since it’s rude to refuse food here, he took to bringing backpacks full of staples – beans, rice, dried meat, clothing – which he would in return force upon his hosts.)
And so they tell me stories, and I try to imagine but all I see are those baby cow-eyed little African children being cuddled by sobbing pseudo-celebrities seeking a checkmark to offset the public perception of their own DUI demons. I fall into the same trap of whipping my country for its fortunes and focusing only on how we ghettoize our Indigenous people into terrible conditions as if to say, see, I *do* understand.
And so I have guilt about my ignorance and naïveté, because maybe in some way it makes the obligation to understand go away. Call it Consumer Catholicism. Forgive me Father, for I have purchased new raw silk drapes from Pottery Barn when my old ones weren’t even faded or torn. Say ten Hail Visas, my child, and make an offering of only buying the second highest cable package tier. And maybe send over $5 to buy a goat for Darfur.
The Ex Mex once accused me of being a Third World tourist, which simultaneously shocked and hurt me deeply. I’m not, I protested to anyone who would listen. I want to learn! I’m here to learn! Teach me, oh wise country. Show me your beauty and your rot. Make we wonder at your wonders, and honour your traditions. Share your joy and your pain with me. Get me involved in your struggles and make me grateful to be Canadian.
I am a Third World tourist, not because I mean to be but because it’s all I know how to do. But that’s going to change somehow. I refuse to let myself off that easily.
In the past five months, my life has centered around the upper middle class neighbourhood of del Valle, where I live in palatial splendour with three fluently multilingual intellectuals, the touristic glory of the Historical Centre, where I have my classes, and the occasional foray for coffee into the artistically posh charm of Coyoacan and the elite shrillness of Polanco. My Mexico, in short, is spacious tree-lined streets, golden angel monuments, and epic urban forests.
Laid against this background, Mexican culture is beyond charming, it’s downright adorable. If you never have to face the reality of life being rather precarious for a lot of the population, how absolutely wonderful is the focus on family and faith. If you never have to know a day without the ability to buy food, how intensely noble is the lack of a consumer culture. The refreshing simplicity of it all, you sigh, thinking wistfully of your consumer debt back home. Imagine putting an intimate knowledge of your extended family over new drapes for the livingroom!
There is, absolutely, a difference in priorities here. I currently am carrying around a comparatively staggering (considering what I earn) debt load because, on moving to Toronto four years ago, it was of the utmost importance to me that I furnish my two-bedroom apartment top to bottom, complete with facilities to comfortably house guests. There was a moment in IKEA, when the realization that I would have to content myself with a cheapo $500 futon rather than a nice $1000 wooden one hit, where I felt hopeless, a consumer loser. For everything else, there’s MasterCard.
The past month, during what I anticipated would be an emotionally trying week, I let most of it go with only nominal and well-ingrained materialistic doubt. It surprised me, actually, how easy it was, considering how important all that stuff had been to me in the first place and how it very nearly stopped me from making this journey. (Kisses to G and James for being my subletting buffer at tremendous personal cost, and to my parents for lining the back wall of their storage locker with the books and music I couldn’t bear to part with even this time around.)
Ostensibly it was to free me to travel, but I do believe it served to just simply free me: no more $500 IKEA futon to anchor me to Toronto. Here I can silver lining my financial situation (precarious, intermittent, unreliable) and label it an opportunity to understand the difference between need and want.
Ah, but see, there I go! That, exactly, is my point:
Oh those noble Mexicans with their $150 a month minimum wage, poor souls! Wouldn’t it be grand if I, wrapped snugly in the knowledge that a) I am earning considerably more than that, and b) I’m only ultimately a well-meaning visitor here and could leave in a second if or when the situation worsened, could learn such an important lesson from them? Won’t I be *such* a better person when I return to the First World with such clear thinking?
It’s the pennies into jars mentality: it doesn’t take much action for the circumstantially fortunate to feel good about ourselves without actually ever having to face the realities for the rest of the world. We can chastise ourselves for naively walking with eyes open into the credit legtrap all we want, but a few dollars to buy a goat for a village in Africa seems to level the playing field: they have goat milk, we can forgive ourselves for wanting a flatscreen television.
In the meantime, we will do everything in our power to reduce the shock factor of the have nots: we will buy lots of silver jewelry because it supports the local artists (and it’s just so darn cheap!), and we will marvel at how clean and well-kept all the cars are, and lament that we will likely never know that level of close family unity. We will give Mexico points in some inane competition against our own porcine culture, elevating their status to “economically poor, but culturally very very rich.” See, we tell ourselves, they don’t have it that bad after all. We can all relax and order another margherita.
But none of this is possible if you actually open yourself to the realities. My roommate – a Mexican national – recently spent a month in another state working with impoverished communities; after the second week, he returned pale and shaken, deeply disturbed not only by the fact of the poverty but by the fact that his country appeared to be doing nothing about it. One of my students, in a previous career incarnation, used to build schools in the same communities; he was never as much charmed by the noble offering of chicken for dinner as horrified that that might be the only meat that family would eat for weeks, maybe months, and that it was being wasted on him. (Since it’s rude to refuse food here, he took to bringing backpacks full of staples – beans, rice, dried meat, clothing – which he would in return force upon his hosts.)
And so they tell me stories, and I try to imagine but all I see are those baby cow-eyed little African children being cuddled by sobbing pseudo-celebrities seeking a checkmark to offset the public perception of their own DUI demons. I fall into the same trap of whipping my country for its fortunes and focusing only on how we ghettoize our Indigenous people into terrible conditions as if to say, see, I *do* understand.
And so I have guilt about my ignorance and naïveté, because maybe in some way it makes the obligation to understand go away. Call it Consumer Catholicism. Forgive me Father, for I have purchased new raw silk drapes from Pottery Barn when my old ones weren’t even faded or torn. Say ten Hail Visas, my child, and make an offering of only buying the second highest cable package tier. And maybe send over $5 to buy a goat for Darfur.
The Ex Mex once accused me of being a Third World tourist, which simultaneously shocked and hurt me deeply. I’m not, I protested to anyone who would listen. I want to learn! I’m here to learn! Teach me, oh wise country. Show me your beauty and your rot. Make we wonder at your wonders, and honour your traditions. Share your joy and your pain with me. Get me involved in your struggles and make me grateful to be Canadian.
I am a Third World tourist, not because I mean to be but because it’s all I know how to do. But that’s going to change somehow. I refuse to let myself off that easily.
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