Mexican Thoughts

I've recently had the opportunity to make a visit to Mexico City. Given that my occupation is measuring and understanding cultures, peoples, beliefs, values and opinions, it has been an eye-opening experience. I now see Mexican immigrants and US immigration in a different way.

It seems that Mexico is a country where you can readily get just about anything, domestic or imported. This makes it different than many other places I travel. The problem is that the disparity in income between the rich and more is so marked that there are only certain classes that can afford things we take for granted in the US. Thus the power of our dollar.

So with that in mind it suddenly makes sense to me why Mexicans would come to our country for a few years or seasonally to earn greenbacks and then go home. It makes since that they are the slowest to integrate into our society and learn English. With a wad of US cash, a Mexican can suddenly live a couple social classes above his native income level. The disparity is so flagrant that I can understand why some people would risk so much to do so.

For example, across from my hotel, in the wealthy Polanco district of the city, is a huge sports field surrounded by stadium seating and impressive buildings. I once asked the steward in the hotel what it was. "A polo field," he said, "though in all my years here they've never played polo. It's used mostly for government speeches and such."

During my trips to Mexico, I have also reconfirmed again that once you've really learned one Romance language you can generally hack your way through all of them, except maybe French. Many thanks to Imperial Rome. My Romanian has helped me through Italian and now Spanish. The French language though, just like the people, is still just....different.

Mexican food is great. My wife converted me many years ago in Utah to liking Mexican food. As a Midwesterner, Mexican food to me had once meant Taco Bell, and was disliked. On my trips this year I've found I like Oaxaca cheese and dislike papaya. And as with the restaurants here, I've enjoyed the mariachis walking down the street outside the office playing their instruments in the afternoon.

Mexico City also has its disturbing sides. Illegal airport cabbies who charge more than the going rate of unsuspecting visitors, for example.

There is also apparently a growing subcomponent of the Catholic religion called the Cult of Death, replacing the Virgin Mary with Santa Muerte (Saint Death); a female skeleton. Its members worship the power of the finality of death, as an affirmation of the value of life, rather than the gift of the Virgin Mary. A little creepy, to say the least.

Familiar Places; Old Acquaintances

One of the benefits of traveling widely is opportunities to revisit places and activities of my past and see old friends flung widely about the planet.

On a recent trip to Afghanistan I had the chance to visit with an old university friend outside New York City. For those of you who know Sasha Philips-Arasakumar, he hasn't changed a bit. We shared some hours at a seaside diner. Good to see you Sasha. My family and I look forward to your visit.

I missed Ilian Casu while in Berlin. He had just left with his family to return to his homeland of Moldova not two weeks earlier after a stint living in the city. He left me another old friend at the hotel counter; some of my favorite Moldovan wine dressed up in spiffy new labels with real corks. Back in '95 when I got to know Moldovan wines, you were doing well if there was a plastic stopper in the bottle. Noroc, Ilian!

Along with the people, there are also the places. Last summer's American Association for Public Opinion Research Annual Conference was in Los Angeles. Matt Warshaw and I took the opportunity to travel down to San Clemente and eat at one of my favorite seafood places on the pier; The Fishermans Restaurant and Bar. Ron Lindorf introduced me to it many years ago ('99?). Sorry we didn't drop in Ron.

Budapest yielded a few suprises on my return. My first visit had been in '95 to share Thanksgiving that year with Zoltan Janosi. Zoltan had been a former Hungarian student of mine many years before when I worked at the Washington Workshops Foundation in DC. The city was much the same, though this time it was warmer than November and I had more purchasing power.

I had enough purchasing power that the hotel I was in was of sufficient status to host the European Cup Wheelchair Fencing Championships. For those that don't know, I spent well over two decades fencing on and off. I had the chance to watch for some time, fascinated by the differences in strategy immobility of the legs creates in the sport.

More recently I returned to Berlin, where I had not spent significant time since I was a student at RFW University-Bonn in 1989-1990. The memories, and the German, came flooding back after 18 years.

My student years in Germany were seminal to shaping my career choices. The night the wall came down I rented a car and drove the city to be part of the experience. It was a transition for me from a hoped for career as a US Army officer protecting then West Germany from the Communists to one involved with US Agency for International Development work rebuilding East European societies after the Iron Curtain's demise.

It was good to revisit a unified Germany. There were things I had forgotten; distinctly German things. There was a bakery selling loaves of fresh bread in the airport terminal, pretzels with mustard for breakfast, good red kraut for dinner almost every night and wine glasses larger than water glasses at dinner (a reverse of the French practice most of us learn in the US).

And there were new things. You can now rent Trabis by the hour to drive around Berlin as a gimmick. I remember seeing them as a standard feature of the landscape on a trip through East Germany in '89. Much of Berlin which was once a no-man's zone between East and West on my last visit has been rebuilt in Bauhaus style. I'm a lover of Bauhaus, but too much in one place goes from being utilitarian to downright sterile.

On one side of the Brandenburg Gate, the old Reichstag has been given new life as the Bundestag with a spiffy new glass dome replacing what was lost during the Nazi era. Next to the nearly-finished US Embassy on the east side of the Brandenburg Gate is a new, thought-provoking monument to Europe's murdered Jews. Oddly enough, it is built on the site of the former Nazi Chancellery and abuts an experimental sign marking the spot of the entrance to Hitler's bunker where he committed suicide at the end of the war. The sign sits in front of what was the height of East German luxury apartments; intentionally built atop the bunker to eliminate it from memory.

Also on the Eastern side is the Berliner Fernsehturm, another landmark I visited 18 years before. It hasn't changed at all; the restaruant at the top still rotates slowely in panoramic motion around the spire, the decorations still smack of the communist era, and the clientle and service are still geared to the teeny-bopper set before 9PM.

My newest, and perhaps lightest, memory to add to the German repertoire was the Ampelsmannfahrraederin. Only in Germany would the city pay someone to ride around on a bicycle with a big placard of the crosswalk signals, handing out literature reminding people to cross with the light. Ah, Germany...