by Teddy Fuentes
The Mexican Dream: Almost Getting Raped, American
Asshole Tourists, and Nostalgia Dressed in Pope Attire.
I was inside a home.
This place was downtrodden but very enticing.
White walls now a cream color. Brown stains like cigarette smoke made art, staining glass never meant to be seen through.
Furniture looked stale, but with the intense feeling of always having been there. Filled with purpose laced with antiquity.
Dust converged and sat on every flat surface. Coating the place with calm and stillness I longed for inside.
It was not my home, but it was Mexico and it felt like home.
The dichotomy of my idea of safety in Mexico means I was aware of all lurid possibility, yet remained jubilant as fuck to have the feeling of belonging.
Outside, through a tiny metal cased window, I saw something very Yin to the home’s sweet Yang.
Something alive, loud, and dark.
The Pope, and a parade for his majesty, was passing by.
All costumes and serious faces with smiles whose corners emit distrust.
It gave me very evil vibes, but surprisingly little sense of foreboding.
As curiosity killed the cat, I gravitated.
Like Esoteric and hidden knowledge obsessed moth to a very endearingly paradoxical flame, I went outside intrigued.
The spectacle had drawn crowds of people who had never been in a dominantly Catholic country.
Americans wearing pastels and sandals.
Also wearing dubious intent glares through Western-lens stares that definitely had roots in mangled psyche’s which repeat to the brainwashed mind “the rest of the world is a twisted work of Art”, “A work of art to be coveted or looked down upon.”
Little did I stare at the Pope and the crowd before I was done and gone.
Intrigue at the parade turned to monotone boredom.
Then that turned into a longing to explore the Mexican streets.
To be honest, the Catholic charade was an all too familiar sight.
Having studied at least some of every facet of ancient “knowledge” and growing up Catholic, I didn’t feel impressed.
I just innately felt that visually, it was just all a ritual to steal others energy.
I very much HI-BYE’ed the scene.
I took my positive energy in my tight black jeans’ pocket and became resolute in crossing.
My Mexican butt was just happy to be in Mexico.
I was filled with nostalgia and I wanted more.
I wanted street vendors and the smell of Churros.
I wanted urban filth and all the lovely shades of brown faces of my people. I wanted Spanish coursing through my brain soothing the harshness of the English language I had been previously subjected to for over a decade.
I wanted the vibrations of a kinder more forgiving and one hundred percent Mexican place to make love to my incessant nostalgia.
I wanted HOME.
This is when I crossed through the parade. My body literally dodging bishops and silly jester-like people carrying heavy metal objects in all religious shapes and sizes.
I felt very avant-garde, breaching a procession like this in a super obvious aloof yet determined manner. It was art.
I was wearing the most typically grungy, all black outfit, too.
I was thinking, “I look a god damned fool cutting through this, oh mother fucking well, let God, let God.” and very much feeling my self.
“Why did the chicken cross the road?” and YOLO type feeling.
Anyways, when I did reach the other side, I was birthed into a crowd of tourists.
To be frank, they were all light skinned American, wide eyed, giving me a feeling that this was not the sea of people my way-too-forgiving soul should navigate.
The parade was at it’s tail end and only a sprinkle of actually low key terrified Them remained.
(They probably felt their pack thinning out and were afraid of what the reverse of “stronger in numbers” means in Mexico.)
I looked no one in the eye, big head held high, as if their judgement meant nothing to me.
While having these very thoughts of “I don’t care, but I do” , I found myself past the river of eyes and walking on a beaten sidewalk.
My step grew calm and my eyes travelled to the natives walking towards me.
No, Shel Silverstein fans? This is not where the sidewalk ends.
The sun was setting orange tones and the city backdrop was grey buildings crawling with graffiti and soul .
I did not get too far down the concretely contorted and govern-mentally forgotten sidewalk until two men came into view.
They had strange mannerisms, dipping and swaying to the troughs and valleys of the ground.
I knew this drunk dance all too well. Public and full of disregard.
My immediate feeling was “be careful but sweet.”
The ominous and bittersweet tone of the surroundings swirled into the smell of alcohol they emanated.
Their aura was mysterious. But I could sense some intention beneath their red-glazed eyes attempting to seem cordial.
Using drunkenness as a buffer to fucked up things is also something I am sadly familiar with.
I said “hola, como estan” or something happy go lucky, a smile on my lips and my misandry gun on my hip.
My youthful tone was “don’t fuck with me, supposedly kind sir.”
But, like any story about men fucking up and worth telling, they did.
The drunker, muscular, towering one grabbed me from behind as soon as I was a mere inch past them.
I was in a choke-hold. One arm around my chest slash neck, and the other around my stomach.
I semi-panicked, knowing that this was typical kidnapping procedure in Mexico. Aware that it would more than likely end in violent rape and my body never found would rot six feet in a mass grave dug by elements of the Police who work with drug traffickers.
My female survival instinct kicked in. Before I even had the stench of my rotting corpse hit my mental nose, I looped my stronger left leg around his drunken spaghetti both-legs.
His knees buckled. He fell. Swift justice was candid and heard.
His skull possibly cracked. His head definitely smashed.
ssssss CRUK was the sound of his slipping and colliding with a little dose of reality.
You can’t burger king have it your way, forever, fucker.
A pool of instant-karma-blood oozed as his face lay unconsciously in a crimson lake of Don’t Fuck With Me.
Here’s the plot twist – I did not run . I did not take my unforgiving steel toed black boot and obliterate his face into a million skull fractures and brain dismemberment.
I didn’t panic. I didn’t walk away full of Pride. I didn’t revel at how quickly I disarmed his disgusting and misguided phallic-y. I mean, fallacy. I didn’t put my middle fingers in his face, pressing down on his sweaty, maybe decaying because of me skin, in contempt and as a final Fuck You.
This might disappoint some feminists of revolutionary and war-like thought, but, a Motherly sense grew within in.
The sight of his blood and his eye lids closed posed the idea of me maybe having killed another.
Another human who used to be a baby. Another brother. Another son. Another someone who was raised to become this monster I so gallantly and possibly slayed into the eternal abyss.
I felt panic at that thought. That realizing mistakes and redemption are only ideas that can be manifested with life. That we all have potential coursing through our veins, and that his was spilling endlessly at my very feet.
I turned to his partner, who is now just looking just in disbelief.
He was frozen and my mind went from “I’m getting kidnapped to get raped then murdered” to “Oh my fuck I think I almost killed this human being, I need to get help for him.”
I was showered in no guilt, but a sense of urgency to restore him back to Life.
I walked back the sidewalk the way I came. There were a few tourists still lingering.
The closest people I spotted were a mother in her mid 30’s with her small child of probably seven.
I was pacing fast and when I got about fifteen feet away I started explaining clearly but in a hurry that “someone’s hurt, I need a towel, a napkin, something-” . I was pointing behind me with a super expressive face of someone is in danger, please help, but
the white woman had a very apprehensive look. Maybe as if this was some type of con. Maybe as if she was trying to protect her child?
I am around five feet mother fucking tall…
Maybe my teenage angst black outfit spoke a little.
I didn’t care. In my mind, the tone of urgency spoke for itself.
I was keeping enough of a distance to not make then flee.
She reached for a napkin out of an American invention that looks silly as fuck but is useful and holds small objects.
Here’s where my gratefulness turned into full on external hatred- she leaned over, hand outstretched, face still bitchy, and the mother blessed napkin slipped out of her clean but nasty little bony hand. She did it with PURPOSE. She did it with subconscious malice dressed in supposed caution.
I boiled over in Mexican Pride. I boiled over and her condescending actions was heat enough to warrant an explosion.
My face filled with blood and I literally forgot what the napkin was for. My body tensed up and my throat let out steam.
“DO I NOT LOOK WHITE?” Thunder. Fire.
She was shocked, standing still, as if no one had ever called her out on that deeply ingrained Interpersonal Nastiness Americans use as a self centered tool to deflect.
Her frozen expression of fear told me the deer in the headlights stance and look was, one: not suitable for her facial structure, two: great for stabbing at anciently racist, pathological entities.
I stabbed, “This is my fucking HOME, not a ZOO, go throw your pity napkins some where else, GO GAWK AND TRAMPLE WITH YOUR EXPENSIVE SANDA-”
That’s all I remember.
Where my vocal disdain for the unsuspecting lady cut off, I now wonder if the man laying in the pool of blood survived.
Yes, I completely forgot about the man.
Yes, I am not as benevolent as previously thought.
Yes, my nerves and memory are tied and cut where racist tendencies and me collide
Yes, I felt accomplished even if I delivered a thousand degrees of Mexican defense and it was perhaps a tad unwarranted.
My native and light skin was just happy to be there, kissed by the Mexican sun, soaking in all the intensity.
Posi Negi, deadly, vivacious, touristy, unforgiving, eclectically magic and always intense, Mexico energy.
Now I sit here writing this. Longing for Mexico fills the spaces of my soul where the United States is a blessing but could never fill the cracks.
Even the tourists, the pope, and the surmounting statistical chance to be raped, kidnapped, and murdered, the location still made me feel complete.
Now I am filled with nostalgia and I want more.
I want street vendors and the sweet smell of Churros.
I want urban filth and all shades of brown painted on my Paisa people.
I want español coursing it’s friendly melodies through my brain. I want it to soothe the edgy and confusing harshness of the english language I have been subjected to for over a decade.
I want the vibrations of one hundred percent Mexican place to make love to all my senses.
I want the incessant nostalgia that creeps in daily to fade, but only because when I look out, I can see the piques of a Catholic church and can hear the Mariachi music of a crowd of six serenading a lady next door.
It’s a trip that the intricacies of my ethnic roots could come down to location. It’s crazy that I need to travel to feel closer to my Self.
I long for Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico.
I want so motherfucking much, and I want it so motherfucking deeply;
But in truth?
I just want Home.