What Teeth Say About Poverty
One of my front teeth chipped last night. I dug a nail between two of them and suddenly felt the familiar tug of loose resin getting stuck between the gap. Shit. I jumped out of bed quickly, unable to race to the mirror fast enough. I knew I needed to assess the damage. The first thing that came to my mind was shit Erica, why can’t you avoid breaking shit. Then, almost at the same time, great, you don’t have money to fix it, remember that?
At first I didn’t see or feel anything different. I looked at the mirror and didn’t see any of the familiar atrocious, loud holes I’ve grown used to as someone who’s had significant work done to her front teeth over the years. I ran my tongue behind the damaged tooth and it felt smooth and whole. Huh, that’s strange, I thought. It took a double take to spot the little dent at the bottom left corner of the tooth. I felt it with my tongue, right at the very tip of my enamel. But the filling was intact. It was a problem of aesthetic. I was still annoyed at myself for having caused the damage out of sheer uneasiness and the need to always be doing something useless with my hands, but I was relieved that I didn’t have to rush to the dentist to get a redo of the filling.
Just a few months ago, early this year, my dentist had a conversation with me about another chipped tooth. He told me it could keep happening, but as long as the filling remained intact, it was only a matter of vanity. Well, he didn’t really tell me that, but once you get to the core of his words, that’s what he really meant. I hate that I caused the aesthetic issue twice. It wasn’t an accidental thing, it was a mindless, thoughtless thing. I always seem to get into trouble simply because I have nothing better to do. And while small inconveniences like chipped teeth that don’t really represent a danger to my oral health always seem to be a tragedy in the stage of my life, this time I have opted for a different approach: why don’t I just try being careful next time and grateful that the deities of teeth spared me true damage?
I like to think of teeth as poverty meters. My teeth are not the prettiest things in the world, but I still have every one of them. And even if some are in need of attention (cavities are, after all, a form of damage that does require intervention), I can still eat a vast array of foods, and for the most part, don’t have to exclude textures because I don’t have enough teeth to bite into firm meet or sufficient enamel strength to deal with acidity. Yet, if you take a close look at them, you’ll see the scars of mild poverty. A girl who has never had a lot, but at the same time, has never needed anything, has never gone shoeless or foodless. You’ll see someone threatened by her lack of health and dental insurance, someone with a college degree who has found it impossible to find employment but has found security in her childhood home.
Teeth tell us a lot about people. My father’s missing teeth will tell you that he always put my teeth and my sister’s before his own, and that he spent most of his money on filled-to-the-top grocery carts and money orders sent to Mexico. If you look even closer, they’ll show you the way his time ran out, how once he got a job that was good enough to offer dental insurance, the bone in his mouth had worn out and even tooth transplants were no longer possible. They’ll show you the cruelty of poverty: the way old age comes and you still don’t have enough money to cover the costs of cancer treatments, and even more cruelly, how you can’t even find solace in the foods you like because you barely have any teeth left.
My uncle’s teeth will say a different story, but teeth are known for speaking in different languages. Crooked, deformed front teeth peak from his mouth every time he smiles. He’s smart so he smiles only when he has to. He was the only one of six brothers who stayed back in Mexico. He was also the only one who graduated with a university degree. He studied engineering and ever since I can remember, he’s never been far from his laptop. He’s a walking computer, he has to be available when programming problems arise. University gave him one kind of freedom at the price of another. He plays basketball and swims and draws pictures on the walls of his children (even engineers have talents beyond computers), but his health is poor. If it’s not the esophagus it’s a hernia or one of many stomach issues that pop up one after the other. They’re the remaining scars after a childhood of poverty: pickled jalapeño juice is tasty when there’s little to season your food. No wonder teeth are left as a last priority. Sometimes education can’t erase what poverty has taught you: crooked teeth are nothing to complain about when you finally make it.
All the people I know have ugly teeth: diabetic teeth, uninsured teeth, neglected teeth, sick teeth. Signs of a sick country that breeds sick people. All the people I love have these kinds of teeth. My community has a tooth problem, a gigantic cavity. We learned to find consolation in food. We learned not to care about things like diabetes because a glass of coke, a tub of ice cream, and a plate of fifteen pork taquitos seem harmless and even therapeutic when we have a poverty problem, an unfed children problem, a separated families problem. Food is a life-source, a party in one bite, a reason to hold on and breathe one last time and remember that at least there’s beer and mole in the fridge.
Teeth are story-tellers. They force us to see the human in the stranger. We like to see people smile because smiles relieve us of guilt. If we see a poor person smile we like to believe that despite their misery, they’ve found a way to be happy. They’re not like us, we happily tell ourselves. They are simpler people who are happy and satisfied with less. Thinking this way makes us feel better, but even if poverty allows people to be happy with less, it doesn’t make what they lack any less real. It doesn’t make their exploitation less consequential, less cruel.
The same thing is true about smiles with perfect teeth. And I don’t mean good-enough teeth like mine. I am talking about bleach-white, straight-as-a-ruler, impeccable teeth — the ones that are fit for beauty magazines and dentistry brochures. What do these smiles tell us about these people? For one, they care enough about their teeth to make them look unnaturally white, that they have more money than the rest of us: enough expendable income to spend on the cosmetic problems of their smiles. They also remind us that money can’t buy smiles, because if the smiles of poor people are bright-enough to relieve us of our collective guilt, it must mean that something other than money is behind our smiles. Wealthy people are unhappy too. Maybe even often. Teeth are good story-tellers but perhaps not good enough to break into the secret vaults where wealthy people live.
Teeth hold the secrets we try to keep from others and often from ourselves: they hold our failures, our triumphs, our eternal striving force towards better. From the impoverished streets of Mexico City, to the working class American neighborhoods. From the children of generations of mine workers to CEO nepotism. Teeth tell the story of this country, of the countries of our parents, and the geography and intimacy of our own bodies. They’re the most personal part of ourselves, often our biggest insecurity, and simultaneously the loudest echo of collective struggle.
