Pura Gente : Who is American? Thoughts on the Caravan and Travels in México
The truth is I am getting tired of the word immigrant. Immigrant. Migrant. Citizen. Alien. Resident. Illegal. These words, even those as innocent and importantly descriptive as immigrant, become primary identifiers of difference. They start to wash together in my head like a wet pile of someone else’s political laundry. Darks and lights. Immigrants and Americans. Used correctly, they’re revealing. Used dogmatically, and they become classifications — unofficial social castes. These words blend the faces of individuals and replace them with mass distinction. Others. People are people, but more importantly a person is a person. Another truth is that I’m a white American male who is more comfortable in Latin America than I am in my own country. Why is that?
I speak Spanish terribly. I have only traveled in a handful of countries in South and Central America, and I lived in Mexico for one year only. But it changed me. It’s hard to explain to people north of the fence who have only visited Cancún. It’s more feeling than language. I don’t want to waste thousands of words trying to get there. I can say most of it in three: todos somos americanos. We’re all Americans. This is my lens of feeling when I read the news, when I hear policy wonks spin their lips, when I consider the privileges of a U.S. passport, when I think about my own place and identity in the Americas.
Last spring I returned to Mexico for a month to visit friends, students, and to relax and write. I was staying with a friend in Coyoacán, the neighborhood where Frida Kahlo painted The Two Fridas and slept with Trotsky before he was killed by an assassin with an ice pick, where Cortés escaped to from the ashes of his own ruin-making in Tenochtitlan. More importantly, Coyoacán functions as a regular neighborhood where people eat, drink, deal, and live. I spent the first week doing little more than eating tacos and paletas and then walking narrow streets to gaze at the falling purple blossoms of jacaranda trees. I was supposed to be working on a book. Instead I forfeited my time to tree-gazing. But it seemed foolish to spend a month this way; the jacarandas were growing bare and soon I would be ogling the same colorless trees.
I decided I needed to leave Mexico City for a few days to visit Valle de Bravo, a favorite weekend getaway of affluent Mexico City families. I was neither Mexican nor affluent, but even gringo Americans need to escape their escapes. Mexico City is many things, but it isn’t relaxing. So I left my hideout for a break from my break from the States.
The only buses available at the Poniente station were second-class buses. Most buses in Mexico are clean and smooth. The nicest ones give you a cookie, a washcloth, and headphones for a dubbed action movie. The bus to Valle de Bravo was not one of these buses. Most people who visit Valle de Bravo go there with money and a nice car. The rest of us ride second-class buses, which are on par with most American bus lines. I started to put my bag under the bus, but the luggage compartment was empty, and there was no handler or system, and it was too big for the overhead compartments. I asked the bus driver if he could give me a baggage ticket for my luggage. He couldn’t.
“I will watch it,” he said in Spanish. He took the bag from me and slid it under. I got a seat by the windows so I could watch the landscape stream by. I tried to keep an eye on the luggage at stops, and then I gave up. I would just have to trust people not to steal.
Valle de Bravo is a town born in the middle of a man-made lake. It reveals itself from a high road as the bus winds through Los Saucos on the final stretch. It’s green and peninsular, sticking out into the color-changing lake like a speckled, verdant thumb. A tall rock fin cuts across the thumb end. The top of the fin rises in a craggy finger of limestone called La Peña which is marked with a large altar to the Virgin Guadulupe and a pair of crosses — one carved from wood and another made of rusting iron pipes.
On the weekend, the town fills with wealthy difeños escaping the capital city. The town square swells with vendors, and the lake blinks with boats. But mid-week it was quiet. The bus weaved through town. All the buildings were painted a uniform white. The streets were stone. I saw only a few white people. I sighed in relief. We stopped at a small bus station a few blocks from the central plaza. I was the last one off. When I stepped down, the driver was waiting with my bag.
He stood over it smiling.
“See?,” he said, waving at my bag. He smiled at me and reached for my bag, and when I reached, too, he grabbed my other hand to shake it. His grip was firm and friendly. He held it and leaned in.
“Pura gente,” he added. He smiled. Pura Gente. Pure people. Good people.
“It’s true,” I said. Es la verdad. I smiled back. Then we let go. I slung my bag over my shoulders and headed for the square to look for a place to sleep that night.
That week I gathered a handful of valuable memories. I sunbathed alone on a wide rock in a river of small waterfalls. I dangled my feet over the cliffs of La Peña while watching the sun set across the lake. I played basketball with locals, including two friendly teammates who once labored in New Jersey without papers. I stood outside an open window of someone’s home to listen to a neighborhood choir practicing La Llorona in a cappella. Yes, I cried a bit under that window. (I was, and I still am, one of those gringos who tears up at Mexican banalities). But the thing that’s stuck with me the most was that handshake.
Months later, it sticks with me as I read the news through the lens of my truth: Todos somos americanos. America expands its range in my mind’s map. We’re all Americans. It sticks with me as our government separates American families. It sticks with me as we watch an American caravan weave its way north through Mexico to a bordering state that used to be Mexico before they lost it in an unwanted war. It sticks with me as we watch people in power try to reclaim America as an ethnic nation, even though it isn’t now and never was.
I do not remember the bus driver’s face, but I can still hear his voice, and I can feel the grip of his hand and the warmth of his smile. There was grace in it. His words were not a lesson. They were a gift. When he said pura gente, he didn’t mean only himself, or the people of Valle de Bravo, or Mexico, or beyond. He was implicating me also. This was the gift. Pura gente. Good people. Together.
Because we’re all traveling somewhere in this world. To new towns, careers. To other jobs, nations, families. Sometimes we are traveling to start anew. Sometimes we’re escaping something, like the countries or communities we are born into — maybe for vacation, maybe for asylum. Sometimes we travel across borders, real or imagined. We hope that we get where we are going, and we hope that we arrive with the things and people we care about most. The myth of the journey is that self-reliance will get us there. It won’t. We depend on others to get there. We depend on strangers who aren’t strange if we stop seeing them as Others. We depend on pura gente so that we might arrive more together than separate. I remind myself that I am included; I am implicated. When I return to the States, I take this back. I try my best to carry it with me wherever I go.
