I found this blog post in a retired blog I had from a few years back, so it may have a few repeated stories. Even so, I thought it was worthy to post.
After my father passed away in 2006, I decided to take an emotional break from society as I knew it and traveled to the other side of the cultural tracks in Cancun, Mexico. I had been there many times before with my mother and we had gathered up a large assortment of local friends that we had come to love. Unlike the times before, however, I was not coming as a tourist to lay on the beach or to dance in the clubs. I was moving downtown into an apartment with friends and planning to make money playing in a reggae band with local musicians. I come to find out, over the six months that I lived there, that language was actually the smallest cultural boundary that I would have to cross.
After being raised to be an independent and strong woman by my parents, I have to admit that for the first two months I had a difficult time embracing the codes of the Mexican culture. I had two strong factors going against me: I was an American and I was a woman.
I felt as though I stuck out in a crowd as an American without ever saying a word. It was probably obvious when I reached out my hand to shake, when they leaned in the kiss my cheek. I wasn't used to closeness from complete strangers and I hate to say that I may have jerked away the first time someone introduced themselves. There were many times when I would walk up to my friends when they were talking to other people, usually men, and they looked at me as if I were crazy. My friends later told me that some of the Mexican men considered bold and independent women to be disrespectful.
It drove me crazy when my girl friends would degrade themselves and say that they were just stupid women and that they knew nothing about anything. I had gotten used to being treated grandly in the hotel zone as a tourist, and I had naively assumed that this was the general attitude towards women all over Cancun. Even though it was such a small matter to learn how to keep my mouth shut and to let the men speak first, it was an important attitude change that helped me fit in better with the local people.
I struggled through the awkwardness and began to learn the differences between my culture and theirs. Since I was living with local friends, they gave me a chance to get accustomed to living in a new culture, and I tried my best to embrace my surroundings. I was soon friends with many people in my neighborhood and they began to think that I was funny and they grew less suspicious of me. I was not called Brittany by many of the people, but often referred to as “loca”, which mean “crazy” in Spanish. I wasn't sure it that was meant to be a compliment, but I laughed it off and embraced my new nickname.
It was hard to try to play music in a band when half of the people do not speak English. However, I did come to find that music can be a language within its self. Sometimes when I would play my instrument and the others in the band would begin to play with me, we all forgot that I wasn't a local girl and that my Spanish was broken and terrible. We were all at the same place in our minds. Music was something where we could meet in the middle without words.
As I made more friends, many of them decided to teach me as much as possible about their country and culture. They taught me Spanish curse words and laughed when I would mispronounce them. The Spanish that I was taught would probably never make it to a Spanish class in Kentucky. I was speaking the slang language of Cancun and it was one of a kind. I have learned the hard way that certain words in Cancun do not mean the same to Mexican people in other areas.
They took the time to teach me how to salsa dance and took me to a Cuban dance club to let me show off my new skills. I was introduced to new foods and new customs. Being used to having a large breakfast, it took a while to get used to toast and coffee in the mornings and dinner at ten O'clock at night. The more the local people trusted me, the more culture I was introduced to. I was soon traveling to places reserved for locals only. I had the chance to swim in cenotes and go to apartment parties where no one spoke a bit of English and I just sat there, playing cards and drinking Sol, and listened to the language around me, trying my best to keep up.
The best memory of all from my cultural experience in Mexico would be celebrating my 20th birthday. I was at the very end of my stay and I was set to leave the next week. I had talked with my mom the day before and she had jokingly told me that she was going to have me deported. I could see that it was time to go home, but it going to hard to leave the little subculture that I had been so wrapped up in for so long. My friends threw me a birthday party on the beach with a large fire and coolers full of Sol, an authentic Mexican beer.
