Monday, November 13, 2017

About Mexico

Mexico, My Third Country

   A few months ago, it was five years since I moved to Mexico City to live with my daughter and her family. She had settled here over a quarter of a century ago. When I told an old friend about my moving plans—a person of my vintage and also a German-Jewish refugee when in her teens—she emailed me, surely smiling, “emigrating again, I see.”
   Well, my friend was right. Five years away from the US (where I had lived for about 70 years, are sufficiently significant, even if it unlikely that this Mexican stint will add up to my original German stay, where I had lived until I was twelve. While, given my advanced age, I am dubious that my Mexican years will last that long. I have no intention of leaving , since I am happy in my Mexico City abode.
   Of course, repeat, of course it is different from anything that has gone before in my life. But when I take stock, much more of the difference from the years preceding can be attributed to geography than to age. Here I only want to mention a couple  of characteristics that are peculiar to the fact that I live in Mexico and on those that are not a matter of choice or discretion.
   Most obviously, the biggest difference from my past is the language. Yes, I had to learn another language moving from Heidelberg to New York, but boy! how different learning English in the 6th grade in New York from coping with a new language in my late eighties. I made very little special effort to acquire Spanish, since a little effort would not have gotten me very far, given the age of my brain.  Moreover, I haven’t had much of a motive to learn a new language, since I live with a family that is wholly bilingual, allowing me to be totally lax about learning Spanish. Thank you, my family!
   Now to a second structural difference between now and what has gone before, from what was familiar to me in the US. Let me get specific.  In the morning, around eight, Antonia brings my breakfast to my room, after I shout that she should come in, in response to her discreet knocking. In short, the Salazar family has a full-time, live-in servant—at this time an efficient young person.
   (Daughter) Ellie and her husband are more than full time musicians, both with orchestra posts and other concert gigs, both with many individual students and other teaching duties, as well as more sporadic chamber music performances, but quite a few of those.
   Such careers would call for household help in the US, but in Mexico, a society with distinct classes, nothing could be more normal than to have a full-time live-in servant. And nothing makes that more clear than the fact that middle class housing has clearly designated servant quarters.
   These two structural differences between my earlier existence and now just scratch the surface of what the change is like. But these two traits are even more fundamental than the difference in food and the like.

   But I should also mention the climate. You can’t beat it!  

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