Tourist, part 1

The picture: I don’t like looking at it but I made myself look at it to write this post. It’s me and four Mayan girls. The tallest one comes up to my shoulder and the shortest one just barely reaches my hip. They are wearing skirts, sweaters and shawls all in different colors: earthy golds and reds, blue stripes and silky pinks; a combination of native dress and American hand-me-downs. It’s Mexico, but it’s also 7,500 feet high and it’s cloudy and raining and kind of cold and the bottoms of my flared jeans are drenched at least six inches deep. The five of us–we’re in the Zócalo, the city center, in front of an old church. The picture was taken crooked. None of them are looking at the camera and none are smiling. I’m looking and smiling.

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In the summer of 2010 I went to Mexico.

It was a really weird summer.

I didn’t have a smartphone and I didn’t even have a computer so I read books which I accumulated from a local English bookstore and I went to the internet cafe. I mostly lived by myself and it was very quiet. I kind of liked it. I cut my hair short and an ATM ate my only credit card. It was the summer I was really into indigenous languages and I liked telling everyone that “shark” came from the Mayan word “xok” which honestly I don’t even know if that’s true. My college had given me some money to work with a small, radical, non-profit. Radical was not something I understood then.

I heard that one of the American women at the non-profit spoke some Mayan and I asked her about it. She told me she took classes for a while but then she stopped because it felt intrusive. Like, that language wasn’t hers. The non-profit worked with Mayan people and the American woman told me how when she went to the Mayan communities they would speak Spanish to her and Mayan to each other and she didn’t need to learn Mayan because when they spoke Mayan they weren’t speaking to her and it felt wrong to be able to understand.

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I arrived at the Zócalo where said picture was taken with an American man friend. We had been told to visit this church, just an hour outside of San Cristóbal. It was ancient, mysterious and distinctly Mayan. It was definitely a place that tourists visited. But not that many tourists. And on that week day we were some of the few white people in the square. It was busy though, with people selling food and tchotchkes, children asking for money, and locals lingering.

It’s hard in a foreign country– and especially a foreign language–to always trust your intuition. Everything is different and new and you don’t know what is normal and what is strange, what is okay and what is not okay. And from that place of fear I mostly tried not to talk to people in the Zócalo. It was just No gracias, no gracias, no gracias.

I didn’t trust my intuition. And also, ironically, I didn’t fully trust my white male companion. And when he said, “Get in a picture with those girls. Yes. Cute.” I didn’t want to, but I did it anyway. I didn’t want to say no or have to explain saying no. So–let’s just get it over with–but I felt uncomfortable with the whole thing. And that is the picture. The five of us in front of the church.

But here’s the thing I feel really ashamed about: after the picture the girls asked me for money. And I said no. In my head I was like: I didn’t even want this picture but he made me! It wasn’t a choice! I feel taken advantage of! Which is no excuse to not pay the girls who are only participating in the capitalist system that my European ancestors forced upon them. My thinking was no excuse and beyond that–my thinking was a total delusion! I did have a choice. I played a role here–a very classic white woman role of being quiet and not having boundaries and doing what is asked of me without pushing back against misogyny, or just, rudeness. And then I got angry about it and took it out on someone less privileged than me!

After the picture we went in the church. It was really beautiful in there. And it felt really wrong. It wasn’t my church.

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I wanted to write about this for a long time. Many years. I still feel like I owe those girls something and I do but it’s not this and I don’t know what it is. I think I wrote this mostly for me, because I needed a confession. But also it does seem important to talk about how we carry systems of oppression within us–it might be one of our best hopes for getting them out.