Around the Valley, Rain

Found words from October - 

The sun here beats so strong that my students sometimes don't even want to have recess. It's too strong to think or play - all you feel is heat. When it rains, a different place descends, calm and cool and reflective. Green shoots come up and the next day, it seems, they're ready to be harvested as cotton, corn, soy, sugarcane. Our backyard has sprouted bananas and avocados. The citrus is coming. 

It rained yesterday. I woke up at friends' house in Harlingen, a city known in the Valley for having the most white people and the most Winter Texans, retirees who come south for the winter (we spent Friday night at a soda bar watching 50 year men in bandanas play the blues). Saturday morning can be sleep or work in coffee shops - but we, Northeast transplants, chased the thought of a city. We drove to Brownsville because it promised buses and parking meters. 

Every city in this Valley has its own distinct feel. Brownsville moves at the pace of the slow-flowing Rio Grande. Coming into the city, if you forget to turn right on Washington Street, you'll end up in Mexico. When we arrived, we wandered slowly, lazily down sidewalks. We gloried in the paired luxuries of walking and accidental human contact. It began to rain and huddling under an awning watching steam rising from those rich sidewalks brought the smell of cities far away. 

In the late afternoon, I drove back to Weslaco. Brownsville is gritty wet sidewalks - Weslaco is a new housing development still tickled by the warmth of bordering fields.  I went to the bridal shower of a 3rd grade teacher at my school. We played wedding bingo and spoke Spanglish and ate small plastic plates heaped with desserts - cupcakes, chocolate chip cookies, a mandarin cake the school nurse had baked for the occasion. I did my grocery shopping on a sugar high and by the time I was driving home, along the local highway, the clouds were over town.

When I got home it started thundering, then drizzling, then raining, that all-out downpour that makes this Valley one of the most fertile in the country. My roommate and I went for a walk at dusk around the citrus groves and marveled at the smell of new dirt. 

Weekend Reading

Prologue

At dinner on Friday, we reminisced about Avril Lavigne, Simple Plan, and Good Charlotte. I remembered on the drive home that I can sing all 13 tracks of Avril's "Let Go," including guitar riffs. Seventh-grade Charlotte felt that album expressed all the drama of her life. Dear middle school crush: Why'd you have to go and make things so complicated?

Sara teaches high school and Emily and I both teach 4th grade. We wondered - do our kids struggle to express their emotions  because they aren't coming into teenager-hood with angsty music? When I turned on the radio in 4th-7th  grade, XXXtina Aguilera sang about getting dirrtay and Nelly said it was hot in hurrr, but Avril and Green Day held down the fort for those with more complicated desires. Though Adele is on the radio now, I don't think she resonates with my kids. She's too much misty British countryside. My kids press skip, looking for Ariana Grande and Rihanna and J Balvin. I'll take an informal poll tomorrow. I want them to be able to hear music that expresses emotions other than a hope for sex. 

On Identity

Yesterday, I listened to the episode of This American Life that had inspired our conversation about middle school music - a replay from 2011, entitled "Middle School." The whole episode merits a listen because middle school dances will always be hilarious; the following segment merits a listen because the US sometimes seems like a giant middle school dance where being accepted carries much higher stakes.  Domingo Martinez writes about his Mexican-American sisters' attempt to fit in in 1980s Brownsville, the border town at the very tip of Texas, 65 miles southeast of where I teach. 

"Mimis in the Middle"

Don't skimp out - listen to the segment. It's only a few minutes long and Martinez' imitation of the lilting, Spanish-tinted Valley English sounds like our copy room conversations at school. I love it; I've caught myself speaking something like it. 

[This is where you listen to it: here's the link again: "Mimis in the Middle"]

What struck me most about the whole episode was a wonder: would any of my students do this? Would any of them dye their hair blonde and ask for Jordache jeans and a tennis racquet? Would any of them give themselves Connecticut names and pull their families into a game of make-believe so that they could feel more accepted?

I can't imagine it. My students carry the weight of many disadvantages, but I do not think they lack pride in their families' heritage. They all dressed up for Mexican Independence day. (The girls twirled in their folclorico skirts at recess and re-braided their hair in the hallways. J. was wearing a gaucho outfit but passed me a distressed note at 10 am saying he had split his tight pants. Mom came in with a pair of jeans). They know the line dances to Tejano music and they also have Latino pop stars like J. Balvin and Pitbull who sing in Spanish even to audiences in Connecticut. They speak Spanish and English in the hallways. At school and at home, everyone looks like them. 

Today, in the Rio Grande Valley, it's me who doesn't fit in. When the 5th grade science class was learning genetics, I was the only person they knew with blue eyes. I do think the Valley has evolved and grown so rapidly since the 1980s that wealth and power look Mexican. Here, at least, my students can grow up feeling that they belong, that someone who looks like them can be successful. 

As to whether they feel American - I don't have an answer for that. I'll need to ask them. And of course, that sense of fitting in will change for them if they leave the Valley and go most other places in the country. 

If you didn't listen to "Mimis in the Middle," you're missing out:

"I was sorry to see the Mimis go. We all were. When they were at their peak, the Mimis had been capable of creating a real sort of magic around them, enchanting both people and places so you could be looking at the same, dreary landscape as them, the same hopeless and terrible event, and while you might be miserable and bitter, they would be beaming, enthralled, enthusiastically hopeful...They were a gift to anyone who got caught in their Anais Anais perfume. They made all of us Americans."

I hope my students can make it into middle school and beyond carrying that same magic and hope - without the perfume, because holy moly the Axe the boys are wearing is already strong enough.

On Citizenship

The Valley is in D.C. as the Supreme Court begins to hear arguments in United States v. Texas. A decision in favor of DAPA could potentially grant temporary legal status to 4 million people who are in the US illegally. 

You can read more in the McAllen Monitor, here. 

"She said her research shows that U.S. citizen children are negatively impacted by their parents’ undocumented status and are often unable to experience the full rights of citizenship. Most of the children she’s encountered live in constant fear that a parent, sibling or other close family member could be deported. She said this uncertain legal status involving any family member restricts the entire family from opportunities to earn good incomes, get ahead at work, and gain access to education and health care."

There is one last Border Patrol checkpoint about 100 miles north of McAllen. The first time I drove through, it made me nauseous. As you slow down to the checkpoint, signs tell you how many pounds of drugs have been seized and how many would-be migrants have been apprehended. 

"Transporting illegal aliens is illegal," they remind you. 

I don't know for certain about the legal status of any of my kids' parents. I do know some of them do not live in the US. S. helped his mom study for her citizenship test, while H. helps her mom clean houses in Reynosa on the weekend. 

But that checkpoint made me feel the fear that I imagine any of my students might feel, going through. They look like the people Border Patrol wants to stop. (Border Patrol does have a very complicated and important job. More here, on the Texas Tribune).

I was so shaken I said, "Good morning, ma'am," to the male officer. 

"Don't worry," he laughed, "Second time that's happened to me today."

He was white. I was white. 

 "Are you a U.S. citizen?" he asked. 

"Yes sir," I said, wondering when he'd ask for my ID. He didn't.

"Have a great day," he said. I guess my skin color was proof enough for him. 

On Learning English

     As we near state testing, the huge disadvantages facing English Language Learners (ELLs) become crystal clear. 94% of my students are ELL. MALDEF, the Mexican-American Legal Defense Organization, filed a lawsuit in 2014 against the Texas Education Association (TEA) for failing to supervise and improve programs to help ELLs succeed in school. More here. 

This article in The Atlantic highlighted some of the work that IS being done to help ELLs in Texas. 

"Elena Izquierdo, a professor in bilingual education at the University of Texas at El Paso would tell you that immersing Spanish-speaking children in English classes doesn’t work. She’s now consulting the El Paso Independent School District as it moves forward after its cheating scandal, and says that type of approach was what led to the scandal in the first place.

"She is helping the El Paso Independent School District roll out a different plan, one she calls the “Ferrari” of bilingual education programs, that she says could serve as an example for best practices for districts like El Paso. The program, which the district began in  2014, teaches all students in English half the time and Spanish half the time. Beginning in the district’s kindergarten classrooms, all students learn all subjects in both languages, so everyone becomes bilingual, she said. The district will continually assess the students to make sure they’re learning in both languages and comfortable about speaking in all subjects in both languages (in Ysleta, students learn Social Studies in Spanish). They’ll also be allowed to test in both languages, until they’ve become comfortable enough with English to focus on the state tests."

Winston Churchill Visits the Valley

March 29, 2016

Today, I watched the kids write personal essays on one page of lined paper that got shipped to Austin to be graded by adults who don’t know them. It was their writing STAAR (State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness), for which they’ve been preparing intensely over the past few weeks. I didn’t even teach reading last week - they came to my room and worked on grammar, punctuation, and those one-page essays. 

I love the times when I get to see them write. In the ideal world, in the world that will be every other year I teach, I would learn all about them through their reading and their responses to what they read. This year, simply getting them to read has been hard enough. I know what books they’ll choose but I don’t know what they want to be when they grow up or what their favorite places are or who their best friend is. When they write essays, I can peer over their shoulders and into their minds. 

(Would you like to know what they wrote about today?….I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you, or the State of TX would kill me). 

When the test ended, the reality of teaching reading again came back to me. We have five weeks before our STAAR to do so much. Forgive me for the mess below:

I would be lying if I didn’t say that this year has been a struggle. I don’t feel capable anymore of stringing together elegant sentences, crisp nouns and verbs with a pearl of observation at the end. In some ways, I feel this is a good thing. My teacher voice and vision are stronger, and what I see and say in my classroom feel more like my job than a weird and intense journalistic experience. At the same time, I feel like some part of my vision and drive has gone missing. Today I think I am remembering to get it back. 

At the beginning of March, my students took their third district benchmark test in reading. We had been preparing for it like they were just preparing for their writing STAAR - after-school tutoring, practice passages, testing strategies, silent reading time. My jaw was clenched and the students were sad, and frustrated, and mean. I was doing what I had been determined not to do. Blinded by the hope of good test results, I turned my classroom into a black hole: a place where positive energy and fun went to die, unless you were one of those students who takes negative energy and grows into a chirpingly menacing side-comment machine. (Editor’s note, one month later: this may be an exaggeration. Leaving in for accuracy as to emotions at time of initial composition). 

Many of my students worked hard and many of them saw a lot of growth on that benchmark test. Many of them, however, especially those who consistently misbehaved in class, stayed put or decreased their scores. We showed growth from the second benchmark, but we scored below the district average of 74% passing. I felt disappointed. I went to a boxing class that night and accidentally bruised and blistered my hands so that they shook when I packed my lunch before bed. That’s what the scores felt like: despite so much hard work and so much love for my students, I got beat up. It felt like a reflection on me and the motivation I seemed to have failed to give my kids. It is, in many ways. (See below, "Charlotte learns to suck it up”).

Over spring break, I had started dreaming again. We need to turn them into readers, I thought. I forgot that part! I was trying to make test-takers! I'll spend my whole class period reading books with them! They’ll write connections and summaries on sticky notes in books that they choose! I’ll have them write a book report! That’s how I learned to read, in my suburban private day school and at my house full of books! Of course it’s the way in this place that is so entirely different!

Reality sank in today when I met with my grade team and our principal. Five weeks isn’t that long. It’s not impossible to make kids the sort of readers I want them to be - joyful and analytical and independent - within that time, but they also have a lot of multiple choice questions to learn how to answer. And if they don’t pass this test, they can’t go to 5th grade. 

So the wonderful writing teacher will be turning her writing block into a reading block so that the kids get double doses of reading. I was given a calendar to fill in - two unmastered TEKs, or objectives (SWBAT sequence and summarize important events in a work of fiction, maintaining meaning and order) to re-teach per day. Clear assessments each day so I can submit daily data on each kids’ strengths and weakness. And the principal has brought in a third, experienced teacher who will be working with me in my classroom to further concentrate our focus and help me get the kids motivated. 

It all sort of threw me for a loop, and this afternoon, sticking away the folding chairs in the hallway after our meeting, I realized: I am taking this personally! I have an ego! It’s bruised! I don’t know what to do! I feel paralyzed and scared! Let me continue thinking about idealistic ways to get them reading!

Running before sunset, things become clearer. The pendulum swings from stubborn dreaming to practical action, mostly. I start to work through the wreckage of a first year teacher’s work - what new can be created, and what else will have to be tweaked and salvaged at this point in the year? Maybe we do just need to get them practicing test passage after test passage. I can move my energy from planning theoretically awesome, overly-complicated lessons into being enthusiastic every single hour of every single day. A good salesperson can sell an empty plastic cup - maybe I can make a passage entitled “Building a Better Sandcastle” more nail-bitingly fascinating than the last scene of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. 

I drove home in enough of a daze that I listened to the droning ads on KTEX. Pulling onto my street, a weird British accent woke me up. I choked up suddenly because that voice was Winston Churchill’s, Nonna’s idol, and he was saying:

“Never, never, never give up”….

I pulled into my driveway. Breeze stirred the palm trees in a pink sky. The ad ended. Anincongruous accent and incongruous associations in a housing development near Mexico. Good words are always relevant. I put my car in park and got to work. 

Valentine's Day

Time travel, scraps pulled together courtesy of Sick Day. 

February 13, 2016 -- On holidays, before the school fills with kids and candy, the hallways hush. Like the calm before a storm, it’s a precursor to the sugar rush that amplifies attention deficits and reminds us that our students are children who spend a lot of time inside and receive very little recess. 

On Valentine’s Day, the noise level in the hallway - despite our best efforts - reached jungle status 5 minutes after the kids started arriving. They were still talking about who had talked to whom at the Valentine’s dance; they wondered who had bought whom a goody bag; they started trading sweet gifts and notes they had prepared for their friends. Some of the boys proudly sat with teddy bears on their desks, ready to give them to their crushes. SHHH don’t spoil the surprise dude!

You couldn’t tell them otherwise - they were going to give out candy to their friends and they were going to eat the candy their friends had given them. Starting at 7:15 am, I had kids run in and leave DumDums and heart shaped chocolate boxes and candy roses on my desk (no complaints). During class, they surreptitiously dipped candy sticks into sugared chile powder, left FunDip in their desks, and pulled notes off of Reese’s Cups and candy hearts. They traded chocolate hearts with their friends. They had chocolate around their lips. 

This sweet goodness, this excitement, should be celebrated. I saw the shoebox Valentine’s mailbox one of my girls had created and remembered the extreme care and thought I had put into my own Valentine mailbox. In 4th grade, I think I actually followed the instructions from Martha Stewart Living. And yet - there was something toxic about this sugar rush. I stress ate mini Kit Kats all day because it felt like I was putting out fires without pause:

A hit J, who had red sugar around his lips, and E pushed L who hit him back. I and D chased each other around the classroom and R came and sat in the back of my room because he didn’t want to go to math, eventually joining the fray between D and I once I had gotten them to calm down. I said bad things about A’s mom across the room. 

I practically pushed them outside for recess, picked up candy wrappers with two students while watching them run and play soccer. I talked with I about his behavior. He appeared to see me for the first time all day. “I’m sorry, miss,” he said. “I just feel like I have all this extra energy to get out.”

After lunch, the swell appeared to have calmed. Then R started sweating and making loud noises. This made O stop working. J wandered around the classroom working his way to the bottom of a box of candy hearts, teasing N for liking Josh (because, as I later told N, who was crying, he really has a crush on her). 

“R is hyper,” one of the kids observed, sounding hyper himself. “He was eating chocolate in the bathroom.” R., who is pre-diabetic and may carry more serious psychological diagnoses, was making loud noises and picking up and putting down a desk. On his way out of my classroom, he pushed into a child and broke his glasses. 

I had set a goal to be quietly firm, after a week in which my kids had seemed to forget how to follow instructions. I was tired of chit chat, so deeply wanting to push them to work hard and think critically. I told them they’d get one warning, and then detention for any choices to misbehave. When it turned out, holy moly, I was serious (Miss Parker is undergoing a transformation), they protested. Pues no. Arms crossed. I won’t stay. In my last period class, a student who has diagnosed anger management issues stood up three times and started to pick up his chair, shaking furiously. He yelled at another student. The class roared, called him a dinosaur. Ricky got too close and got three hits to his stomach. 

At the end of the day, 12 hours after it had begun, I ran out of my candy coated room. I felt stubborn, hyper with reaction; I had said no all day, called parents, given detention, moved desks to face the wall. I hadn’t backed down; it had sort of worked. But I felt a sad disbelief at the poor health and disobedience. I wondered if I had been too mean. How could I not have told them how much I love them on Valentine’s day? I thought I was showing them by holding them accountable to high expectations, but maybe my firm energy was toxic too. 

We had a teacher’s work day the next day. Thursday’s chaos, harshness, had vanished. The school was quiet and my room looked a lot cleaner than I had remembered it. We did a training on English Language Learners in the computer lab. Something was missing. I walked to our 4th grade hallway, where 35 kids were sitting in a special writing training with a fantastic consultant who projected joy and energy. The room was calm and quiet. The kids sat in their street clothes, no uniform. Some of the boys had gotten fresh hair cuts, some of the girls wore dresses. The group by the door smiled when they saw me and a few kids whispered Hi Miss Parker! Shh, I said, work hard, and left, melting a little. I was so happy to speak to them with love. 

I snuck out of our training again when I heard them in the hallways going to lunch. They ate pizza and hugged me, sang a new song about pronouns. I felt so proud of them, then, and so in love. I remembered all the things they had done well that day before - kids sitting tall, listening, answering questions on sticky notes about their books. 100s on vocabulary quizs, two bold kids who performed the bonus question raps they had written about their best friends. Kids who used to tell me they were bad at reading who had told me, Miss, I’m getting better.

At home, I opened one girl’s Valentine’s Day note to me. She had packed it in a sheet protector inside a teacup that says Siempre juntos, always together. She had asked me twice, have you opened it? Do you like it?

I have loved very few things more. 

Dear Miss Parker, the note says. Thank you for always supporting me. I know someday our hard work will pay off!

Notes From a Movement, Not Stapled Together Yet Because It's Sunday and I Still Have to Put in Grades

This weekend, through the support of my school district, I was lucky to attend the TFA 25th Anniversary Summit in Washington, D.C. 

Writing now feels like picking avocados in a rush at the supermarket, hoping they'll be ripe, hoping the whole pile won't fall to the floor when you pick one from the bottom. This weekend was so big picture - so much talk of news and history and a path forward - when my day to day is so small. I've been using words to illustrate the things on my desk and my kids' faces when they get in their mom's car at the end of the day. Using them to tease out a generational issue feels harder, further out of my reach, but necessary.

***

Between the sessions and swag bags, around the cocoon of the privilege of discussing privilege in a huge DC conference center, hung a legacy of struggle and good will, hard work and resilience. That first corps members asked - how can I afford to fail? And the question today is the same, for Teach for America and for all educators. 

Education is a civil rights issue; teaching should be a fight. Colorado State Senator Mike Johnston gave a speech tying Selma to our march now to educational equity. The change we seek hasn't fully happened. Churches are still bombed, police still shoot, some schools in Memphis prepare only 4% of their students. But we've got to keep working. Quasi religious rhetoric: shining lights and climbing mountains. Words building to a crescendo just like the spoken word poet who reminded us to live like we have a microphone under our tongue - our words matter and our silence is dangerous.

I will be thinking about my words all week. I will be smiling at my kids more. I will be thinking about how I, doing my best job, can advocate for them. I remembered the love that needs to go into the classroom every day. Without that, you don't have anything; without that, teaching is just talking and making copies. 

I've been listening to Martin Luther King's speeches for the past few weeks now, ever since Spotify made a playlist that intersperses them with Common and John Legend and Jay-Z. We read about him and Rosa Parks and the kids wrote about him as their hero without my prompting. As I understand more and more the lack of services my part of the country receives - as I feel both outsider and insider for the privileges I have - As I listen to the news from Flint, from New Mexico, from New York- I've been thinking about and wondering if what I'm doing, anyone doing, is any progress at all. 

On Friday afternoon, I ran around the National Mall. I stopped near the Washington Monument, imagined the grass full of people, imagined a clear firm voice. I kept going. Three chalk-like boulders, a full story high, turned gold around rush hour. I jogged in. 

There's a small path, like someone split a rock face. Martin  Luther King stares out at the tidal basin, chin up, reminding of the way to carve a path through monumental obstacles. How you move doesn't matter, but you've got to move.

***

(While my efforts to make #teacherstryna a trending hashtag were unsuccessful, you can read my notes from some of the sessions I attended here: https://twitter.com/charsnewweb )

Pick Up Duty

Every afternoon at 3:45, after the tornado of the last class period has passed through our doors, we go to the curb to send kids back out into the world. The sun warms faces, hands, wrists. The context of my classroom returns. 

The pickup line stretches past the gate of our campus, to the potholed roads outside the gate, and as parents pull up we pace the curb passing students’ names back to the school building like hot potatoes. 

At my small private elementary school in New Jersey, pickup was similar, except that a lot of parents arrived an hour early because they didn’t work. The line of Chevy suburbans, minivans, and BMWs reached the gates of campus, too, and caused traffic in downtown Morristown. Mr. Mortensen’s voice came crisply from the loudspeaker, clearly enunciating each first and last name. 

On East Las Milpas Road, around the corner from Juniors’ taco mart and in between two huge fields, there is no traffic to be caused, but the rhythm of names is the same. 

The window rolls down. Para quien? I ask. Ponce. Ponce, I shout, and Vargas tips it up to Karina, who passes it to Ms. Medina on the mike in the hallway where the kids wait. Barragannnnnn. I relish the rolling my rs, i relish projecting names not mine with confidence, passing them down the line to other teachers until the child emerges from inside, book in hand or backpack messily unzipped, ready to go home. I relish thinking that each child is a part of the hopeful fabric of our school.

Parents often look surprised to see me, la guerita, out there. In my first week, I had to ask “otra vez” many veces when I asked for a child's name. There are many Mexican names I have never heard before - or names that, in the mouth of a mother, come out so quickly my brain needs a minute. I’m learning. I try to channel the simple solid I mean business tone of the women in kindergarten who herd small children efficiently and kindly. This week, a dad smiled at me when I bellowed his son's name up to the front of the line. “Good pronunciation,” he said. I acted like it was no big deal, but that made my day. 

***

98% of our student body qualities for free or reduced lunch; I’ve been surprised by the number of big, new pickup trucks, Ford F150s and Toyota Tundras and Chevy Silverados, cleanly washed with shiny chrome rims. When they get into gear to move up two places in the pickup line, they roar. You need to pick up a pre-K student, Dora the Explorer backpack and all, to load her in. 

Then you have the smaller trucks with farm mud on the flaps and bulk crates of eggs in the bed. The low Hondas, bumpers dented, with rattling doors. The dusty minivans with cleaning equipment inside and mom in her cleaners’ uniform. 

Such a window into a world, the threshold of someone’s car. Mom’s driving, with gold-teeth grandma in the front seat, or it’s an older sibling, or a young couple who could be the parents or the older siblings. Healthcare’s the fastest growing industry in the valley and many of our kids’ family members wear scrubs. I see big new cowboy hats, engine-grease-stained t-shirts, polo shirts from Churchs’ chicken. One mom in a black Acura SUV wears yoga pants. They listen to norteno or country music or Mexican ballads i recognize from 105.1, radio internacional. 

Parents pass back gummy bears with chamoy, or Doritos. sometimes an orange. I've seen empty Coke cans in the back seat, rolling around near the feet of a Kindergartner with three silver fillings in his teeth; I’ve seen 2nd graders sit in the front of a huge truck without a car seat. It’s not my job to judge; rather, putting a child in their car, back with their families, reminds me to think carefully about why they may not be doing their homework, or why they complain about stomachaches all the time, or why they are not reading on grade level. 

***

i have one student, whom I’ll call Emiliano. Many teachers have called him chiflado, lazy. He still does not start his work until you’ve gone over to him, crouched at his face level, and asked him to tell you what the instructions are. He has tried to run away from mandatory tutoring 3 times, sobbing. This child has never loved school, except for one day when we read part of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. 

On Thursday, his mom came to pick him up. She drives a white suburban and wears reflector aviators. She had her phone held up to her face after saying hello, and it took me a second to understand what she was doing. Emiliano was walking out of the building with his 1st grade sister by the hand, walking and smiling slowly when he saw his mom. She photographed them in that golden afternoon light and Emiliano happily hopped in when I opened the door. Mom took off her glasses, smiling. 

This student is a child, loved by a mother; this student is a child who matters, and it’s my job to figure out how to get him to smile like that every day before he comes to the curb to go home. 

In the Valley, Before School Started

Notes from a long time ago, in another country. 

Buying a Car

I spent my first day in the Valley looking for a used car. My friend Juan picked me up at the Harlingen airport and we went right to a dealership housed in a vintage building where the flatscreen TVS blew out the electricity. Juan lamented that girls in the valley only like guys with big trucks. We test drove a new Rav4 and returned it to a parking lot where heat waves mixed my vision. The next dealership had cookies and popcorn but no car in my price range. After that, I ordered my first Big Mac and acquiesced to go see Antman. The trailers were for Mexican kids’ movies. When we returned to reality, we went to Walmart and bought shampoo with families doing Saturday night shopping. 

Signing a Lease

Mr Thompson, the landlord and proprietor of Thompson Citrus, drives a white suburban with a grapefruit on the license plate. He was born in this house and he calls Mexicans Latins, though he speaks a calm respectful Spanish with his guys. 

“Don’t get snookered,” he told me. “Don’t go to the wrong Walmart or they’ll steal your purse,” he told me. “I can be there in 5 minutes flat with a gun if need be,” he told me. 

I locked all the doors and set the alarm the first week, but I don’t think we’ve set the alarm since then. Cumbia music comes from down the road some nights, but mostly dark is the sound of crickets and a moon over the citrus groves. 

Running

The week before school started, I got a drink at Chili's off the highway with three TFA women and then I ran in the Weslaco city park, where I was the only white person. A truck with a loudspeaker sold ice cream and elote, corn in a cup with mayonnaise. Little kids tentatively kicked soccer balls while their older brothers ran laps around the field with graceful footwork. Packs of grandmothers sauntered around the outside trail hablando en Spanglish. 

I’ve been running alone in the state park about a mile from my house, where the sky is open and my footfall surprises rabbits and flocks of small yellow birds from sage brush and cactus. In the city park, I moved feeling part of a beating heart of human activity.

On the drive home, at dusk, a neon car wash sign glowed beautiful in my rearview mirror. 

Driving

During TFA training we watched a video about a woman namedCarmen Anaya and how, speaking no English, she still managed to agitate for change so that, eventually, children in the colonias didn’t have to ruin their shoes walking through sewage puddles on the way to school. 

After that training, I filled my car up with its first full tank of gas (2.40/gallon), and drove out to Las Milpas, the neighborhood of Pharr that Carmen Anaya helped pull up and out of the most extreme poverty. There was no one on the road but me and a bunch of shipping trucks headed to Mexico in a hazy, vaguely holy evening light. I stopped at my school, which was quiet. 

The drive back along Military Highway was almost empty too. Flat and green, the type of landscape that might make you imagine you’re on dirt roads. Mexico, arrow to the right. I got home and ran in a new direction, in a housing development called Springfield Estates where they’re still trying to sell lots. Financing available with $500 down. Electricity from the city of Weslaco. The American dream! Across the street, in a small, fenced-off clearing, a woman pitched hay and a small goat bleated. 

On the radio, the Mexican government proclaims in baritone, “move to Mexico for your prosperity…”

The Border

After I met my students’ parents for the first time, I ran to the border. I carried their questions and their bendicciones. It was dusk just before darkness: The Rio Grande swung past, a calm seafoam green, an easy swim. Cows mooed bucolically on the other side. 

We had started our run in the evening. Santa Ana felt empty, jurassic. As the gold went away and dark fell it became emptier. DPS suburbans illuminated the dark on the drive home.

The Pulga

Today, when the heat was heaviest, we went to La Pulga, the sprawling flea market off the freeway. 

We parked in a lot by dudes who would tint your windows. The whole thing felt like a mall in a highway underpass. The old woman at the check in booth had a gold tooth and asked what time it was. 50 cents to go to Mexico. Casi no hable una palabra de ingles between the stands selling new DVDs, the kitchen appliances, the old clothes, the piles of fruit. Griffin told me about chiles that grow native and wild, little pinpricks of heat. We bought tacos and micheladas at an outdoor stand where Aimee and I were the only white girls. Inside the dance hall, old couples twirled, touched, took each other’s hands to the back bar when a song ended. I still don’t know my research question for the Valley. La Pulga reminded me that I am in a place of fluid identity where I have a lot to learn. 

Sick Day

I drive to school in the morning at night. The moon and the stars still hang in the sky. The llano fed by the Rio Grande stretches soft and dark outside my car window like the bed I leave behind. 

When I turn onto Military Highway, white US Border Patrol suburbans appear now and again like ghosts. They train their headlights on Mexico, 1.6 miles away. I haven’t seen any people emerge in those beams yet. The lights at the international road bridge to Progreso blink red, green. Sometimes there’s a parade of 18-wheelers; mostly, it’s just me and a few other early commuters. The animals at this hour are still nocturnal. When I get to school, the milk is just being loaded into the cafeteria. I see the sunrise from the hallway door when my first period class lines up outside my room. Unless I have recess duty, I don’t go outside until 6 pm. (My students don’t have it much better, on the days when they have inside recess). Military Highway winds me home between the llano’s fields when the sun hangs close to setting. 

On the drive to school on Friday, I hit a racoon. Baby’s first roadkill. Thump. I saw its eyes shine in my headlights. 

My voice was almost gone, anyway. All I did last week was wake up, go to school, drive home, prepare for the next day, and fall asleep worrying about how I was going to get all the pencils sharpened before class. How N. has been more and more defiant. How I feel like all I do say is no. How the kids who speak the least English misbehave the most because they're not engaged. I noticed myself getting sick but was too worried I was an incompetent teacher to pay it any mind. 

On Thursday, most of my 120 students had been sweet. Miss, you’re sick, they said. Miss, you should go see the doctor. They were less chatty than usual, sort of, out of kindness. 

But your voice, you see, is power. Tone and volume change responses and reactions in ways I’m just beginning to comprehend. I still believe there’s power in silence. But you need vocal power if you’re going to corral 120 under-exercised, over-sugared Friday-morning ten-year-olds into a hallway to read silently while Kindergarden gets to use the playground. That didn’t go so hot on Friday. I rasped and coughed instructions to a substitute and drove home feeling defeated. The raccoon’ s corpse lay on the middle of Military in the midday sun.  

I got home and sorted through the surveys I had given my morning classes. I had asked them to tell me how they felt about our class, statements like (Agree or Disagree) “Miss Parker believes in my potential” “Our class feels like a safe place” “I feel like Miss Parker is working to get to know me."

I had expected their responses to be negative, based on how many of them mocked the questions while I was reading them out loud, how loud our room still gets at breakfast, and how my pockets fill with confiscated eraser bits and cootie catchers by the end of the day. 

 And I couldn’t decide if that expectation, or their positive, thoughtful responses and notes (“This is my favorite class” “Can we decorate the classroom for the seasons?”“I wish everyone were respectful to everyone else” ”HARRY POTTER”), made me more melancholy. How the heck can I tap into the potential of all of these children when I spend most of my time with them and away from them worrying I’m not doing things right? 

I just taught simile and metaphor, sorry. I lost my voice and I have been losing my voice. I have been forgetting why I’m here. I’ve been in a daily tunnel of stress and nerves, driving up and down Military Highway in a fog even on the brightest evening. 

The fog was so thick it took me about 24 hours to remember that when you’re sick you normally try to get better. I drank tea on Saturday morning and called the doctor, who told me I had laryngitis, badly infected. Don’t talk, she said, until you’re back 100%. 

So I called a sub for today. This weekend, I did all of the things I normally do for the upcoming week but breathed in between them. I took more than five minutes to eat dinner and I vacuumed my room and I spent a few hours on Sunday morning exploring river channels with my roommate in an inflatable kayak. I’m starting to remember that I need to do the things that fill me with joy, so I can bring that joy into my classroom. (Duh, but revelatory, two months into this job). 

This morning, I drove to school so I could make copies of a work packet to leave for my students. I left the building just when the kids would be pulling the breakfast cooler into our classroom. The sun’s fingers appeared. Parents’ pickup trucks lined up outside the long, low building. As I was pulling out of the parking lot, it all seemed sort of miraculous: two faithful buses shimmered on the horizon, bringing a hundred more kids for another day of learning. 

Long Weekend

On Sunday, we found an abandoned pool club on the Rio Grande. Four pools, hot tub, beer (warm) still in the bars. Mexico on the other side of the river and border patrol vans driving by.

In the old Spanish chapel next to it, a woman prayed and gave us dirty looks for our dirty feet. I stayed outside, bare shoulders. 

We kept driving along the military highway that tracks the river and the border - past a burned out monastery that sits on a Catholic schools campus, past old men drinking beers and shooting doves pop-pop  from folding lawn chairs, past the road bridge to Mexico, past a small red bar called El Vaquero, right under that bridge, past about a mile of shipping warehouses with NAFTA flags. 

I bought poblano peppers and bistec suave from the meat market, La Michoacana, got looks because I was the only white girl. A father and son joked while they waited in line with the butcher. I drove home missing the evening light in NJ, joking with my parents in our kitchen. I cooked for my roommates and my hands burned for two hours after from the pepper seeds, reminding me that I did not come here to feel at home. 

New Posts will be under "Borderlands"

...but I have yet to set up a subscription widget!

So for now, I'll post links here:

I'm living in a new country in my own country, on the border with a country that permeates every aspect of the day. 

I toggle between South Texas country 100.3 and 101.5 Digital, which plays Enrique Inglesias and Mana on heavy rotation. Que dios te bendiga, God bless you, the ladies in the front office say, at the end of every conversation. The nurse orders us plates of flautas and tacos for lunch on Fridays. My kids are testing out swears in Spanish and they eat gummy bears and chili on their shaved ice after school. The drive-through convenience stores sell micheladas and avocados and all the flavors of Takis. 

I'm working in a new country, too, a nation of  120 ten year olds who test me and push me to remind myself, every day, that respect is earned, not given. Confidence covers up most mistakes. Everyone wants to be loved, and no change happens over night. My voice sounds like I've been on a three week bender, not working from 6 am to 8 pm in an air-conditioned schoolhouse. 

I've been writing more lesson plans and sticky note reminders than anything else, but there are rich words and images here to share and I'm working on pulling them together. 

Postscript, aka Publication

After spending most of my trip, it felt, pitching my research to various publications, I placed two articles with OZY, a new media outlet focused on the New and the Next. 

If you haven't already seen them, here they are. Thanks for reading. 

"Why the Keyword in Farming Startups is Regenerative," June 26:

http://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/why-the-keyword-in-farming-startups-is-regenerative/60722

"Going Wild on the Coast of Uruguay," July 24:

http://www.ozy.com/good-sht/going-wild-on-the-coast-of-uruguay/40940

Post-Script Table of Contents

In homage to the genre of Blog, the end of this first stage of Southern migrations probably calls for a Reflection. But I Reflected enough over the past few months to last me through at least a few weeks of not writing a single word, so I provide musings to you in the form of a pared-down selection of what I wrote:

1. Mari, on a wise woman and traveling back to Argentina six years after my first visit.

2. The Road to the Ranch, One and Two, from the week I spent in Wally and Pilar's home in Salto, Uruguay, watching them run ranch and family. 

3. On Language, in which I vent about feeling like a baby and hanging out with babies.

4. On the Road: Resistencia to Buenos Aires to Punta del Este, on hanging out with fifteen Paraguayan farmers in northern Argentina and pretending to be Martha Gellhorn.

5. 20 Lines on Solitude, because damn, I really did keep my own company on a lot of this trip, especially on the coast of Uruguay (except for a brief unfortunate date with a surfer who turned out to be nineteen years old and a believer in UFOs (oops)).

6. On Sidewalks and Walls, on learning Buenos Aires. 

7. Dining With Welders, an experience that reminded me that travel is often absurd. 

8. Maps, on Patagonia's pull and the Fenton family, who magnified that pull for me. 

9. Will Hamilton, because East of Eden is always relevant, especially when you are researching farmers and Benefit Corporations.

10. CrAzY dAYz in BA pt. II, on playing writer for a few weeks.

11. Two Buenos Aires Stories, because that city spun itself strong and pulled me in for a little while. 

12. Rio, on how bar-hopping may be one of the best ways to digest that complicated city.

13. Sunbathing, on America (of the 'Murica variety), from Mexico. 

Sunbathing

I read The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in Cancun, on a beach under a sun that laughs at you for previously thinking you could tan. The book made sense there. Junot Diaz calls the places that speckle the Caribbean sea surreal, for their heat and their water and the true myths of their histories, and Cancun definitely fits the bill. It’s Disney surreal, not the dirt-floors-and-guns absurdity of countries under dictatorships, but still - you question the reality of the whole place. The sun that pulls sweat out of your pores and dulls your brain. The water that’s brighter blue than a blue raspberry Slurpee. The sand and the high-rise hotels that are blinding white; the fact that someone thought to line a thin strip of barrier shore with those high-rises in the first place; the fact that in high season every room in every one of them is occupied by people who are escaping their own reality, wherever in the world that may be. 

Maybe most surreal was the documentation of that escape. Everywhere we looked: phones out to capture arms reaching to the sky, hats at a jaunty angle, abs tightened. Props, I guess, to the numerous women I saw attempting the complicated mermaid-selfie maneuver: lounge in foamy surf in small string bikini, take selfie without drowning phone or self. 

So on this beach, drifting in and out of sleep, I was reading Oscar Wao, a story that’s basically about how real life can feel like a fable and dreams can infiltrate reality. The sentences of sneakily poetic slang, Dominican and American, went down like cool water because that’s how my brain feels, right now, a total mezcla. It’s running back towards sure-footed English but feeling like it’s picked up a few words in Spanish it doesn’t want to let go. 

I fell asleep on a page where Junior, our main guide through all this quilombo, is talking about his drives around Paterson and Camden and Perth Amboy. Place names and their peculiar gravity. These are the cities on the highway signs on my way home from the Newark airport. Like Oscar Wao’s Dominican grandmother La Inca is stringing their names together, incanting me home. 

Somewhere else, Yunior talks about “a particularly Jersey malaise - the inextinguishable longing for elsewheres,” but I woke up sunburnt on a surreal beach to the feeling that this time the longing is for places that are real, that are already there. 

Notebook Scraps from Mexico

//Time started here with oranges. On the way from Tuxtla to San Cristobal, when I was giddy with arrival, the bus driver stopped by the side of the road, bought a bag of oranges warm with sun. He passed me one. Its peel was scraped away, leaving a thin white spiral of pith like a planet’s rings. 

//I’m enjoying my newfound status as pure tourist. I wore flip flops in town yesterday and running shoes today. 

But I took photos in a place where they said not to take photos and all of a sudden it felt like I was taking it too far. It was in San Juan Chamula, a church near San Cristobal. The building is a Catholic church, built by the Spanish when they invaded, but its shell protects the beliefs and the rituals of the indigenous community. Inside, there are pine needles on the marble floor and a tree in the back corner by the shrine of the Virgin Mary. The entire perimeter of the church is lined with fire - hundreds of tall candles in glass jars, a tribute to the God of the sun. People kneel on the floor and sacrifice chickens to chase away spirits of sickness, swig from a bottle of clear alcohol, light thin colored candles that leave wax puddles on the floor. I’m still trying to figure out why I couldn’t just see it, why I had to try to take a piece of it away with me. 

//One day, we left at 5 am to drive in a white van with six other tourists to see waterfalls and Mayan ruins. The van stopped at 8 am at a roadside restaurant where the buffet served beans and rice, plantains, or pancakes to people who had emerged from about twenty other white vans. We rolled in a caravan, with a police escort, to the first waterfalls. We ate lunch facing the waterfall and had the bittersweet pleasure of watching people pose for photos that they'll show their coworkers or grandchildren next Monday. They used selfie sticks, drones, long arms, and/or an iPad on a stand in a bush. 

At the top of a temple in the Palenque, the Mayan ruins, a guy in a straw hat held up a black flag of the Harley Owner’s Group of some small town in France. 

The frogs, or the bugs, sound like the whine of an arriving UFO. Not too far from the realm of possibility, if you believe the Mayans built UFOs. 

//They grow coffee here, for Starbucks and Green Mountain coffee. There's no time for much subsistence farming when the coffee day is over, so many of these indigenous communities don't see a lot of vegetables. Beans, onion, tortillas; maybe some tomatoes. The chicken is all free range (on your house floor) and beef is almost non-existent. Kids drink soda, which is cheaper than bottled water and cleaner than well water. Sometimes, Ali said, she stayed with families who could only scrounge together cookies and coffee for dinner, before waking up in the morning to harvest the beans for Starbucks again. 

//On the night bus from Tuxtla to D.F., Mexico City, the driver played a movie about a prison uprising and the bus stopped two times so that federal police could check for drugs in the sides of the bus and in everyone’s backpacks. After the second stop, in the final scene of the violent prison movie, a baby in the front of the bus wouldn't stop crying.   

//Every street corner we’ve passed in D.F. smells like lime. There is so much food on the street in so many different colors. By the Palacio de Bellas Artes, there was a cart bursting with bouquets of fried snacks. Red, green, orange - the same color as the fruit they sell In cups, watermelon, lime, mango, all with a dusting of chili if you want. A woman fries black tortillas with orange filling, lets you ladle red or green sauce. 

//Flying into Mexico City from the flat Yucatan, you understand why Tenochtitlan was the first city of empire.  That Aztec city was made strong by mountains. Today, Mexico’s main city spits houses over hills like its ancestor did. Shafts of light strike the mountains;the clouds are the serpents’ wings.

Rio

My friend Catherine, a freelance journalist who has been living in Rio for three years, gives a walking tour of Rio’s city center and port zone that narrates disparate neighborhoods through food. She leads the walk through a company called Culinary Backstreets, and if you are going to Rio I HIGHLY suggest that you go on this walk. A few highlights - an aid, if you will, for digesting this complicated city: 

Rio was the seat of the Portuguese empire for thirteen years. The King had barely any idea what lay inside Brazil's borders, beyond jungle and potential slaves, but he did bring a European fondness for pastries that could be made with the new cash crop: sugar cane.

Real Gabinete Português de Leitura (Royal Portuguese Library): When the King of Portugal fled to Rio and moved the head of empire to his new city, he brought a boat full of first editions of Portuguese literature and built this church-like library to hold them. The collection also has a full archive of Brazilian newspapers. From an exhibit poster, a reproduced cartoon, circa late 1800s, as railroads were built across the country: “progress, but for whom?"

In 2013, as private contractors finished stadiums and hotels for the 2014 world cup, millions of Brazilians protested across the country because public transportation fares were too high and buses too slow. Down the street from the library, in the faculty of social sciences, so many people came for an open-mike grievance meeting that they pulled a heavy wood table from the red-curtained auditorium and held the meeting in the square. Thousands of people came, Catherine said, and for six hours took turns speaking for two minutes each about what needed to change as  Brazil went about growing. “Order and progress,” says the Brazilian flag. 

Catherine’s roommate recently wrote a story about Brazil’s guarantee of asylum for Syrian refugees. We drank coffee at this shop that was founded by the first wave of Syrian immigrants, in the early 20th century. The owners started out selling nargileh; now they sell cigars from Brazil’s Bahia region. 

This store, founded by another Syrian family, sells West African red palm oil, Middle Eastern olives, peanut butter, dried mango, pineapple, banana, and pastry supplies; in other words, a nice indicator of how diverse Brazil is. Outside the store, you can eat a middle eastern empanada, sprinkling on each bite a brand of African red pepper sauce that’s now produced in a suburb of Rio. There are five branches around the city.

Tapioca: This is the Brazilian hot dog, choripan, taco, your pick - the street food you grab on your way home from the office or after a late night out. It's made from manioc flour, which looks like little white pearls until it's been cooked in a pan of oil and turned into a crepe-like base for salty or sweet fillings. 

Neighborhood bars are a key social space. "We’re in a boteco and we can talk about whatever we want," Catherine said. We ate bolinhos de bacalao (codfish balls) and bolinhos de feijoada (beef stew, breaded and fried). Feijoada, like cachaca, the sugar cane alcohol, was once slave food - and is now one of the pillars of Brazilian cuisine. 

Also, there are 200 word for cachaca in Brazilian Portuguese. 

From Morro da Conceição, a hillside neighborhood that's becoming an artists' haunt, you can see abandoned buildings in Brazil's downtown. On the right, Catherine shows how the port zone fits into this hill neighborhood and the city center. 

Pedra do Sal, Little Africa: African slaves carved these stairs into this rock before slavery in Brazil was finally abolished in 1888. Their descendants carved out a neighborhood that's become a hub for Afro-Brazilian culture. Now, on Fridays, on this rock, there's a samba show here and so many people come you can't move as anything but part of the swaying crowd.

The view from the top of Morro da Providencia, Rio's first favela. 

Here, at the top of Morro da Providencia, in a square that used to be a public park before the city government built a cable car as a gentrifying gesture, a community pillar makes gnocchi with shrimp in a spicy coconut sauce. She learned to make gnocchi from the Italian woman in whose house she is a maid; the sauce is a speciality of the northeast of Brazil and uses West African red palm oil. "It's an amazing fusion dish," said a Turkish chef who did this food tour with Catherine a few weeks ago. 

Favelas are hillside neighborhoods of adaptation and resistance. People build houses with flat roofs so that they can add floors when the next generation comes along. This building here is covered with portraits of the Providencia residents who were evicted from their homes when the city government built the cable car. 

En Transito: Everywhere to Mexico

24 hours of travel from Rio to Mexico, pictures > words:

On Uruguay: Painting with a Broad Brush and a Gourd of Mate in my Other Hand

The curtains on every bus I took around Uruguay opened  to green, rolling and rocky views - unexpected mountains, extensive grasslands. A nation of grasslands. To me, agriculture gives the country some coherence. But there’s a lot more to say than that, or that it’s the Switzerland of South America, or the country that elected as president a former guerrilla named Jose Mujica. The Uruguayan puzzle I've started to put together is part traditional mindset, part progressive politics - and part something else I haven't found yet. 

Over two months, I stayed in the capital, Montevideo; a mid-sized city, Salto; a large coastal town, La Paloma; and a tiny coastal town, Punta del Diablo, that in the summer swells to a resort. I passed through two other mid-sized cities, Tacuarembo and Rocha. In all of these places, I was struck by the general homogeneity of the houses. In Montevideo, of course, there are luxury towers and beautifully preserved (or elegantly crumbling) old palaces; but in general, people live in small, one- or two- story cement houses. Bars on the windows, and gates to a courtyard; maybe a place to park a car. It’s a place where people have enough money to live and maybe go on vacation in January, and maybe buy their kids Samsung cellphones (iPhones are rare here) - but the luxury is not apparent as it is in Buenos Aires. I’m sure that if I spent time in Punta del Este or more time in Montevideo, my view would be complicated. But from what I hear, read, and understand, Uruguay is just chugging along. 

Before I came south, I had subscribed to Google alerts for Uruguay that had made me think that the country would be booming. My inbox was full of links to World Bank press releases and the Uruguayan Investment and Export Promotion Agency’s home page: a solar plant here, a wind power plant there, a proposal for an open pit iron mine that had passed an intensive social and environmental impact assessment.

I see more problems in those stories than I did before. After being to Pilar’s ranch in Salto, the timber forests that push at the edges of pastures seems sinister. After spending time in La Paloma and Punta del Diablo and the wild beaches further north, the thought of a deep water port (since put on hold!) in the middle of that beautiful coastline, one that Brazil and Bolivia would use, too, seems short-sighted. There’s not enough need to justify it; there’s too much wilderness to permit it. 

And what people told me is that there aren’t enough people to do the work projected for those big projects, either. “People don’t have the same values as they used to,” I kept hearing. Because the government gives out social security to people under a certain income level, they don’t bother to work, I was told. Pilar has a real labor shortage on her ranch. “There’s money to be made, but only for who wants it,” the hostel owners in La Paloma said. For anyone else, the government can supply enough to buy mate and cigarettes and beer.

I don’t know the details of any development projects well enough to say for sure - perhaps sustainability is truly taken into account, perhaps they projects will create jobs that will boost people’s livelihoods, maybe the new infrastructure would be a blessing for everyone. The roads are invariably bad, in cities and in country. “We’re really still a developing country,” I kept hearing, “Have you seen our roads?”

***

On my last day in Uruguay, I went to a conference about Benefit Corporations, or companies that are required, by charter, to seek not only economic but social and environmental impact. In the conference room of a sponsoring law firm in Montevideo, we heard about the history of B Corps, the story of the first certified Uruguayan B Corp, and the beginnings of a process to create a legal framework for B Corps in Latin America.

The coordinators of the Uruguayan hub, which currently consists of two companies, said that Uruguay could be a good place for more B corps to grow. It’s small and progressive enough to change legal frameworks and business culture within its borders, they said, and can then influence other countries in the region. At the coffee breaks people drank organic tea produced by an Argentine B Corps and took notes on their iPhones. The organizers were pleased with attendance - not just “save the earth types,” they said at lunch afterwards, but lawyers and businessmen, the people who have the tools to change the legal frameworks and push industry to seek that triple bottom line (financial, social, and environmental). 

In the evening, I met up with one of the organizers and her boyfriend. They were sitting at a corner bar in their neighborhood, wearing yoga pants and jorts, respectively, drinking mate and beer. We ordered sliders. She is Uruguayan but was raised in the US. She told me that coming back to Uruguay has brought her back to the basics, in a good way, but that Montevideo feels sleepy, for 20-somethings who are working in movements to change how the world works. Uruguayans may allow progressive policies to pass in their legislature, but in the end, she said, this is a place where you buy the same type of squash from the same corner grocery for thirty years without wanting to change it up. 

I’m in Rio de Janeiro now. Last night, I went to a party hosted by a group of young Brazilians who work in city government, congress, and a grassroots community organizing association. Before we arrived at their door, they had been hosting a meeting for a campaign to block a law that would lower the age of criminal responsibility and send more teenagers to Brazil's dangerous prisons.

For the rest of the night, even as the sangria bowl emptied and the music pulsed louder, people wore bright red and green stickers on their t-shirts: Amanhecer contra a Redução, or "A new day against reducing the age." The whole campaign had been inspired, a friend told me, by how youth had mobilized and prevented a similar law from passing in Uruguay. 

20 Lines on Patriotism

It started with a feeling of affectionate embarrassment for Bill Clinton. At a conference on social enterprise, the head of the B Corps network in Uruguay gave a presentation that included a video of Bill talking about B Corps back in 2012. He spoke haltingly and he looked sort of flushed, like he had just had a few drinks. I looked around the conference room full of lawyers and social entrepreneurs to make sure no one was laughing. The subtitles, in fact, did not pick up on Bill’s lack of eloquence. 

I sat back. Hearing English was soothing and, no matter how he stumbled, what he was saying was good - we need to clear our minds of the primacy of short-term profit. Corporations and shareholders need to be willing to think long term. His accent and his aim made me think fondly of the country where I was born. Straight-shooting, idealistic. Then the founder of the first Uruguayan B Corp took the stage and hit play on another YouTube video. It was about lawyers in the US banding together to create a legal framework for these Benefit Corporations. They wanted companies to be allowed to incorporate social and environmental benefit as fiduciary duties in their charters. 

As the music swelled and more states who had passed legislation were highlighted on a big US map, I found myself feeling a little emotional. When Jack Markell, the Governor of Delaware, spoke about his states’ duty to pave the way (over 50% of publicly-traded US companies are incorporated in Delaware), my heart beat faster. Then the kicker, the corkscrew opening that bottle of American idealism:

“I believe, ten years from now, we will look back on this time as the start of a revolution,” said Yvon Chouinard, the Founder of Patagonia. 

After this doozy, the clip gave the final tally of states that had approved legislation and cut to a scene of a small New England town square. That just about did it for me. When the video ended, I was about to excuse myself to the hallway so I could let tears stream down my cheeks in peace.

Facts: The B Corps movement is strong here. The Latin American countries that have been forced to host transplanted capitalism may understand, better than we Americans who have mostly reaped the benefits of that blind industry, why a triple bottom line is important. I almost cried watching YouTube videos about corporate law in the United States, so I think it may be time to start working my way home. 

Two Buenos Aires Stories

1.

They met in a church. The chapel was freshly painted turquoise for a bride wearing melon and pink. The Uruguayan priest cracked a few jokes and ended the service in fifteen minutes. The church spilled out 120 guests from France and Buenos Aires. The Argentines wore more colors and higher heels. His eyes were blue and her scarf was red.

They said goodbye in a bus station. She knew what his trip home would be like because he had told her when they met in the church. He loves arriving in Buenos Aires by ferry at sunset. The boat slides in and the city emerges like a Carlos Gardel tango, powerful and melancholy. 

2.

I went for a walk last night, after it got dark but before the heat lifted. There were closed storefronts with sounds behind them and a stream of bicycles on Cordoba. There were birdcages on a roof. There were shadows of trees and the smell of jasmine. There was a dog who looked like a lion, walking without a leash, and the flashing light of a TV behind a window, and a couple kissing in a dark corner with balletic grace. Over the railroad tracks, there was a block where people spilled onto the sidewalk in a bath of fluorescent light. 

This pulled me in like a moth to a lantern and pushed out delusions of poetry. It was a grill house in an old garage. I asked for a table and the man at the grill was kind but brusque because he had a whole lotta mouths to feed. At the tables on the sidewalk, groups of old men poured themselves more Quilmes and yelled about their wives. A mom cut pieces of steak for a two-year-old wearing a NASCAR shirt; a family argued over who got the last chorizo. A few guys in soccer clothes waited for takeout.

From my plastic table in the back room, I ordered a skirt steak and fries and a small bottle of wine and I didn’t end up bothering with the book I had brought  because the TV was playing a telenovela about a bunch of singing nuns with nicely-plucked eyebrows. The boy with the NASCAR shirt toddled into the room every few minutes, shrieked with joy at the screen, and went back to his mom. 

Just as my steak arrived on its metal platter, a group of about twenty guys filed in to the table a foot away from mine. Buen provecho, bon appetit, they said, one by one, smiling. 

I spent twenty minutes keeping my focus intently on the steak and the telenovela and trying to avoid eye contact. Apparently you can only do that for so long when you’re eating by yourself a foot away from a big group. 

“Where are you from?” the guy with the dreadlocks asked, when I accidentally looked up from my food. 

We had a pleasant conversation under that fluorescent lighting. It was his 29th birthday. The guy across from him spent a week in New York last year. They were all friends from high school. We cheersed to his 30th year. When my waiter brought my check, I paid for an extra bottle of Quilmes and asked him to bring it to their table after I left. Que lo pases hermoso, I said on my way out, suerte.

I walked home thinking about how there’s something really nice about stories you don’t make up.