discrimination

01.07.06. i’ve changed. i remember years back when i was new to a group, i was one of the first to crack a joke, to introduce himself, to start a conversation. when i did the guanajuato-michoacán-querétaro trip with all the runners-up in the mejor alumno de sexto contest, by the end of the week i even had a little girlfriend, and all of my new friends wanted me to come forward during our last dinner and make a speech. then in 10^th grade i went to the national young leaders conference in dc, and my spanish lessons became very popular in the bus amongst the other kids. they particularly liked my teaching technique of saying the word in spanish while waving the hands in the air, describing the object being taught. how do you say ‘butt’? katie gottermeyer, my other noviecita from pennsylvania would ask, and i would reply pompa, while making a gesture with both hands in front of me, as though feeling an orange with each hand in the supermarket to make sure it was ripe. i would press my imaginary oranges twice and repeat butt, pompa, butt, pompa, and everybody would crack up. i only met these guys for about a week and i still kept in touch with about six or seven of those kids for about a year. then the letters became more sporadic until they just stopped coming (and going). (to those interested, i remained secretly in love with katie gottermeyer for several months, put up a picture of gelito, anna (his own secret love), katie, and me on my corkboard in my bedroom, and after a couple of letters never heard from her again. i googled all of them up about two years ago and only came in contact with jeff gepner, who is now teaching english at the american school in london. thanks to angelo alexander, the people-finding-freak, i came across a picture of josh gilliam in full navy suit, and learned from his wife or his answering machine, i can’t remember, that he was in iraq. i bet his westpoint education paid off. about katie, i only found some evidence that she might still be somewhere in pennsylvania giving swimming lessons to little children.) even in my first year in college, i quickly became the classroom’s buffoon in our private law class with el licenciado césar aranda. i always had some story, some anecdote, as i called them, to tell. chapo would always hate me for that. i think almost everybody else liked me and my stories, though, even professor aranda. he was a great teacher and now i wonder why he let me tell my anecdotes every time if he thought they were irrelevant. maybe he didn’t. maybe when i told how we were at a party, everybody else but me was drunk, the police came, and they put most of my friends in the granadera... maybe there was a point to my story. una anécdota, una anécdota, would implore pili even before the class had begun, and maría, lionel, cordelia, and everybody would laugh (come on, chapo, you must have at least smiled once, i’m sure!).

but, yes, i’ve changed. i’m still loud and funny when i’m with my friends but i’ve become quiet, almost shy, when i’m with stragers. i’ve even made concerted efforts to be more talkative but i can’t think of any fun things to talk about. i run out of topics very quickly and then i get the impression i become boring. or maybe it’s the other people who bore me out and i’ve just become uninterested in what strangers have to say to me. this actually comes as a new discovery to me now but it might actually be very true. i just met these girls in my hostal in salzburg. one of them was kind of interesting. the others seemed exclusively interested in the most inane topics. the most interesting one studied religion at the university of florida or florida state and said things trying to engage me in conversation like i read that life of pi book you’re reading too, but then i stopped when the boy is building a raft cuz i though it was boring, what’s interesting about it? or tell me where to go in mexico, i like the cultural stuff, like the aztecs and the mayans and all that stuff or simple questions like teach me some economics. but then i didn’t like all the self-deprecating comments that she and the other three made. how they didn’t even know why they were studying what they were studying in college, how their friends who went to such and such university were smart but they weren’t, etc. of course the fact that i’m at yale only made things worse. when they asked me what i was doing in connecticut, i said i go to school there. one of them said oh yeah? what school is there in connecticut? and i said nonchalantly yale, trying to sound as casual and indifferent to my school’s reputation as possible. silence. stereotypes and rejection ensued. wow, you must be pretty smart, said one. i don’t think i know one single person who goes to an ivy league, said another. yeah, i know [insert random name here], she goes to princeton, said a third one. she must be damn smart, said the last one. and then they all started talking amongst themselves, almost ignoring me. until the more interesting one started talking to me again, self-deprecation and stereotypes never stopping.

it’s funny to realize that there are people who don’t know anyone in an ivy league school. i don’t mean this in a pedantic, condescending way. but i’m talking about people like these girls, well-off americans, college-educated, with the means to travel for a couple of months in europe or elsewhere. (is it because they live in florida, the land of the retired? these girls have never even been to the northeast—their parents don’t like it, they said!) to me, it’s the opposite: i don’t have any friends in the florida-state-kind-of schools. all of my friends go to yale, penn, harvard, dartmouth, stanford, chicago... but then i think the reason is that most of my friends in these schools are international students who would hardly leave their countries if it weren’t for one of the top schools. i guess we don’t realize how small our circle is.

discrimination comes in many forms, and this is one of them. it sucks that every time i meet random people (always americans) on the train or at a bar or on the street, i always have to make an extra effort to sound very casual when i say where i go to school. i even try to avoid saying it, if possible, like it’s a sin. should i lie? this reminds me of my confession as a kid, when kids from monterrey, san nicolás, and guadalupe asked me where i lived, and i almost felt guilty to say san pedro because i knew what was coming next. the same stereotypes and rejection. i won’t say that as an ivy-league educated student living in an upper-middle class neighborhood in the city with the highest per capita income in latin america i’ve suffered much, no. i’ve been privileged and i’m thankful for that. but de facto it is as wrong to have these preconceived ideas of people because they go to a certain school or live in a certain neighborhood, as it is to judge them because they are of a given color or come from a given country.

this in part has to do with that conversation i had with héctor a couple of weeks ago. after the mexico-iran game in nürnberg, we went to some tv azteca celebration near berlinerplatz. the tv azteca guys had free beer and tacos and so the place was packed. as we were in line for the tacos (for over two hours, mind you!), i heard these girls talking in front of us and immediately recognized their monterrey accent. one of them looked like alicia villarreal, except with darker hair, so i will call her alicia. they were all living in a small town in germany and attended some technical school in an exchange program with the universidad de nuevo león. we chatted for a while and in a spurt of frankness alicia told me, tú hablas bien fresa. an unexpected thump, it reminded me of my confessions as a kid. i always knew i speak fresa, a characteristic intonation in the spanish spoken by the upper classes in mexico. ¿dónde vives? asked one of the girls both teasingly and defiantly, de seguro en san pedro. another added, de seguro vas al tec, no? i did live and attend school in san pedro my whole life, and also went to tec for high school and part of college, and like a boxer in the corner of the ring, i could not avoid the punches. freaking chicho didn’t help. in his attempt to be funny, he kept on with the tease. except it wasn’t funny to me. i denied it and said i lived in santa catarina, where my sister lives now. then i added that i don’t even have a house in monterrey and i don’t even live there anymore. for some reason, this sounded even more fresa to them and they all went uuuuuuh! after i said it. again, stereotypes and rejection followed. a few minutes later, i joined the game and started to make fun of alicia, cuz most likely she lived in one of the fresa neighborhoods in san nicolás, like anáhuac or las puentes. she did indeed, so my punch was effective and the comments faded out. but later in berlin, héctor and i talked about the incident and he wondered why fresas speak like that. my theory is that it’s just like a regional dialect, like the vernaculars spoken in different parts of germany or austria or switzerland. people from the upper-middle class live in similar neighborhoods and attend the same parties. their kids go to the same schools and summer camps. they all do business with the same people and those in monterrey travel to mexico and guadalajara, just as those in querétaro, saltillo, and chihuahua. that must explain it. however, my question to héctor was a different one. what is the definition of a fresa? it doesn’t have to do necessarily with the money, because there are a lot of people who have no money and are still considered fresa. i was one example of it. even though i always lived in a good neighborhood, my family never had money and i wouldn’t have gone to any of the good schools i attended had it not been for my scholarships. héctor’s definition included begin an arrogant show-off, which fortunately i am not according to both him and even alicia villarreal. still, a lot of people with no money brag about things they don’t have or pretend to be something they are not, concealing their socioeconomic status. i had even mentioned that i had some friends who were really fresa, which might explain my fresaness, but i definitely never meant that they are arrogant show-offs, so this is not necessarily part of the definition of fresa either.

so what exactly is a fresa? we could not really reach a conclusion. it’s some ethereal concept that is inherent to some people and places and actions—like the way one dresses, the way one writes, ...—which apparently is related somehow (maybe in an indirect way) to either wealth or arrogance or even some notion of superiority of some sort. yet, it is hard to define. it’s like naconess. it is equally difficult to explain. the concept is in the air and has no definite shape, yet it is easily recognizable by all...

however, this was not exactly the point of the conversation. the point was to illustrate these ridiculous prejudices of a group against another. of course, the most famous ones are those that involve acts of discrimination of rich against poor, or well-educated against ignorant people, because in those cases the poor and the ignorant are the ones that suffer, not only from the form of discrimination, but from its consequences and from the divide between their own group and the opposite. however, the other form of discrimination, the one that is committed by people in precarious economic conditions against allegedly well-off individuals, or that exhibiting someone’s self-deprecation because they don’t belong to that group (school, company, etc.) with a better reputation, might affect both individuals negatively because of the act of discrimination itself... but only affects the person in the less advantaged group because of its consequences. it only deepens the separation between the two groups, even though the person from the more advantaged group might not hold any negative biases against his interlocutor.

in sum, it is true that, as they say, we are all equal, but some are more equal than others—not because of the intrinsic value of these “more equal” individuals, but because of social misconceptions. the moral of the story is: avoid all prejudices and take a hands-on approach in dispeling the existing ones.

he dicho.