E X P Mexico.com

The main church in Chinantla, Puebla, my mother's home town.

Rafael Zafra is studying English language writing with the ExpEnglish Blogging Program. A student in International Relations at UNAM in Mexico City, his posts in Spanish are published on eldefe.com.

Being a resident of the east side of Mexico City makes me think about how hard life has been for people who have moved to this region. I know that more than 50% of the people who live here came from the countryside like I did. Mexico City is not London, New York or Paris but it is another city where people have come to find a better, like one of those cities but with the particularity that this is a third world city.

My father left his house in Puebla at about the age of 11 years. At least he has always said that. I have never been close to him but he told me that he escaped because he did not like his life in Tepeaca, Puebla. I think that life in Mexico City was more exciting to him as New York could be more exciting to me.

My parents thought I would enjoy watching those animals. I just wanted to give water to the donkey. (Click to enlarge)

Then my mother was offered a job in Mexico City. They each settled in eastern Mexico City and they became part of the tens of thousands of men and women who built this part of the city. It is not like Satelite, La Roma, Coyoacan or Tacubaya. This part of the city has something very different and I can not easly explain it. It is well known as the poorest side of Mexico City and also as a place whose people hardly finish school so we can easily imagine the sort of rudeness of these people. We each bear the embarrassment of living here next to Nezahualcoyotl, Chimalhuacan and Iztapalapa. Places we – as children – certainly did not choose but which our parents did not choose either.

As I have said my parents came from Puebla a state not too far from here but one which is very different in terms o culture, people`s behavior, traditions and beliefs. I would say that Puebla is very religious, people are close to each other, it feels warmer and everything turns around family which suffocates me a little bit.  But it is still surprising to me. The fact that from the time you are born every single thing in your life has to be witnessed by god.  When I used to feel part of that, I could not even think about celebrating Independence Day with my friends. I could not say or even think anything against god. That would have meant the worst thing ever – a tremendous feeling of guilt – something that I have long understood from Mexican Catholicism.

In Puebla I can still see that that unawareness in People because they suppose that people are not bad nor ever immoral – something that we Chilangos lost a long time ago. The Poblanos seem to trust anyone and are thus suscepetible to all manner of tricks and deceipts. The Chiangos, trusting no one, can not rest in the easy certainty of “values.”

My parents chose to live far from the happiness, from the guilt, far from their families and the warmth. They met in the mid 1980s in a high school where they were both working as teachers in Nezahualcoyotl, eastern Mexico City, a place I would describe as kind of dangerous.

I can remember when I was a child that I was very excited about giving water to the donkey or the little horse that carted out the garbage for some meager pesos. – I was so innocent that I could not realize that those animals were badly treated – something something that I guess did not happen elsewhere in the city.

Somewhere in Brooklyn. I wonder what would have happened if I had grown up in Puebla or New York. (click to enlarge)

Currently I am 22 and I need to look for my own way, a better life far from their happiness and far for the ugliness of eastern Mexico City as my mother and my father did in the mid-1980s – escaping from Puebla. Certainly my mother found her happiness and the health she was looking for and my father did as well. There is no question how much better their lives became coming from the countryside where for example my mother used to spend days without eating waiting from those dollars my grandmother was supposed to send from New York City.

The conditions are different at this moment. I had the chance to go to university which opened my eyes. I got the chance to know the difference between the “perfect” life in Puebla where families stay together until death separate them where sons study those perfect majors like Law and Medicine, and the life in Iztapalapa where children grew up alone because their parents have full-time jobs and can not take care of them as my parents did not take care of us.

I have heard some people say “You Chilangos have lost values” – something that is nearly true. And I also know the Mexican life in New York where people keep a connection with Mexico celebrating every Mexican holiday and marrying other Mexicans, hanging out with Mexicans, organizing Mexican soccer matches in the parks but they hardly have relationships with other New Yorkers and at times they do not even want to learn English.

We settled ourselves in Nezahualcoyotl in 1989 since then I have been growing up in Nezahualcoyot, Puebla, Iztapalapa and in New York. I did not have the opportunity to be the son of those who chose to live in New York. I did not have the opportunity to live in the first world. And fortunately I did not stay in Puebla living but three streets from the church nor in the small town where you have to wake up at 7 am to attend mass and then work in the farm thinking all the time about how life is outside of there.

I have spent entire years and months in each of those places and I really do know how they are. Home, however has always been in eastern Mexico City close to gangs, to drugs and this marginalization that has formed my personality. Despite all of this I learned from my parents that freedom is the most important thing in life - doing what you really feel and you really want to do without caring about what people are going to say is the most important thing which I really could not learn in any one of those places.