key to culture

If you cannot speak Spanish, you will never live in Mexico.


Well, those eleven words should arouse some comment. The corollary is: You may reside in Mexico, but you will never live there.


Language is a tricky topic. I will skip over the theory of what language is and get right to the practical point.


Every society communicates with a language. Until you can speak in that language, you will miss out on everything that people say in that language. Until you can think in that language, you will miss what people really mean. Only when you learn to think in Spanish will you be able to understand the Mexican culture.


Right now, I am still in the category of barely learning to communicate at the level of a four-year old. Two anecdotes from this last trip prove the point.


When I arrived at the Manzanillo Airport, I purchased my taxi voucher and headed off to meet my driver, Agustino. He knew very little English, but I was prepared to have the type of deep conversation any child under five can have.


We both had great fun in trading words for wind and rain. Green hills. And my favorite: coconuts and bananas. I can always rely on agriculture to save the conversational day. It also helps that I know a bit about growing bananas. By translating just a few words, I can learn new ones.

And then I got cocky. We talked about growing corn. Putting on my best South Dakota attitude, I tried to ask if the corn was sweet corn or silage. For the life of me, I could not remember the word for cattle. The best I could do was talk about bulls and what they eat. But I think I asked whether I could eat a bull. We laughed almost the full half-hour ride to Melaque. I tried to learn more, and I did -- letting myself be the butt of the joke.

My second tale has a different spin. I walked the two or three miles over to Barra de Navidad in the morning. By the afternoon, the heat and humidity forestalled the option of walking back to Melaque. But I knew that was not a problem. I had ridden the bus between the two towns last December.

I waited at what I thought was a regular bus stop. (Yes. Yes. I know there are no real bus stops. But I had seen other people waiting for the bus at the spot.) The bus pulled up. I hopped on, and said in my best Spanish: "Cuánto cuesta?" In the universal bored voice of all public bus drivers, he responded, what sounded to me like: "Seven thousand." Now, I am from out of town, but I knew that was not right. I must have heard wrong. I asked again. This time the subtext shifted from boredom to irritation. My mind translated his curt response as: "A thousand children."


I then did what every defeated warrior does. I surrendered by holding out my handful of pitiful coins. He took one with nary a smile. As I walked to the back of the bus, my fellow passengers showed the same compassion you would show a child who mistakenly missed the short bus -- by keeping their eyes glued to the floor.

The lesson is the same from both stories. I need to study more. It is impossible to pick up a language merely by being around it. I laugh when I hear people say "I'll just pick it up" -- as if Spanish were a quart of milk or the flu, rather than a language. (Well, I guess it was also a flu, but that is a different story.)


Because osmosis will not work, I need to get back to my formal lessons -- especially those from the Learnables. And then I can venture into the world of taxi and bus drivers -- and actually have a conversation.


On my first night in Melaque, I allowed myself to be so intimidated by the thought of going out to buy food that I remained hungry in the house. That was doubly troubling because when I went to the market the next day, the clerk had a very nice conversation with me in a mixture of Spanish and English.


I need to first learn Spanish that I may start thinking in Spanish.


The only place I did not need Spanish was in the house I test drove for the week in Melaque. That is the next post.