I went to the hidden triangle point of the patio, behind the enormous circular column, to cry and cry hard. I really preferred no one see me, though it might open their eyes to see people who care greatly.
I couldn't look into the eyes of my colleagues. I kept some honor. I kept some pride. I felt so firmly valid in my emotions yet knew it would be something I experience alone by nature of the beast.
I escaped in a way that felt polite or semi polite. My counterpart tried to put it into perspective.. to deny the case. This was of course, infuriating. He was as blind as a racist white man justifying segregation. "They prefer to have lower jobs". My partner, who left the workshop anyway, tried to give me a solemn look at offered his hand to cheer me up. I looked at him in the eye for a millisecond before having to flee. It was just time for me to leave. I couldn't believe how backwards my colleagues' view of the world was. Women didn't work in their lives.
My superior saw that I was busy in my eyes, he said. Ah yes- just that :) are you happy? He asked. Oh man, let's go on a walk. No I'm not happy. But I'm excited. There are a lot of reasons I am here. I really believe I needed to do this for so many reasons and I have so much to gain. I feel like I have a purpose. I'm stoked. I just wish the boss didn't terrify everyone all the time, and that my partner would communicate. Its gonna be like that.
It goes like that.
As I'm biking I know I have to respond to my colleague who challenged me and dug himself into a terrible hole on his way out. It was a big hole.
I stopped on the sidewalk, allowed dusk to swallow me, and typed a letter I would but would not send for knowing better:
A man feeling humiliated by his wife earning more than him is no different than a white man being humiliated by a black man earning more than him. Can't we agree that it is absolutely ridiculous and that the entitlement of superiority is unfounded and toxic?
What is humiliating is feeling not just that you CAN'T earn as much as a man just because you're a woman but that you SHOULDN'T. Its deep, and its engrained. By humiliating your husband by earning more You are harming those who you depend on by becoming independent - this is the terrible psychology. And harming all others. Its not unlike a runaway slave, a woman who leaves her abusive husband and goes to work on her own, the outcast of society, in rural mexico, with deep social pariah as having fail led her family given role as "wife".
A prior cleaning lady at my current apartment paid fairly and paid education expenses as an incentive to progress herself was deeply punished by her father who said she brought shame on her family by earning more than him and getting such priviledge as
Sponsored education? She must be a prostitute. There's no other way. Out of the house or quit immediately. You cannot talk to that boss again, you slut. You aren't worth going to school. Why would someone give YOU that? You're just a cleaning lady and a slut. I'm picking who you work for.
The girl was in her 30s and unmarried.
Its worse than the black-white scenario, because there do result in differences between men and women biologically. But the moment these are used by one to subjugate the other (or to increase a perceived likelihood of success in a twisted world, one to subjugate herself), it is violence. Women are survivors and we will adjust our outlooks accordingly. Breaking ourselves down is inevitable because its so convincing that our value is children, and in the current system our children have best resources in dependent-on-a-man circumstances.
I was so affected because it makes me so sad to see every day women act powerless here in mexico. It is unlike any place I've been in my whole life (~20 countries). Its not consistently the case, but it is a default against which many have decided they must survive. In the average mexican family... with little property ownership and decision-making, why should women have a say regarding their reproductive capacities? If they don't have kids, what are they worth? This is a terrifying reality to the extremes of society the richest and poorest women around the world.
I feel like a spectator, because I believe I could be a man as quickly as a woman...watch the world treat me sometimes as a woman, sometimes as a man, because I was raised to act as both and often assume and identify as both. Androgeny is a freedom strategy, or perhaps expression; I can only imagine the feeling of our ancestors being the first to wear pants ...freed of the hoop skirt, suddenly able to physically leave their masters' estates by riding away on a horse! How stupid of them, and how absolutely vital!
Yes-I do have hope. I have to figure it out. My daughters are going to learn to love dinosaurs and supernovae, as I was taught. I am also a terrible example of entitlement. I was raised educated and white, believing I deserved every privilege in my path due to superior education and precociousness. I know I am too at times toxic, and at times due to being from the capital of the richest country in the world, empowering due to my blindness to true lack of opportunity. I evolved into a Californian...I value innovation, positivity, disruptiveness, freedom of speech, freedom of love, freedom of social rules.
Its no joke that activists here are murdered by the government. Its not something we should at any point forget about, though where moving on is concerned, ignorance is bliss. But bliss is for the very elderly at heart. While we have the means, we should care to care. We have an incredible opportunity within this pais to love mexico, and help Mexico love mexico, and help people believe in themselves by an ideal of what they can --and in my cultural value most core, REALLY CAN- be.
When I was 6, I had developed 2 useful reflective skills: I could write full sentences (poems!) And I had identified my top 2 passions and talents which at the time made me feel unique because they earned me great recognition and awards in preschool: swimming fast and drawing realistic humans. I wrote in my diary what became my motto that year, as I pondered deep in the depths of my bedroom alone one winter night before dinner was called:
"I can swim,
I can draw,
I can do anything I want to. But do I?"
I felt boundless only by my own motivation. Later, I learned that I was not going to be the top Olympic swimmer in the earth for reasons beyond motivation, but its hard to say. Maybe I am still grandiose enough to think somewhere in the back of my head it was because I chose differently.
And then, like magic, Ale emerged and saluted me, who at that point had frozen like wax in the shadow of dusk and a nearby tree against my bike against the wall, typing this all into my phone, wondering if it was a brilliant or suicidal move to actually send this to my colleague who had said that women don't earn the same as men because its better for the man to not be humiliated, its the reason marriages are failing. Ale gave me so many words.
Ale told me very carefully advice I had heard before. Play the game. You must here. But what if it is not worth it to you? It is. If you lucha, they will te ataca. With machos, if you are strong, they will build themselves up like the artichoke and spick you much harder. They will destroy you. Well, it could go this route. I could, in theory, attempt to destroy - fight back.... viva la revolucion.
I learned early on that this doesn't work as a vegetarian. People with pride problems don't react well to being accused in perfect peacefulness of being morally twisted.
Ale told me to think. She is short and looks small and meek and pretty. But she is not. Her father has been openly homophobic, almost violent. She stuck up for her gay friend to her father with great composure, and in turn inspired her cousin to come out of the closet. Within families and close friends, we all can meter. It gets too dangerous with strangers. To succeed and be tranquil I need to become an insider. This will require leaving my pride on the floor and acting submissive ... playing the game so as to not threaten the machos. Then I will have power. It is not something I am convinced of, breaking myself down for my own benefit. I understand it, but I'd rather just be bad ass and confident and different and me. I'm fairly certain my colleagues will push back on that.. keep a distance. But its hard to play a game I so deeply disrespect. I'll have to run experiments. At the least, be more keen with what I ask of people. I am the boss on the team. It runs like that. I own all the relationships for my book. I control it. So I can afford to think before I speak, and flatter strategically. Its beyond old diplomacy. Something even more medieval and Machiavellian, at worst.
Hour by hour.
Geez. I'm exhausted. Day by day.
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