It started as it usually does, with a man leaning out of a truck shouting, “HEY BABY!!” and laughing with the satisfaction of a baboon gnawing on a piece of rotten fruit.

The machismo funk.  If I’d had a semi-automatic weapon, there would have been Kill Billish gratification of a type that would deter any slightly overweight, education-deprived and cologne-soaked lout from ever cooing at a passing woman ever again.  The images that go through my head in these moments of harassment approach horror movie heights in graphic detail.  Then they pass and la di da what a pretty evening sky and how ‘bout a double americano and oh-look-at-the-light-on-the-colonial buildings. The afternoon is a soft gentle thing, all buttery light on peeling turquoise and maroon walls, all whispering trees, all mountains echoing in the distance.

And yet somewhere within the serenity a raging ball of fire spews violent fantasies of writhing, screaming machos pinned under a dog’s clenched jaws.  Sometimes I fall into that fire, and chase a man at full speed with my German Shepherd until said man screams in fear or gets backed up against a wall.  But I rarely do this anymore, for two reasons:

1) It is dangerous.  For as much as I fight the Mexico-is-scary standard in the media, Mexico can be a little scary.  Not because drug lords are going to come lob off your head, but because if you throw a mango at someone’s face he might know someone who knows someone or he might be a government official — they love them some good harassin’ — or he might just get generally pissed and decide to act on that, none of which are good things.

2) It ruins a perfectly good day.  You’re walking along with the dog, letting yourself get sucked into your dreamy writerly fantasies in the midst of another peach sunset, saying, ay que bonito, ay que tranquilo, and then WHAM some loser with a plastic cup full of cheap beer is keeling out the window of a beat-up car barking at you.  You go from quaintly blissful expat to insult-hurling psychopath in 2.5 seconds.  Then, it’s hard to go back.  The whole afternoon is permeated with men-need-to-be-exquisitely-tortured-until-they-scream vibes.  It’s not fun.  It doesn’t generate good karma, shall we say.

But what to do.  This is the central dilemma of traveling, the hub where all roads of expat life eventually lead. Do you roll with cultural relativism, looking straight ahead unperturbed as a man weaves towards you whispering “hola guerita como estas?” an inch and a half from your face, or do you indulge in a little cultural give n’ take, roaring “wanna meet my dog, sucka?!?”

So this might be a slightly dramatized version, but it contains the basic elements of an essential foreigner conflict: the wanting to belong, to accept the local culture, the knowing that to force your beliefs, desires, and needs upon it is wrestling with that old imperialist beast (not to mention, oftentimes, isolating and frustrating yourself) and yet the wondering why certain things — the blatant harassement of women, for example – should be protected in the name of “culture.”  Why is culture so often the providence of lecherous old men?  So, if I live here and participate in the culture, why shouldn’t I fight against something that I believe is universally, unequivocally wrong?

I have gone in circles on this debate so many times that I end up weary with a pulsing headache wondering if maybe we should just move to Canada.  I have written about it endlessly and tried to come to so many pat conclusions, all of which sit sticky and false on my tongue.  The failed essays pile up flat and unfulfilling in the “writing in progress” folder on the desktop.

No patented response or attitude is satisfying enough, and none encapsulates the complex back-and-forth emotions that flare up when machismo crashes into my daily life.  Sometimes I’ve told myself to ignore it, to accept it as part of this place, and I feel queasy the whole time but slightly more peaceful.  Other times I’ve tried and speak out against it in non-violent, non-fruit-throwing ways, and I feel strong and empowered but also jittery and tense for a day afterwards (i.e., the time I walked up to the truck full of men hissing at me and said, “Would you do that to your sister?  I don’t think so.  Please, don’t insult me.”  And they stopped.  But the mix of emotions following that was more upsetting than positive.  And not every truck full of men would respond with silence).  These issues lie in an intensely foggy gray zone; the kind of pixilated fog you need to paw your way through, the kind that never seems to end.

Yesterday, though, I think I might’ve briefly punctured the fog.  I began to think about the machismo problem differently.  Not as a question of righteousness and justice vs. imperialism and dominance, of culturally appropriate behavior for an insider vs. an outsider, but rather as a question of personal growth and sanity.

Fighting machismo on the street, lashing out, creates so much negative energy it sucks the rest of my life into a black hole of fear, anger, and frustration.  Each encounter with machismo taints the rest of the day, leaving streaky gray trails through my mood.  A 30-second encounter that I find insulting and maddening becomes a full day of stress.  Karmically, this does not beckon good things.  It means I’m expelling a helluva lot more negative energy than positive energy, and Oaxaca looks meaner, uglier, dirtier.

So yesterday, slumped Thinker-style on the edge of a stone fountain in the Llano park, thinking about how I’d narrowly escaped that spell of negative energy again post hey-baby, I could see the desire to live here, the genuine enjoyment and appreciation of it, peeking through the cloud of macho fury.  And beyond the right or wrong of it, whether I believe machismo is a force to be taken down or something I have no right to question, is the nature of my presence in this city and whether it becomes a swirling void of resentment or something more hopeful, something more compassionate.  More simply, how can I live here and stay not only sane but also tolerant and openhearted?

There are those cycles again, the cycles of cultural adjustment, and ultimately passing through these cycles over and over again you try to come out if not necessarily cleaner and prettier, if not shiny white and new, softer and more affectionately worn, more accommodating to the curves of a place.  And the idea is to do this graciously, without stirring up huge drifts of excess frustration and bitterness.

The point here isn’t that machismo isn’t worth the time or effort to combat, or that it should simply be ignored.  The point is that it’s one of those massive cultural differences that challenges my assumptions about myself, my relationship with Oaxaca, and my growth as a traveler and a person, and that beyond the larger social-cultural debates about cultural relativism and imperialism I have to learn how to deal with it on a personal level.  At some point, every long-term traveler and expat will have to deal with some issue like this and come to confront it on her own terms in order to avoid easy hatred and stereotyping and resentment.  She will have to find some way to crawl through it and learn something about herself and her culture in the process.  So this is what I have come to see with machismo : the struggle is no longer about the epic rightness or wrongness of machismo, it’s about how I deal with it, and how I can live in Oaxaca and not suffer constant bouts of suffocating anger.

Yesterday in the Llano it became clear that what drives me most insane about machismo isn’t necessarily that imbeciles insult me with their dumb come-ons, or that occasionally some freak scares me by shouting from a van, but that I have so much difficulty controlling myself when it happens.  That my emotions burst forth like the tongue of the dragon and it takes a mammoth amount of restraint to reign them in.  And this happens over and over until I finally dread going outside because I fear those feelings.

So, I thought, how about framing machismo in different terms.  How about framing it so that it is an opportunity for me to learn how to control that anger, and those flashes of emotion, which ultimately do little but sabotage days or weeks?  Not simply on the machismo front, but in general – I tend to be a slightly — ahem — fiery person.  And machismo throws some white gas on that fire.  But so much of the time the anger I feel in these or other situations does little more than open a big chasm of negativity I fall into and then need to spend days climbing edgily out of.

What if I think : ignoring these displays of machismo isn’t about justice or relativism anymore, it’s about being in control of myself.  And ironically, the struggle becomes a sort of gift.  The pearl offered up by the oyster of murky cultural difference.  Instead of seeing it as a sign of weakness, I can see turning away from macho posturing as a sign of control and empowerment. The ability to not lose control, endanger myself and torpedo the day’s potential becomes strengthening instead of debilitating.

This is not to say, ever, that harassment of women is OK or should simply be ignored, or that machismo really isn’t that big of a deal.  Every woman will deal with it differently because tragically, so many women have to deal with it, and most of them deal with it in ways I couldn’t begin to imagine and that can’t be easily resolved by a simple psychological battle with oneself.  I am fortunate enough to have to deal with machismo on a fairly superficial level, and to be able to sit on park benches stewing over appropriate philosophical/intellectual responses.

But that doesn’t change the fact that living here, I have to adopt a machismo strategy, and ultimately, my way of dealing with machismo has come down to a way of dealing with myself : my righteous, furious, fiercely just, madly emotional and strong self.  Instead of thinking of machismo as a threat, pressing down on my identity and stifling it, I want to think of it as a new and distinct challenge to my strength: challenging me to walk straight with my head held high not giving a shit in the world whatever the guys in the backs of trucks are shouting.  I saw a Mexican woman do this the other day and was impressed by her strength: some greasy turd with a gardening tool was shouting at her, more and more insistently, and she had her chin pointed straight up and out and did not move an inch from her self-assured march forward.  Yes.  That is an image of empowerment, too, not one that I would have ever conceived of within the confines of my own head and my own culture, but one I have come to believe in out of a search for how to be, here.

In Japan, two incredible women friends with decades of experience living overseas laid the smack down on my posture toward machismo (which at the time was an unequivocal it’s wrong and I’m going to fight it as best I can).  “You’re so American,” they said, half lovingly and half disdainfully, “you’re so righteous and you really think you can and should change the world.  Deal with it.  Mexican women will ultimately fight it when they are ready, and you can help, but you can’t decide when.”

Fair enough.  So the battle now is for control of myself, for the ability to speak out against machismo in its many forms in writing and with friends, but also to live my daily life without constantly getting dominated by my own anger, without letting it shape Oaxaca in its image.

Yesterday in the park I got caught looking up at a mango tree.  It was a huge, soaring mango tree, one of those rainforest trees that so towers above scurrying things on the ground that it seems to exist in a time and place apart.  Mangos shimmered like plump beads on its top, hundreds of feet above the plaza.  The wind made them shiver each time it drifted by.  I saw this because I had been able to escape that furious circle of should-I-fight-back-or-should-I-not, because I had been able to keep on walking after being yelled at and look past it to everything else that keeps me in Mexico, and because that ability to control myself gave me the chance to exhale and to get a sense of vision and empowerment back.  It was the ability to look at a mango tree instead of stewing in cultural discomfort and vitriol.  It may not be politically correct, it may not be ideal, but it felt right.  It felt like one of those adjustments an expat makes living in a place, shifting a little here and there, until she finally figures out the right posture.  This is how I fit, here.  This is how I can make it work.  And even if I don’t get the temporary relief of seeing the splat of a mango on a macho face, I get the greater satisfaction of living a daily life that isn’t slowly corroded by frustration, of inhabiting an expanding empowered space instead of an angry, contracting one.  It is one of those ongoing battles we wage in daily life, to keep grinding and gnawing our way through to a place where we can find just a little more compassion, just a little more hope, just a little more patience, to go on creating good things.