Susy and I have always shared issues of otherness, but mine are intellectual flirtations, mazes explored intentionally with the constant possibility of escape, whereas hers have been deeply instilled and inescapable since childhood.  Susy is Mexican-American, and has spent her life split between the two countries; speaking Spanish and English, eating menudo in Nogales and barbeque in Austin, Texas, facing the long, critical looks at immigration when she goes North and the skeptic judgment of native-born Mexicans when she heads South.  Hers is a quest for belonging and understanding, for reviving the traditions of the South in the North and for increasing acceptance of U.S-born Mexicans in the South.  She now shares this with her husband, Mauricio, who is also of both worlds (and several others, with Moroccan and Cuban grandparents).

This past Saturday I went to Susy and Mauricio’s wedding.  Jorge and I headed over to their place in the early afternoon to help with final preparations.  We found a hive bustling with friends and family hanging, sorting, cleaning, preparing, strategizing, creating, adjusting.  It was not your typical wedding scene.  I am used to arriving at a church with its stale relics, firmly in place year round and temporarily borrowed for the purpose of ceremony, and then proceeding to a reception in a room rented for a few hours, a cold space briefly lit up with activity, a few lights flickering to brightness and then left cold again, lights out, tablecloths smoothed.

This was something entirely different.  This was Mauricio and Susy’s house, a space into which they have consciously directed all of their energy and creativity for the past several months setting up their lives in Oaxaca.  They are both doctoral students in Anthropology conducting research on the 2006 social movement in Oaxaca.  Their house contains both a sense of of rootedness and of openness and reach towards the outside world; their passion and commitment to this place, and the parts of themselves formed elsewhere, in other cultures and places.  They wanted to have the ceremony there, and the effect was to create a poignant sense of continuity between their daily lives in Oaxaca, this consummate event of their marriage, and their future.

But beyond that, beyond the feeling of the space being lived in and charged with meaning and fluidity, was the vigorous sense of community.  This is something I have never found or felt in the same way in the United States.

Here, in Mexico, there is a shared awareness not only that people have certain responsibilities and obligations to help out on a special occasion, but also that they are the occasion; they are creating it and making it what it is by inherently being part of the community.

Perhaps we can use the metaphor of roads.  In the U.S you walk your highly individual, personalized path, and at brief points in time it intersects with the paths of others.  You share time and friendship and the sense of community and then you get “back on track.”  But here the paths are not so defined.  You are rather part of a web, and there are moments when the web expands and contracts.  When it contracts you feel a certain gripping warmth, and you are in the center of a community.  When it expands you are back in the outskirts of your individualism constructing and spinning your life, but always connected, always attuned to the hum of the others also spinning their lives in the same web.

I learned this when a group of friends and I helped a pal empty out his girlfriends’ apartment and move all of her things into his place.  We spent an afternoon passing plants down a narrow staircase, packing old hangers and fragments of her life into boxes, hauling furniture back and forth from apartment to car to apartment.  Then we drank caguamas, relaxed, chatted and laughed.  I had never felt that kind of belonging before – a belonging that came from that contracting web, from everyone having contributed something to a group effort that was directed at a particular person but wasn’t singularly about them but also about the waves of participation and cooperation around them.  We may have our pithy, oft-mocked soundbite, “it takes a village” but villages are long gone in the U.S and so are the mentalities and relationships that come with them.  Here, they are still alive, both in physical form and in deeply ingrained attitudes towards companions and friends.

So when we arrived at Susy and Mauricio’s place on Saturday morning we found people everywhere, all fully engaged in a project of some kind, bustling, concentrating, plotting, laughing.  “Put me to work!” I said, and two hours later a small group of friends and I had woven fragile white wildflowers through the metal fence bordering the platform where the ceremony would take place and strung white carnations across the top of the passageway that would serve as an aisle.  The heat slammed down at the hottest time of the year in Oaxaca and people wiped their brows and nonetheless darted in and out of the house, carrying handfuls of things, glasses, boxes, buckets, signs.

New wedding-goers arrived fresh off the bus from D.F and joined us, teasing out handfuls of flowers from the bunches and carefully tying them around the posts of the wooden staircase, sweeping the discarded leaves, arranging small daisies within the bigger, wispier bouquets.  Meanwhile Mauricio’s mother and aunt had made an altar for relatives who had passed away, and the terrace – usually a bare concrete place for hanging laundry, sparse and borderless – had been transformed into a breathtaking space with a view of the shimmering lights of downtown Oaxaca, the valley, and the mountains.  Tables and chairs were set up along with a makeshift fence with cardboard signs saying “Don’t lean!”

Jorge left to take pictures of Susy as she had her hair and makeup done at a salon in Colonia Reforma.  At nearly 4 Xochitl (another anthropology doctoral student who studies performance and who had directed the final flourishes of the wedding preparations with flair) Mauricio’s mother, sister, aunt, and I took a taxi back downtown.

Five people in a taxi – “just don’t let los de transito see us!”, said the driver – one in front, four squeezed in back, classic Oaxaca.  We barreled down zigzagging hills towards the city center.

These four women slipped back and forth between English and Spanish as if the two languages were constantly intersecting rivers.  “Estuve pensando en ponerme unos pantalones off-white, what do you think?” “Dondé esta este café, the one with the salads you were talking about?”  “Negro y rojo are off limits, pero azul esta bien y tambien café.”  “Puedes decirle where we’re going?”  It felt natural, comforting even, since Jorge and I do it all the time. “Do you think debemos doblar aquí?”

In that taxi, flying by the Miscelaneas and crumbling buildings and walls the color of robins’ eggs weathered by sun, I thought about how those women slipping into English and emerging in Spanish, delving into Spanish and winding up in English, spanned two worlds; how their souls came from two places and two languages and how they had come, willfully or reluctantly, to encompass both.  And I thought about how my child, someday, will do the same; she or he will span cultures, languages, ideologies, will slip between worlds with the fluidity of these women and of so many of the people who came to Susy and Mauricio’s wedding.  This is my heritage.

I came into the world in Cincinnati, Ohio, as an estadouniense with German roots, raised on bagels and backpacking and individualism and follow-your-dreams-because-you-can-be-what-you-want-to-be, but when I leave it I will leave a different legacy; one that is also the feel of tight-knit community, its warmth and its frustrations, also the nearly spiritual love of food that goes back thousands of years, also the traces of ancient civilizations and the legends of the first citizens and cultivators of North America, also the insecurity and the anger that comes from being dark and from the South in countries whose racism has been subverted many times but never eliminated, also the consistent aching of otherness, and the singular sense of belonging to two worlds and being both outside of and within each, feeling with love and conflict and pride in one’s being the union of the two.

I thought this while I saw Susy and Mauricio clasp each other’s hands and read the vows they had written about growing up in otherness and having finally found a companion to share it.  I read a passage about matrimony and when it was over I cried, tears slipping down my face in the wind, looking at the two of them on the small stage bordered by flowers we’d woven through the fence, the sky on the edge of rain lit up in thundercloud blues and grays.

Then they descended to the stage to the exuberant burst of the banda’s horns and began the hugs and kisses of tearful congratulations that must be given to everyone at Mexican weddings.

Later in the night I’d chat with Susy’s grandfather, who had come 48 hours on a bus from Arizona and upon disembarking had said straightaway, “Yo quiero tacos.”  He had gone to the market in search of a sailor suit because he wanted to resemble Popeye.

“I tried to find a pipe that blew bubbles,” he told me woefully, “but I couldn’t.  Do I look like Popeye to you?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

We talked about Japan; he had fought for the United States in World War II.  He remembered more Japanese than I did.  “Ikura desuka?” he said, “How much does it cost!  Cuanto cuesta!  Ha!”  I had to agree that no, he hadn’t forgotten much, and it put me to shame.  I introduced him to Jorge and he grabbed both of our arms, stared intently back and forth at both of us and said,

“Que dios los bendiga.  Que dios los bendiga.  God bless you.  God bless you.”

He said everything in both languages that night, as if appeasing both Gods.

“Que dios los bendiga.  God bless you.”

Later I thought I’d hang onto that, that blessing in both languages, like a gift reserved in my veins for a later time, that someday I will pass on to the being who will take up these two languages and histories, going back and forth between the two, embodying both.