A Day Without A Mexican, Who´s Not Really A Mexican, But Everyone Thinks He Is, Anyway

Cinco de Mayo 2008 has come and gone, and what a day it was. I decided to celebrate with two separate activities – making tacos for several friends, and, for the first time in 8 months, speaking Spanish without a Rioplatense accent.

The tacos proved to be much easier. I bought entirely too much meat, bought empanada shells to cook up as tortillas, and a Spanish rice mix. And hot stuff. Dear Lord did I buy spicy condiments. The food in Uruguay is many things, but hot-n-spicy is 99 times of out 100 not one of them…this has been a challenge for those among us whose favorite food toppings back home include chipotle powder, Sriracha chili sauce, and jalapeños. So, I bought the closest Mercosur-produced equivalent to Tabasco for those of us with the need to feel a little bit of after-burn with our Tex-Mex dinner, and found some mild barbecue sauce for those who wanted something with some zest, but without the heat. Two hours of chopping onions, browning meat, and crisping up empanada shells later, we were ready to go, especially since José, our doorman and honorary roommate, came downstairs to the ugly kitchen to wash and chop the lettuce and tomato, little knowing that the fruits of his labor would not be sweet. But more on that later.

Wilma, Álvaro, Seba, his girlfriend Andrea, and Karin showed up with wine and canned peaches for dessert in hand, plus a corkscrew. Ordinarily, the memory of a corkscrew would not be making me laugh as I type this…but this was no ordinary day for corkscrews. I had asked José earlier in the day if he had a corkscrew – a “sacacorcho” in Spanish….but that´s not what I said. I said “sacacorcha” instead – a fairly minor mistake, except that José misheard my misspoken word and thought I said “sacaconcha.” “Concha,” in Latin American Spanish, is slang for something other than a seashell on the beach, suffice it to say. There was a lot of laughter that followed the confusion, as you can imagine.

But yes, Wilma and her family arrived “sacacorcho” in hand, and a few minutes later, Kirsten and her friend Matt, who is visiting this week, joined us. Martín had come down to the kitchen a few minutes after José, and so the ten of us sat down in our ugly kitchen, dance class in full swing in the rec space just beyond our door, and ate a very impressive quantity of tacos. Daniela, our doctor friend who lives in the building, came once she got off work and ate what was left…which was a lot, because I had grossly overestimated how much meat would be needed. Fortunately, the leftover taco meat has proven to be a great empanada stuffer…but more on that later.

Somewhere during the after-dinner chatting and hanging out, Daniela mentioned mariachi music, and so I fetched my mp3 player and a set of speakers and put on Los Lobos´ “La Pistola y El Corazón” album. Martín, however, was not a fan, and so we ended up switching over to Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix afterwards – not necessarily traditional Cinco de Mayo jams, but nothing quite says “cultural exchange” like listening to Jimi Hendrix wail “Ah´m a voodoo chile, voodoo chile baby, LAWD KNOWS Ah-ma VOODOOO CHILE!” with the music from a salsa class in the background.

I mentioned, in the first paragraph, that the taco dinner was only one part of my celebration, and that I had decided to revert back to my previous, bien Mexicano, accent. It required conscious, continuous thought to do it, and even then I still wanted to talk like a Montevideano. About the only way to guarantee that words came out the right way was to lapse into my Speedy Gonzalez-esque joke-Mexican accent. I struggled to put the emphasis on the correct syllable for Mexican Spanish, as well – after 8 months of using “vos” instead of “tú,” it felt absolutely bizarre to hear “quieres” come out of my mouth instead of “queres,” or “¡CAyate!” instead of “¡cazhAte vos!”

Somehow, it felt symbolic yesterday when I dragged the leftover meat out of the fridge and began making taco meat empanadas. People have joked for 8 months (well, ok, for 23 years actually) about my secretly being a Mexican – I´m from Texas, I have dark hair and darker skin than most “white” people, I took to Spanish quickly in school and speak it without too much of a gringo accent (people here normally, but not always, can tell that I´m a foreigner and non-native speaker, but they almost never think I´m a native English speaker – I get French, Italian, or Brazilian most of the time). I got asked on a near-daily basis during my first semester at TLU if I´d joined the Mexican-American Student Association yet, my friends nicknamed my moustache “Dirty Sanchez” last year because of its “Mexicanization” of my appearance, and nearly everyone I´ve met for the past 4 years has confessed that, at first, they thought I was Mexican-American…and this includes people in Africa, Europe, and South America, not just Norteamericanos.

But now…the Spanish that comes out of my mouth isn´t Mexican. It isn´t entirely Rioplatense, either. It´s something between the two with, ok, a certain English-tinged twang to it. It´s something unto itself…it´s become a part of my identity as much as my weird, “where´s he from?” accent in English, or my “I look Latino, but I´m really not” appearance. I´m a taco empanada – neither here, nor there. I think of a line from the Luther movie – “People think I´m a fixed star, but I´m a wandering planet.” God only knows what Chicago´s going to do to me…and you only think I have a funky accent now.
To end on a less pensive note, I alluded to José meeting a fate worse than taco breath after dinner. I had made the taco meat with some packets of Old El Paso´s mild taco seasoning – it´s the only kind you can get here, after all. José ate the tacos without any of the sauces, just meat, veggies, and cheese…and it was still too spicy for him. Mild seasoning. The level of heat than the biggest spice wimps in the U.S. can handle…and he said it was “like eating poison” for his digestive tract. He said it felt like he “had a volcano in his stomach.” He also ended up with a fever, so I suspect he has a virus and it just so happened to hit at the same time as some taco indigestion. Guess the next time I cook Texan cuisine, it´ll have to be something a little more Anglo-Saxon…biscuits and gravy, perhaps?