A new job and a trip to the (really, really) big city: August 2010

A view on a rare clear day in Colonia Roma, Mexico City

After more than a year of worry over work, I finally managed to fall into a new job in June.  I'm a partner in a consulting firm that provides research and capacity building services to groups working on issues of racial equity in the U.S.  It's a logical extension of the last 30+ years I've spent chasing organizational missions aimed at eradicating racial and sexual violence, winning indigenous rights and immigrant rights and humane criminal justice policy; doling out free food packages; opening emergency shelters; and marching, protesting, and generally raising a ruckus in the hope that speaking up is a meaningful step toward making the world a better place.

How's that for a mouthful?  I only wish that all of those years of investment resulted in more victories. The sad truth is, my years of work have mostly been about trying to keep things from getting worse.  And, lately, worse appears to be the general trend in U.S. politics.  Boy is it a mess up there.  

But mess or no, I'm back in the political game as a consultant and strategist, helping community leaders and public policy advocates fighting for reforms that benefit those on the down side of unjust power relations.  Only now, after years as a player in the field, I'm a coach.

My colleagues include my friend Soya, someone whom I've worked with in the past, both in her former role as an immigrant rights leader in the U.S. and when we were both program officers for the same social justice foundation.  Soya has been with me on my sojourn in Mexico, one of the 5 who became 3 who left the U.S. more than a year ago to chase a dream of creating a life here.

As I write, Soya is in Chicago, representing our little firm at a conference.  When she returns, it will be to San Pancho, to a little, leaky apartment with a rooftop terrace (sans guard rails as is often the case in rural Mexico where no insurance and no money means no lawsuits and very little in the way of safety codes). Her apartment is right under Eva's tacqueria, next door to the yoga studio on Calle Egipto,  and a stone's throw from the house on Calle China that we once kept together.

The new job, at least in it's current iteration, was not in my plans until, well, there it was, a golden opportunity to continue work I've loved since I was a teenager, and among friends, and with start-up capital provided by an investor.  The best part is that I can work in Mexico.

The change in jobs has brought on a change of moods. I'm suddenly mobile, and my new mobility has inspired wanderlust.  I want to travel and try out different places in the world.  San Pancho is still home, but the summers, I think, will be times to live here and there, mostly in other people's (off)seasonal homes, among their things rather than among my own possessions, as house-sitters if possible, as renters if necessary.

This August, I started to try to satisfy my wanderlust by arranging to spend two months in Mexico City and then two weeks in Cuernavaca.  The trip is intended to speed up my language learning and to provide a much needed dose of something different to do.  For those who follow this journal, that's how I ended up with a view of the Plaza Villa Madrid and the Fuente Cibeles, in La Colonia Roma, smack dab in the...well, I'm not sure you could call  it the middle, but somewhere in the vast expanse that is Mexico City, the third or fourth largest city in the world.

More than 20 years after moving away from rural Hawaii, my escape from urban living and return to el campo was necessary for my sanity.  I needed to know whether I was destined to return to the life I so often missed.

My return to rural living in the tropics sparked warm(and not so warm) memories on one hand while, on the other, also helping me to see, finally and with some clarity, how much the world has changed since my Hawaiian childhood.  Long held points of reference and nostalgia drenched memories of the past have finally come face to face with the reality of change; of progress or something like it, and much to my surprise. I sometimes feel the fool, not having realized just how much time has passed and how the changes that occurred during those now nearly 3 decades have transformed rural communities.  And if time and the shifting tides of global capital have changed rural Mexico, what can it mean for change among the less remote rural plantation towns of Hawaii?

If you don't believe me when I say things have changed, really changed, check Exhibit A, below, a page from a yearbook from my high school back in the day -

Notice the kid with the mushroom?  In the school yearbook?  That's innocence - maybe not as the term has been used to sell us the illusion of an easier and gentler past to return to via evangelical churches and Republican politics, but no doubt we were less jaded. I'm sure the faculty yearbook advisor had Euell Gibbons on the mind, not Timothy Leary.

Perhaps even more telling is this yearbook ad by the plantation manager, congratulating the new graduates, the vast majority of whom were expected to go to work for him alongside their parents and grandparents.  Note his wish to continue being of "support" to the class of 2000?  There would be no 2000 for the sugar company. They went belly-up in the 90s, a victim of globalization.

This was before the war on drugs; before AIDS; pre-Reagan and Bush and Bush; back when the global economy wasn't quite so global; before the internet and You-Tube and Sky TV; and long before 9/11 and the war on the "axis of evil."  Back then, dressing down was de rigueur, going back to the land was not considered a granola move because almost know one knew anything about granola, and those of us on the down side of traditional power relations were feeling our oats, believing better days were soon to come.  Oops!

My escape to rural Mexico has forced me to recognize that times have changed, and they just keep changing, faster and faster.  I've changed, too.  And the inevitability of change is why, I suppose, as was once famously written, you (or at least I) can't go home again.  I'm as much urban as rural anymore, and now and then I need a little fix of urban living; a shot of gin with my tonic to make life go down a little easier.

That long story is why I'm here, amidst the crowds and the pollution, sitting breakfast at sidewalk cafes, and hopping around the bars and museums and bookstores and restaurants of Mexico City.  And now we're caught up, sort of.  The story of here, or my little slice of it, comes next.