LIVING in MEXICO: Sugar and Spice and This Time Nice Part 1

Living in a Mexican town that is probably the most provincial in the entire country can have many advantages. One such is that this town is really mired in its "group-oriented" mentality. What this means is that rather than the "I am Mexican; hear me roar" mentality so pervasive in America, it is "We are Mexican; hear Us roar." Mexican traditionalists tend to derive their identity from their family group, their work group, their neighborhood group, and so on. They think of themselves as members within these groups. They judge whether they are doing well or not by how well they are functioning within these various groups.

I rather love this concept. The gringo can, in a small way, cash in on this. In the first neighborhood we lived in here in Guanajuato, there was a Mexican family that did not do well within the "Neighborhood Group." They had these really vile little mutt dogs that loved to bark relentlessly. When they weren't sleeping, they were barking. Like most Mexicans in this town with dogs, though they had a yard, they felt it necessary to cut these dogs loose at least once a day, sometimes twice, to roam the streets.

This was a signal to the dogs that their owners approved of their reprobate behavior of biting and mauling the ankles of those who dared pass by, especially Gringo Ankles. Poopie and Pongo especially loved eating my flesh. I don't fault the dogs. They were born as the spawn of Satan so I do not hold it against them. Though I had plotted their deaths many times, I soon grew to forget my animosity and rejoice in the fact that everyone else in the neighborhood wanted to kill these two dogs.

Well, I tried reasoning with these people. One of the owners was a deaf dwarf who wondered just why don't Americans show a little tolerance to a bit of noise? Of course, he couldn't hear his dogs barking, making the sonorous and earsplitting roar that two yip-yip dogs create. And, just perhaps the TV he ran at maximum heart attack-inducing volume had something to do with it.

We complained to the Internet Café guy in the neighborhood and he said he wife would take care of the problem. And, she did. Her reasoning was that we gringos were just as much a part of the neighborhood group as any of the Mexicans were. She told the deaf dwarf as much. She said that the way he refused to control his loud and ankle-biting dogs was not appropriate and not good for "The Neighborhood Group." We were part of the whole. The rest of the neighbors (one of whom walked by the dogs, opened their gate, and chased them down the block in hopes they would keep going and never return-it didn't work!) stood up for us even though we were gringos.

That just one of the things I love about this town.