News That Stays News

Mérida, part 1 July 14, 2017

July 14, 2017

I started writing this in Mérida’s airport, and finished it in Houston’s. To quickly cover the basics: The conference was interesting, I gave a pretty good presentation, I had fun, etc. I have also doubled my number of foreign countries, although I don’t know how much I can extrapolate about Mexico in general from Mérida in particular.

The first thing I noticed about Mérida was that it doesn’t have four-to-six-inch ankle-breaker rain gutters the way San José and Palo Verde do. This area is relatively dry for the tropics, and either it doesn’t get torrential downpours as frequently as Palo Verde does, or people are okay with the streets flooding. Given the general upkeep of the city, and the fact that the entire area is incredibly flat (the second thing I noticed), I suspect it’s the former.

Something that took me a bit longer to notice was the sense of being in a large country again. While Costa Rica isn’t totally homogeneous, it’s a lot smaller and more centralized than either the United States or Mexico. Of the three, Mexico seems to emphasize regional identities the most. On learning it was my first time here, a taxi driver told me “welcome to Mexico, welcome to Mérida, and a double welcome to Yucatán*”. Similarly, almost all the food, art, and other cultural elements in Mérida were specifically identified, usually as Yucatean, sometimes as Mayan, rarely as an import from another region. When a dance company performed a series of traditional dances, almost every dance was identified with a particular state, like Veracruz or Oaxaca.

Incidentally, since Mexico has 31 states and is officially known as the Estados Unidos Mexicanos (United States of Mexico), it turns out that my current answer for where I’m from, “los Estados Unidos,” is theoretically ambiguous, although probably not to anyone who’s listening to me speak Spanish. Oh well, it’s still more informative than saying I’m an American.

* Yucatan is the name of both the state Mérida is in and the entire peninsula. I was never quite sure which was meant.