A Year in Oaxaca: Part 3 — Settling In
Days after moving in, Edgar wondered if we were ok.
Author’s Note: Today’s entry is part of a recurring series excerpted from the book proposal I am working on. The same type and variety of other posts I’ve been writing will also continue to appear. The previous entry is linked below. Thank you for reading!
Those first days in our house were so disorienting it felt as if nothing were real. Not only were we living in a new country where we barely spoke the language and had very little understanding of the culture, we’d completely changed environments. Our apartment in New York sat at the intersection of West 86th Street, a major crosstown thoroughfare in Manhattan, and Columbus Ave, a busy artery heading south in Manhattan. It was a bustling nexus and we loved both the convenience it offered and its natural, virtually unceasing energy. Our new town, a small village in southern Mexico, probably has 10 times fewer people living in it than exists in our former city block.
It was also a time of constant, low-level discomfort. Only part of the house was furnished and virtually all of our possessions were in a storage container in the bowels of a cargo ship trudging its way down the Atlantic seaboard. While Penny and Victor had left the downstairs of the house and the palapa nicely decorated and with ample furniture, our bodies weren’t accustomed to any of what was there. We were sleeping on a mattress that wasn’t ours, sitting on a couch that didn’t feel quite right, eating off of plates and bowls of sizes that felt odd to us, cooking with utensils that didn’t feel right in my hands, and eating with silverware with unfamiliar dimensions and heft. Everything was askew.
Less than a week after we’d arrived two other things happened to upend our new life: Andrea returned to the United States for a work trip that would last for ten days, and I lost my job. Neither was a surprise.
“I’m sorry!” Andrea said to me the day before she left with both apology and exasperation in her voice. “You know we can only live here because I was allowed to keep my job, and having to make trips like this is a big part of that.”
I looked at her with sadness but also resignation, as I had not forgotten. Long before we purchased the house Andrea had asked her boss if she could move to Mexico and still keep her job. He handled the request gamely and consulted with the company’s human resources department, telling her not too long after she had approached him that she should speak to them directly. We had been quite anxious about how that conversation would go and were surprised and pleased when everyone involved said that as long as she was still able to perform all of the functions of her job, including traveling about once a month for work, our relocating south of the border wouldn’t be an issue.
If only everything could have been that easy! Andrea’s boss and company agreed to her request, saying they valued her work and thought she could be successful while living in Mexico. My company did the exact opposite.
Working in publishing is a famously noxious experience and that’s especially true about modern digital media. When the publisher I worked for announced they’d be merging into one giant, unholy mega-publisher it was like a scene from the John Carpenter movie The Thing, wherein that film’s titular alien-monster consumes its victims and incorporates their bodies into itself in a spasming mass of glistening ropy tendrils, splayed open torsos, and flesh pooling together like melting ice cream. The behemoth that resulted from the merger was made up of only the worst parts of each publisher and I had fielded my request to work from Mexico with only the faintest of hope it would be approved.
It’s the pessimist’s burden to be not just routinely hopeless but also frequently correct, and my perception that the company viewed me as a disposable cog was proven to be true. About two weeks after I asked if I could move and keep my job I received a resounding no and was instructed to tender my resignation.
The company was very clear and insistent about the importance of the resignation, too. They weren’t going to fire me; I had to resign voluntarily, presumably so that I wouldn’t be eligible for severance or any legal protection. When I asked if I could stay on as a contract employee, a situation that could conceivably allow me to keep my job at the expense of receiving lower pay and no benefits, the company was silent.
Suddenly, I was alone in a home that felt cold and strange, in a country I didn’t know, with nothing to keep me occupied during the day. I was like a ghost in that place and I haunted the gardens at odd hours of the day and sat in the washed-out sunlight of the concrete artist studio that I had claimed as my home office. With Andrea away my only company was Edgar, our house’s handyman, and Penny and Victor’s more-or-less adopted son.
The house in its original state had merely been an unfinished concrete shell and Edgar, who is only a year or two older than us, had been a part of the crew hired to turn it from a rough idea of a place someone could live into an actually livable home. After the work was finished Penny and Victor kept him on as a handyman and gardener, and as the house grew in complexity and eventually became the place we were so transfixed by Edgar’s relationship with them grew and deepened. When they first met him he was a kid in his mid-20s who needed a job. By the time we moved in he was married to a woman named Adi with whom he has two daughters named Chelsea and Rut (the biblical spelling of “Ruth”). He grew up working for them and in many ways became like a son to them, and his children were like their granddaughters. If we wanted to buy their house, taking care of Edgar was part of the package.
They need not have worried. We’d been impressed by his work from the first day we’d met him, and he seemed friendly, if also slightly serious, and we knew him to be punctual, responsible, and talented. He was a jack-of-all-trades, someone who could do a little bit of plumbing, carpentry, construction, and electrical work, but who was particularly good at gardening and didn’t seem to mind in the slightest spending a day working in the hot and dry Oaxacan sun. We only felt like we could move because we’d have Edgar there to make sure the house wouldn’t fall down, and we were extremely happy to hear that he was willing to stay on after the sale.
Penny and Victor took pains to describe to us, though, that our relationship with Edgar would be unlike any we’d had before. We wouldn’t just be his bosses, we’d be his “patrones”, and we’d be assuming a level of responsibility for him that goes far beyond what an employer would do in the United States.
The patrón system (for which the famed tequila brand is named) harkens back to the days of Spanish colonization. Functionally the term means “boss,” but the older definition of patrón is far closer to “master,” or “owner.” The patrón system is one connected to the days of haciendas—palatial, rural homes owned by wealthy people who made their money through exploitive agriculture.
It was Edgar who first introduced us to the term, and one day when I heard him discussing something related to us he referred to us as his patrones. It was for me an uncomfortable moment (although I suspect there are a great many modern-day Americans who wouldn’t be opposed to returning to the days of chattel slavery), but for Edgar, it was a way of describing to other people the nature of the work he does and the obligations we owe him in return.
We are obligated to him, too, and during our first visit to Oaxaca Penny and Victor invited us to sit in the palapa with them so that we could discuss how this all works.
“Things are a bit different here in Oaxaca,” Penny said somewhat demurely. “This isn’t like having an employee in the United States.”
The U.S.’s preferred system of at-will employment means that an employer can terminate someone at any given time, for virtually any reason. That’s not so different in Mexico where most people work off-the-books, being paid in cash and not reporting any of their income to the government. Those completely unofficial arrangements leave employees vulnerable to manipulation and wage theft. But what Mexico has instead is a strong, ideally inviolable cultural obligation to care for the people who work for you.
Victor leaned forward in his chair as he began to explain. “In Mexico, there’s an expectation that you won’t just take care of someone working for you, but that you’re also on the hook for their family. If their kids need braces or new school uniforms, or if someone gets sick, you’ll be expected to help pay for those things. But what you get in exchange is that your employees will worry about you and take care of you, almost like you’re a member of the family.”
“It’s nice, really, and so unlike the United States,” Victor had said. “You really feel like you’re part of a community here and that people care about you.”
“You have to be careful, though,” Penny chimed in. “You can become responsible for the children of people’s children, too.”
We leaned back in our chairs as we thought about that.
The same week we moved to Oaxaca, Edgar showed that he was indeed looking out for us in a way a normal employee likely wouldn’t.
Andrea had only been away for a day or two when one evening, at around 9 pm, my phone suddenly rang. Looking down at it I was alarmed to see the call was coming from Victor, a person more likely to volunteer to pick up unexploded ordnance than make a phone call that wasn’t necessary.
“Hello there!” Victor said brightly. “Edgar asked me to call you to see if everything was ok at the house.”
“Yes, everything’s completely normal,” I said, puzzled. “Why is he worried?”
“Well,” Victor said, “Edgar says that none of the outside lights are on in the parking lot and there’s a strange car parked there. He wants to make sure everything is ok.”
I couldn’t help but smile in wonder as I realized that two things had happened.
The first was that I didn’t even know that there were outside lights I could turn on, or where the light switches were that controlled them. Following Victor’s guidance I walked outside and climbed the stairs which led to the second, unoccupied floor of the house, the level that had no furniture and thus was not being used. Without any people inside it was eerily quiet and I walked briskly over to the area Victor described until I found a flat, white switch I had never seen before. After flicking it on I looked down at the parking area and could see it was brightly lit by nice, evenly placed lamps set into one of the walls of our compound.
The second thing that had happened was that Edgar had seen the car I had charitably named the “Mitsubishi Shitbox.”
Many people in Oaxaca don’t own cars. Not only is it prohibitively expensive to purchase and maintain one, but gas in Oaxaca is more expensive than it is in the United States. Instead, the majority either take buses or hail collectivos, a type of shared taxi that drives along a pre-established route while picking up and dropping off people on demand.
Our short-term plans involved buying a car but that was not something I was prepared to do while Andrea was away, and for the first week in Oaxaca we decided to rent one.
If the rental agency we went to before Andrea went on her trip had a nice car in their fleet, they gave it to someone else. The one we received was dreadful, an ugly white Mitsubishi so comically poorly built and maintained that we would have gotten better performance and horsepower by removing the floor with an angle grinder and turning it into a foot-powered Flintstones car. It was dirty, dinged up, and old, the kind of car that would make you think, “Whoever owns that probably keeps the body parts of their victims in the wheel well next to the jack and jumper cables.”
That seemed to be what Edgar thought. Deciding to check in on us that evening and not knowing we’d rented a car, he had walked down the road to the gate of the house, seen the murder-mobile, and called Victor to make sure we were still alive.
All of this I explained to Victor while we had a good laugh over the phone. “Well alright my boy, I’ll tell him you’re ok,” Victor said.
“Tell him he should feel free to message me directly, too, if he’s ever worried about anything” I suggested to Victor, who said that he would. As soon as we were off the phone I called Andrea to let her know what had happened.
The next day when Edgar showed up for work promptly at 8 am he poked his head into the house and asked, “Todo bien?”
It certainly was. I’d had good bosses and supervisors before, people I knew cared about me and wanted me to succeed, but never before had I had anyone working for me so invested in my survival. Employment culture in the United States is so profoundly tilted toward the benefit of the employer that the idea an employee, and especially a new one, would check in on their new boss after hours felt almost unthinkable.
That night I didn’t sleep well, and every time there was an unfamiliar noise from outside I got up to look out the window to see if someone was, in fact, trying to breach the compound. But, of course, they weren’t. Besides, even if they were I could call Edgar, who’d walk down the road from his house to make sure I was ok.
Fascinating
Fascinating to read about your experience moving to Oaxaca. So excited to read more.