There’s something they don’t really tell you about the joys of being an outsider: you can fit in everywhere precisely because you don’t fit it anywhere.
There’s something liberating about realizing this and knowing that no matter where you go, people might look at you as if you were a dog that suddenly started speaking. If you expect it, you can ignore it, which is a good way to not have a bunch of feelings about it.
I thought about this a couple of weeks ago as I was running a bunch of errands with my partner. The first stop was Liverpool for some dress clothes. We were headed to a wedding that weekend!
Liverpool is a popular department store, and it’s pretty fancy. It always seemed a little pretentious to me, actually. Who do they think they are, selling a simple tablecloth for 3000 pesos? I mean, really. Sometimes just to tease, I call it “charco de agua” — puddle of water. Get it? The actual Liverpool, I hear, is a pretty unpretentious place.
In general, businesses that give themselves English names to sound fancier crack me up, especially when the spelling or punctuation is wrong. Did you know that in downtown Xalapa, for example, you can grab a slice of pizza at the Pizza Shoop? Afterwards you might want to do some shopping at a Gift’s Shop. Gold!
A name in English doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily be able to make yourself invisible, though. But that’s okay. Sometimes it’s just quite nice to walk through a perfectly clean and well-lit environment with free, four-star bathrooms. Sears here is equally fancy. It, along with several other American companies, has successfully reinvented itself into a solid upper-middle class establishment in Mexico. When you need to feel like you’re in the United States for a bit, actually, I suggest a stroll through the mall! There’s no shame in it; sometimes we just need a little break from the urban jungle.
After spending some time surrounded by 2500 peso polo shirts, we went to a downtown Veracruz market. This is the urban jungle I speak of.
We were on the hunt for, among other things, a catrina dress for my daughter’s Day of the Dead school play. If you took a view from the middle of the street in this market, you’d see that store fronts are completely covered by the various stands. What stores are behind them? Well, you’ll have to traipse through the market tunnels to find out! Everything is dusty, and old, loud buses barrel down the road.
As you walk along through the tunnels, merchants speak to you. Pretty much all of them. “Feel free to look, there’s no commitment.” Sometimes, they’ll simply start providing you with a running list of their wares. A mere “gracias” as you continue on your way will suffice, and in Veracruz, they seem perfectly happy with it even if you don’t stop to buy something. “Okay, have a good day!” many will shout after you.
One of the most striking things about Mexico to me is the variety of environments you might find yourself in, many as different as night and day. You might have breakfast sitting on a gritty bench at a market with strangers. The tablecloth will be plastic, and the cook, waiter, and cashier are all the same person. Only cash is accepted, but the food is usually very good and very cheap.
For lunch, you might find yourself at a fancy restaurant with air conditioning and a play area, each table with a QR code you must use to look at the menu on your phone. Whichever you choose might just depend on which “Mexico” you feel like visiting that day.
There are seemingly an infinite number of environments. Explore them all! Unless it’s explicitly made for tourists, it all counts as “the real Mexico.”
Sarah DeVries is a writer and translator based in Xalapa, Veracruz. She can be reached through her website, https://sarahedevries.substack.com/
