So last week, Jocelyn Bresnick and I went to a place downtown called Casa Vicente, a Mexican food restaurant that holds tango dancing every Wednesday night from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Now, when I think of tango dancing, I immediately think of the stereotypical dramatic side to side, Addams-familyesque gliding across the floor, with brisk and fast moves back and forth. However, it was simply not the case!
When we walked in, people were dancing slowly in the middle of the restaurant near the bar. I went up to the bartender, thinking because we were early that maybe we had caught the last end of the ballroom dancing. “Excuse me, when does the tango lesson start?” I asked. He gave me a pretty odd look and added the obvious “you’re looking at it,” comment to make me feel even more stupid.
I literally had no idea it was tango. It was so subdued and calm. The males were not forcefully moving their female partners back and forth, nor did the female have a red rose between her teeth! What was going on here? Where’s the tango?
What I learned is that tango dancing can be done in many different ways. What I did notice, however, after careful consideration, is that no matter the style of tango, there is always a deep connection between both partners. Never during any moment in the dances did the dancers lose eye contact with one another. They weren’t looking at their feet but were fixated on eachother, almost looking at the other for the next move across the floor.
Although it would have been entertaining if they had the rose stems!
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Awk City.
So, the other night I went on a date with a guy, we’ll call him Eduardo for purposes of this blog. He was Mexican. As my friend Marcy Jones would say, it was “awk city.”
He picked me up to go out for dinner. He kept telling me he wanted to take me out for “authentic” Mexican food. I was a little hesitant because of my diet restrictions. But he seemed very interested in my Border Beat class and he wanted to kind of give me a taste of his culture.
So, on the car ride to the restaurant, we started talking about our lives. He asked me about my family, I asked him about his. I answered one sister, he answered six brothers and sisters! He went on about how he was very close with them and how although he was annoyed by them sometimes, he loved them and he couldn’t imagine what his life would be without them. I started to wonder how my life would be with a big family. How it is so different for him and for me. We literally were raised completely different.
So, we get to the restaurant, Rosa’s Mexican Food. Eduardo keeps telling me that I am going to get amazing authentic Sonoran Mexican food. Everything was going completely normal, normal for my dating standards. We walked in, got seated, ordered drinks, talked about that on the surface stuff that breaks the ice. It was alright. Not too exciting, but not all that boring. Then we all of the sudden take a trip to awk city…on the express train.
While we were talking, enjoying our chips and salsa, a man walks up to the table. Now, I have never seen him before, but Eduardo just looks absolutely ecstatic. He stands up, says some Spanish phrase and hugs the man. They start talking. Now, this next part is a blur because I was one margarita in AND I can’t speak a word of Spanish. They were talking for what seemed like forever, who knows about what. It was awkward because I could not contribute anything to the conversation. Normally, and this is even with complete strangers, given that the dialect is English, I can jump in and engage in a conversation with anyone. But this was another story. So I sat in awk city, population: me, Eduardo and this man. I think Eduardo introduced me to him but I would never know because of the language barrier.
When the conversation was finally over, Eduardo sat back down, acting like nothing happened, like it was no big deal that he had been talking to this person for the last 20 minutes in a different language and left me sitting there like the confused white girl. The rest of the date was kind of a blur as I was not fully able to get over the rudeness from earlier in the evening.
All in the all, the date was a bust. It took a slow train to awk city and never left. I don’t think I will be buying a ticket anytime soon.
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Body Image & Latina Women
So I am sitting here at my computer, thinking about what to write about. I casually click on another tab to purposefully distract myself. It’s a website called TheSkinnyWebsite.com. It’s a blog that has recent and up to date pictures of celebrities who have gained weight, lost weight, are fat, skinny, have cellulite, etc. All the normal, human-like qualities that we seem so easily to critique sitting in our chairs in the privacy of our own homes. There it was then, a recent update of the weight and look that Jessica Simpson has been sporting lately, followed by some positive and negative comments about how she should “lose a few” and how she “doesn’t look confident.”
Now, this website displays women of all shapes and sizes, sometimes men too. Recently, there was post about Jennifer Lopez and there have been a few before that. In the recent post, Lopez was described as “slim, yet curvy”. Which, in my opinion is a positive critique. A recent post of Jessica Simpson had no real description of what she was. Curvy? Slim? So many times has Simpson been critiqued for her exceesive gaining and losing and gaining again, and her yo-yo dieting. But Lopez has managed to stay relatively the same in body size and look. Why is there such a difference here between two musically talented women in somewhat of the same Hollywood mentality and environment. What’s the difference here? I started to wonder.
I don’t think it’s a far stretch to say that Latina women grow up with a much different perspective of body image not only with themselves but in popular culture compared to non-Latina women.
The reason I am bringing up this topic is because there is always such hard critique on women and their weight in mainstream media in the United States. Whether it’s on a blog, a television show, a gossip column…critics are always in full force whenever a celebrity significantly loses or gains weight. But what I find most interesting is how differently women are talked about depending on their ethnic background.
I think the true fact here is that both Simpson and Lopez are curvy, healthy and slim women. But yet, they receive very different feedback about their body image and their weight. I truly believe it stems from cultural differences and upbringing. Now, I don’t know exactly the environment that Simpson grew up in, nor do I know the one that Lopez did. But I do know that there seems to be a different obsession with food and body image and weight for women across cultural lines. How many Latina women do you see talking about their yo-yo dieting? How many of them are extremely thin, then gaining the weight, then losing it again?
The cultural lines and differences in body image are definitely there, and although Latina women are still slowly making their way into mainstream American media, they are showing a vast difference in their lifestyles of healthy living and healthy body image that other women are displaying as a hard concept to grasp.
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Sex Appeal in Ballet Folklorico?
Imagine a hybrid of the Chiquita Banana lady and Selena Quintanilla-Pérez shimmying center stage. This was just one performance at the Ballet Folklorico performance at the Tucson Convention Center.
Several weekends ago, Jocelyn Bresnick and I went to the performance in the Leo Rich Theater for a story. The group is called Ballet Folklorico Tapatio and they have been performing since 1997. I had no expectations of what the performance might be like before we arrived, but it definitely gave me a new outlook into the Latino culture.
There was a young girl, my guess was she was no older than 18. As part of the intermediate group of performers, she wore a bustier, a bright colored skirt topped off with a colorful head dress. Her midriff exposed, she wore a mesh-colored fabric that was sewed onto the bustier. similar to the mesh fabric figure skaters wear in the Olympics to make sure they are covered but that it looks like part of their skin. What was interesting about this girl was not only that she was dressed unlike any of the others, but the reception of the crowd when she moved up to the front and center of the stage. I concluded from my own observations that she was basically the female muse. And for appearing to be so young, she was definitely exuding the sexuality and confidence of a grown woman. And that got me thinking about the Latino culture and sexuality, and I started to compare my childhood experiences to the kids that I was watching on stage.
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What’s In a Label?
So Jocelyn Bresnick and myself just finished a slideshow story on a woman who is from Nogales and has just recently told her mother she has a girlfriend. I know, lesbian, right? That’s what you’re thinking. But in all actuality, she doesn’t consider herself one or the other. And that got me thinking about labels.
We all consider ourselves a certain way, we see ourselves a certain way. Then there is the other part, and that is how we are perceived by the people around us. Patty, the woman we interviewed, explained it from her sexuality class that there is a spectrum you can put yourself on. On one side is masculine and the other side is feminine. She put herself somewhere in the middle. Where would you put yourself?
There is an organization in Tucson for LGBT’s in the area called WingSpan which is an organization for gay, lesbian and bisexuals to go when they are looking for people like them, a place they feel comfortable and accepted.
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You should not get your boyfriends name on your ass because you never know how long it will last.
Someone has made or heard a joke like this before and it usually involves the question, “But what if it doesn’t last?” or “What if you two break up? Get a divorce?”. But chicano tattoo artistry involves just that–people getting portraits or names engraved into their skin of the people that they love and care about. And this got me thinking about relationships.
photo by Jocelyn Bresnick.
I went to do a story with my colleague Jocelyn Bresnick about a chicano tattoo artist named Tony Edwards. He allowed us to watch as he tattooed the word “Anita” into one of his customer’s biceps.
As I watched him lightly follow the lines of the letters, I began to wonder about who this Anita woman was. She must have been a real catch for her man to decide to self-inflict pain upon himself by etching her name into his arm. Tattoo’s are no funny business, they are permanente. And that got me thinking about culture.
photo by Jocelyn Bresnick
Edwards explained to us in the interview about how chicano art involves lettering and names a lot, and even highly-detailed portraits. Many times, men and women would come in and ask for the names of their loved ones or designs of their portraits. I think this says a lot about the traditional relationships in the Latino culture. There is this idea that it is strong, that the families stay together and that they don’t break up or get divorced. The people that they love, the ones they choose to marry, it’s intended to be for life, just like the ink in their skin. I found the tattoo’s to be a huge representation of their intentions for the relationships in their life. This guy must have been damn certain that Anita was the woman for him and would be for life. And this simple tattoo of her name was a representation of just that.
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House Rule: No Boys.
She does know about the house rule, right? No boys?
I live with a friend of mine and her sister. Their parents own the house and they are from Rio Rico. There is a house rule that I recently learned about and it goes a little something like this: No boys allowed.
First, let’s take a journey through a scenario where that rule is deeply enforced and followed. Now, one of the girls in the house, the older sister of 23 years old–we’ll call her *Laura–she has a boyfriend, and a steady one at that. Can these parents truly assume that she is not having him over all the time? Do they expect her to just meet the guy and get married? What is so wrong with having a boy over to your house? At first, I truly did not understand. But once I started to think about it, I started thinking about it more rationally.
I came across this website called When Do Latino Women Start Their Sex Life, an article I found on Softpedia.com. It talked a lot about how the influence of family expectations, and how they play an “important role” in a Latino woman’s life as to when she becomes sexually active. I think it is important to note because *Laura worries so much about her family liking her boyfriend, and he’s not even allowed in the house! Now, when I’m dating someone I could truly careless what my parents have to say about him if they don’t like him. My opinion is that it is none of their business who I date. But in a Latino family, and most notably in my roommates, a lot of what her family does and says judges how she views and lives her life.
I came across another website thats talks about dating in the hispanic culture. There is a quote from this website that I really liked referring to dating: “The expectations in Hispanic culture appear outdated in the modern dating world.” I think this is true in many respects, and my roommates parents are just one concrete example.
This was just a small observation of my daily life and I thought I’d share 🙂
Keep reading…
❤ N
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My first post
If you couldn’t already tell by the title, my blog is going to focus mainly around sex, dating, relationships and health in the border region. I am very interested in the Latino cultural traditions and how they differ and coincide with essentially “American” traditions.
I became interested in this topic when I began to make more friends from Nogales. Both my roommates are sisters and are from Nogales and so are a lot of my friends. You don’t realize the cultural differences that exist here, especially when it comes to dating, relationships and sex. It may be a new decade, but the traditions of this culture of people, like my roommates parents, are still somewhat in the past. I will get into this issue much more in my future posts.
Keep reading.
❤ N
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Hello world!
Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!
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Going South of the Border 