Mexico: The Fifty-First State (And Other Inanities)

This week, for reasons way too long and uninteresting to explain here, I had to transfer money from a bank account in Mexico into my US bank account. To do this, I needed both a wire transfer number and an international wire routing number, or some such thing. I thought, “Oh, this shouldn’t be such a big deal, I’ll just call my bank and ask!”

After about thirty minutes of “pressing or saying one”, I was finally released from voice automated purgatory and put through to an operator. I explained the situation to the operator and asked if she could give me the two numbers I needed.

“Well,” she responded oh so helpfully, “I’d be happy to give you the wire transfer number, but you don’t need the international wire routing number. That is only for international transfers!”

Momentarily confused and then assuming she’d missed that part of the explanation, I responded, “Oh, uhm, yes, but I’m in Mexico, so I’ll need both the numbers….”

She responded with a condescending chuckle, saying, “Well now, history may not be my strongest suit, but I’m pretty sure that Mexico is part of the United States, honey….”

I was speechless. After a moment of gasping and stuttering, I finally managed, “Uhm, well, I’m here IN MEXICO (articulating carefully so as to be certain she didn’t think I was saying NEW Mexico), and it is definitely a foreign country.”

“Well,” she responded complacently, “It may seem that way, but I assure you that you don’t need any foreign authorization numbers from within US borders….”

Big sigh on this end. “Well, the bank seems to think I need the number. Will it do any harm if we just give it to them anyway?”

“Wellll nooooooo,” she responded.

“Good, then why don’t we just give it to them, even if it is (silent wincing) unnecessary.”

She agreed to this, and we both went on our merry ways. I imagine she went back to doing her nails, or some equally complicated task. I went back to the bank and spent the rest of my day wondering about how it was she missed the whole “foreign country” part of Mexico. It raised so many disturbing questions…. Leaving aside the fact that the people in charge of handling my money are unaware of Mexico’s status as a sovereign nation, I wondered exactly what she thought all that fuss over immigration reform reported so frequently in the papers was about. Does she, I found myself wondering, think you need a visa and passport to cross state lines?

I may have been a bit impatient with her. It has been a long and busy couple of weeks here! I’m teaching a course for the Anthropology Department that runs from 8 in the morning until 5 at night Monday through Friday. In the middle of my day, I get to set the students up with projects and take off for two hours lecturing on the Politics and Economics of Modern Mexico. After five, I get to write my lectures and brush up on assassinations, economic collapses, uprisings, and general bad PRI (Mexico’s ruling party until 1997/2000….) behavior. Somewhere in all of it I squeeze in about four hours of sleep. I’m looking forward to the end of all this very much!

It has been an interesting couple of weeks. For example, I discovered that none of my ten students, Americans and French, had ever heard of the 1968 student massacres in Mexico City, the Zapatista Uprising of 1994, or, more recently, last years drama in Oaxaca and/or the drama surrounding the presidential elections. I was shocked and depressed by the lack of current events knowledge until the Bank lady gave me a realistic measure of my student’s awareness. I’m heading into class tomorrow grateful that my students are at least conscious of the fact that they are currently in a foreign country!

My other class in the Anthropology department has mostly been lots of fun. I’m training five archaeology majors in the identification and analysis of animal bones. We are using the collections from my digs, and so I’m getting my dissertation data processed in return for many, many hours in the lab. For the most part, the students are doing a great job, and I expect to have all 4,000 or so bones identified, analyzed, and entered into my database by the end of this week. (Hooray!)

The only fly in all of this ointment is that my cross to bear has returned from last year. Those of you who have been following this blog since the beginning made his acquaintance last year when I was frantically trying to think of something that would minimize his interaction with other human beings.

This year, I figured it would be easier because we’d be in the lab…

HA!

So, for those of you who don’t know how the animal bone thing works, basically, what you do is:
1. You clean the bones with old toothbrushes and write teeny tiny numbers on all the little bits of bone. This takes days, weeks, or months, involves the use of foul smelling chemicals which get you high, and is very important. It means when you dump all the bones out of the bags into big piles, you know where the bone was originally taken from. (i.e. everything with number 134 on it was taken from the southeast quadrant of the 10 cms of earth above the floor in Room number 21.) My students were total rock stars and got this nasty job done in four days!

2. You then take all the bones and divide them into boxes by body part (so all the femurs, regardless of what they are from, end up in a box together). This is easy with complete or mostly complete bones. It gets trickier as the pieces get smaller. Once they are no longer “easily” identifiable, you pull out the comparative bones (complete skeletons of recently dead animals) and try and match the bits and pieces to the whole based on things like the line or curve of the bone, the interior structure, the placement of foramen, and the patterns of muscle attachments. This gets easier as you spend more time doing it and you build a mental image database of lots of minute markers.

3. You take a box of body parts (gruesome, isn’t it…), and figure out species of what you’ve got using comparative specimens when available and books when not.

4. You record everything on a data sheet. In my case, I record: species (or as close as I can get to species), body part, symmetry (right or left side of the body), if the bone ends have fused yet, if it is weathered, burned, butchered (and if so how is it butchered, what kind of marks, and how many of them), or marked by rodents and/or carnivores, and the weight of the bones.

5. Then you put all that into a database and the fun of playing with data begins.

The students are currently on step two. When you are new to the process, this takes a ton of time because you have to compare every fragment with every possible bone in a skeleton, and then check for variation between species. With the exception of my cross to bear, the students have been patient, thoughtful, and hardworking.

To ensure accuracy in the final analysis that goes into my dissertation, I’ve been checking every ID the students make. So they take a bone fragment, compare it with everything, bring it to me with the “match” from the complete skeleton and give me a justification of why it is that bone, why it isn’t any others, etc. Sometimes they are right and sometimes I send them back with a few suggestions of things to look at. Four of the students are doing just this and working hard at it. My best bud, however, has a different method. It goes like this.

He picks up a bone fragment. He looks at it. He sighs heavily. He wanders aimlessly around the lab for a few minutes staring into space. He puts the bone down, goes outside, and has a cigarette. He comes back in, picks up the bone, and resumes his wandering. After about half an hour, he comes to me and presents me with what is clearly a femur. “This is a rib!” he says proudly.

I say, “Uhm, o.k., well, why do you think it is a rib?”

“Because it looks just like a rib,” he says proudly.

“Well, can you show me a comparative specimen that looks just like it?” I ask.

“I don’t need to do that. I know it is a rib.”

“Well, uhm, I’m not sure that it is a rib, so how about you look at the comparative materials.”

He looks at me with pity. “Elizabeth, clearly this is a rib. There is no need to look at the comparative materials.”

My patience thins. “Why don’t you try checking the femur and the Humerus and see if it is one of those.”

“That would be a waste of my time, Elizabeth! I know it is a rib.”

“It is NOT a rib and you need to check the comparative materials to see what it is,” I say firmly.

He blows out an exasperated sigh. “I’m trying to avoid doing that Elizabeth. Besides, you are wrong, it is clearly a rib. I know it is because that is what it looks like!”

We go back and forth for a few more minutes until he finally admits defeat and goes to compare things. Eventually one of the other students takes pity on him and helps him with the id. He then moves for a new bone fragment and the entire process starts all over again.

He has been subjecting me to this round of “negotiating” for a week now, ever since the students finished numbering the bones. Miraculously, I haven’t given in to any impulses to do physical damage, but I have been getting shorter and shorter in my responses.

This past Thursday after lunch, we were sitting around the lab working. All was quiet except for a very enthusiastic peacock outside the window calling loudly (there are peacocks everywhere on the grounds of the university… part of the landscaping… the library hasn’t been given funds to buy a book in three years now, but you can have your pick of any number of breeds of peacock…). My cross to bear sighed loudly and said, “Elizabeth, may I have permission to take a break and go out and kill the peacock.”

“No,” I said, “We have enough dead things already, there will be no killing.” (Not entirely certain that if I accepted this as a joke he wouldn’t get up and go outside to kill the peacock.”

“But it is annoying me and deserves to die,” he said.

I looked at him hard and said, “I don’t think it is in your best interest to set the precedent of killing things that annoy us!”

We passed the rest of the afternoon in blessed silence while he pondered that!

Well, I should probably stop procrastinating and write a lecture on the 1994 Zapatista uprising and ethnic politics in Mexico!

On a final note, I’ll be making a flying trip through the Northeast this summer (New York to Maine) in late July and early August. If you are in the Northeast, will be around, and want to see me, send a note and we’ll work on a schedule!