MEXICO LIVING - Don't Mess with Mexican Women

GUANAJUATO: I was standing outside the walk-in-closet-sized store where my wife loves to shop. It is also the neighborhood gossip center. Need I say more about why women love the place? I was helping to hold up a wall with my gringo bulk when I noticed something across the street. A Mexican woman was reading this man the riot act. I could tell from what conversation I could understand in their rapid-fire Spanish that they were lovers. I could also tell that what was happening was the public display of a very closely guarded secret: Women Run Mexico!

I had no clue what this Mexican Donnybrook was about and didn't want to know. What I could see was an extremely smart Mexican man taking his chewing out bravely and, might I add, most intelligently. He shook his head in affirmation and frequently interjected, "Yes, my love," and "Yes, my heart." There was no arguing. He listened.

The man was a muscular hulk. He looked like he could bench press a pickup truck. I was sure bullets could not only bounce off his chest but, if he wanted to, he could have leaped tall buildings with a single bound, bent steel with his bare hands, changed the course of mighty rivers, and so on. You get what I mean. But, he kept his mouth shut.

The reason for this is: You Don't Mess With Mexican Women.

Never, ever, not in a million years, do you talk back, contradict, or challenge a Mexican Woman. She will not only chew you up and spit you out again, but she might also rip your arms off and beat you with the blood stubs. Why this is so is probably because women have to run things because men, as is universally true, screw things up so badly that the women have to fix their screw-ups.

I know this from personal experience (Thank God for my wife).

If anything runs smoothly in Mexico, if anything turns out right, if anything at all has any appeal whatsoever, it is because Mexican women made it happen.

It is not that Mexican men are useless. It is that they are on this earth to do what is their destiny: Not to Mess With Mexican Women!

n my story, "Don't Mess With Mexican Women," I mentioned

"I had no clue what this Mexican Donnybrook was about."

One of my "critics," though professing to hate everything I write (and professing to hate me), took that opportunity, because I said what I did, to postulate that my not understanding the conversation contradicts everything I've been writing about learning Spanish. "If I had any degree of spoken fluency (and I do) then I should have been able to divine what was being said by the warring couple, the subjects of my previous story." So goes this critic's logic.

Let me say this: We Americans, with a less than 9% bilingual rate in our country, linguistically inept, are hardly in a position to judge what is or is not linguistic fluency.

The point is simple. If how you judge fluency in a second language is having the ability to speak with 100% proficiency, like a native, then you do err.

The Spanish you learn in a classroom will not be the Spanish you hear spoken on the street. It most certainly will not be the Spanish you hear when a Spanish speaker, especially a Mexican, is mad and talking at the speed of light. This is what this woman was doing in the incident I reported, "Reading her man the riot act."

Mexican youth, much in the likeness of the Pochos and Pochismos in La Frontera, right here on the streets of Guanajuato, make up their own dialects. Tell me how anyone would learn what "No manches" or "¿Quién va a hacerlo, Buey?" means in a classroom where you are learning how to conjugate estar and ser?

You can't. You've got to live in the culture, not in Gringolandia isolated bubbles, and you've got to have relationships in the community so you can have your acquaintances teach you the street slang.

Imagine trying to figure out the slang at speeds that make you wonder how any human could possibly understand what was said, and you have the reason why "I had no clue what this Mexican Donnybrook was about."

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