A breath of not-so fresh air
Happy New Year friends!
Over the winter break we went to Mexico City, where the colors are bright and the air is dirty. While I was there I read Jesmyn Ward’s 2013 memoir, Men We Reaped.
Men We Reaped heaves with grief - Ward tells the story of growing up poor and Black in rural Mississippi, and of the violent deaths of five young men in her community over a four-year time span.
While these men died of various causes - gunshot, suicide, overdose, car accident - what really killed them over the course of their young lives was a message that they didn’t matter, writes Ward.
The young men in her community had received that message forever, and they lived it - they were overlooked in school, looked at too closely by law enforcement, and had few economic opportunities. One of the men, writes Ward,
“never laid claim to a dream job…never got a legitimate job, perhaps dissuaded by the experiences of the young men in the neighborhood, most of whom worked until they were fired or quit because minimum wage came too slowly and disappeared too quickly.”
Instead, C.J. talked about hustling - figuring out a way, any way, to make money to stay alive. I thought about this a lot while wandering the streets of Mexico City - if you’ve been, you know that the volume of folks out there trying to sell you hot sauce-laced potato chips or Frida Kahlo combs or little painted wooden animals or postcards or tacos or light-up flower crowns is HIGH.
42% of Mexico’s total population lives below the national poverty line. In Mexico City alone, there are so many people, working all day outside, breathing the bad air, trying to make enough money to feed and house themselves, their kids. What message is their city, their government, sending them?
After 10 days in this beautiful place, I felt like I had bronchitis. But I could get an Uber to the airport, sail through Customs and Border Protection with my family, and return to a place where the air pollution blows out to sea. Both Mexico and the U.S. send me, a white, middle-class American tourist/consumer, a message that I matter.
So I’m continuing to wonder: what will it take for countries and cultures to take care of all of their citizens equitably? What would it look like for all young Black American men to have true economic and social mobility? What would it take to have clean air in Mexico City (between industrial growth, more people, more cars, and the city’s unique geographical situation, it’s complicated)? And to lift that large segment of the population out of poverty?
Oy. I don’t have answers, although I suspect that it has something to do with changing the economic systems that aren’t serving us well.
In the meantime, I’m looking forward to exploring all of the ways we do and don’t take care of ourselves, each other, and the planet over the course of 2020.
Can I ask you a favor? Write back and let me know what interests you about what I’ve been writing, and where you think I might go deeper. Also, sometimes I feel shy about sharing these notes to broader audiences on the internet, but that doesn’t mean you should. Feel free, anytime, to share if you are so moved.
See you next week, hopefully with sunnier reflections on the lovely and thought-provoking Mexico City. The art! The tortillas! The people!
XO
Leigh