"What I'll remember most is the mother's face, so aged but beautiful it was," Chencho says when they get back in the van to return to the city. The mother, Angela, lives in the small village of Teotitlan del Valle, just thirty minutes outside of the city of Oaxaca. She's lived there her whole life. She grew up speaking not Spanish but Zapotec. Only in the last four years has she begun to understand and speak the national language with her grown children and her growing grandchildren. Angela is not even close to five feet tall. She is round in the middle with muscular legs and arms from her years of labor on the land. Her skin is the deep color of cafe, dotted with freckles. In her skin are the lines of her time in Teotitlan. These are lines that tell stories. She cannot be old, but must be in her forties. But her forty years are wiser, softer, and less rushed than forty years in a city. Angela sits on the small chair, small enough for an infant, and cleans the lam
Milan Kundera wrote that "being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood." These are the stories of my tightrope walking and the joy of falling.