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Tapeta

"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

Sicko in Mexico

They always tell you not to drink the water here. They say don't eat the fruits or the vegetables. When you brush your teeth, you better have bottled water nearby so you don't accidentally put your brush under the tap. Close your mouth in the shower. No ice in beverages. Some people go as far as to say you shouldn't eat the salsa. No salsa in Mexico? But, if Moctezuma is really out to get his revenge, he will find you even if you follow all of those rules, as I followed all those rules these last five days. For me, it't now a diet of rice and bananas and te de manzanilla (chamomile). For now it's sipping a banana-colored chalky medicine every four hours followed by two more days of antibiotics just to make sure Moctezuma is really gone from my bowels. The doctor reassured me that it wasn't anything I did wrong; after all, I didn't eat the street food. He said, "This is the rainy season and with it come the bugs. Lots of people get this problem right no

Claudia & Palmira

The afternoon that I moved all my belongings from the room with no window in Callao -- the heart of the red-light district -- to the piso in the barrio of Puerta del Angel, Claudia welcomed me with the familiar saying, “Mi casa es tu casa, tía.” The very next morning she scolded me for leaving my shoes under the coffee table overnight. Claudia was just nineteen, away from her hometown of Gijón, Asturias for the first time. Her parents were traveling prison guards who bought the flat to live in once they retired to Madrid. Until then, Claudia was acting as tenant and landlord, and seemed fearful of any mistakes she might make as her parents’ proxy. We reached the rental agreement in English, but after that we spoke only Spanish. No, it was more like a stutter somewhere in the meta-language of communication, something akin to Spanglish but a distant cousin at best. I only heard her English on cleaning days – she was frugal and tidy like a good Spanish daughter -- when she cranked up Bob

Women Welcome Women…to Sacramento

Carolin Grahlmann, a twenty-two year old German-born biology student at the University of Groeningen in Holland, decided to take a year off from her studies to travel around the world by herself. She planned to visit world-class destinations in California, New Zealand, Australia, and Southeast Asia. But in the middle of all her travels, Grahlmann ended up in Sacramento. For Grahlmann, Sacramento was a surprising though welcome respite from itinerary-driven days in the big cities of New York, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. Sacramento allowed her the chance to rest while still taking in some vital California history. She toured the State Capital, visited Old Sacramento, and admired the elegance of the Sacramento Youth Hostel (the beautifully-restored Llewellyn Williams mansion located downtown). In regards to her guided tour of the Capital, where she was the only international guest that day, she says, “They were all surprised that somebody from so far away came there to see their