MC Quixote

I Was Born the Day NAFTA Was Passed Part 16

Not too long ago, I was asking my dad about being a parent. I said something like,

"Dad, I'm starting to become an adult now, and in some ways, I still feel like a kid, but I'm curious, what it's like to have kids?"

He answered me in a way that seemed like he knew that one day this question was coming, almost as if he'd rehearsed his response.

"Caylee", he paused for a while.

"It's difficult to express, but when you were born, it was like receiving the greatest gift a person could have and at the same time, the biggest challenge a person could imagine."

Was he trying to scare me out of having kids? Maybe he thought I was pregnant? Sometimes my dad is almost too honest. I always wonder if he's so brutally honest because he's deaf. It can be abrupt at first, but I think I prefer that kind of sincerity, even if it's a little bit in-your-face. Even when he lies there's an honesty to it. He still won't quit with the idea that I was born in Oregon and he always makes sure to tell people up here, but not many listen to the deaf.

So, listening to his idea that I'm his "greatest gift and the biggest challenge" is profound. It seems to be another one of those unwritten laws of the universe, "The most important things in life are the things that challenge us the most." I'm glad he didn't say, "It was a blessing and a curse." Sometimes that's how I look at my coming into this world. Yea, maybe that's a bit extreme, but I did take an interesting path arriving here.

I'm not sure how the stars were aligned that day but there was a strange chain of events that transpired when my mom started going into labor. Yes, I was born right around the time the North American Free Trade Agreement was being signed into law. How do I know this and why do I care?

Well, the story goes that we were already late getting to the hospital because my dad had trouble flagging down a taxi that day. We didn't know why there was so much traffic in DF, down by the Zocalo. We were getting close to the Hospital de Jesus and our taxi was clipped by a Mercedes stretch limo and this vehicle was part of a procession that was taking the President of Mexico to sign the NAFTA agreement. We were actually hit by the limo that Salinas was in. Mom says that his secret security agents rushed him into the next car in the procession and then checked to see if we were a group of anti-NAFTA revolutionaries or something.

While my dad was flagging down another taxi, one of Salinas' bodyguards started to inspect my mom to make sure she was really pregnant and further verifying that this wasn't a plot against Salinas. Yes, my mom did feel violated and I kind of feel violated too. And from that day forward my family has closely followed NAFTA.

Because the traffic was so bad my dad finally got my mom into a bicycle taxi. Luckily, the bicycle taxi-driver got us through the traffic and to the hospital by any means necessary. My Abuela Adela had the delivery planned at The Hospital de Jesus because that's where all our family members (on her side) have been born for the last four generations.

It goes back to Abuela Adela's thing about the sacred ground where Montezuma first met Cortés. Abuela says that it was one of the most important events in human history and that this hospital is still charged with the energy of that historical event. And so, we're all born and most of us die in The Hospital of Jesus.

Back to the blessing and the curse - The blessing part of this would be that my mom ended up making it to the hospital to have a trouble-free delivery. I'm not claiming it wasn't painful, but, thanks mom, for bringing me into this crazy world. And what was the curse part of all this? NAFTA, yes NAFTA would turn out to be the curse.

The impact it's had on our immediate family has been dire. My dad lost his farm, he ended up losing everything, and we basically became fugitives in the country that created our downfall. And that's just looking at the curse on our own microscopic family level. This NAFTA curse has caused so much pain, suffering, death, despair; it's basically created an economic holocaust in Mexico. The devastation and disintegration are everywhere.

And the people up here seem to be paranoid that we're stealing their jobs, taking away their dreams, ruining their schools, killing the healthcare system, and the scapegoating goes on and on and on. If they would look a little deeper, just scratch below the surface of Fox news, they would start to see that what's happening in the U.S. is the result of something that actually was started by forces in the U.S.