MC Quixote

Alone, Looking for the Lost Part 50

Something about coming off that plane in Salt Lake City that brought back the last seven years I'd spent here. The light in Salt Lake has this stark quality about it. Salt Lake light is different from New York; where the light and air mix into something thicker than this high mountain place. And Mexico has this warmth embracing quality about the light.

In Salt Lake; it seems bright and clear, yet kind of two dimensional, maybe it has to do with all the reflective light coming off The Great Salt Lake.

Yes, there is this mirror quality here, reflecting everything. Looking at myself, my life, and walking out through the terminal, past all the security, near the baggage claim, I see the families and lovers and friends reuniting. When I look closer, I notice some are giving their farewells, sending off their loved ones.

Looking into that reflective Salt Lake City mirror, I can see that no one is there to greet me, and I don't expect anyone to be there, but I stay by the baggage claim and watch all of these other humans communing and it's beautiful, and at the same time, I'm feeling more alone. I finally snap out of this state with the realization that I need to find a lost member of my family, Sancho.

I move toward the public transport area of the airport and take the first bus into town and I try to put on my canine senses, my Sancho sensibility, and think,

"Where would I go?"

It's a strange way to think, to try and think like my dog, but it does move me away from the thoughts of being completely alone here. Well, I do have Tammy, Tammy and Sancho. They are my anchors, and I keep them in my mind and it helps me continue. Taking it a step further, I get out my notebook and start to write a letter to Sancho, which seems to keep my mind off my mind.

Dearest Sancho,

I can't describe how sad I've been since I heard you were missing, I hope to God you're OK, please be Ok Sancho. I take the blame and I feel terrible that I left you behind. When I think back, I remember how I got caught up in the whole MC Quixote performance in Guanajuato and I just kind of left you here with dad. I remember being more worried about bringing all the right equipment for the Cervantino than making sure you were taken care of.

I don't even remember saying goodbye to you when I left for the airport. I really had no idea Dad was coming down to Mexico and when he showed up at the show, he told me you would be with Tammy, so I thought everything was going to be OK. Hmm, I guess I was wrong.

So, I'm back here to find you, and after I find you, we'll go back to Mexico and finally be a complete family. You're going to love Mexico and we've saved enough money to live a simple life and afford Abuela's medicines. And who knows, maybe MC Quixote is going to blow-up in Mexico.

I don't care about any of that MC stuff as much as I care about getting you back. I thought MC Quixote saved my life during the last seven years in Salt Lake City, but now I realize it was you, you and Dad who helped me make it through. I apologize that it took this situation for me to realize this. I hope more than anything that I can find you.

Thank you, Sancho, for saving my life by always being by my side and always loving me. I know now that these are the most important things in life. I love you so much and I'm going to find you soon. Meet me at our old apartment and we'll take your favorite walk down to the school and I'll throw a tennis ball and we'll play. See you soon. Love,

Caylee

So, I still don't know where I should start looking, my old hood? or head to Tammy's house? Tammy's place isn't that far from a trax station, so I'll text her and start heading over that way. It's about 3:30 PM, she might be at work for another hour or two, so maybe I'll take the ghetto chu-chu and hang out out around Sancho's old stomping grounds, and there's the added bonus of checking out the walls over there along the tracks and see if any of my art is still hanging.

Even better, maybe I'll do a small piece for Sancho on those walls; something like the letter I just wrote, maybe:

"Dear Sancho, MC Q is looking for you. Come out and play." with some canine décor surrounding the message. This seems the proper ritual to begin my search, to start by making some art. I think I'll just pick up some chalk for this work and reduce the risk of getting busted - I don't think chalk is illegal in Salt Lake, yet.

That's one of the differences with the United States and Mexico; everything in the United States is illegal and not much seems illegal in Mexico. Nothing is illegal in Mexico if you have money.

It's strange how's there's a part of me that feels a nostalgia for Salt Lake. A nostalgia for the times when Dad and I were doing all we could to survive this place with a certain level of dignity. And for the most part, Dad and I were able to accomplish this - survival with dignity, which was not all the time, but most of the time. I'm nostalgic for those times. I think it has more to do with the dignity than the survival part, but we did do both, in light of everything around us trying to take our dignity away from us.

It seems to be another difference with Mexico and the United States; strangely it seems harder to maintain your dignity in the U.S. You'd think it would be harder to maintain your dignity in a poorer country – and yes, there's poverty in both countries.

It is degrading to be poor, to have to work over 12 hours a day, six days a week to provide for your family, and that's if you're lucky enough to have a job with those kinds of hours. Not getting the hours you need to survive, or being unemployed, and see your family struggle economically, is completely degrading.

However, in Mexico, people seem to help each other out a lot more. Almost everyone understands being poor, and being poor doesn't reflect on people like some sort of personality flaw, like it does in the the U.S. You get that a lot in the U.S. There's this idea that people are poor out of choice, that people are poor because they're lazy. But if you look a little closer, and especially if you're undocumented, you see that the people who work the most are the poor, low wage workers, and they do the most difficult, dangerous, physically demanding work in the United States.

And for the working-poor in the United States it's degrading to reach a level of survival with this emphasis on stuff. There's this reality that things, and money, basically materialism, has more value than people. The system is just so big and powerful here that it can disregard people, people are sort of expendable in the U.S. What are people for in these two different countries? The answers to that question seems different for the United States and for Mexico.

And the blending of these two countries, these two cultures, whichcontain many cultures; the blending because of people traversing these borders,interacting with one another, inevitably changes both countries. Mexicoexchanges humanness for dollars and the U.S. gets humanness and all theexploited labor. It seems like a bad deal for Mexico, but never underestimatethe power of money.