by Rachel Johnson

Created on: August 17, 2009   Last Updated: August 18, 2009

living among the Latino Culture.
I spent seven long months in Mexico missing my American lifestyle. It is a blow to the routine female ego to go to a place where women are treated as second best. I was the American equivalent to a housewife. I stayed at home and cooked and cleaned. I was expected to have dinner ready when he came home and not question why he was late or what he did. I spent many a night wishing for the life I had taken for granted.

In Mexico a woman is measured by her ability to cook and clean. By clean I mean wash clothes by hand on a stone washboard. I have been used to washing machines most of my life. I had never done such a thing as wash clothes by hand. I quickly learned that this meant a lot of blisters. Sore tired angry hands, and rubbing them raw. All so I could do it again the next day. The test of them being clean was they were not to smell dirty or be stiff. This was the most miserable chore I had ever done in my life. I can now get socks whiter than a washing machine can, and yet every day I stick them in there and forget about it.
Cooking was different there too. They use a lot of propane tanks for the stoves. In Mexico they do not eat a lot of meat or cheese. They eat a lot of vegetables. They have lots of simple meals. Salsa is on top of everything. Foods like mushrooms are a dinner themselves. Meat is sold by the peso. I soon learned that I had to change my style of eating if I was going to survive. I learned to make a simple vegetable, like cauliflower, into a whole meal. Beans were an everyday necessity. They filled the space where here in America we have meat. I also learned there are tons of different salsas. Ones made with dried chillies or ones made with fresh chillies. From green to red, they make the meal.
The lifestyle id so very different there. I was one of the few in the neighborhood to have the fortune of a refrigerator. Another luxury that I was afforded was a microwave. When everyone was heating their tortillas on top of the stove, I could just zap them up in the microwave. However I could not use this everyday. Most of the time I had to heat a cookie sheet on top of the stove and flip the tortillas on there to heat them.
Life there was hard. It was hard to see how poor a people could be. The worst part was to see how many uneducated women are there living a life where they spent their whole life having kids and changing man to man. It is not just a fact it is a common disease. The normal life of a woman in Mexico

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