Se ve, se siente, Primero A está presente
I once made hundreds of dollars selling of old Nintendo Entertainment System (good old NES!) games to a seventh grade peer in Mexico. I guess I should say I made thousands of pesos. I ended up spending the money on clothes to the dismay and anger of Older Brother A, who technically owned one-half of the games and therefore should’ve been given a cut of the proceeds. However, he was studying in the U.S. at the time and had bragged to me over the phone that he had purchased a Sega, which was way better than the NES (or so he said to me). I took this as permission to profit on our now outdated system. I believe the console is still in our house in Mexico, absent of any games except maybe Duck Hunt. Where did my scheming financial genius go?
Impossibly enough, though, even with all of my middle school shenanigans and goings-ons, I loved middle school in Mexico. It was a time when I was considered pretty, popular, smart and was looked up to by all of my peers. You have no idea how that affected me, the girl who had gone to school in Saline, Michigan, and was nothing compared to the Suzannes, Kellys, and Jennifers of that stark-white world. There was a time when I felt absolutely comfortable and began to see myself as I was, not as I wished I were – I stopped wishing for blond hair and blue eyes, I stopped wishing for paler skin. For once, I was perfect the way I was and I thrived in that environment. I adored my school – Escuela Secundaria Federal Rafael Ramirez Castañeda. Life outside of school was actually boring compared to school and I wished for mornings to come sooner because it was fun. It was fun to learn, fun to interact with my friends, fun to interact with the other seventh grade class, fun to impress all the teachers who put effort into teaching and trusted me to learn (unlike my experience in Mexican sixth grade, which sucked). At a time when kids’ self-esteem tends to plummet, there was newfound joy in school and in myself.
It didn’t stop with me. Most of my peers were pretty happy and well-adjusted, too, at least when it came to school. Discipline problems were scant and we actually took pride in doing our best and elevating the school’s stature. Perhaps it was partly attributable to the fact that we all had to wear uniforms – ugly uniforms, to be sure, but they did have the effect of creating a sense of equality that wasn’t there prior or immediately after my Mexican middle school days. Teasing about being fat, skinny, light, dark, just didn’t happen in my class. We all got along well and usually banded together. There were divisions between male and female when it came to what could be called executive power (I lost my bid to be eighth grade president simply because our homeroom teacher decided that having girls as presidents two years in a row simply wasn’t fair), but we mostly got along. There were family problems, of course; some peers did drop out due to family pressure or lack of resources, but they still remained friends. We were one big happy class, the kids in Primero A (middle school grades, seventh through ninth in Mexico, were subdivided into two classes, A and B – there was spirited competition among all the classes and grades, to say the least). Primero B seemed to be a bit more fractured but they were, after all, B.
(As much as I still tease B, they were generally good kids and we were friendly enough to each other – the school administration was good about fostering healthy competition between all grades and class divisions. A subdivisions generally won across the grades, so that’s where the mock high and mighty attitudes emerges.)
I had conquered my fears of Mexican school in sixth grade, so going to seventh wasn’t as big a deal academically. Socially, I was terrified and ended up sticking to my older cousin and her friends for a bit. But as she was a year older, I couldn’t keep up the Post-It Note act for long – I had to interact with my peers. I was surprised and delighted that they weren’t as assy as my sixth grade classmates (this was a school most people commuted to, myself included) and made friends rapidly. Soon I could count them all as friends. Hugo, the guy who could do back flips at will and usually did so after scoring a goal in soccer; Marta, a sweetheart of a friend who was a smart ass in disguise; Juan Carlos, who tricked into my first miserable yet memorable kiss; Gaby, a girl whose father owned a paper shop nearby and helped fight the good fight with me to get into typing class; Sandra, the girl whose father was principal but who never attempted to get by through nepotism; Enrique, the kid who beat me out as president but was pretty decent to talk to once the gender wars settled on any particular day. There were more, of course, but they’ve all faded away with time.
Middle school was a good time in general; the last half of it, done in Saline, was no treat, but I had my experience as a Mexican kid to look back on instead of Saline. I’ve often said my life kind of blanks out from the second half of eighth grade until the time I started college. Why the hell are U.S. schools so terrible on kids? Everyone’s a dictator, all the kids are mean, and you have to watch your every step so you don’t become a mockery. Be a little different (like, oh, say Mexican) and you’re toast. Not so in Mexico – even with my accent and sometimes awkward Spanish I was considered cool.
I have to wonder what their formula was for keeping kids relatively sane at that time of life, so much so that they had time to become entrepreneurial masterminds.
