Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
Gringo Avoidance
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
First, I taught my students a lie; then, I fled the country. I teach—I taught—high school civics.
Before I came to San Miguel de Allende, I liked to lecture my classes about the competing governing philosophies that distinguish the two main American political parties. My students learned that a vibrant democracy depends on ballot box debates over what kind of government the citizenry wants.
While I was making lesson plans, outside my classroom one political party was killing itself. Death by political deceit and dumbfuck ignorance. If I were a better teacher, a more honest one, I would have told my students that the American two-party system was a rotting corpse.
The bustling zócalo of San Miguel is called El Jardín. Vendors hawk shiny red, yellow, green and blue balloons. Women sell strands of homemade jewelry which hang from their outstretched, sun-crisped forearms. Men peddle straw hats stacked high on their heads. Food carts summon passersby with sniffs and whiffs of meats and munchies. Families celebrate birthdays and graduations. Young lovers nuzzle.
Around El Jardín, I’m on the lookout for American tourists and expats strolling the streets, sipping margaritas at sidewalk cafes and bronzing their pale skins. By my estimate, one in four is trying to kill me.
One in four is the number of Americans who boast a blind allegiance to the Republican Party of Death. By denying science, killing our planet. By rejecting public health protocols, exterminating a million people. By fetishizing guns, arming psychotic killers. By opposing a living wage, consigning workers to a living death. By fomenting a religious crusade against abortion, killing women. By advancing anti-voter laws, slaughtering democracy.
I never told my students any of this. Lying by omission is a well-practiced educator’s trick. Like teaching American history without mentioning slavery, or Native-American genocide, or racist immigration laws, or child exploitation, or environmental degradation.
I am here in San Miguel to escape. Travel is the gift of privacy, apartness, otherhood. A gift I need to give myself.
A far corner a former 18th-century convent, the Centro Cultural Ignacio Ramírez El Nigromante, is my preferred refuge, the Café Musas. Weathered cloisters in bleached, calming colors cocoon me. A gurgling fountain serenades. Towering trees filter the sunlight. The breezes whisper, “here you are safe”.
To stretch my legs, I walk under the portico to arrive at “The Laundry Women” by Eleanor Cohen. The mural depicts the hard-scrabble life of women the world over who find community—in this case, while washing clothes in river water.
At my table, I nurse a frothy cappuccino. I’m not a welcoming figure. My hunched shoulders ward off anyone who might endanger my privacy or dare to disrupt the cataloguing of my pedagogical sins.
For uncounted hours, my only company is a chipped blue-and-white ceramic planter with a single, forlorn succulent. A potted plant makes an excellent companion.
After all, a plant, even one uprooted and repotted into a worn-out container, remains grounded in the real world. A thirsty shrub struggling to survive knows enough to do its part to reduce greenhouse gases.
A plant doesn’t do cruel or stupid things to other plants.
