A sense of place

I do a lot of research when I’m writing, trying to get as many details right as possible. But some things I have to leave to my imagination—and one of those things is the setting, especially if first-hand experience of a location would require travel.

It’s too bad, because nothing can equal the experience of being there, of actually smelling a place, hearing the sounds, taking in the details and having them recorded in your own sensory memory.

But sometimes you have to make it up. So I’ve decided that Bombay in 1835 was a combination of Mexico City during the 1960s and Miami in the 1980s—Miami’s sultry weather and vegetation, and Mexico City’s slow pace and exotic cultural blend. 

I couldn’t pick just one or the other place. Mexico City, being high on a mountain plateau, doesn’t have the moist jungle atmosphere that Miami does, and Miami in the ‘80s was a jittery, fast-paced place with lots of new people and new ideas. And I remember Mexico’s slow pace from the ‘60s, so if it’s changed since then I wouldn’t know about it.

Mexico City was not as big in the 1960s as it is today. We lived on the very outskirts of the city, near the Periferico or outerbelt highway.  Our small group of homes, called a privada, was surrounded by dry brown fields where lean, tough cattle grazed. The railroad crossed a neighboring field, and on the rare occasions when we were allowed to leave the house—with a maid to watch us, of course—we placed coins on the tracks so that they would be flattened into strange shapes by a passing train.  

Up the street from us was a cemetery, and between it and our little compound was a small makeshift village—the barrio in which our maid lived. Tin-roofed shacks with adobe walls and hard-packed dirt floors lined both sides of the street, and half-way along was a single metal faucet sticking up out of the ground. I think that was where everyone got their water. Probably it was, because I remember my mother took an outraged photograph of the faucet and made a point of showing it to our friends and relatives back in the States every time she did a slide show about our experiences in Mexico.  

We were the exotics there. My tall blonde mother looked like a Valkyrie who’d strayed by accident into an hacienda. Even my oak-brown hair was considered “fair.” I was a guera—pale-skinned and fair-haired although not a rubia like my mother. My brother’s tow-blond hair a source of wonder and delight to Mexican girls in the marketplace; Whenever we went there he used to run down the aisles, head ducked to avoid the fingers that reached out to touch his bright head.

The marketplace smelled like warm, spoiled fruit, rich and sweet and rotten, with a layer of musty corn laid overtop like a veil. There were pyramids of mangos, limes and oranges, long poles of sugar cane, neat towers of tortillas. Stalls sold embroidered dresses and tops made of cool white cotton with brightly colored flowers winding across the front and back yoke.

We left Mexico in the early 70s, and I’ve never been back. But I wonder if I ever could go back to the place that I grew up in. What do you think? Can you ever really go home again?

Saralee