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4. “They Didn’t Tell Me Anything”
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88 Fiesta Time Once a year, just before Easter, the otherwise quiet town of Villachuato comes alive. During the preceding weeks, streets and homes begin to fill with extra cars—their license plates from Iowa, Minnesota, California, Nebraska—and family members. As relatives from the United States flood into the town, English adds itself to the cadence of daily life, and children compare notes with their cousins about life “on the other side.” Toward the center of town, the streets fill with food vendors, baked goods, housewares, and jewelry for sale. Beside the old hacienda façade, an otherwise vacant lot becomes a carnival, complete with mechanical rides and competitive games. Two blocks away, in an empty field that is sometimes used for softball matches at other times of year, metal grandstands are erected and a rink is installed for a series of well-attended rodeos. Villachuato’s fiesta is well known throughout the general region of northwestern Michoacán. It is the town’s claim to notoriety, and it is a remarkable display of festivities. Eight-foot-tall puppets are danced through the center of town, and Modelo beer cans are shaken and sprayed over the crowd so that dancers are literally “bathed in beer.” In the evening, crowds throng inward to dance to the music of live bands. A week later, video clips of these festivities appear on YouTube so that family members living in the United States can take part in the festivities from afar. 4.“ They Didn’t Tell Me Anything” Community Literacy and Resistance in Rural Mexico “they didn’t tell me anything” 89 The excitement of this festival, as well as the added influx of visitors— many of them young men who live and work in the United States for most of the year—makes la fiesta a central point of conversation among the young women in town. And with good reason. Given Villachuato’s strong trend toward outbound migration, relatively few young men live there full-time, so the fiesta season represents an important opportunity for courtship. Indeed, several weddings are held each year during the weeks following the fiesta. Some of these weddings are planned in advance (as in the case of couples who have been courting long-distance for some time), and some are more spontaneous. Equally, some of these unions result in women returning to the United States with their new husbands—quite often without papers and without the expectation to work outside the home—while in other cases men return to work in the United States and women move in with their new inlaws in Villachuato. In this way, the fiesta dynamic highlights the gendered reality of Villachuato : Men come and go, and women remain at home. And, while discussions about the fiesta fill the entire year, highlighting the longing that families and would-be lovers feel to be more connected with community members living in the United States, the wake of the fiesta can leave some young women in compromised situations. During the year that I lived in Villachuato, for instance , one of the young women in my social group eloped with a man a few days after the fiesta. They went to live briefly in the empty house that he kept in Villachuato, and he promised to take her back to California with him. However, when he left a few weeks later, he went alone. At nineteen years old, Eugenia went back to live with her parents, where she worked in their small storefront painting nails and embroidering handbags. After that event, she no longer joined our social group for outings because now she was a married woman. “Not a Señorita Anymore”: Gender Norms in Villachuato In Villachuato, a community that is nearly 100 percent Catholic, social expectations are conservative and gender divisions are strong. While men work and/or migrate and are often seen publicly on the street, women’s lives take place primarily inside the home. Typically, a young woman is expected to help her mother with chores and then to get married, move to her husband’s home, and take care of children and domestic responsibilities there. Indeed, the gender demarcations in the town are apparent even at a visual level. At any social gathering, the women comprise the dominant position, in both numbers and spatial importance. At the weekly dances held in the plaza on Sunday evenings, women sit on benches or link arms to wander casually around the perimeter of the...