The half-way point has come and gone. January 30th was the official half-way point of my Fulbright leaving 5 months left. If I had to give a report card on my experience so far, it would be something like this:
Cultural Experience: A
Mexico is great. The food, the people, the price, the destinations are all amazing. I have a funny reputation at work. Everyone says I am the most Mexican person there. I like spicy food, I am always down to eat tacos, I can do a Mexican yell ("Aaaaiiii aiii aiiiiiiiiiiiiiii), I play soccer, I go to Cruz Azul soccer games, and I like eating food in the street. Everywhere I go in Mexico I am called "guero", which means light-skinned. Seriously everywhere. Every market I have ever gone to, they call me "guero" without fail. I am also playing a lot of pick-up soccer near my house. It´s 5 v 5 walled soccer and it is open to the public for free. We play first to 2 goals. I normally don´t bring anything valuable because some of the dudes look pretty ghetto, so I still don´t have any pictures.
I also feel like I have seen the majority of the main destinations in Mexico. The places that I still haven´t been to are either far, dangerous, or both. Most of the North of the country unfortunately falls into that category.
Work soccer team
Academic Experience: B+
So far I have taken Negotiations and Business Law and I am currently taking Financial Statement Analysis and Computer Programming (at the undergraduate level). The academic rigor is not as tough as in the United States. For the MBA coursework that makes sense because I am in a part-time program and the professors understand that everyone is working. However, I know that introductory computer programming classes are extremely hard in the US. My class is pretty easy so far. We are just doing flow-diagrams and programming simple things. The homeworks are maybe an hour long each, compared to 10-20 hours for problem sets at UW. This is good for me though because I don´t have to spend as much time doing homework. I got my first trimester grades back and they were both 9/10, so I am pleased.
Professional Experience: B-
I am starting to feel pretty frustrated at work as they don´t really have any meaningful work for me to do. The work they do have available to me is translation work, simple marketing work like preparing applications for the firm to be ranked, and basic website maintenance. I had really hoped before the Fulbright that I would be learning about international business and doing business in Mexico. That really has not happened. I started off doing translation thinking that I had to pay my dues and learn the vocabulary, but after a few months of that and taking a business law course in the MBA program at ITAM, the learning curve has not changed.
The work culture is also something I had not anticipated. Mexico is very hierarchical and the boss is always right. I find this to be extremely frustrating as I am used to more horizontal organizations where you can debate ideas with your boss freely. I also realized that lawyers look down on accountants, in Mexico anyway. They don´t care that I am an accountant and that I have 3 years of work experience. I am routinely task with simple administrative work that should be for an intern. Because for them, I am an intern. They don´t have to pay me, so why should they value my time. My current strategy is to shift my priority away from work and towards my classes and the cultural experience. The one redeeming attribute is that my co-workers are all really cool. Although as of late, they have been too busy to do lunch, which was almost daily during the fall.
Here is a graph of what I have been doing. As you can see the majority of my time was spent on the website, which was launched last month. Here is the link: http://solcargo.com.mx/ The things that I enjoy doing are Empresas, or Business, and Energia, or Energy Reform, which are tiny slivers of my total time.
Language Experience: A-
I feel like my Spanish is getting much better, both formally and informally. I intentionally have been taking hard classes at ITAM and studying vocab in my spare time to improve it. I am also living with a Mexican, Beto, and I regularly watch movies in Spanish. Of course my Spanish could improve more if more of my work was in Spanish, rather than 50/50 English Spanish. I know a lot of Mexican slang, much to Sandra´s chagrin. I still haven´t mastered the Mexican art of alburreando (speaking with double meaning, often sexual jokes), but that takes years of practice. Here is a list of popular Mexican slang. On the left is the least and on the right is the most. For example, "no está dificil" = it´s easy and "Ta cabrón" = it´s fucking hard!
Part of the Fulbright program is that we do mid-term presentations on our experiences so far, and that we attend a conference with the other Fulbrights in San Miguel de Allende. All the other Fulbrights got to spend Monday - Friday in San Miguel de Allende, but as we have internships, we only got to go Thursday night to Friday afternoon. On Wednesday we did our presentations in D.F. I decided to focus my presentation on the cultural differences between the United States as measured by the social physiologist Geert Hofstede. In the 1970´s, Hofstede did a comparative cultural study by having all the employees of IBM around the world (about 117,000) take a survey. From the results of this survey, Hofstede concluded that there are 5 cultural dimensions:
Power distance index (PDI): "Power distance is the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions (like the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally." Individuals in a society that exhibits a high degree of power distance accept hierarchies in which everyone has a place without the need for justification. Societies with low power distance seek to have equal distribution of power.
Individualism (IDV) vs. collectivism: "The degree to which individuals are integrated into groups". In individualistic societies, the stress is put on personal achievements and individual rights. People are expected to stand up for themselves and their immediate family, and to choose their own affiliations. In contrast, in collectivist societies, individuals act predominantly as members of a lifelong and cohesive group or organization.
Uncertainty avoidance index (UAI): "a society's tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity". It reflects the extent to which members of a society attempt to cope with anxiety by minimizing uncertainty. People in cultures with high uncertainty avoidance tend to be more emotional. They try to minimize the occurrence of unknown and unusual circumstances and to proceed with careful changes step by step planning and by implementing rules, laws and regulations. In contrast, low uncertainty avoidance cultures accept and feel comfortable in unstructured situations or changeable environments and try to have as few rules as possible. People in these cultures tend to be more pragmatic, they are more tolerant of change.
Masculinity (MAS), vs. femininity: "The distribution of emotional roles between the genders". Masculine cultures' values are competitiveness, assertiveness, materialism, ambition and power, whereas feminine cultures place more value on relationships and quality of life. In masculine cultures, the differences between gender roles are more dramatic and less fluid than in feminine cultures where men and women have the same values emphasizing modesty and caring.
Long-term orientation (LTO), vs. short term orientation: Long-term oriented societies attach more importance to the future. They foster pragmatic values oriented towards rewards, including persistence, saving and capacity for adaptation. In short term oriented societies, values promoted are related to the past and the present, including steadiness, respect for tradition, preservation of one's face, reciprocation and fulfilling social obligations.
Indulgence versus restraint (IVR): The extent to which members of a society try to control their desires and impulses. Whereas indulgent societies have a tendency to allow relatively free gratification of basic and natural human desires related to enjoying life and having fun, restrained societies have a conviction that such gratification needs to be curbed and regulated by strict norms.
To give you an idea of how various countries stack-up, here is a graph showing Brazil, Russia, India, China, and the United States versus the World averages.
Anyway, I decided to compare Mexico to the United States.
As you can see, the main differences are in Power Distance, Individualism, Uncertainty Avoidance, and Indulgence. When I first saw this, I was surprised how well it described what I had been seeing in Mexico. The first difference, Power Difference precisely explains how I feel at work. In high power distance societies "everyone has a place without the need for justification." The boss is the boss, and that´s it. It also explains why there isn´t more social unrest as a result of the high levels of inequality. People are more likely to accept that they are poor, and those who are rich don´t feel guilty that they are rich.
For individualism, the US is off the charts compared to the World. Mexico is much closer to the world average. This difference shows the beauty of the Mexican culture. It is very inclusive. People want you to feel comfortable. This is why I adapted so well at work. Everyone was offering to take me to lunch and was very nice to me. In the US, I have seen when foreign people come to work as transfers at Deloitte, and they are often ignored. People don't give a shit. They are polite, but that's as far as it goes. I wish that the US was more like Mexico in this regard.
Uncertainty Avoidance. Countries with high levels of certainty avoidance have a nasty symptom, increased bureaucracy. It makes sense. If a society doesn't feel comfortable making decisions, it invents a whole bunch of rules so that the decisions are made by rules and not by people. I experienced this bureaucracy when I tried to get my student visa. It was extremely frustrating and time consuming. I have also seen uncertainty avoidance at work. I was tasked with making the Christmas card. Again a great utilization of my accounting and finance skills. The partners couldn't make a decision on which card they liked, or what message they wanted to include. In the end, over 50 emails were exchanged related to the content of the Christmas card because they wanted complete consensus. It was insane, it's a Christmas card for crying out loud.
The final difference is Indulgence. In Mexico, you can pretty much satisfy any desire or impulse you want. There are tons of places to eat in the streets, junk food at every turn, cigarettes are ubiquitous, and the number of sex shops and prostitutes is insane. There are two consequences from this. The first is negative. Mexico briefly eclipsed the US for obesity rates (but US won it back this year!), and there are tons of teenage pregnancies. The second consequence is positive. It means that Mexicans know how to enjoy life and have fun. They are more spontaneous. Why not have a beer? Why not go eat some tacos? Why not go salsa dancing?
That was the basic premise of my presentation. Everyone liked it, although I was definitely tip-toeing on the edge of what is appropriate. I'm glad my boss wasn't there, especially for my comments about Power Distance and Uncertainty Avoidance. Here is a picture of all the Binational Business Fulbrights and the Director and Coordinator of our program:
After our presentations, we headed to San Miguel de Allende to meet up with the other 80 or so Fulbrights. On the way, we got a flat on the side of the freeway.
Instead of staying to help the driver, we exercised our Mexican Indulgence and went to the gas station to buy beer, which we drank while we waited.
As part of our Fulbright conference, we had the Ranch Olympics. It consisted of various exercises including tug-of-war, donkey races, sack races, and catch the chicken.
Donkey Race: I am the one behind using the Stick of Encouragement.
Change of strategy, I'll pull White Lighting, our albino burro.
Chicken catching. Not that easy. This girl in glasses, though, apparently worked at an aviary and was amazing at catching chickens.
The place was beautiful. Our Mexican cowboy hosts spent most of the time laughing at us trying to catch chickens and ride donkeys.
Since we had only spent about 16 hours in San Miguel de Allende, and it was 5 hour trip, I decided to stay with two other Fulbrights, Jesse and David, and take advantage of the weekend. Somehow I ended up back in Guanajuato, for the fourth time! On the fourth time, I decided it was finally time to follow one of the estudiantiles bands around the streets of Guanajuato and sing songs.
Picture at a traditional cantina. Until about 1980, women weren´t allowed in cantinas so the urinal was in plain sight of the bar. For some reason, this cantina decided to maintain it that way. Fine by me.
Massive indoor area with everything you could ever want for sale: leather, art, food, clothing, furniture, shoes, etc...
There was also a big section with cows, horses, goats, and other animals for sale. This was the section of fighting roosters for sale. They had to have cardboard separators between their cages so that they didn't see each other or they would go crazy.
I took the Ferris wheel by myself. Selfie! It cost $2 so I felt like I had to. Once I got up there, I realized that I was about 8 stories up on some sketchy Mexican amusement park ride and I got nervous. Luckily I survived.
To set the record straight, Mexicans don't eat burritos (except in the North). They don't even know how to eat burritos. This is demonstrated by this sign I saw at the fair instructing users on how to properly eat a burrito.
I saw this attraction at the fair and I had to take a picture because a) it looks super awesome and fun for a little kid, and b) for liability reasons, it will never ever exist in the US.
Other random thoughts:
Recently discovered the molcajete. It´s basically a bunch of meat, cactus, cheese, and onion bathed in salsa verde inside of a giant hot lava rock cup. It is the best thing ever.
At least I´m not the only one frustrated at work. One of the Fulbrights said that at work they spend over an hour trying to build a shoe tower.
Window washing was already sketchy in the US, but in Mexico they don´t even use those little carts. They just straight up rappel down and wash the windows.
Super Bowl:
I´ve finally come to terms with the outcome from the Super Bowl. Unfortunately, I bet the trainer at my gym 150 burpees on the game, so now I have to do 150 burpees. Fortunately, I´ve been giving this particular trainer the slip, but eventually I´ll have to pay.
Even Mexicans didn't understand that play call. But whatever, it's fine. I'm over it.
