The guy from the last post

When David Smith, 34, from North Carolina goes to bed at night, he thinks about his new job as a timeshare promoter. He thinks about how if he won’t get any couples to go to the presentations he won’t get paid, and if he won’t get paid he and his girlfriend won’t have enough money for food. He thinks about that a lot, he says.

David came to Mexico in April, about three months ago, leaving everything behind: his job, his house, his car. Everything. “Everything I have is in those boxes in that room there” he says, pointing at a tiny bedroom in the small house of his girlfriend’s sister. “It’s like a bunch of horror movies and my little digital studio so I can do some recordings, for my music and all that. It’s all I have”.

They live in the sister’s house temporarily, only until their own house just next to it is finished. David’s nephew is building it. Well, it’s not really his nephew but David and his girlfriend have been living together for so long that it’s just about the same thing, David says. The girlfriend is also the reason David left his North Carolina for Mexico. They met about six years ago when they both worked for the same pork processing factory. They soon fell in love and not long after that they moved together in David’s house. But there was a problem: she was in the country illegally: “She never got in trouble with immigration or anything like that, but we went to some immigration lawyers and they told us that after the 9/11 incident they changed the law. It used to be that if you were in the country illegally you used to be able to marry an US citizen and pay a fine and you would be legalized. But that stopped because of the terrorism. And we didn’t know. It was around 2006 when we started trying to fix her papers, and we couldn’t do it so… we just saved up what a little bit of money we could and we came here, just to keep her from getting into trouble.”

We are sitting in the village of Los Mezcales; his girlfriend is resting in the hammock while three of his nephew’s four children play on the dirt floor. Loud Mexican banda music coming from the neighbors.

Back home he used to be a bass player in an underground death metal band and says he’s thinking about starting another one down here, but that it’s hard to find musicians playing something else than Banda: “I love Mexico, but I hate the music,” he says.

After being here for just over three months he is still thinking about what he left behind, but he’s not ready to go back just yet: “Well… I’m still sort of going through that homesick stage. I think that when I go home, when I land in the united states, I’m gonna kiss the ground. I love my country, I’m just not very happy with the government. Especially with the immigration issues. It’s like they are targeting the Hispanics… I mean, how many Hispanic terrorists have you really heard of? There aren’t any. They’re just there to work. At least here I don’t have to worry about looking over my shoulder to see if immigration is coming to get my girlfriend. At least now we‘re free”.

But freedom has a price and David has to work hard on his new job as a timeshare promoter to make ends meet: “Most of the time I think about my job. You know. I’m just trying to think about… how can I perform my job. It’s a commission job. If I don’t get couples to go the presentations I don’t get paid. And if I don’t get paid,” he says nodding towards his girlfriend in the hammock, “me and her loose our bellies. I really think a lot about that.”