Daniela En Mexico City
By: Daniela Velázquez
Tags: Expat Life, Mexico, Cdmx, Women Traveler, Travel

Era como un leap de fé.

Como “Emily in Paris.”

Except my name is Daniela. And I work in public relations. And by ancestral inspiration, faith, and a little bit of moxie, I asked to live in Mexico City for three months. And the universe said yes.

Really. I woke up one morning in March and my first thought was: “I need to go to Mexico.”

“What?”

“You need to go to Mexico.”

“Que locura es esta?” I said to myself.

And so the adventure for the adventure started. I texted my friend, Diego, a Paraguayan native and my Latino Brother From Another Mother who always makes me work to get in a word during our fast-paced conversations.

“Go,” he said to me. “Learning Spanish is a game changer for you.”

Then, I started to think about it as I looked around my one-bedroom apartment in St. Louis. The knowledge I’d have my second Moderna vaccination in my arm by the end of the day emboldened me. The world was still WFH (working from home) with the pandemic, and, well, what better time to go than now? I didn’t know anyone in Mexico City, but I’d fallen in love with it when I visited in 2018. My phone plan worked. It was in the same time zone and the sprawling, cosmopolitan city had fast internet and Airbnbs to rent. What else would I need?

The truth is, I’d been dreaming about an international adventure most of my life, but just never had the guts — or ganas — to follow through on actually leaving for an extended period of time. And during the pandemic, I’d swapped my wanderlust for Spanish-language soap operas. It also helped me learn the language.

Last summer, I stumbled on La Reina del Sur, the hit novela that has inspired the English version of “Queen of the South” on the USA Network. Except Kate del Castillo’s version of Teresa Mendoza had way more gusto for me than the English version. She was raw, naively in love (been there, not with a narcotraficante, but…) and later found herself in danger. She was fierce and compassionate, even as she was fighting classism and the patriarchy. She took me to Spain, Morocco, Gibraltar — and I found myself learning about geography and culture I was never taught about in school. Teresa was successful because she did things her way.

During that time, I would take walks around Tower Grove Park in the summer evenings, listening to Latin pop music on my headphones, thinking about what if I were walking through the Bosque de Chapultepec, instead of TGP? What would it feel like? Smell like? What if those tropical looking-flowers could transport me to another place?

When I think about my wanderlust, I remember I am a child of the diaspora. I am connected to lands far away. I know that part of my life’s purpose is to reconnect to the language, the land and the traditions of the diaspora — including Puerto Rico, Latin America and Africa. My ancestors know this. In the roots of these cultures, it is understood that we stand on the shoulders of the ones who came before us. If we listen, they are here, trying to guide us with love and the lessons they learned so we don’t have to repeat them.

I recently learned my Abuela Lila had taken her pentecostal ministry to Guatemala in the 1970s. My cousin, Myra, lived in Mexico City for a couple of years in the 90s to work on her Spanish. And my sister took a six-month sabbatical to learn Spanish and travel across the Caribbean and Latin America in the early 2000s.

While my adventure may seem novel(a), I’m really just on track with my ancestral mission.

In short: I’d been dreaming about adventures afar. And yeah, they were inspired by some fictional chingonas. But as the heroine of my own story/novela/comedy-drama, I decided it was time for me to finally commit to learning Spanish, and taking the adult study abroad trip I’d wanted, but never knew how to make happen — or had the tetas to ask for — until this year.

Era como un leap de fé. Y por fin brinque.