Anatila spent her childhood in her mother’s traveling circus. The Circo Rivero went from one pueblo to another performing to crowds of enthusiastic working people throughout Mexico. Sometimes they went to places with no real roads and travelled to remote towns on horseback.
Anatila started performing when she was five. She and her sister Margarita danced barefoot on shards of broken glass. She says that if you approach it with no fear, the glass doesn’t cut you. Both girls were also trapeze artists and contortionists.
Anatila levitating
| Anatila at 13 |
When she was seven, Anatila became an animal handler. The Circo owned one solitary monkey, Pancho, who was her responsibility, As she gave him a bath one day, he escaped into a tree, and she climbed the tree and grabbed him by the “hand.” The monkey, outraged at losing his new-found freedom, bit her. She pulled him out of the tree and bit him back (gently). She says Pancho was easier to work with after that.
To Anatila’s relief, the circus disbanded when she was fourteen and she lived peacefully in Mexico City for some years with her grandparents, attending good schools and wearing a uniform rather than a pink tutu.
Anatila worked in Cancun when it was just getting off the ground, hiring employees for hotel chains. It was hard to get fresh food or medications and there were few stores. Everyone worked crazy hours. One of the high points was that most of the people there were men. “It was fun,” she said.
Anatila’s beloved sister Socorro had moved to Merida in the 80s and Anatila moved here in the 90s. Tragically, Socorro died of cancer, but Anatila remained here and eventually started teaching English to local kids and Spanish to visitors.
Recently, she became the local coordinator for a British organization called Original Volunteers and connects the volunteers with agencies here that need them. She also teaches on a full schedule and is raising her beautiful teen-age granddaughter, Gita.
We asked Anatila to comment on some of the issues confronting foreigners settling in Merida. With a wide smile, she says that it’s important to remember that “Mexico is a subjunctive country.” To understand Mexico, Anatila says, you have to learn to think in the subjunctive mood. The subjunctive is defined by Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary as “designating or of that mood of a verb used to express condition, hypothesis, contingency, possibility, etc., rather than to state an actual fact: distinguished from imperative, indicative.”
The subjunctive is often used to express hope or doubt. This grammatical construction is more commonly used in Spanish than in English and indicates a true cultural difference in thinking. For example, people often tell us they will be at our houses at certain times, but the subtlety of their language, which many of us miss, indicates that this is not the concrete statement we think it is. Thus, the cultural choque.
Anatila observes that foreigners sometimes get frustrated, for instance, at what appears to them to be a lack of commitment on the part of service providers. She says that if we could think in terms like, “If the albenil should come today…” rather than, “The albenil is coming today,” we would start to understand the rhythm of Mexico.
Anatila has come a long way from the five-year-old in spangly tights swinging on a wooden trapeze in the tiny pueblos of Mexico fifty years ago.