Isla Mujeres
During spring break of 2018, I took a trip with some family friends to Isla Mujeres, which is a small island off the coast of Cancun, Mexico. Before leaving for this trip, I thought about how I could use this leisurely trip to impact my life back home in snowy Minnesota, especially as part of the MSU Honor's Program! I became proficient in the Spanish language throughout high school by taking up through College Spanish II before I graduated and had been practicing ever since. I decided to give myself a goal for this trip: speak in as much Spanish as possible while at Isla Mujeres! I knew this would be a lot easier said than done, however.
We landed in Mexico very early in the morning and had to endure a lot of transportation in order to make it to our resort on the Island. Throughout this process, I was able to communicate with drivers and other people on the streets to better help us get where we needed to be, or sometimes even just find the nearest restroom! This process was very difficult, but through the language and gestures, we were able to make it where we needed to be! Throughout the week, I spoke with many local people on the resort and around the island. Sometimes people spoke about their lives and tried to sell us trinkets. Sometimes we needed to order food and drinks at a local restaurant. And sometimes we needed to simply tell the staff we needed a few extra towels.
I learned a lot about this new culture and about how difficult it truly is to live in someone else's culture and communicate efficiently with them. There were times where I struggled, but this experience overall helped me to become more aware of myself in another culture, ask questions about that culture, and communicate efficiently with people in that culture.
I believe that this experience helped me meet 'communication' levels 2-4. I met level 2 because I was quickly able to discover differences between verbal and non-verbal communication back home compared to verbal and non-verbal communication here. For example, in MN, English is spoken slower with lots of hand gestures and body language. In Isla Mujeres, Spanish was spoken very rapidly and aggressively, with lots of facial expressions. Spanish speaking people had different ‘slang’ sayings, body movements/gestures, and volume/tone of inflection – which definitely represented their loud, vibrant and beautiful culture well. I also was able to compare this experience with my other experiences in different locations of Spanish speaking people from other trips. The ‘slang’ sayings and accents differed from location to location, so even though they all speak Spanish, there is still a small barrier between different groups of people in this culture.
I met level 3 throughout the trip because I was able to practice more and more of my Spanish language skills and began to get the hang of their fast-paced language via conversations with workers at the resort when ordering food, and local people on the island telling me about places I should visit. One of the issues I began to realize was that many English-speaking people simply didn’t give the time of day to try to listen to the people on the island because they were impatient and angry that they did not also speak English. I personally witnessed rude demeanors towards some of the local people regarding this issue.
I met level 4 because I was able to learn some of the complex ideologies that underly the relations between people and the languages they speak. I learned that communication styles were majorly dependent upon the acute culture that I was surrounded by. At the resort specifically, I was a tourist. Many of the employees knew at least a bit of the English language (or more) because they needed to be able to communicate with their guests to provide the best stay possible in the interest of the resort’s economic benefit. However, when I traveled to the main Island, I found myself more in the culture of the local people. Some of the small business owners/workers did not speak any English because they interacted with many more local people, rather than tourists that generally stayed more at the resort end only. This proved to be quite a complex language dynamic once I thought about it more; even though I was the guest staying in a foreign country mostly at the resort, many of the native people still spoke English in their daily life, even though it was not their first language. This showed a relationship between language and economic gain/status. I was able to draw new connections like this and realize that even though I was in a foreign culture, there were even further subdivisions of culture between groups of people there that had different daily experiences or motives, like their work.