Amor y Odio

A stab at ethnography #6

I did two things for the first time today, Sunday, one of them surely for the last time also. A student from IU South-East sent me an e-mail message yesterday inviting me to join her for church services today, and like an idiot (“I am not an idiot, I am afflicted by idiocy”) I accepted. This morning I went to the Centro Cristiano (CC) de Cuernavaca at noon and met her and two members of the family she is staying with, a mother and her grown-up son, a man in his forties. The señora told me she has seven children and, so far, eleven grandchildren. Sombrero! Chelsey, the IUS student, is a nice young woman with too much goo curling her eyelashes. I asked her what denomination the church was (it was obviously not Catholic) and she told me “Christian”; at that point I should have said “muchas gracias” and fled, but I managed to convince myself that I was pretending to be an anthropologist and that, for once, I would observe dispassionately a gathering of a cultural group. My admiration for anthropologists has grown; I found it nearly impossible to be scientifically dispassionate in a “Christian” church.