In Mexico, I'm taller than almost everyone (six feet, or 1.86 meters). I'm also slow, lanky and lunkish. In New York, on the other hand, I'm quick and I move with style. When I stand up I stand out in Mexico, and when I hunch down I'm condescending. I get laughed at when I swat myself in the face with low-hanging branches, or when I have to walk doubled over in the street markets under low-slung tarpaulins.

I have less hair in Mexico. In fact, I'm one of few skinheads here. Black culture isn't very popular and everyone thinks people with shaved heads are anti-Mexican racists, so the fashion hasn't really caught on. When I walk into a barbershop, everyone gets nervous, as if I can only be there to rob them. Kids stop their mothers on the street to point at the pelon (which literally means peeled, though it's also another word for dick), and ficheras (women you pay to dance with you in salsa clubs) ask why I would want to make myself look so ugly. But then there are certain girls, hip girls, who can't keep their hands off my shinehead and who think rubbing my dome gives them good luck. They make it all worthwhile.

I'm also whiter in Mexico-- though there are enough white Mexicans, blue- or green-eyed, freckles even, that at certain parties I'm the darkest and the poorest. Like the party I went to in one of the fanciest neighborhoods where everyone was white and wealthy except the servants and the members of the blues band from Chicago who were flown down to perform and then flown back the following day.