The New Laurita Gordita

Lessons in cross-cultural relations and body image: the adventures of Ali La Grande in Argentina.

In 2005, I spent a semester abroad in Buenos Aires. It was marked by moments of introspection and steps towards self-knowledge, identity crises, label-shedding, and also moments in which many Argentines took the liberty of giving me one very constant label of their own. Grande. Large. Big. As a nineteen year old girl, it was difficult to hear that word associated with me, especially since for women, at least in the U.S., large usually connotes fat. I considered my self esteem to be in a generally good place, especially for a teenage girl, and due to the fact that I had spent most of my life on a swim team, my body never really had time to gain much fat, and thus if people in the U.S. commented on my body (which they rarely did, because we don't talk about those things to people's faces in my culture), they would usually use words like ''very tall,'' ''slender,'' and sometimes, ''muscular.''  I never worried about whether I was portly or not. Until Buenos Aires. People loved to comment on how grande I was. My sheer size delighted people. The cute little boutiques of Palermo Viejo, with their delicately-patterned sundresses hanging in the window, generally carried one or two sizes, the larger one typically being a dress that might fit around one of my calves. The petite ladies behind the counters would often eye me up and down and tell me straight up that they didn't think they carried anything for people as grande as I was. Grande became a large part of my identity while I was down there, and it definitely messed with my mind for a little while.

I'm back in Argentina, and luckily this time I'm a lot more comfortable with the state of my body and the relativity of the word grande. Good thing, because the grandes have been flying at me left and right, along with their sister word, gordita (fatty, chubby) and occasionally, grueso (thick). The family here on the farm is delighted with my size, especially because they had a volunteer here a couple of years ago named Laura, who apparently was my identical twin when she arrived on the farm. They love to talk about Laura because of the massive amounts of weight she lost during her five month stint here. Apparently, she requested a special diet of only vegetables and the occasional fruit: no bread, no flour at all, no sugar, no dairy [no fun] in order to cure a mysterious stomach parasite that she had self-diagnosed herself. Since Laura spent so much time here, and because she underwent such a drastic transformation, the family loves to talk about her. ''Laura was so much like you,'' they say, ''when she arrived. Gordita, white, with a body muy grueso, grande, grande, but after five months, she was tan and very thin! Cured!'' Gordita, just like you. Yep.

Now, I must be fair and state that, down here, gordita is also a term of endearment. It is often used for little babies, and sometimes has nothing to do with how much blubber someone actually has. Also, the only two permanent (non volunteer) women on this farm, Mariel and her mother, Amparo, are not exactly typical representations of the female body. They are both barely five feet tall, eat raw fruits and vegetables as their only source of sustenance, and so their frames resemble Somalian 8 year old boys much more than, say, 30 and 60 year old Argentine women, respectively. If they are the norm, then I'll take grande, please. So, on this trip, grande has become my friend. It reminds me that I am a robust, strong, tall woman who loves her fruits and veggies but who has also been known to consume a bottle of red wine, an entire loaf of country bread, and a big chunk of Vermont cheese in one sitting. Maybe my body would be ''healthier'' (and less grande) if I never ate those evil foods. But they taste so good, and to me, food always has and always will be more than just sustenance for the body--there's a strong spiritual and emotional component there, too. I think I've rambled on enough about what food is to me in my last post, though, so I'll just leave it at that for now. Plus, my grande fingers have more to type.

I've been in sort of a reflective place this past week, especially since I am nearing the end (I fly back home in about a month). I have been thinking about one of the last nights I spent at home before embarking on this voyage, outside, dusk, in my parents' back yard with my family and a few friends, sitting around our wood burning stove, roasting marshmallows and seeking refuge from the mosquitos. Suddenly, a large, hard-shelled flying insect kamakazed itself at full-speed into my head, became tangled in my hair, and stutter-buzzed around in the net it had formed as I shrieked and clawed at my head, searching my scalp for that vile creature so that I could chuck it as far away from me as possible. My whole family just watched, then laughed at me and started to tease me, ''Really, Al, you're going to go live in the countryside of various South American nations, and this is your reaction to a New England beetle?'' I was flustered and frustrated because I knew they had a point. I had never been much of a lover of insects, and that was a theme I had chosen not to think about until that moment. But I also knew that part of the reason I was doing this trip was to be more at peace with nature--I knew that in the tropics of Colombia, which was my first stop, I'd have no choice not to adapt, fast.

I used to flinch and twitch when the sound of buzzing insect wings flew by my ear. I'd get this tic, snap my head to the side, earside down, with the shoulder below it rising immediately to reach it, kind of like a one-sided shoulder shrug with an added head-tilt. It was an immediate, automatic reaction, usually accompanied by swatting at whatever caused the sound, or, if it was a bee or wasp, a quick freeze and sucking in of breath until it flew by me. I secretly hated that part of me; I didn't want to be that person who wanted to save planet earth but was okay with the extermination of any biting or stinging or crawly insects.

And so recently, I came to the realization that I no longer do that flinch and twitch. I don't know when the change happened, but I was squatting along a line of pumpkins and zucchini, severing them from their vines with a knife, when I realized that there was a general hum of flies and other flying friends around my head, and I hadn't even heard them until I took a moment to stop and actively listen to the sounds around me. I don't even hear them anymore. And bees? Not a problem. If they're inside the flower of a plant I'm also working with, I can work around them without the rapid increase in heart palpitation that used to accompany that situation.

Okay, so wasps still freak me out. They are larger than life down here, and they are mean. One attacked my friend Aurelia last week while she was minding her own business. If I see a large nest hanging from an apple tree, I run in the opposite direction. And I still smack mosquitos and paquitas, which are other nasty (but tiny) little blood-sucking beasts that bury their entire heads into your skin. But they're slow and stupid, and you can almost always slap them and kill them, which yields a satisfying blood smatter as well. Well, it's your own blood, but still, the image is carnal and statisfying. A proud fist-pump or war cry almost always follows.