Hay Mas Tiempo Que Vida*

*Time is longer than life. Meaning: time is going to keep on going forever but we're not, so let's focus on quality. No me fregues! Get off my case, dude!

A common complaint of the gring@ abroad, particularly when paseando in the Americas, is that "people in country X have no respect for time." This manifests itself daily in irritated and confused exchanges. So what if the restaurant is closing in a half hour, why is the waiter refusing to make me a coffee that I will pay him for? Why are these people debating whether or not their store is open? Why is she taking so long to deal with one customer, can't she see there are people waiting in line? Ponete pilas! Let's go already! Why did she arrive an hour late to the meeting? Why is there no written bus schedule in the terminal?

Time is beloved and feared by American culture. We fetishize it, bowing to its wishes, rolling it around our tongues in myriad idioms, cutting it into smaller and smaller chunks, our technology addiction striving to eliminate the line between need and gratification, capture and communication.

"Those people are so lazy" is the gringa's lazy minded, non-reflective reaction. But upon any amount of reflection, it's clear that like any cultural institution, there is a historical reason for these different conceptions of time. While the notion that time matters is ingrained in American DNA, it is not shared by most of the world. Because the notion that time is worth something is a capitalist one, a product of industrial society, where minimizing the time to do one task maximizes profits. Attending to time generates something. Such a standard could only exist in societies with relatively robust employment (by global standards people, I know it's far from a rosy picture out there) and are  where (mostly) it's not so unbearably hot, or else nature has been put in her place, pacified by armies of heaters and air conditioners.

A society where time matters less is shaped by an entirely different set of conditions.  Where a several hundred year labor history would feature exploited peasant laborers, or worse, slaves, for whom stealing time from the patron was one of the few "weapons of the weak" available to undermine the savagery of the system. Where transportation is slow, unreliable, comically crowded. Where unemployment/underemployment figures run to a dismal 50%, what is your time worth really? Where best case scenarios of present day salaried employment are likely to generate a couple hundred dollars a month. For a 16 year old boy, unemployed, with limited education, whose day consists of sitting in the park, waiting for something to happen, there literally is no opportunity cost, because there is no opportunity for gain in sight. Being in a rush would presume having a place to be rushing to. Therefore, opportunity costs are calculated in ganas, willingness, because chances are what little will be gained by rushing or working extra hard will probably not be worth it. "I don't wanna" is a halfway decent reason. Especially if it's ungodly hot out. Hay mas tiempo que vida.

Women, particularly, don't assign monetary value to their time. And why would they? A Marxist Feminist analysis of the situation of the majority of women would conclude that they are exploited because their massive efforts to maintain their household are not compensated directly, but merely with enough means to continue them in perpetuity. The cultural system of machismo assigns a labor cost of $0 to women's work in the home and cleverly demands this labor by defining women through these labors and reifying the image of the obedient wife and mother. While women might see opportunity costs, ie by doing this action I can't do other things, they have little reason to include money in these calculations. My host mom, for example, sells frozen juice treats, helados, out of our home. She claims it pays for her electricity bill every month but the significant amount of time she spends in this endeavor (buying fruit, cleaning it, blending it, mixing it with water and sugar, sometimes cooking it, measuring, pouring and knotting) would make it completely infeasible were she to have salaried employment.

So understandably, there are tensions when these world views meet, particularly because American exceptionalism is drilled into us and it's hard to break free of the notion that our system of doing things is better, context be damned. But there is also a beautiful fluidity to life in the hay mas tiempo que vida lane that can be reached if only, just only, the must-do-it-NOW mindset can be turned off for a second.