At our wedding, my husband and I danced with a turkey. His sisters tossed plastic colanders, ladles, dish driers, and buckets into the upstretched arms of revelers; we performed la vibora de la mar, in which we clung to wooden chairs and the stiffened shoulders of relatives while a snake of guests writhed around and tried to topple us. We also grooved disco-style, in that mezcal-drunk, so-painful-to-view-later-on-video American way, to “Stayin’ Alive.” Our guests were a mix of indigenous and mestizo Mexicans and Midwestern Americans, and our ceremony was in both English and Spanish. It was the official merging of our families and cultures, just before we moved from Oaxaca to Pittsburgh so that I could begin graduate school.
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