Driving around Austin (in itself a change from Jaumave, where I walk almost everywhere I go, Jesse strapped to my back) what I see everywhere is the shininess, the money. Four dollars for a coffee at Starbucks, mansions lit with huge displays of lights, last-minute gifts that cost more than a day's wage down here. My friends, mostly "poor" creative types like us, buying CD's and dinner out, shopping at Whole Foods—twelve dollars for a chicken. Driving everywhere we go, the asphalt paving the way between where we are and where we want to get to. White Jaguars and trim black Volvos scoot by me—not once do I see the type of car I've grown used to in Jaumave, patched with primer, its engine chugging a little as it lumbers by me down the dusty road.

In Minnesota, it's snowmobile culture and the after-Christmas sales, a fire in the fireplace, big meals of ham and pumpkin pie. Outside, it's frosty white and the horses wait to be fed. I feel the insulated warmth of a life that I always thought of as simply 'middle-class' but that I now recognize as absolute luxury.

Then we come back to Mexico. After four or five trips to and from the States, I'm a little dulled to the shock of crossing the border from moneyed Texas into the battered brutality of Reynosa—that dustiest of towns, the road lined with homemade signs scrawled on sheets of dirty plywood. Leaving Reynosa, we drive down between mountain ranges, past grazing goats and a landscape of scrub that's slowly turning from summer green to winter grey. We come back. Back to the quiet. Back to the place where whole families gather under the porch roof to sit in old chairs and eat homemade tostadas, kids playing in the dust at their feet.

My temptation, at least on paper, is to want to simplify and idealize: to characterize the United States as mercenary and media-driven, glutted with excess and ingratitude, in contrast with these small-town Mexicans who have "chosen a simple life." I want to see us "Americans" as thoroughly and always unhappy in our compulsion for more things; I want to believe that the Mexicans, overall, are happier in their relative poverty than we are in our wealth. But there's no simple moral here: it's possible that most people in Jaumave would love to drive a shiny SUV and wear Abercrombie and Fitch. And an abundance of possessions can sometimes be a blessing, not always a curse. And it's probable that the proportion of happiness to sadness is the same here as anywhere else. The difference, the contrast, is not so much between people's natures as between their circumstances. And me? I get to experience two sets of circumstances, straddle the line between two cultures. It's my hope to glean the best of both worlds.