Crossing Cultures

by Alison Nemes Moncayo ’98

It was a magical night in Ecuador. The salsa music didn’t stop, the bride was radiant, and the lights of the Andean capital were spread out along the valley below the hotel’s top-floor windows. At the end of the evening, when the popular music gave way to traditional dances, the women moved into a circle around the men, who circled the groom while he got down on one knee and saluted his new wife. As a former anthropology student at Centre, I was fascinated with the display. It was the most incredible wedding I’d ever been to, not least because it was mine.

Like so many other alumni, I met my husband through Centre, although we never walked through the Quad (when it was the Quad) or kissed on the steps of Old Centre. My first memory of his hometown is from 1997, walking out of the airport in Quito to be besieged by small dark men offering to carry luggage and children selling gum, then riding through a city half in darkness because of roving blackouts. For almost a month, I was mesmerized with the rest of our winter-term group by the sights and sounds of this tiny Latin American treasure, savoring both nights in the jungle and brilliant blue afternoons among the Andean volcanoes. After a semester in Europe the year before, the poverty in South America was shocking to me, but the open kindness of the Ecuadorian people was even more striking.

Three years later, following a second trip to Ecuador during graduate school, I had a party for a friend who was soon going home to Quito. She invited a fellow Ecuadorian who had been in her English class at UK. Her friend turned out to be a handsome engineer named Javier, who also happened to be an amazing dancer.

When Javier went home to Quito three months later, and things were suddenly serious, some people questioned my decision to be involved with a “foreigner.” He speaks Spanish; I speak English. He’s from a developing country, and I’m from America. Two o’clock to me means two o’clock, while to him it means, oh, some time after three. I was told—and part of me was afraid—that melding two cultures was too difficult, that one of us would be an outsider wherever we went. We could never really understand each other, and wasn’t understanding what marriage was all about?

The thing is, South Americans consider themselves Americans, too. We are just North Americans, here in the United States.

I thought back to my anthropology classes and the enthusiasm I felt for absorbing new ideas and cultures, especially while traveling abroad three years in a row with Centre. I thought of the tolerance and openness I learned as a child from my parents and grandparents. I thought about Javier’s niece and nephew, the products of an Ecuadorian-U.S. marriage, who are beautiful, bilingual, and loved unconditionally on two continents. Mostly I thought about my enamorado, who truly has a heart of gold.

So five years ago we had two weddings, one in Quito and one in Kentucky. He gave up his career and moved here while I finished school. He’s found new friends, new jobs, and a new life. My family adores him, and I think his family are some of the most wonderful people on the planet. It hasn’t been without difficulties, but besides each of us learning another language, the biggest culture shock in our marriage is that he’s a morning person and I most definitely am not.

Now landing in Quito is almost as familiar as going to my hometown of Louisville. I step out of the new modern airport and breathe the familiar thin, cool, high-altitude air. We race to hug family with tears in our eyes and pile our luggage into tiny cars, then head to my in-laws’ home, where more hugs and news and lots of salsa music await us. The hotel where we got married is now an office building, but we sometimes drive past just to look up and remember. The lights of Quito, however, are as beautiful as ever.

Learning about and experiencing other cultures in college made me see a world, not just outside Kentucky, but outside the U.S.-
centric way of thinking that most of us grow up with. My time at Centre opened my life and my mind to new ideas and peoples. I never realized that in the end it would open up my heart as well.

Alison Nemes Moncayo ’98 is a pediatrician with the White House Clinics. She and her husband, Javier, live in Richmond, Ky.

—D.F.J.

Back to Summer 2007

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