Interviewer: At some point- what happens after you run for La Raza Unida state representative? Maria Jiménez: Well after I run, I leave for Mexico. Well, during this period- for over five years- I was in a relationship with someone from Mexico. A leftist from Mexico. I decided that I should accept his proposal of marriage because I already had him waiting for 5 years. For me it was a good transition because by the time I said yes, I realized that I had advanced in ideology to understanding that is was the capitalist system that created the inequities so it did not matter I was, Africa, Mexico, it was the same system so it had to be flawed. I accepted the proposal to get married. He was a Mexican immigrant. All of his family was here but he did not like living in the United States. So a friend of his offered him a position in Mexico so we left and went to Mexico. Interviewer: What happens when you arrive in Mexico? Maria Jiménez: Well, I have to relearn everything. I am in mostly leftist circles. There were different splits within the Mexican left. I had to understand them, I had to get into the study of Marxism, etc. Also, begin to understand my own experience within that context. I began to participate with the student movement at that time which was extremely radical. I began to work as an English teacher at one of the high schools in Sinaloa. That was dominated by sectarian political views. I remember the first big fall out between the teachers. There was a teachers meeting and when I arrived one of the first things a teacher asked me was did you bring you arm. I said “what arm?” There was a shoot out. They were really violent experiences at that particular university, and it was sectarian. It was a time swim because some of the teachers would actually shoot at each other because of ideological differences. Assassinate each other. It was a complication situation. As an outsider coming into leftist Mexican politics, I had to relearn a lot of things. And sometimes the violence that was expressed in the political scenes in Mexico. The total control of the press by the Mexican government and institutions of Mexico. That is kind of blurred over when you live in the states, especially our generation who were so discriminated against for being Mexican. Over here we had a very “idealized” view of being Mexico and the government is the same as the people, which is not the case when you are there. Interviewer: What was the name of the university you worked for? Maria Jiménez: La Universidad Torma de Sinaloa. In Mexico there was a student movement that was very much grew in La Universidad Torma de Sinaloa call Movimiento Infermos because Lenin in the work he does he talks about this analysis. So he says some of the sectarian “sick”- los infermos. This group adopted the name- Movimiento Los Infermos which was a very sectarian group. We had a whole vision of the university as a factory and the students as the proletariat. It was a- I remember my first few meetings- the teachers they went to a whole Marxist analysis about buying the paper clips, and buying the paper and the students reigned. The students picked the teachers. The students hired the teachers. The students- I do not know how many times I – we had sort of a lab for the English classes- I do not know how many time the students actually locked us into the rooms. You could never know. I saw the students after a meeting tear teachers cars apart, pouncing on it. I remember that I usually took the bus but if I took the family car I had to park it six blocks away because you never knew. It was just a chaotic and violent scene. I had to learn to teach with it. But at the same time the circles, my ex-husband belonged to they were the more traditional leftist circles, So I got to understand the gamut of the spectrum. Then, to figure out who had the correct view or who was not and what that meant and what all the different shades that reflected Latin American were about.