Blanche Kameny !

Lillian Blanche Kameny

Jason Peters

ENGL 134

31 October 2018

Electricity: A Cultural Divide

The past few months, the circular, industrial light in my bedroom has been broken. Either

a fuse blew or some mystical voodoo magic occurred that resulted in a never-on light. I

eventually bought some lights and have not thought about my broken light since then. Of course,

before I bought the lights, there was one, painfully long evening where I had no lighting in my

room besides the sad, bright blue glow from my phone and laptop. The entire night I was

agonizing over how dark it was. I couldn’t read anything. I couldn’t play piano. The only thing I

could do was go to bed, and hope to find replacement lights as soon as possible the next day. At

least I could still charge my phone and plug in my speaker to listen to music. After this evening

where I was held prisoner in the darkness, I could not help but think about how unequipped I was

to face any event in which electricity ceased to be available. In America, electricity is as natural

as air—there are always outlets and lighting wherever you go. Not having an outlet or a light to

turn on is simply unthinkable—it’s impossible.

Oralia Kameny, my aunt who immigrated from Mexico, grew up in the small village of

Tenango Villanueva in the state Zacatecas. She, unlike me, was familiar with the feeling of no

access to electricity. On the farmland she and her family lived on, there was one room with dirt

floors and a tiny window—this is where they all slept. Outside, there was a cooking area shielded

from the elements with only a tarp. Scattered around their yard were farm animals: a chicken
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coop, a few pigs, a donkey, a cow, and a horse. There was no access to electricity or gas, so

cooking was done with wood fires on the hearth and oil lamps were used during the dawn and

dusk. With no electricity, or gas, Oralia’s life, and her parents work, was centered around the sun.

Oralia’s father did intense, manual labor out in the fields from sunup to sundown. Oralia, being a

child, would sometimes help her mother with milking the cow, but mostly entertained herself

during the day by simply playing in their open, natural land. Life without plugs or outlets was

based mostly around their jobs, both around the house and in the fields, which had no true need

for electricity.

Despite the lack of electricity in Tenango, Mexico itself was not without power. The very

first electrical plant in Mexico was developed in the city Leon, in the state of Guanajuato, in

1879 to fuel textile and mining industries. Due to the limited amount of electricity produced,

there was no urgency for rural electrification (Carreón 1). In an effort to electrify underdeveloped

areas with no promise of profit for service providers, the “Comision Federal de Electricidad” was

passed in 1937 (Carreón 5). Despite this legislation, lack of interest towards rural electrification

remained well into the 1960s, when Oralia’s time in the rural town, Tenango, was punctuated by

the absence of electricity. Much of the electricity produced in Mexico during the 19th and 20th

centuries was spread throughout more industrialized and populated cities, like Mexico City. Now,

in 2018, there are sixty homes registered in Tenango Villanueva—where Oralia was born. Only a

few homes have no floors and there are no remaining homes with only a single room, like

Oralia’s childhood home (Giovannelli). And, while Oralia didn’t have electricity in the 1970s,

100% of the homes in Tenango Villanueva today have access to electricity.

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While the development of electricity in Mexico was slow-moving, America had been

rapidly electrifying towns and cities. In 1879, the same year Mexico received its first electrical

plant, that America first utilized street lighting in Cleveland, Ohio (Administrator). As Mexico

was attempting to provide the very beginnings of electricity to industries, America had already

moved beyond industrial energy and was instead focused on commercial use, and free

distribution, of electricity via streetlights. By 1925, half of all homes in America were using

electricity on a daily basis (“The Electric Light System”). However, similar to Mexico, the

electrification of rural areas in America was largely ignored. It wasn’t until ten years later, in

1936, when the Rural Electrification Act (REA) as passed as part of President Roosevelt’s New

Deal legislation. Not only did the REA pass, advisors were sent to those rural areas in order to

educate new consumers about how to use their new power (Wallace). Electrification in America,

even in the rural areas, proved to be a success; by the early 1970s, “98% of all the farms in the

United States had electric service.” (Sanchez). So, while Oralia and her family grew up

throughout the 1970s in Tenango with no electricity, her family’s American counterparts—rural

Southern or Midwest farmers—had practically 100% access to electricity.

Eventually, Oralia, her two new brothers, and her parents moved from the village,

Tenango Villanueva, to the city Villanueva in the state of Zacatecas. In Villanueva, their house

was more akin to the types of houses we imagine here in the America. There were multiple

rooms, a bathroom (sometimes in the form of an outhouse), and an outdoor kitchen was still

common, though gas stoves were also present. Recalling her improved electrical conditions,

Oralia remembered “everything was very minimal. Very functional. You didn’t have fancy light

fixtures—you had a lightbulb in a room.” Functional lighting fixtures were also provided by the
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city in the form of streetlights—something absent in provincial Tenango. Another small town

that Oralia moved to, Jiquilpan, in the state Michoacán, also had electricity based on necessity

rather than artistic designs. Larger cities, like Zacatecas City, the capitals the state of Zacatecas,

had been electrified years earlier, and it showed in their more ornate, stylized streetlamps.

In Mexico, especially in small towns, like Villanueva and Jiquilpan which had limited

amounts of electricity available, electricity meant far more than merely having lighting. Thus,

well-off people were more likely to have electricity than those with less resources. “It was a

status thing,” Oralia described, noting the cultural impacts of electricity. “If you didn’t have

electricity, and then suddenly you did, you were on the next level.” While electricity provided a

lens with which to view economic class, this was not the only impact it had on cultural norms;

quality of life and habits changed with access to electricity. Electricity expedited stay-at-home

mothers’ tasks around the home, thanks to appliances like washing machines or blenders. Gone

were the days of handwashing clothes or painstakingly chopping every single tomato and chile

for a salsa. Other appliances, like refrigerators, allowed the extension of food life, lowering the

amount of cooking necessary in a week. In larger cities, electrification enabled industrialization

in the form of factories, which gave consumers purchasing power to buy products en masse.

Those same stay-at-home mothers no longer needed to make tortillas by hand. Oralia describes

the significance of these factories: “A homemaker, didn’t have to make fresh tortillas anymore…

you [didn’t] have to grow the corn or make the masa… now they could go to the tortilleria…

[which] has electricity and can make hundreds of tortillas on the belt. And now you can just go

buy your bag of fresh tortillas.”

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After waiting eleven months in Villanueva, Oralia and her siblings finally crossed the

border and reunited with her mother, father, and new baby sister in Downtown LA. The first

thing she noticed was the abundance of light available at night, in the form of streetlights and

stoplights. To have lights, provided for free, throughout all hours of the night was eye-opening

for Oralia. She found that electricity in America was the exact opposite of Mexico; on its own, it

held no social value—everyone had access to electricity, not just those in the upper-class. These

differences Oralia noticed, in terms of cultural norms, remain today. Scrutiny of class is instead

based on whether or not your refrigerator has a screen or can dispense ice. Electronics are also

not purchased with the intent of more efficient living. Rather, they are based more on what

luxuries the appliance can offer. A washing machine, for instance, is not considered a

monumental purchase in America for most—many people already have access to washing

machines (either personal or a nearby laundromat). Instead, electronics like the home voice-

assistant Alexa or the newest, futuristic Bose stereo system are the major purchases for an

average person. Electricity doesn’t provide larger cities with any significant changes either.

Mexico’s electricity paved the way for factories in cities. But in America, having already gone

through industrialization in the early 1800 and 1900s, electricity currently does not provide cities

with opportunity beyond electrified billboards.

In Mexico, advancements in electricity resulted in significant shifts in cultural norms,

whether it be social status or improving life at home. In America today, electricity is so

ubiquitous, it is meaningless. Oralia has lived in America, with unlimited electricity, for over

forty years now. Despite having lived without electricity, or with constrained access, during her

childhood, she insightfully critiqued her own consciousness about electricity:

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It’s funny, I don’t miss it until it’s gone. I don’t think about it at all. But when electricity
goes down for an hour, for whatever reason, I’m like, ‘that’s okay. I can deal with this.
I’ll just go make a quesadilla. Oh crap, I can’t.’ Everything stops. You can’t function.
You think you can, because you have it, but as soon as you don’t have, you think, ‘I can’t
go anywhere.’ You feel this, almost anxiety.
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Works Cited

Administrator. “History of Electricity — A Timeline |”. The Historical Archive. THA New

Media LLC, 17 February 2007, http://www.thehistoricalarchive.com/happenings/57/the-

history-of-electricity-a-timeline/. 29 October 2018.

Blanche Kameny, Lillian. Personal interview. Accessed 26 October 2018.

Carreón-Rodriguez, Victor G., Armando Jimenez, and Juan Rosellón Diáz. The Mexican

Electricity Sector: Economic, Legal and Political Issues. Centro de Investigación y

Docencia Económicas, 2005.

“The Electric Light System”. National Park Service. U.S. Department of the Interior, n.d.,

https://www.nps.gov/edis/learn/kidsyouth/the-electric-light-system-phonograph-motion-

pictures.htm. Accessed 29 October 2018.

Giovannelli, Claudio. “Tenango Zacatecas (Villanueva) Town in Mexico”. Nuestro Mexico. N.p.,

n.d., http://www.en.nuestro-mexico.com/Zacatecas/Villanueva/Areas-de-menos-de-500-

habitantes/Tenango/. Accessed 29 October 2018.

Sanchez, Teodoro, and Tomas Tozicka. Energy for All 2030. European Commission External

Cooperation Programmes, February 2013.

Wallace, Harold D., Jr. “Power from the people: Rural Electrification brought more than lights”.

O Say Can You See? Stories from the National Museum of American History.

Smithsonian National Museum of American History Kenneth E. Behring Center, 12

February 2016, http://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/rural-electrification. Accessed 29

October 2018.