Time stops in Mexico. Every December my brother and I accompany my dad on a two-day drive through the Nogales border in Arizona, through to Sonora, then Sinaloa, the long highway is broken up by small pueblos, with cracked streets and a town center with a church that looks like the church from the town before. We stop by wood-pitched vendor stands for sliced mangos con sal y limón. “Quieres chile? Echale tantito,” dad teases. But I shy away from it.

Luis Miguel plays on the cassette deck, and I try to keep my eyes open to keep my dad awake while my brother sleeps in the back camper. The hot days feel short and our lives in California are miles away and insignificant, but the cold nights drag on and our knees feel stiff and I’m reminded that hours are ticking closer to daylight each time my dad’s Timex watch beeps. We’re just a few hours closer to Tamazula—a small town of 14,121 in Jalisco, where my Dad and his 13 siblings grew up. I always feel safer when the moon is out, as if it’s my dad’s headlight keeping him awake.

In Tamazula, my uncles are preparing their trucks for the day at work but are in no rush. My uncle Juan Luis kisses my aunt Claudia goodbye. After breakfast, we drive out to dad’s sugarcane fields.

Burning sugarcane mixes with the petroleum smell from dad’s Toyota. The sun is hot overhead and I sluggishly step out of the truck while he slashes down dried up stems, looking for bugs. His worries of working to save up money are gone, and the immediacy of this moment is the only thing that matters. He chops one down with a machete and peels it open for me. I bite into it and chew out its sweetness.

The only things that mark change here: what once was a metal foundation is now a home that my uncles built, my boy cousins are growing facial hair and new bars are open in the town square. Even Don Pancho, the ice cream man, looks exactly like he did when I first ate a vanilla cone with chocolate syrup 16 years ago.

“Aqui, uno nunca tiene tiempo,” Dad grumbles looking across the yellow field. Working long hours to save up to build his house in Mexico has left scars on his hands and tired. I understand now why my father always says that Western culture is about work and time. Before the invention of the first mechanical clock 700 years ago, ancient cultures used incense or sundials to measure time. But it wasn’t until the industrial revolution that the United States shifted from natural time to clock time.

In the 1860s, American towns had different local times. A train would stay on the time from the town it left even as it traveled to towns with different solar times, making it confusing. Railroads stretched across U.S. towns in 53 different local solar times before times zones were reduced to the current four.

Charles Dowd, a “co-principal” at what today is known as Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, was the first person to propose time zones to the U.S. railway. He was denied approval but in 1918 William Allen’s similar proposal was accepted.

Mexico followed suit in 1922, but life remains leisurely in Tamazula. According to Luiz Barbosa, a global sociology professor at SF State, technology quickens America’s pace.

“With capitalism there is an emphasis on time—time means money. It’s a commodity,” Barbosa says. “Time became a way to quantify how much labor was being provided.”

Our predominant perception of time is as a commodity, we can’t waste it—we have to use it wisely, which means less time for leisure. Barbosa says that smaller agricultural towns have less technology and aren’t influenced by the clock as much as we are.

Around noon, the mini-market down the street from my grandma’s house, my stepmother’s family ferreteria (hardware store) and the tortilla shop close for lunch. There’s only one restaurant in town and even it closes.

My uncles Renato, Juan Luis and Poncho drive back from Tamazula to my Aunt Claudia’s house in Soyatlan for lunch. They spend the hour talking and then decide not to go back to work.

“There are cultural differences of time, but no one system is better than the other,” says Barbosa.

There are a few Internet cafés in Tamazula where residents go to check email, but it’s such a simple town that there is no hurry or concern to save time like there is in California.

“We use technology to save time, but email [for example] creates a time problem rather than solves it,” says Larry Kroeker, SF State psychology professor. “People spend hours replying and sending emails when a personal exchange would be better.”

Today I live in San Francisco and deadlines predominate my schedule. In California, I enjoy the structure of meeting deadlines, sending emails and making lists, but I’m caught between trying to balance work and leisure. December is overwhelming with trying to finish up finals, cutting corners, scrambling to figure out whether I’m flying home or not, or if I can afford to take time off work to go to Mexico—December just doesn’t feel like a haven anymore.

According to Jessica Fielder, an SF State astronomy lecturer, “In Western culture we have all these illusions of shaping, using and molding time, but it’s going to pass no matter what we do.”

My eyes feel cold and fatigued not because of a long drive, but from staring at a computer screen. It’s been three years since I’ve gone back to Mexico, I need to go back as a reminder that time only exists on my wrist.