|
JOHN SCHERBER AN AMERICAN VOICE IN MEXICO HOW WE CAME TO MEXICO It started on the beaches, both in Ixtapa, on the Pacific coast, and Playa del Carmen on the Gulf. In the 90s we began to come down for a week at Christmas break with the kids. They thought it was Mexico. While it was certainly a great winter vacation place, we thought Mexico might better be found in the old colonial cities of the interior. Not that I had ever cared. I had spent an afternoon in Tijuana when I was in college, and I didn’t return for 35 years. Eventually, it seemed to me that all of Latin America had fallen off the map. The North American continent came to an abrupt end at Laredo––there was nothing but water between there and Antarctica. When I wanted a vacation, I went to Europe. But as the millennium approached, the dollar was no more than wallpaper in France and Italy, and that gave reason to look at Latin America again for a place to move to once the kids left home. The old colonial cities proved to be what we were looking for. But which one? San Miguel de Allende had a substantial expatriate community, something like 10% of a population of 75,000, the kind of infrastructure that made it possible to find out quickly how to settle in. It was centrally located, and at 6400 feet, the climate was moderate, although it was on the same latitude as Havana. Coming from Minnesota, we already knew that we didn’t want to live in a place we felt we had to leave for part of the year for climate reasons. This was why we rejected Mérida in the Yucatan. It was a town we both liked better than San Miguel, but the climate was nothing short of tropical, and we didn’t want to live with air conditioning. After the five-month annual entrapment of the Minnesota winters, we were ready to live outdoors. Querétaro was attractive and clean, but too large. The lake community at Chapala, south of Guadalajara, was too staid, too retired, although the climate was plausible. Guanajuato, a quirky and charming college town and state capital, lacked much of an expatriate community, which we felt might be important in coping with the transition and having a good social life afterward. We didn’t expect to be accepted in middle class Mexican society. Oaxaca looked good to me, but not as good to my wife, Kristine. Mexico City, full of marvelous attractions, was out of the question because of its unmanageable size. Our moment came in 2007. By then we had known for some time that the choice was San Miguel. We had made seven visits and looked at a lot of houses. By then, while the Minnesota real estate market was what had been described to us as “soft,” it was not yet quicksand, and we were able to sell our house in June of 2007 for what we hoped to get, and we escaped the coming slide. Not that we knew it was coming. We had chosen that moment to leave not because we were smart, but because the kids had left home and it was time. Armed with a purchase agreement we’d signed the night before we left, we arrived in San Miguel in June of 2007 and began to seriously look at a handful of houses we’d been tracking on the Internet. The market was slow here too, and it wasn’t hard to make a deal we could live with. We went home after a week and began to get ready to leave the U.S. Our Mexico closing was scheduled for October 15. After seven or eight months of living in Mexico I began to realize that there were changes going on in my head. Some of them were surprising, and I wasn’t able to explain them. I felt it had something to do with hundreds of small daily encounters with the culture, the people, the urban environment. All of them were new and different. Each day brought a series of minute incremental changes that could easily be overlooked if you never took a couple of step back to get a longer view. One night during a dinner party at our casa, I posed a question. “Why are we here?” Some took this as existential in nature, others religious. It was neither. “No,” I said. “Why are we living in Mexico, here in San Miguel de Allende?” What followed was an unconnected rush of explanations, none of which resembled the others. There were six guests present, besides the two of us, and they gave six reasons for coming, six ways of now looking at the U.S., six theories on how much connection with American culture was needed or desirable. None of them were like ours. The obvious conclusion was that there was a unique story for every expatriate––a story not just slightly different, but often radically different. Furthermore, each person seemed eager to tell his version. Here was food for thought. All I had to do to understand what I was going through, was to ask others what they had gone through, and judging from the response at my dinner table, they wouldn’t be shy about telling me. Not everything they said would connect to my experience, but I sensed that the sum of what they might say about theirs would at least illuminate mine. Was there possibly a book in this? It would be a way that people who were contemplating, or even only fantasizing, about such a move, could get inside the heads of people who had pulled it off. Unfortunately, I hadn’t written any nonfiction in 40 years. I wasn’t even sure that I believed nonfiction really existed, but that’s another story. PLEASE VISIT MY WEBSITE AT: www.sanmiguelallendebooks.com
Related Articles -
Retire, dream, San Miguel, expatriate, Mexico,
|
