Getting away is often a good idea, be it a girls-only day out, a weekend without the kids, or just a quick jaunt up the trail. Sometimes that getting away will be something a bit longer, a vacation of some sort, a date to mark on your calendar. It breaks routines, shatters your rhythm in a good way, and gives you a chance to basically think about nothing, at least nothing at home. It's a chance to finally relax both physically and mentally, which is something many of us do far less than we should. And so it was that we found ourselves sitting at the malecón in Ajijic, the concrete walkway at the edge of a smallish town outside of Guadalajara, Mexico (the word "malecón" generally means a stone embankment), people-watching locals and ex-pats on their lazy Saturday stroll. The open-air market vendors were hawking their wares, the luckier ones having already locked a booth inside the gardened-grounds of the non-profit
. The jewelry, clothes, art, and fresh fruit & veggies of the local vendors were as varied as they were beautiful, but seemed minor when compared to the vendors who worked their way up and down the streets and sidewalks --the musicians, the three-wheeled bicycles filled with tamales, the weathered man loaded with a Gordian knot-like tangle of baskets, the sellers of woven blankets, juices, and traditional cookies that were as big as a slice of Texas toast-- all of them trying to reach the locals and those like us who had come here to just "get away." And we were far from alone...
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| The road from Guadaljara to Lakw Chapala |
Ajijic and the Lake Chapala area currently plays host to "the largest concentration of US ex-pats in the world," according to
International Living. What's up with that? Estimates range that from 20-24,000 ex-pats come or are here in the winter months, a number which drops to about half that in the summer months. The year-round temperate climate here causes many ex-pat sites to consider this area a good place to retire; with restaurants relatively cheap (a nice dinner, including drinks and a 20% tip, will average around $20-25 USD*) and annual property taxes on a $300,000 home only being about $400, it's easy to see why so many Americans and Canadians are willing to face the long drive down, or the somewhat expensive costs of flying down in order to come for a week or a month or perhaps even longer (a flight to the entry-city of Guadalajara in the high-season would be about the same price as a flight to Hawaii).
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| A dish of seafood in a white sauce runs about $12 USD |
My wife and I were here because our friends had graciously invited us to stay with them for a week. They had earlier helped their friends settle into a rest home here (a large converted home, really, but with an expansive setting overlooking the lake), a facility far more personal (fewer than 8 occupants of which 99% are foreigners because in general, Mexico is so family oriented that elderly relatives are generally cared for at home and not placed in a "facility"), a professional staff (most of the "care workers" are registered nurses), and far less expensive (often about 20% of the cost of memory care in the US). Our friends had gotten their friends settled, fell in love with the town, and soon decided to buy a second home here themselves (home prices in the Ajijic area run between $90,000 and up to well above $3.5 million on the real estate "guide" books that line the town; that said many homes are $<200,000). Add in that a housekeeper here will cost you about $35 a week for 2 days a week of cleaning, with a gardener running about the same, and for our friends it seemed a good chance for them to plunge into the ex-pat world.
The lake itself --the largest inland body of water in Mexico-- may not be the crystal clear waters our cab driver remembered as a child (the lake is now considered polluted and considered relatively unsafe for swimming due to industrial and agricultural runoff from cities higher up), but is still a nice site through the haze (the air is also cloudy much of the time for the same reasons, including smoke from the burning of sugar cane). But as with so many places my wife and I have been fortunate enough to visit, the beauty of a place comes down to two simple things: your attitude towards it and the people there. To a person, my wife and I witnessed the feeling of family everywhere, at least from the locals...in restaurants, on the malecon (where weekends see far more locals than ex-pats, in my opinion), in stores (the local liquor store threw in two bottles of beer when I left saying, "you try, it's free!"). Others help you with your Spanish (the police officers I asked for directions had as much trouble with their English as I did with my Spanish but we all got it figured out and all with a laugh) and before long it is easy to find yourself easily swept into the lifestyle: the ladies on the malecon being caught into a quick half step passing music that snared them, the children giggling away, the people on crutches or in wheelchairs or riding bikes, all seeming happy to just be out, the impromptu Spanish and music that came at you from all directions, the wandering collarless dogs which appeared far from hungry, and not an angry person in sight as if all would continue to be right on this day.
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| Men on horses regularly come through the streets of Ajijic on weekends |
Part of this cheery outlook of course was that other than having a brief bit of exhaustion we had managed to avoid the dreaded Montezuma's revenge, the nickname for stomach sickness after drinking tap water in Mexico or anywhere south of "the border." Sanitation and filtering has improved of course, since many restaurants and clubs now purify their water (in this city, the well water has been fine so far). But this didn't mean that we were careless -- we washed our hands often, and drank bottled water for the most part (even many of the smaller hotel rooms have a purified water dispenser inside; and if not a liter of bottled water costs less than 50 cents at most stores). We felt comfortable ordering salads and having ice in our drinks; after all, how can you not have a margarita while here, especially since most places offer 10 or more varieties of the drink including ones flavored with tamarind (really?) We were still being cautious because although such symptoms from untreated water are often caused by bacteria (other worldly nicknames include Delhi Belly and the Nile Runs), I had just finished a review in
The New Yorker about parasites:
"It has been said that every species of animal is either a parasite or a host," the authors write (citing the book,
Parasites)
. "Among all known animals, there are more species that live as parasites than are free-living."...Among three parasitic infections that affect humans, a large portion are caused by various species of nematodes, a phylum of worms. Nematodes account for four-fifths of all animal species and are so plentiful that, the authors write, one could "line them up end to end and have nematodes in every meter across our entire galaxy." Hmm, guzzling down beers and such while down here, I couldn't help but wonder if it was me who was the parasite, a tourista parasite? But that thought vanished as quickly as it came and I ordered another cerveza...
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| Workers hand-repairing on of the many cobblestone street sections |
Mexico itself has been through a lot when it comes to history. The
DK Eyewitness book of Mexico summed up their early history as one with conquest after conquest as if the myriad rulers and civilizations couldn't really decide what was going to be best for "the people." Montezuma himself was but one of the many rulers that followed such civilizations as the Olmecs, the Maya, and the Toltecs (which is where Mexico got its name, "mexica" meaning "of Toltec culture" -- Montezuma's reign as a ruler would follow with the Aztecs). Then from Spain came Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro Altamirano, or as most history books name him,
Hernando Cortéz. With only about 500 soldiers, he would use cunning and smooth talking to win over native allies, and within 3 years, had finally defeated the internally-fighting Aztecs and brought Mexico under Spain's rule (some 75 years later, Spain would have brought over so many black slaves that Mexico held the largest African slave population in the Americas). But less than 2 centuries later, after both Spain and France were ousted, fighting in Mexico continued only now it was between the church and the state: "30 presidents in the 50 years following Mexican independence," said the book. Santa Ana, Bonito Juarez, Francisco Madero, Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa. "By the end of the revolution," the book continued, "violent conflict had touched almost every part of Mexico. Over a million people had died or left the country, the currency had collapsed, and Mexico's infrastructure was in tatters." But as if to mark how much of history had again changed, jump to present Mexico City and find it just over hundred thousand people shy of becoming the 4th most populous city in the world, according to
Wikipedia.
As to the ex-pats, this "search" for a home in another country is one taking place all over the world but primarily is one being done by those in the Anglo world, those few who are financially and physically able to choose where they may want to move, whether temporarily or permanently...Costa Rica, Portugal, Ecuador, Indonesia. Ex-pat magazines and web pages are now plentiful with choices, as are the primarily Anglo realtors who follow the burgeoning market of senior retirees (for the most part) along like flies, many of those realtors former ex-pats themselves who had moved earlier. But for much of the rest of the non-Anglo world such choices to move are anything but optional. Said Bill McKibben in
The New York Review of Books:
Human beings, according to Jen-Christian Svenning, a Danish academic whom von Brackel (one of the authors being reviewed) quotes at some length, have concentrated themselves for at least the past six thousand years in a "surprisingly narrow belt" of the planet, centered around an average temperature of thirteen degrees Celcius, or about fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit, and with relatively low humidity: much of North America, Western and Southern Europe, the Middle East, eastern China, Japan. This is the "temperate to Mediterranean zone," and it's appealing because "small-scale farmers can work outdoors without suffering from excessive heat or cold"...the bigger problem is that much of the world that is already hotter than average will become lethally hot. Less than one percent of the planet's surface has an average temperature higher than twenty-nine degrees Celsius, or eighty-four degrees Fahrenheit; at the moment that's mostly in the Sahara region. But computer modeling shows that within fifty years those kinds of temperatures could be common in most of the tropics, an area projected to be home to 3.5 billion people. Living there will become borderline impossible -- it will be too hot to work outdoors. McKibben cites another book that says rice farmers in Vietnam are already "planting at night with headlamps to avoid dangerous heat." For Mexico and other ex-pat tropical low-cost getaways, this may only add to those leaving their native homes because they don't have a choice. Added McKibben:
The UN's High Commissioner for Refugees reported in late May that the world, for the first time in recorded history, had 100 million forcibly displaced people. Of those who were set on the move in the previous year, "conflict and violence" accounted for 14.4 million, and "weather-related events" accounted for more: 23.7 million...These numbers are enormous -- 100 million is more than the population of, say, Germany or Turkey or Vietnam. But they are a small fraction of what we can expect as temperatures rise: the International Organization for Migration has predicted that we could see 1.5 billion people forced from their homes by 2050. One of the talks I attended while here was by an ex-pat who has lived here for 7 years and has been extensively trying to immerse herself into the community. She was trying to tell the attentive crowd (primarily seniors with not a "local" in sight, at least that I could see within the gated walls where she was speaking), was that hidden beneath the food and smiles and low prices and lifestyle that was proving so attractive, there was something much bigger...a culture, and that it was THAT which we visitors and tourists and ex-pats should welcome and adjust to and not attempt to change. Family, cooperation, social norms, and a willingness to participate should all be embraced even if they often contrasted with our more "first-world" views of individualism, and confrontation, and go-go-go attitudes; mellow or eliminate those thoughts while here, she expressed, especially if one chooses to move here. Her summary was that while here, consider this a land of siestas and fiestas but in a good way, for here was a land where people followed natural circadian rhythms and enjoyed family and celebrations...and wasn't that what most of us strove for? Here, deep in their culture, was a beIief to "be" vs. "do" in life, that it was important to find early on in life what it is that you really want to be working towards. Such an outlook was echoed by Anthony Grafton in a review in
The London Review of Books:
David Henkin (citing the book,
Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are)
sets out to discover how Americans became such creatures of the seven-day week. By the time the United States was founded as an independent republic, he writes, North Americans were already ‘by the contemporary standards of Europe ... particularly apt to follow the seven-day cycle’. Henkin makes clear that there is no obvious reason for the existence of the week, much less for its omnipresence in modern societies. Americans used both the Julian and the Gregorian calendars, the former until the mid-18th century and the latter afterwards. Both employ solar years that average 365 ¼ days (the Julian) or a little less (the Gregorian year), which can’t be divided evenly by seven...Why then do we use this odd system to cut the year into its smallest units? More important, why did we use it to divide our lived time into days of different kinds, until the decline of blue laws, the rise of the internet and the illimitable dominion of Covid overran these boundaries? McKibben wrote that the
books he reviewed noted similar thoughts, that immigrants to any country should not be viewed as "invasive species" nor should they be "burdened with the expectation of performing gratitude." When NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Act) came into being, wrote Mckibben:
...more than a million Mexican farmers were forced into bankruptcy within a decade, while corn exports from the US to Mexico increased 323 percent. This flood of cheap corn particularly damaged indigenous communities that were both economically and culturally dependent on a crop first domesticated on their lands. "Millions of Indigenous people, farmers, peasants, and [villagers] from rural areas were dispossessed and then proletariatized into low-wage factory and farm work," Walia writes (Harsha Walia, author of
Border and Rule)
. Employment in the maquiladora factories along the border "exploded by 86 percent within the first five years of NAFTA," in cities that soon became deadly for women; 90 percent of these factories were US-owned, and they "set the de facto wage floor for manufacturing across the continent," costing 700,000 factory jobs in America. It's easy to see how this simultaneously drives migration pressure in Mexico and brews resentment north of the border. We were visiting at a good time since such political tensions were down from some years ago, although a few shops still featured such mugs and tee shirts with anti-Trump sentiments such as "Dump the Turd on November 3rd" and "Flash -- Mexico Will Pay for the Impeachment" (back in his days of campaigning Trump was quoted as saying "I want nothing to do with Mexico other than to build an impenetrable wall and stop them from ripping off us!"). Then Covid hit and from what we had heard, many ex-pats ended up stuck here for far longer than they had planned and later decided to move back to the US. Still, it was hard for my wife and I to not feel that we were once again the "ugly" Americans, here to take advantage of low wages and prices by putting more into our bellies than into the community. "But they NEED our money," was the common refrain, similar to that of so many areas dependent on tourism (including Hawaii); but we had witnessed this hint of local resentment before in Scotland some decades back, a time when Londoners flush with money began buying up homes, land, and sometimes even castles, because they were so cheap when compared to the prices in England, all of which raised the prices of homes in Scotland and soon priced out locals who were trying to save for a place to start raising a family. I had a nagging feeling that even with a $10 tip, a local person working hard here in Ajijic would have a difficult time saving enough for a down payment if home prices continued climbing ever higher. These are general observations of course, and all from my biased US view. Not all locals likely feel this way, nor do all ex-pats. Indeed, the expats whom we met were happy, generous (in a sense), and willing to learn at least a little "restaurant" Spanish. Quiero or quiciera? Bueno or bien?
So what was or is the compromise or perhaps even the solution? As a tourist here for only a week perhaps one answer was to simply change my attitude, to feel that a centuries-old culture would prove stronger than the arrival of a few thousand foreigners year after year, but also that what those foreigners brought could be beneficial, be it in talent or monies or their differing viewpoints...and I had to ask if we should we be having that same attitude when foreigners visit or move to our own country? The speaker I had heard ended her talk with a quote from Mark Twain:
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime. My wife and I loved our visit, but truth be told we had decided that the prospect of moving here, at least here in Ajijic, wasn't for us despite the fact that we loved the food, the gaiety, and the people. We tried to immerse ourselves into those here and indeed met a number of wonderful people; and it wasn't that just wanted to explore other places (although there is still much we want to see) but rather that we wanted to take more time to dig deeper into our own heads and to try and figure out what or where our future is headed. Do we move somewhere?...definitely (our current home has a LOT of stairs and well, we are getting older). Do we move out of the country?... hmm. As we age we have to think of our mobility some years hence, the state of our mental health (as if we could predict such a thing), the climate that will suit us (never thought that I'd say it but I am growing tired of the ice and snow), the highways growing more crowded and perhaps more difficult to navigate (several of our freeways already have 5 lanes in each direction), the polluted air already starting to emerge from the drying Salt Lake (now just 34% of its original size), the water situation (despite heavy snowfall this year our state is still considered to be in a drought), and the stress of a rapidly increasing population...and those thoughts are about both where I live now and where we may want to live some 2 or 3 years hence. Hmm, I'm beginning to sound not only like a snow bird but like an ex-pat. And maybe those same concerns are in the minds of some of the locals here in Ajijic...
So I end with the closing notes of author Kristy Hamilton who I had mentioned in the last post: Rebuilding a better world may take slowing down and recognizing that speed at the cost of atmospheric destruction is not the price we want to pay. There is rebellion in choosing to turn from the speed of our hectic lives and refocus our eyes. To recognize with humble curiosity the myriad creatures around us, all bound by an equalizing bond: the unstoppable momentum of being finite on this Earth. After all, laying the foundation for a better future isn't just about the birth of an idea or place; it's about choosing where we want to go...Our species is still young, trying to find its footing in a chaotic world, but we need to grow and acknowledge that this youthful stage is unsustainable. It is asking the hard questions to create a lasting, or at least more meaningful, existence. And while author Hamilton concluded her book by asking why Nature has made little use of what may arguably be humankind's greatest invention, the wheel, maybe it's time for me to ask myself when is the time to shift my life into just "being." Intentando! Senor, un otra margarita, por favor!
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