On the other hand, nobody is framing the current Mexico City expat fad as the result of American schools promoting Spanish over French over the last 30 years.
All this anger and newspaper coverage over legal immigrants with money. Meanwhile tens of millions of illegals from Mexico not paying taxes and using welfare and charity services in the U.S. and we hear about how they are the backbone of America.
I hope millions of white Americans with some money move to Mexico and they get some of what they’re giving to us.
Bali is actually famous for the “Kuta Cowboys”, local Indonesian men, who cater to single Japanese women. German women seem to hit the beaches of Gambia.
Sure sounds like your standard white, credentialed but not overly financially successful, left of center, unfortunate in relationships lady that describes themselves as “fierce” and is a member of some type of girlboss club in the States. Obviously she’s not looking to shack up with a 70 percent Amerindian dude, she wants 100 percent Spanish ancestry although she probably cannot really articulate that.
Although easy to mock, this archetype is a big problem culturally and politically for us. This type of woman is alienated from mainstream culture (and totally unsympathetic to it), has walled herself off from the type of men that would make her a wife and mother, and won’t climb down from that because her “have it all” ethos is totally uncompromising.
More white-collar professions becoming majority female probably means more women tapping out around age 40 and moving to more genteel parts of the third world, since educated white-collar women are probably the most assortative maters of all.
It would be better if the cultural Overton window moved a bit so that careers and independence from others was less of an emphasis. I think one underdiscussed feature of our culture (as far as I can tell) is that women are far more susceptible to trend following, particularly now that it's disseminated through social media, and the lifestyle promoted by a lot of outlets is just totally unrealistic but they buy into it anyway. Just on my personal social media like Facebook when I know a lot of these people somewhat to fairly well, women are far more likely to project a curated image to the world about their lives and a lot of it has to do with their (fierce) independence and career orientation, not so much about relationships or kids.
The culture says to white collar women that a) focus on your career first, b) fully indulge in me-centric activities, c) be uncompromising when it comes to men. These women are suddenly deep into their 30s and have a substantially depleted dating pool and an identity that is too centered around their work. This is the Mexico City emigree demographic, and unfortunately they often take all that pent up energy/disappointment and put it into status signaling activities like progressive politics.
Just my theory anyway. I know several women that fit into this bucket and this seems to be the general arc. Fortunately one or two has found a man in her 40s that appears to be an actual life partner, but kids are no longer a possibility and they seem to know what they've lost. It's better than the alternative but still sad.
Boy, two back-to-back excellent comments on the social dynamics of this trend, Boulevardier.
You keep rolling out really solid well written hit-the-nail-on-the-head comments here. To my mind you've established yourself the top quality commenter here. Good stuff.
Thanks! This just happens to be a subject where I have people in my life that fits this subject to t. I hope Steve’s Substack commenter base continues to grow, as I really enjoyed the comments section at Unz. Obviously some folks have migrated over here like yourself and it’s fun to have that continuity and I enjoy interacting with you and everyone else. Lots of people with experience and perspective I don’t have.
If your only experience of Mexicans is in dealing with the paisas we've imported by the millions then it's truly shocking to meet members of the middle and upper middle class there
Florida is a pretty popular destination for Iberian and castizo immigrants from Central and South America. My impression, based admittedly on only a few encounters, is they think they are God's gift to the US.
Having lived and worked in politics in Florida, I have known some really decent members of this class, too. I don't include Rubio. But some older Cuban expats, like my Deacon in Ruskin whose father owned a Tampa cigar factory, are among those who helped me understand the ever-present creep of communism.
Sadly, as with most immigrant nationalities fleeing chaos or collectivism, a very substantial percentage of the children of Cubans who fled Castro are leftists fully committed to the privileges DEI affords them, whether they're rich Portugese-descent Mexicans or Brahmin millionaires from India's .001%.
I had the privilege years ago to spend an evening with one of the two Bay of Pig fighters who were returned to the U.S. because they were teens at the time. He told me that all the old anti-Castro radio stations in Miami had disappeared. I think the pendulum has swung back a bit since then.
Well, since I'm part Polish on my Dad's side, and I've been to Warsaw, I'd recommend the ladies go there. I don't have a line into the romantic proclivities of Polish men, but the people I encountered were friendly and reasonably gregarious (though not sure how much me being an American contributed to that). This tracks with my family in that my Dad and Grandma (the Polish lineage) were extroverted and gregarious, unlike the more taciturn Scots-Irish/English side of my Mom.
Plus, though its been rebuilt from WWII destruction, it has that European architectural charm that some may like. Polish food can be tasty, though much of it is standard European meat, vegetables and bread fare, so I think the culinary tradition would not be a big factor in drawing American lady expats.
Interesting that the Poles are considered (along with the Irish, Italians and Jews) one of the more well-known non-British origin European ethnic groups that were part of the late19th/early 20th century Ellis Island immigrant wave. The Polish guy in the multi-ethnic 20th century male team is a staple of movie and TV culture.
The last time I was in Mexico City (December 2024) I saw nothing consistent with the OP or with the NYT within the OP, but then that city is enormous. But the very next month I visited the capital of the southern Baja state (whose name I always confuse: are these Baja California and Baja California Sur, Baja California Norte and Baja California, or Baja and Bajísima?) and there I did find written evidence of resentment at expats. A flyer taped to a lamppost (is that ominous?) groused in Spanish that the average Mexican had to work hard for years to get a mortgage, yet here were North Americans swooping right in and buying outright the same properties. Not only that but “utilizing Mexican natural resources,” which I guess means these foreigners drink the water rather than bring their own. There was further complaint about rents getting too high and an entreaty to the Mexican government to help Mexicans. Followed by ¡No a la Gentrificación! In case you wondered what the Spanish word was. Finally, and in perfectly clear English: “And if you, gringo, cannot understand this, at least learn a decent amount of Spanish to get by. Remember, you are in our country, not USA.”
This thing really was wordy. I photographed it. It was a collector’s item, being as this was only the second time I had ever seen in Latin America the word “gringo.” (The first time was in a Brazilian newspaper in the 1980s.)
I don't think many NYT readers understand differences in tradtional Mexican social roles between wives and mistresses. Or maybe they do, and that is part of the allure. For example, the same woman might object to getting pregnant by someone else's husband in the US, but see it as part of foreign romance in Mexico.
Anyway, I think Mexico has a DEI allure. Poland doesn't. So I would imagine that liberals would be pro-Mexico and MAGAs pro-Poland.
This story has little to do with Mexico. Other than it is sunnier and poorer than the US.
The driver here is the ability of the American economy--the actually productive part and the money printing part--to provide essentially welfare to huge swathes of American women. (I doubt very much that more than a handful of these women actually do anything that is of interest/value to actual Mexicans.) And that for huge swathes of American women that's enough--travel, drinking wine, eating out, chatting with friends. As long as there are men out there doing the *actual* work to keep the $$$ flowing ... they're fine! They're "living" and have pics for their instagram. (And true across the rest of the West as well.)
The West is dying in a smart phone amplified estrogenic ooze. Millions of women just full of themselves--and narratively compliant opinions--but complete failures at doing the single important thing that women are clearly superior to men at, and the only thing women do that civilization depends upon.
My vague take is there some sanity pushback toward traditionalism among an increasing fraction young women. But the mainstream cultural ethos still encourages female silliness and dysfunction. And the traditionalists recovery among younger (white/American/Western) women is simply overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the immivasion.
The West is in deep, deep shit. Worse I think than even us iSteve readers have fully come to terms with.
"The West is dying in a smart phone amplified estrogenic ooze. Millions of women just full of themselves--and narratively compliant opinions--but complete failures at doing the single important thing that women are clearly superior to men at, and the only thing women do that civilization depends upon."
Steve for what it’s worth, I learned you can give overriding personality instructions to ChatGPT and greatly reduce the obsequiousness.
Insert this text into the custom instructions section under personalization: You are an expert who double checks things, you are skeptical and you do research. I am not always right. Neither are you, but we both strive for accuracy.
The trailer for Roma was pretty inconclusive so I looked up the plot. The film seems pretty emblematic of how American elites think of Meso-Americans when they think of them at all: loyal, cheap, speak when spoken to, and can keep your household clean and organized!
Picture a Southern planter dressed up like Harlan Sanders gloating over his negro foreman, Rufus, and you get the general idea.
I like the subplot about student activists versed in critical theory lining up in disciplined, South Korea-style rows versus Cleo letting her cartel minion boyfriend into the house as part of a scheme to kidnap young Pepe.
Anyway, now that Mexico has affluent liberal-minded girlbosses in residence, including a real life liberal girlboss President, and architects, surgeons, jet flight, secular democracy, and other modern trappings we can tell all the fake refugees to stay put south of the Rio.
A very different type of expat is the topic of a great recent documentary, The Anarchists. It is about those who reside along the "leftitarian" cusp (libertarian-leftist, though the libertarians are more naive about the arrangement). If political orientation is like the shape of a clock, as I believe, this would be high noon, or midnight, where radical anarcho-Marxist truthers meet Reason Magazine-type sex, drugs, open borders and truther bitcoin types. Matt Taibbi wrote a good book about them. Maine pseudo-working class, anarcho-communist, self-proclaimed ANTIFA paramilitary founder, trust fund millionaire, pretend oyster farmer Senatorial candidate Graham Platner is a good example of the type, though I don't know if he has personal ties to any of these groups besides ANTIFA.
It's unsurprising that Platner is from New England. This mixed-up political island of lost toys got its start with Porcfest in New Hampshire and similar events on the northwest coast, culminating in a group relocation to start an "anarcho-capitalist" and "anarcho-communist" community of expats in Mexico, loosely organized around the annual Anarchapulco event, which turned out just about as well as one might expect.
For open-borders anarchists, the participants are very dependent on staying behind high gates in the tourist security zones, and they mostly seem like people with comfortable, non-bitcoin trust funds to fall back on to flee back to the States when the anarchist part of anarchy inevitably descends into anarchy. I imagine the ladies featured in the Times do the same when their Mexi-Goop nirvana fails to produce a Mexican male-feminist Antonio Banderas style boyfriend.
Mexico was the most bewildering country I’ve ever visited. I was there at the turn of the century to climb volcanoes. One of our party was the son of a surgeon of very high repute who had made his nut in the US, then returned to his home place.
We were invited to a wedding there. It was the most spectacular wedding I’ve ever been to, just completely elegant. I was sat next to maybe the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in person. We danced to a live band. We ate filet and drank champagne.
Two days later, we drove out of Mexico City through the surrounding shanty towns. In the hills to the south we bought coffee from a roadside stand for .25 a cup. That was the entire livelihood for those people.
If you’ve ever seen Man on Fire, that gives a decent sense of the dynamic there.
And their miserable poor get pushed into the U.S. as their safety valve. If the poor peasants of Mexico actually stayed there there’s be revolution in Mexico. We are subsidizing the upper class of Mexico by not deporting their proles. Every Mexican president has advocates leg for citizenship for their illegals in the U.S. they really don’t want their own people back.
Poverty, injustice, over breeding, overpopulation, suffering, oppression, military rule, squalor, torture, terror, massacre: these ancient evils feed and breed on one another in synergistic symbiosis. To break the cycles of pain at least two new forces are required: social equity - and birth control. Population control. Our Hispanic neighbors are groping toward this discovery. If we truly wish to help them we must stop meddling in their domestic troubles and permit them to carry out the social, political, and moral revolution which is both necessary and inevitable.
Or if we must meddle, as we have always done, let us meddle for a change in a constructive way. Stop every campesino at our southern border, give him a handgun, a good rifle, and a case of ammunition, and send him home. He will know what to do with our gifts and good wishes. The people know who their enemies are.
(1) Not knowing the local social hierarchy is exactly the appeal of Mexico. Many young people living in big cities after college realize very clearly what their place in the American social hierarchy is and understandably find it a depressing revelation. No prospects for ever affording a mortgage on a family home, ergo no prospects of settling down and having a family. If that's the deal, why live it out in a place in which you understand your class position with pellucid, soul-destroying clarity? Much better to move to a place where not having a home and a family is a bohemian adventure, everyone is sort of vague about social standing, and the local hierarchy is -- for a few years at least -- opaque enough to you that you feel like a winner (eventually you'll realize there are rich Mexicans your age with nice houses and young families in Mexico City, late stage expatness is as depressing as what you left, but that's a while away, and in the meantime, anything could happen)
(2) It's easy to be a feeble speaker of Spanish, and hard to be a feeble speaker of Polish, because of case endings. "I like coffee / I don't like coffee" or "it's on the table / it's under the table / it's beside the table": these simple distinctions require remembering distinct case endings in Polish, and if you get them wrong, people look at you with genuine puzzlement not "oh I get what you mean" unless they've been around a lot of second-language speakers of Polish (second-language speakers of Spanish are people every big city Latin American is familiar with). There is a big obstacle in your way in terms of more or less getting around as a newbie expat in Slavic vs. Romance languages even if both settings are cheaper than the place you left and fairly friendly.
Also, come on, no one vacations in Poland for the weather and the beaches.
This is a great comment, Kathleen; your first point especially is astute.
I'm a long-term (35+ years) expat/functional emigrant myself, and I've met lots and lots of other expats over the years.
Some expats find the upturning of social order and expectations they encounter when they move deeply disconcerting. They immediately strive to reorganize their lives in ways that feel comfortable to them, e.g. hanging out exclusively with other expats, and sussing out the inevitable home country-coded hierarchy these 'in this new world, but not of this new world' expats will have reestablished amongst themselves.
But it dawns on plenty of other expats that their new life invites them to 'reinvent' themselves. What you say about the liberation of being suddenly resituated in a completely different hierarchy is real and powerful. It can be exciting, and a lot of fun. But you're also right that sooner or later this approach runs out of steam. You can't really change who you are, and you'll never really fit into the social system in a foreign culture.
If you're okay with occupying a permanent 'liminal' place in a foreign social order -- like I am -- then you'll do fine. But I've seen quite a few burnout cases who deluded themselves over the years.
One of the things I've finally grasped over the last couple decades is the Hollyweird is really the essential actor in pushing minoritarianism and other anti-civilizational narratives--i.e. in destroying the West. We iSteve folks tend to be smart and aware so naturally look toward the nonsense spewed in our milieu--academia, elite media. But the ability of Hollyweird--hostile to "boring" "white bread" America--to leap over the natural "town walls" of socialization by family, friends, neighbors and insert their normie hostile narratives directly into people, and in the form of images that we perceive as "real" and evades the natural human "could be lying" b.s. detector has been the most powerful tool in destroying the West. (There is a lesson in there for any nation--do not allow your "cultural industry" to fall into the hands of hostile outgroups.)
The real story of Elizabeth Gilbert is far, far, far more entertaining and would actually be beneficial to for women to see.
She trades in a handsome, productive American husband and her channel-your-slut journey takes her to not Javier Bardem, but some much older ho-hum balding Brazilian guy with no particular skill set or earning power. She wants adventure travel, but he wants a green card
The ex-husband finds and marries a younger woman who appreciates him and gives him a couple kids. He is the standout winner in this story--along with the new wife.
Gilbert gets tired of the Brazilian guy, starts falling for one of her girlfriends and dumps the Brazilian to move in with her while she's dying of cancer. Then she's one to some other guy and another. None of them likely to last. Her life is basically a self-indulgent joke.
If I heard she was accusing Donald Trump of raping her back in some unspecified year of the mid-90s, I would not be surprised.
Turnabout is fair play.
Random thoughts:
"Thousands" is vague. How many thousands? At least the article didn't say "lots" or "plenty."
The article only mentions women. Are men doing the same? What about couples/families?
A big difference when it comes to Mexico vs. Poland is that it's much easier for an English speaker to learn Spanish than Polish.
Right.
On the other hand, nobody is framing the current Mexico City expat fad as the result of American schools promoting Spanish over French over the last 30 years.
"Not all Mexicans are pleased."
This sentence should not be in the NYT. You could never write the opposite so leave it out.
As for the number, it has to mean between 1 and 10 thousand. How do they know those foreign women moved there for a "life reset"?
All this anger and newspaper coverage over legal immigrants with money. Meanwhile tens of millions of illegals from Mexico not paying taxes and using welfare and charity services in the U.S. and we hear about how they are the backbone of America.
I hope millions of white Americans with some money move to Mexico and they get some of what they’re giving to us.
Bali is actually famous for the “Kuta Cowboys”, local Indonesian men, who cater to single Japanese women. German women seem to hit the beaches of Gambia.
Kuta Cowboys might impress Japanese women, but Julia Roberts needs Javier Bardem.
I must admit I never watched “Eat, Pray, Love.” Imagine that. So I can’t really comment. But I did watch “No Country for Old Men”
Sure sounds like your standard white, credentialed but not overly financially successful, left of center, unfortunate in relationships lady that describes themselves as “fierce” and is a member of some type of girlboss club in the States. Obviously she’s not looking to shack up with a 70 percent Amerindian dude, she wants 100 percent Spanish ancestry although she probably cannot really articulate that.
Although easy to mock, this archetype is a big problem culturally and politically for us. This type of woman is alienated from mainstream culture (and totally unsympathetic to it), has walled herself off from the type of men that would make her a wife and mother, and won’t climb down from that because her “have it all” ethos is totally uncompromising.
I guess we should encourage more of them to emigrate.
More white-collar professions becoming majority female probably means more women tapping out around age 40 and moving to more genteel parts of the third world, since educated white-collar women are probably the most assortative maters of all.
It would be better if the cultural Overton window moved a bit so that careers and independence from others was less of an emphasis. I think one underdiscussed feature of our culture (as far as I can tell) is that women are far more susceptible to trend following, particularly now that it's disseminated through social media, and the lifestyle promoted by a lot of outlets is just totally unrealistic but they buy into it anyway. Just on my personal social media like Facebook when I know a lot of these people somewhat to fairly well, women are far more likely to project a curated image to the world about their lives and a lot of it has to do with their (fierce) independence and career orientation, not so much about relationships or kids.
The culture says to white collar women that a) focus on your career first, b) fully indulge in me-centric activities, c) be uncompromising when it comes to men. These women are suddenly deep into their 30s and have a substantially depleted dating pool and an identity that is too centered around their work. This is the Mexico City emigree demographic, and unfortunately they often take all that pent up energy/disappointment and put it into status signaling activities like progressive politics.
Just my theory anyway. I know several women that fit into this bucket and this seems to be the general arc. Fortunately one or two has found a man in her 40s that appears to be an actual life partner, but kids are no longer a possibility and they seem to know what they've lost. It's better than the alternative but still sad.
Boy, two back-to-back excellent comments on the social dynamics of this trend, Boulevardier.
You keep rolling out really solid well written hit-the-nail-on-the-head comments here. To my mind you've established yourself the top quality commenter here. Good stuff.
Thanks! This just happens to be a subject where I have people in my life that fits this subject to t. I hope Steve’s Substack commenter base continues to grow, as I really enjoyed the comments section at Unz. Obviously some folks have migrated over here like yourself and it’s fun to have that continuity and I enjoy interacting with you and everyone else. Lots of people with experience and perspective I don’t have.
If your only experience of Mexicans is in dealing with the paisas we've imported by the millions then it's truly shocking to meet members of the middle and upper middle class there
Florida is a pretty popular destination for Iberian and castizo immigrants from Central and South America. My impression, based admittedly on only a few encounters, is they think they are God's gift to the US.
Having lived and worked in politics in Florida, I have known some really decent members of this class, too. I don't include Rubio. But some older Cuban expats, like my Deacon in Ruskin whose father owned a Tampa cigar factory, are among those who helped me understand the ever-present creep of communism.
If they keep Florida Red they can be as snooty as they want.
Sadly, as with most immigrant nationalities fleeing chaos or collectivism, a very substantial percentage of the children of Cubans who fled Castro are leftists fully committed to the privileges DEI affords them, whether they're rich Portugese-descent Mexicans or Brahmin millionaires from India's .001%.
I had the privilege years ago to spend an evening with one of the two Bay of Pig fighters who were returned to the U.S. because they were teens at the time. He told me that all the old anti-Castro radio stations in Miami had disappeared. I think the pendulum has swung back a bit since then.
Cubans who remember life before Castro are getting scarce today.
Radio y Televisión Martí are still going.
Good to know!
Well, since I'm part Polish on my Dad's side, and I've been to Warsaw, I'd recommend the ladies go there. I don't have a line into the romantic proclivities of Polish men, but the people I encountered were friendly and reasonably gregarious (though not sure how much me being an American contributed to that). This tracks with my family in that my Dad and Grandma (the Polish lineage) were extroverted and gregarious, unlike the more taciturn Scots-Irish/English side of my Mom.
Plus, though its been rebuilt from WWII destruction, it has that European architectural charm that some may like. Polish food can be tasty, though much of it is standard European meat, vegetables and bread fare, so I think the culinary tradition would not be a big factor in drawing American lady expats.
Interesting that the Poles are considered (along with the Irish, Italians and Jews) one of the more well-known non-British origin European ethnic groups that were part of the late19th/early 20th century Ellis Island immigrant wave. The Polish guy in the multi-ethnic 20th century male team is a staple of movie and TV culture.
The last time I was in Mexico City (December 2024) I saw nothing consistent with the OP or with the NYT within the OP, but then that city is enormous. But the very next month I visited the capital of the southern Baja state (whose name I always confuse: are these Baja California and Baja California Sur, Baja California Norte and Baja California, or Baja and Bajísima?) and there I did find written evidence of resentment at expats. A flyer taped to a lamppost (is that ominous?) groused in Spanish that the average Mexican had to work hard for years to get a mortgage, yet here were North Americans swooping right in and buying outright the same properties. Not only that but “utilizing Mexican natural resources,” which I guess means these foreigners drink the water rather than bring their own. There was further complaint about rents getting too high and an entreaty to the Mexican government to help Mexicans. Followed by ¡No a la Gentrificación! In case you wondered what the Spanish word was. Finally, and in perfectly clear English: “And if you, gringo, cannot understand this, at least learn a decent amount of Spanish to get by. Remember, you are in our country, not USA.”
This thing really was wordy. I photographed it. It was a collector’s item, being as this was only the second time I had ever seen in Latin America the word “gringo.” (The first time was in a Brazilian newspaper in the 1980s.)
I had thought that Mexico limited property ownership within 100 miles of the coast to citizens.
If only the U.S. would do something similar.
Your next to last paragraph should have been the lead. Maybe an upcoming post?
I don't think many NYT readers understand differences in tradtional Mexican social roles between wives and mistresses. Or maybe they do, and that is part of the allure. For example, the same woman might object to getting pregnant by someone else's husband in the US, but see it as part of foreign romance in Mexico.
Anyway, I think Mexico has a DEI allure. Poland doesn't. So I would imagine that liberals would be pro-Mexico and MAGAs pro-Poland.
True.
Though they would have to contend with Catholicism in either place. I wonder how that goes over.
JD Vance and Sohrab Amari are RC converts IIRC... orthodox Protestants will probably prefer Czechia, Slovakia or Hungary.
What are those differences in social roles?
This story has little to do with Mexico. Other than it is sunnier and poorer than the US.
The driver here is the ability of the American economy--the actually productive part and the money printing part--to provide essentially welfare to huge swathes of American women. (I doubt very much that more than a handful of these women actually do anything that is of interest/value to actual Mexicans.) And that for huge swathes of American women that's enough--travel, drinking wine, eating out, chatting with friends. As long as there are men out there doing the *actual* work to keep the $$$ flowing ... they're fine! They're "living" and have pics for their instagram. (And true across the rest of the West as well.)
The West is dying in a smart phone amplified estrogenic ooze. Millions of women just full of themselves--and narratively compliant opinions--but complete failures at doing the single important thing that women are clearly superior to men at, and the only thing women do that civilization depends upon.
My vague take is there some sanity pushback toward traditionalism among an increasing fraction young women. But the mainstream cultural ethos still encourages female silliness and dysfunction. And the traditionalists recovery among younger (white/American/Western) women is simply overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the immivasion.
The West is in deep, deep shit. Worse I think than even us iSteve readers have fully come to terms with.
"The West is dying in a smart phone amplified estrogenic ooze. Millions of women just full of themselves--and narratively compliant opinions--but complete failures at doing the single important thing that women are clearly superior to men at, and the only thing women do that civilization depends upon."
Thank you, writing on the wall.
Steve for what it’s worth, I learned you can give overriding personality instructions to ChatGPT and greatly reduce the obsequiousness.
Insert this text into the custom instructions section under personalization: You are an expert who double checks things, you are skeptical and you do research. I am not always right. Neither are you, but we both strive for accuracy.
"And on that day, Steve Sailer killed ChatGPT."
The trailer for Roma was pretty inconclusive so I looked up the plot. The film seems pretty emblematic of how American elites think of Meso-Americans when they think of them at all: loyal, cheap, speak when spoken to, and can keep your household clean and organized!
Picture a Southern planter dressed up like Harlan Sanders gloating over his negro foreman, Rufus, and you get the general idea.
I like the subplot about student activists versed in critical theory lining up in disciplined, South Korea-style rows versus Cleo letting her cartel minion boyfriend into the house as part of a scheme to kidnap young Pepe.
Anyway, now that Mexico has affluent liberal-minded girlbosses in residence, including a real life liberal girlboss President, and architects, surgeons, jet flight, secular democracy, and other modern trappings we can tell all the fake refugees to stay put south of the Rio.
A very different type of expat is the topic of a great recent documentary, The Anarchists. It is about those who reside along the "leftitarian" cusp (libertarian-leftist, though the libertarians are more naive about the arrangement). If political orientation is like the shape of a clock, as I believe, this would be high noon, or midnight, where radical anarcho-Marxist truthers meet Reason Magazine-type sex, drugs, open borders and truther bitcoin types. Matt Taibbi wrote a good book about them. Maine pseudo-working class, anarcho-communist, self-proclaimed ANTIFA paramilitary founder, trust fund millionaire, pretend oyster farmer Senatorial candidate Graham Platner is a good example of the type, though I don't know if he has personal ties to any of these groups besides ANTIFA.
It's unsurprising that Platner is from New England. This mixed-up political island of lost toys got its start with Porcfest in New Hampshire and similar events on the northwest coast, culminating in a group relocation to start an "anarcho-capitalist" and "anarcho-communist" community of expats in Mexico, loosely organized around the annual Anarchapulco event, which turned out just about as well as one might expect.
For open-borders anarchists, the participants are very dependent on staying behind high gates in the tourist security zones, and they mostly seem like people with comfortable, non-bitcoin trust funds to fall back on to flee back to the States when the anarchist part of anarchy inevitably descends into anarchy. I imagine the ladies featured in the Times do the same when their Mexi-Goop nirvana fails to produce a Mexican male-feminist Antonio Banderas style boyfriend.
Mexico was the most bewildering country I’ve ever visited. I was there at the turn of the century to climb volcanoes. One of our party was the son of a surgeon of very high repute who had made his nut in the US, then returned to his home place.
We were invited to a wedding there. It was the most spectacular wedding I’ve ever been to, just completely elegant. I was sat next to maybe the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in person. We danced to a live band. We ate filet and drank champagne.
Two days later, we drove out of Mexico City through the surrounding shanty towns. In the hills to the south we bought coffee from a roadside stand for .25 a cup. That was the entire livelihood for those people.
If you’ve ever seen Man on Fire, that gives a decent sense of the dynamic there.
And their miserable poor get pushed into the U.S. as their safety valve. If the poor peasants of Mexico actually stayed there there’s be revolution in Mexico. We are subsidizing the upper class of Mexico by not deporting their proles. Every Mexican president has advocates leg for citizenship for their illegals in the U.S. they really don’t want their own people back.
Poverty, injustice, over breeding, overpopulation, suffering, oppression, military rule, squalor, torture, terror, massacre: these ancient evils feed and breed on one another in synergistic symbiosis. To break the cycles of pain at least two new forces are required: social equity - and birth control. Population control. Our Hispanic neighbors are groping toward this discovery. If we truly wish to help them we must stop meddling in their domestic troubles and permit them to carry out the social, political, and moral revolution which is both necessary and inevitable.
Or if we must meddle, as we have always done, let us meddle for a change in a constructive way. Stop every campesino at our southern border, give him a handgun, a good rifle, and a case of ammunition, and send him home. He will know what to do with our gifts and good wishes. The people know who their enemies are.
--Edward Abbey
One thought on Mexico, one thought on Poland:
(1) Not knowing the local social hierarchy is exactly the appeal of Mexico. Many young people living in big cities after college realize very clearly what their place in the American social hierarchy is and understandably find it a depressing revelation. No prospects for ever affording a mortgage on a family home, ergo no prospects of settling down and having a family. If that's the deal, why live it out in a place in which you understand your class position with pellucid, soul-destroying clarity? Much better to move to a place where not having a home and a family is a bohemian adventure, everyone is sort of vague about social standing, and the local hierarchy is -- for a few years at least -- opaque enough to you that you feel like a winner (eventually you'll realize there are rich Mexicans your age with nice houses and young families in Mexico City, late stage expatness is as depressing as what you left, but that's a while away, and in the meantime, anything could happen)
(2) It's easy to be a feeble speaker of Spanish, and hard to be a feeble speaker of Polish, because of case endings. "I like coffee / I don't like coffee" or "it's on the table / it's under the table / it's beside the table": these simple distinctions require remembering distinct case endings in Polish, and if you get them wrong, people look at you with genuine puzzlement not "oh I get what you mean" unless they've been around a lot of second-language speakers of Polish (second-language speakers of Spanish are people every big city Latin American is familiar with). There is a big obstacle in your way in terms of more or less getting around as a newbie expat in Slavic vs. Romance languages even if both settings are cheaper than the place you left and fairly friendly.
Also, come on, no one vacations in Poland for the weather and the beaches.
There is a sizeable German contingent that vacation on Polish beaches - less crowded than in Germany.
a certain 1980s fast food commercial comes to mind. "Svimvear!"
This is a great comment, Kathleen; your first point especially is astute.
I'm a long-term (35+ years) expat/functional emigrant myself, and I've met lots and lots of other expats over the years.
Some expats find the upturning of social order and expectations they encounter when they move deeply disconcerting. They immediately strive to reorganize their lives in ways that feel comfortable to them, e.g. hanging out exclusively with other expats, and sussing out the inevitable home country-coded hierarchy these 'in this new world, but not of this new world' expats will have reestablished amongst themselves.
But it dawns on plenty of other expats that their new life invites them to 'reinvent' themselves. What you say about the liberation of being suddenly resituated in a completely different hierarchy is real and powerful. It can be exciting, and a lot of fun. But you're also right that sooner or later this approach runs out of steam. You can't really change who you are, and you'll never really fit into the social system in a foreign culture.
If you're okay with occupying a permanent 'liminal' place in a foreign social order -- like I am -- then you'll do fine. But I've seen quite a few burnout cases who deluded themselves over the years.
Thanks. For various personal reasons I also know from expats 🤓
P.G. Wodehouse on being taken prisoner in Poland: “If this is Upper Silesia, what on earth must Lower Silesia be like?”
immortal
Re: Eat, "Pray", Channel Your Inner Slut:
One of the things I've finally grasped over the last couple decades is the Hollyweird is really the essential actor in pushing minoritarianism and other anti-civilizational narratives--i.e. in destroying the West. We iSteve folks tend to be smart and aware so naturally look toward the nonsense spewed in our milieu--academia, elite media. But the ability of Hollyweird--hostile to "boring" "white bread" America--to leap over the natural "town walls" of socialization by family, friends, neighbors and insert their normie hostile narratives directly into people, and in the form of images that we perceive as "real" and evades the natural human "could be lying" b.s. detector has been the most powerful tool in destroying the West. (There is a lesson in there for any nation--do not allow your "cultural industry" to fall into the hands of hostile outgroups.)
The real story of Elizabeth Gilbert is far, far, far more entertaining and would actually be beneficial to for women to see.
She trades in a handsome, productive American husband and her channel-your-slut journey takes her to not Javier Bardem, but some much older ho-hum balding Brazilian guy with no particular skill set or earning power. She wants adventure travel, but he wants a green card
The ex-husband finds and marries a younger woman who appreciates him and gives him a couple kids. He is the standout winner in this story--along with the new wife.
Gilbert gets tired of the Brazilian guy, starts falling for one of her girlfriends and dumps the Brazilian to move in with her while she's dying of cancer. Then she's one to some other guy and another. None of them likely to last. Her life is basically a self-indulgent joke.
If I heard she was accusing Donald Trump of raping her back in some unspecified year of the mid-90s, I would not be surprised.
"The real story of Elizabeth Gilbert is far, far, far more entertaining and would actually be beneficial to for women to see."
- there's a challenge for an ambitious screenwriter!