In the Shadow of the Giant: The Americanization of Modern Mexico

7. The Mexican Dream

On Sunday mornings the courtyard of the public library in the colonial town of San Miguel de Allende fills up with Americans. The drawing card is a weekly house-and-garden tour that spotlights some of the splendid homes purchased by American expatriates in the historic city center and on the hillsides overlooking San Miguel, and on a typical weekend in the fall of 2005 I am one of 176 tourists who have filed into the library building for the start of the two-hour-long sightseeing excursion. Eleven Mexican musicians resplendently dressed in burgundy-and-gold tunics and velvet breeches stand to one side of the cobblestone courtyard, playing a mix of familiar homegrown staples like “La Bamba” and classic Spanish folk songs dating back to the days of the celebrated author of Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes. By the time the buses roll up outside the library’s street entrance to ferry the visitors to the first stop on the tour, the courtyard is a sea of gringos chatting amiably in English. They sport the typical garb and accessories of vacationing norteamericanos—baseball caps, walking shorts, white sneakers , sunglasses, T-shirts, and sandals. They wear name tags bearing their first names and the cities and states from whence they have come—Tucson and Tulsa, Maryland and Montana, San Antonio and Santa Cruz, New Mexico and New York. Apart from the musicians, the only Mexicans on hand for the tour are a young, middle-class family of five from the nearby city of Querétaro who look a tad bewildered by the tableau unfolding before them. 135 c h a p t e r 7
The Mexican Dream Ch007.qxd 11/27/08 2:44 PM Page 135 The mood is festive, and it’s all for a good cause. Proceeds from the weekend tour are donated to the library, which houses one of the largest collections of English-language books in the country, and at $15 a head the weekly excursion generates a tidy stream of revenue. Doing good works is one of the main pastimes for the town’s burgeoning American community, who makes up an estimated one-tenth of San Miguel’s 63,000 inhabitants. A walking tour of the historic center on weekdays helps raise money to provide dental and medical care to the needy children of San Miguel, which is a three-hour drive from Mexico City. One group of American residents called Amigos del Parque (Friends of the Park) is working on the renovation of the town’s long-neglected Juárez Park, and yet another organization of expats donates money to the Hospital de la Fe. In one corner of the library courtyard that morning stands a fortyfour -year-old ex-banker named Chris Doolin. He is telling tourists about a photography project he runs that has raised thousands of dollars in scholarships for over fifty underprivileged high school students in San Miguel. It is his way of saying thank you to the town to which he moved from Arizona four years ago.“It’s a privilege to be living here in more ways than you can imagine,”says Doolin, handing me a business card that bears the e-mail address, ex_gringo@hotmail.com. My chuckling over the inscription on his business card lights up the eyes of Doolin, an athletically built man dressed in gray jeans, a tight-fitting white T-shirt, brown cowboy boots, and a straw hat he wears on his shaved head.“I don’t think I’ll ever live in the United States again,”says Doolin, who gave up an $80,000-a-year white-collar job in Phoenix to try his hand at freelance tourism photography in Mexico. “Once I got finished living my American dream, I paid off my credit cards, sold off everything I had and moved down here with two suitcases. Everything that’s happened in the country since Mr. Bush took power has been going against my whole values structure. I am never going to pay taxes to those fuckheads anymore.”1 Doolin belongs to a growing number of Americans who are fleeing the Fruited Plain to pursue their own Mexican dream. They represent the flipside of the exodus of Mexicans pouring across the southern border of 136 in the shadow of the giant Ch007.qxd 11/27/08 2:44 PM Page 136 the United States each day in...