Guanajuato, Mexico - The Gringo Propaganda

Check out NBC's Dateline Report on San Miguel de Allende Kidnappings--CLICK HERE

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One of the most salient examples of just how propagandized the vast majority of websites and blogs are when it comes to presenting the truth about living in Mexico, is retireinluxury.com. Whether it is a book, a house to sell, or a travel business to promote, the bias is as thick as maple syrup .

The people of Mexico routinely treat strangers with warmth and curiosity. The people here seem to have the ability to enjoy life, be more hospitable, more respectful of their fellow man....And it's not our money that makes everyone so friendly: the people are deeply steeped in a tradition of courtesy, culture, and kindness that goes back centuries...The people are almost always willing to stop whatever they are doing to be of assistance to a friend, a neighbor or a stranger. It seems they welcome any opportunity to be helpful. Isn't that the way life should be? -- www.retireinluxury.com

1) "The people of Mexico routinely treat strangers with warmth and curiosity." -- Go the website, My Mexico Story and read a few of the stories of how these folks were treated when they were strangers in Mexico.

2) "The people here seem to have the ability to enjoy life, be more hospitable, more respectful of their fellow man" -- You should on your next visit to San Miguel de Allende as the owner of the butcher shop, Carnemax, what he thought of this when he was robbed at gun point on Feb. 19, 2010 by his fellow Mexicans.

3) "And it's not our money that makes everyone so friendly: the people are deeply steeped in a tradition of courtesy, culture, and kindness that goes back centuries." -- Either the author of this website, who is trying to sell a book on how sinless it is to live in Mexico, is absolutely mono-cultural, or she is not telling the whole story (Maybe she doesn't know it).

One more than one occasion , Mexicans have told us that from a very early age they are taught that Gringos are to be "taken" whenever possible. They are taught how to do it all along with the rationalizations why this isn't a bad or unethical thing to do. Another told me that Mexicans are your best friends as long as they are getting money out of you. When you stop the cash flow you then become the enemy.

4) "the people are deeply steeped in a tradition of courtesy, culture, and kindness that goes back centuries...The people are almost always willing to stop whatever they are doing to be of assistance to a friend, a neighbor or a stranger." -- What this quote in its whole is trying to prove and failing to do so, is that Mexicans have some intrinsic goodness that sets them apart from the rest of humanity. In many face to face meetings I've had with potential Gringo expats, these wannabes will not believe that any crime occurs in Guanajuato or it is so insignificant as to not be worthy of a single thought.

The Gringo perceived politeness in Mexican culture is probably due more to the cultural need to save face than it is to some ill-perceived Gringo notion that Mexicans know how to treat their fellow man better (Is that even a testable hypothesis?). See the study done on this very point: Click Here

The point is NOT whether there are polite Mexicans in Guanajuato, or in the country at large. The point is whether Gringos who have ulterior motives are telling you the whole picture? Are their perceptions tainted with biases and/or nefarious motives?

To write about something critically never implies any degree of hate. To NOT like something and to say so is NOT wrong.

What is wrong is becoming singularly obsessed to the point of wanting to destroy someone who holds a different point of view than your own.

What is totally insane, and implies the need for professional help, is to believe an author who disagrees with the position that Mexico is something other than just a place with flawed people is out to ruin your real estate business, your money making source. That bias, obsession with filthy lucre, can drive one to paranoia.

That's all I'm saying.

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Guanajuato, Mexico - Arrogant Americans Need Not Apply

I can hear the screaming coming from the other side of the world. I have readers there, you know. Thailand comes to mind, if you must know.

I didn't say that, "Arrogant Americans." Someone else did and when they did it raised all sorts of hell.

An information technology staffing firm based in Rolling Meadows, Ill., posted an advertisement for a technical writer that warned that an "arrogant American" would not flourish in the position. "Exelon is looking to provide these proposals to Chinese businesses, so someone who is respectful and understands Chinese culture is preferred. An arrogant American will not work well in this role," the listing read. - SOURCE

Of course, the ad firm took it down as soon as the threats of lawsuits began flying faster than geese during hunting season. Such hues and cries of, "offensive and inappropriate" and "Exelon is deeply committed to diversity and inclusion" were heard. Viva USA, an information technology consulting firm took the ad down. They shouldn't have.

Americans are now the "we can do no wrong" crowd and don't you dare saying otherwise. If you do, we will sue your buttock based on the profound legal precedent of "hurt feelings."

Actually they will quote the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as the basis of suing you, but let's face it, they will come after you based on how tight that knot in their panties got twisted.

There is a reason why the ad originally read as it did. Americans come across to the rest of the world as an arrogant lot. It just has to be the "I am American hear me roar" attitude that it perceived as sour grapes by the rest of the world. It is "The American way or it's the highway" also tastes a little bitter to the rest of humanity.

In Mexico, you have to take a really long time developing relationships with Mexicans before you can discuss American arrogance with them. They don't want to offend and when they are assured they won't offend you, the info flows like water.

The Mexican also hates American arrogance.

Learn Spanish, take a few years to develop a trusting relationship, and they will most certainly tell you so.

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Resources

1. THE PLAIN TRUTH ABOUT LIVING IN MEXICO
2. A WALK THROUGH MEXICO'S CROWN JEWEL - A Guanajuato Travelogue
3. ROCKET SPANISH
4. LEARNING SPANISH LIKE CRAZY

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Guanajuato, Mexico - Talking For a Tip

"...the Careys are questioning the safety of tourists in Mexico and warning others who plan to venture there." -- Vacation from Hell

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One year we were on a traveling jag. We went everywhere and then some. We rolled into a Mexican town called Aguascalientes and had a two hour layover before making our connection to our next destination.

I was sitting outside watching the buses coming and going and the people. I get some of the greatest blog fodder from people watching.

A young Mexican man walked up and sat beside me and began talking. He wanted to know all sort of things like where I was from, if I liked living in Mexico, what I did for a living, etc... We talked for an hour, at least, until my bus was ready.

When I stood to board my bus the young man thanked me very much and then held out his hand and said, "That will be $25.00 dollars."

He asked for dollars and not pesos.

When I asked him what for, in my dramatic, heightened tone of voice, he said it was for being nice to me and chatting. That was his fee for talking to me.

Well, I told him to get lost, got on my bus, and watched him through the bus window staring daggers at me. I am sure he is hating me to the grave.

Yesterday, the wife and I went downtown to do some business. When we walked up from one of the tunnels, we were set upon by a pair of ten years olds who in accented yet perfect English asked if they could tell us a story. I assumed it was to practice their English. We used to see this a lot. The kids would ask you if you would speak to them in English for practice. I assumed this was the case.

Luckily I asked her why to which she responded, "After I tell you the story you can pay me a nice tip."

After I sent her packing I said to my wife, "They learn young, don't they."

Gringo tourists love this sort of thing. I see the Gringos constantly forking over the dough to these hucksters. They squeal with such practiced delight and merriment over the kids doing this. The younger the better.

But, what's wrong with this picture?

First, this is what the American and other tourists expect when coming to Mexico. They want the locals to entertain them and the younger the shyster the funnier they seem to the Gringo. This huckstering is not what the educated Mexican trying to pull their country out of the
Third-World-Country mire wants to be thought of. And yet, this is what a lot of Mexican children are taught to do.

Our friend, Erica, told us that she, her cousins, and most of her peers were taught from a very early age that the Americans, the Gringos, are their ATM's, the banks, their fountain of wealth. They were taught how to scam the Gringos from as young as she could remember.

It is a lesson in how to get by, barely by, with scamming the Americans when they come as tourists. Instead of working hard at a job, they are taught it is easier to beg. Some, children as well as adults, will lie to your face with how a member of their family died and they can't afford to bury them. A favorite is when an adult male will put on an Academy Award winning performance, tears and all, telling how his wife lost their baby and they can't get the body back from the police for burial until they pay a fee.

Then there are those who will talk to you then try and get your money from you for the effort.

It teaches how Americans are an easy mark and why should they have to work hard when it is so easy to scam the stupid Gringos.

Secondly, Gringos paying out money for such shysterism perpetuates the idea that the Gringos exist to take care of the Mexican. This is disgusting beyond measure. It fosters the myth that Americans, without exception, are fabulously wealthy and are there for the Mexican to take for a ride.

I have asked Mexicans who beg money from me why they think I have money and why they think I have money to give to them. Without exception their answer has been because I am a Gringo.

I got into an hour-long discussion with a group of youths who told me they were taught that because Americans, all of us, are wealthy that it is not wrong to cheat us, steal from us, rob us, or scam us. If we were poor, it would be wrong. Since we are all rich beyond description, it is ok.

(There is also the President Polk and Texas incident to which they will allude.)

I have a good friend at our church who is 45 years old, married, and has three children. The man works his tail off to put his kids through school, including college, and does all the work on his home. He told me he's never had to rent a house because he has always worked hard to be able to buy a home. He has just now purchased a pair of computers and internet service for his kid's school work and all from HARD WORK!

Think of the example to his children. They have learn delayed gratification, to work hard, that nothing comes very easy in life, and that if you want something in life go out there and work for it.

I just love that!

Resources

1. THE PLAIN TRUTH ABOUT LIVING IN MEXICO
2. A WALK THROUGH MEXICO'S CROWN JEWEL - A Guanajuato Travelogue
3. ROCKET SPANISH
4. LEARNING SPANISH LIKE CRAZY

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Guanajuato, Mexico - Dumping Culture

Culture can be a funny thing. Americans do not tend to know their own culture, much less someone else's, so it is a bit difficult for Americans to come to grips with the fact that not all you encounter in Guanajuato, or any where else for that matter, is a sweet expression of a wonderfully kind and patient people.

The word "culture" is most commonly used in three basic senses:

* the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group.

* an integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning

* excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities, also known as high culture


Culture is something that should be embraced and shared with the rest of the world, in my view. However, depending on whose culture it is, there are things within the culture that should indeed be embraced and made timeless, treasure it!

There are also things within culture that a society should very seriously consider eradicating from the face of the earth and never to be thought of again.

Guanajuato is a trash-dumping-where-ever-they-please culture.

At the beginning of June 2009, was the nationally celebrated "Let's all pitch in and clean up Mexico" day. Dressed in their cute little green smocks and with their green hats, volunteers swarmed into the Guanajuato river (cesspool) to pickup their fellow Mexican's garbage.

Admittedly, the river looked pretty decent when they got done. This valiant effort, by the precious few Mexicans in this country who are ecologically minded, allegedly took place all over Mexico.

Today, June 18, 2009, were you to come to my neighborhood in Guanajuato you would see little of the cleaning effort that took place at the beginning of the month.

It is as filthy as ever. The only thing I was unable to see was the discarded tire that sat in the brown mucky water for the past year.

Plastic pop bottles, plastic grocery store bags, shoes, complete bags of households of trash, toys, plastic plates, and God only knows whatever else, is in the river as it was before. The stench turned my stomach.

It was as though the litter thugs thought, "We'll show those neat-nicks and their ecology activism a thing or two," and just re-trashed the river to get even.

And, mind you, it isn't just children who throw their trash into the river when there are trash dumpsters no more than a crossing of the street to take advantage of! Children learn it from their parents and we've seen plenty adults dumping loads of garbage into the river or just on the street itself.

If success of anything is based on results, it does not take a genius to see what the: "the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group" regarding trashing one's environment is in this city.

How Mexicans deal with their environment is a culture of dumping and it is a horror to the world.

It is grafted (infected) in their cultural mindset and does not look to be excised from their culture anytime soon.

Guanajuato, Mexico: Two Price System

"Many Mexican shopkeepers and others along the border treat Americans like suckers who deserve to be taken. They try to get as much out of them as possible because they presume they will never come back." (There's a Word for It in Mexico The Complete Guide to Mexican Thought and Culture; NTC Publishing Group, Lincolnwood, Illinois; Boyé Lafayette De Mente; 1996; Page 298)

I haven't visited this subject in a while and thought I would again. I recently had lunch with a gringo visiting from the States and this was one of his question: "Is there really a two-price system in Mexico in general and in Guanajuato specifically."

My answer to him was, of course, yes.

There is a two-price system that affects everything. We discovered this long ago in our personal experience and from stories from other gringos as well as Mexicans in town.

Where we live, the Mexicans pay about 100 dollars less for their apartment rent than we do. Our landlady was upfront about this citing that Americans use more water and electricity than Mexicans.

When our Spanish began improving, this was one of the hot topics I wanted to ask Mexicans in the city about for various articles I've written.

Our retired friend, Roberto, born and bred in Guanajuato, was particularly enlightening about this subject. I asked him, "Why does the price for anything in this town automatically increase when a Guanajuantense sees the gringo face coming?"

Roberto didn't hesitate a bit: "Dollars. They see American dollars and they want to charge as much as they can get out of the Rich Americans."

It is a cultural expectation (false stereotype) that all Americans are rich and can afford to pay more for whatever it is the Mexican is selling.

I might add that never once have I gotten any other response from the Mexicans I've asked this question. Roberto's reply is the universal answer.

Some Mexicans take offense at this notion that Americans are targeted. In fact a friend of ours said this regarding a forum post about this very subject:

I find that first statement really insulting to Mexicans. I have lots of "gringo" friends who live here in Mexico City and I don't think a single one of them has ever expressed this thought to me, or had this experience..........

This person is from Mexico City and perhaps the two-price system has faded into some kind of cultural obscurity. Who can say?

All one has to do, that is if you have Spanish fluency, is walk through a festival's food kiosks and listen to the vendors. My wife recently overheard a taco-selling woman talking with a lady friend sitting with her, telling her friend that she charged "that gabacho" three times more for the tacos than she did the Mexicans before him.

Mexicans here in Guanajuato, just like in the quote at the beginning of this blog, will assume you are a tourist, too stupid to know the difference, can't understand Spanish, and will never return. The same goes for just about any open market in this town. This makes it so hard for Spanish-speaking expats who live here and want to be treated on an equal playing field.

I have this taxi driver pal who told us that he charges English speaking gabachos twice the normal fare if they won't speak Spanish to him.

My poor wife would have to be on her toes constantly in the local markets to listen to what the vendor would charge the person ahead of her. When it came her turn, she would end up having to haggle with the vendor pointing out that he charged two to three times less to the Mexicans. He would, of course, deny this.

For this very reason we no longer shop at the Mercado Hidalgo. We go to the local markets in our barrio who know us and who do not rip us off. And, what we can't find in the barrio's markets, we go to the Super. It is sad, in my view.

I do not see this abating in the near future. What will happen is the more gringos who come for visiting or living, the higher and higher the prices will go. This is why you spend twice to four times more in San Miguel de Allende for a lunch than you would elsewhere. The Mexicans charge whatever the market will bear and the rich folks in San Miguel will gladly be taken for a ride, apparently, and pay more.

That's what's coming to Guanajuato.

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My newest book: A WALK THROUGH MEXICO'S CROWN JEWEL

When Gringos Attack – Part Two

I just love reading forum posts about living in Mexico. Actually, I rarely read them anymore because the majority of those doing the posting, mostly Americans, whose total knowledge of Mexico could fill a thimble, so frustrates me that I gave up following the threads. My wife reads them then forwards to me those she thinks I can use for Blog fodder. She sent me a doozy today.

Americans really don't get it. As the forum posters sit in front of their computer screens reading and engaging in the never-ending battle of trying to debate the Gringolandians' invasion (infection?) of Mexico through the written word, the collective reasoning power of these potential Gringolandians can't seem to make the very small leap of logic in this discussion that is required to get the point of it all.

The Gringolandian versus the True Expatriate War of Words is this: Why do Americans come to Mexico and never learn Spanish, thus creating a self-imposed barrier to the culture? Why do they create Gringo Enclaves, Gringolandias, when learning the language would open the door to the Mexican culture, thus making enclaves superfluous? Wouldn't learning Spanish solve this problem and make the creation of Gringo Gulches, Golden Coasts, Golden Corridors, and Gringolandias totally unnecessary?

In the five years I've been writing about expat issues and following these posts, the collective lot of them can only come up with this:

"So why is it okay for millions of Chinese, Cubans, Italians, Germans, Mexican, Guatamatecos, Koreans, Vietnamese, Middle Easterners to come to the U.S., set up their enclaves where they speak their own language, observe their own cultural history, eat the same food, establish businesses that cater to each other all the while preserving a piece of their homeland in their new land...but you seem to be saying it's NOT okay for Americans going to Mexico to do that." – A Forum Poster

Is this not the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Manifest Destiny at its best?

Let me just say that the person who wrote this does not get it at all.

The ethnic groups the person mentioned created enclaves not because they want to preserve their own cultural identity. They have created and continue to create enclaves on American soil because they never were, never are, nor never will be accepted into the Anglo-Saxon mindset.

When we lived in America, we attended a Methodist Mexican church in the inner city. Most of the congregants may have been illegals. We taught some of the English. Most, if not all, of them came to America in absolute desperation to earn a better living. They were, unfortunately, convinced by the coyotes that sold them on the idea, that there was a Promised Land waiting for them in America.

Some of these guys worked 20 hours a day and slept on floors at night. Every moment of their time was spent in trying to earn enough money to send back home to their starving families. Just when would they have had time or the money to take English classes?

The reasons they flee to the U.S. are not the same as Americans who move to Mexico. Mexicans move to America to survive. Americans move to Mexico, at least traditionally, so they can exploit the cheaper real estate, cheaper cost of just about everything, and continue to live their pampered lifestyles.

Don't miss this point in the Push and Pull factors of this aspect of Human Migration.

The vast majority of Americans who near retirement age want to preserve the lifestyles to which they've grown accustomed. They want their two cars, two or three TVs, three computers, four bedrooms, three or four bathrooms, a maid and gardener. In other words, they want to live like the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon. They are lured down here on the Concept, Hype, or Idea of Mexico, which promotes the idea they can live better on less and have a life of the rich and famous. They come running based on the propaganda that all of Mexico has been so Americanized that they can live a life of luxurious pleasure having the Mexicans wait on them hand and foot.

Mexicans move to America for survival. They don’t live like they did in Mexico. In most of the cases we've seen, they live a lot worse.

Most of the Mexicans we knew could not afford to take English as a Second Language classes. They told us they wanted to take classes, but there was no money available for such an expense. Instead, they had to come to those of us who taught English for free as a ministry.

All of the Americans we know in Mexico could most certainly afford to take Spanish classes, but they don't. They don't because it's too hard, too boring, too inconvenient, too whatever. So, that's why they form enclaves and set about transforming the ancient Mexican cities (San Miguel de Allende, for one) into Disneyland versions of what the Americans want Mexico to be to them.

Ethnic groups had to form their enclaves in America because they had to. The Anglos didn't welcome them. And even then, enclaves didn't always provide a measure of safety from the Anglo-Saxons who hated anyone who was something other than white and Protestant.

The reason there is now a population of German Mennonites and Quakers in Mexico, not to mention the generations of Chinese-Mexicans, is because the Anglos chased them out of America time and time again into Mexico where they found true freedom to be who they wanted to be. They stayed.

So, the Life in Mexico forum poster, whom I quoted at the beginning in this article, just doesn't get it at all!

I don't think the Gringolandians ever will.

Mexicans have to form enclaves in America because they aren't welcome in American society.

Americans do not form enclaves because they have to. They do it because they want to. They refuse to do the one thing that would guarantee assimilation—Learn Spanish!