As expats, we straddle 2 economies, but our hosts don’t

Published January 8, 2023

by Sarah DeVries

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the significant increase in both visitors and immigrants, mostly from north-er North America to Mexico, and it’s got me thinking about what it means to be a gracious newcomer.

I don’t really count as a newcomer myself. I came to live in Mexico back when nobody thought it was a good or safe idea, and when the perception was that most of the gringos in the country were rough-looking men with questionable criminal histories.

If you wanted to work, a job at an in-person school was your best bet, and you received pay that reflected the local economy. (I made a monthly salary of 7,000 pesos a month at my first full-time teaching job in Mexico — worth about US $700 today — with no benefits.) Getting official permission to work was difficult, and you were mostly paid in cash under the table. It wasn’t a great plan for wealth-building in one’s prime working years, and most people my age stayed away from Mexico, save for a vacation or two.

Since then, Mexico has caught on in a major way, in part because people, especially, from the U.S. seem to have become particularly disillusioned with their own country: at this point, gangs of narcotraffickers with specific targets don’t seem like such a big deal compared to the prospect of young men walking into schools, grocery stores and movie theaters to mow the places down with easily-accessible combat weapons they acquired under the guise of “self-defense.” Add in our looney tunes politics of late, and it’s no wonder people are looking for something different.

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