All stories in El Jalapeño are satire and not real news. Check out the original article here.
With the superpeso rumbling ever onwards, American expats from Ajijic to Zacatecas have been forced to significantly downgrade their lifestyles in a collective belt-tightening exercise that one gringo described as “no bueno” and that the Mexican economy has not acknowledged as a crisis, because it isn’t one, for Mexico.
“My wife and I used to buy rib eyes at City Market for lunch every Thursday; este jueves we’re having tacos de tripa,” New York transplant Don Manhattan told El Jalapeño in the meat section of a no-frills Bodega Aurrera in San Miguel de Allende, moments after bumbling his way through his weekly Spanish class, which has not yet covered the phrase “purchasing power parity” but has, apparently, covered “pinche,” a word his teacher told him to avoid using at all costs and which he deployed immediately upon being asked about the exchange rate.
For his part, Condesa-based digital nomad Chase Remote confirmed he was no longer frequenting natural wine bars, high-end contemporary Mexican restaurants with English menus, and the capital’s too-cool-for-school craft beer dens — establishments that, it should be noted, exist in Mexico City specifically because people like Chase Remote arrived and created demand for them.
He now drowns his dollar-denominated sorrows with bottles of Barrilito, one of Mexico’s lowest-cost mass-produced brews, while subsisting on a diet sourced primarily from his local OXXO, which has been feeding Mexicans through worse than this for considerably longer and without a lifestyle column about it.
One thing, however, remains non-negotiable: Remote will not be leaving the Condesa-Roma bubble in search of cheaper rent, no matter how many increasingly plump fistfuls of pesos his Airbnb requires.
“The thought of sparking a wave of gentrification in another neighbourhood instead of simply contributing to the one here is just too triggering,” he said, downing the dregs of his third Barrilito and gazing longingly across Parque México toward La Uva Orgánica, one of his erstwhile haunts, which is still there, still serving natural wine, still accepting pesos, and has not reduced its prices in response to his situation.
“Besides,” he added, “this is the only part of town where I don’t need to learn Spanish, and I feel like I’m in a hipster neighbourhood of Portland, even if I can no longer afford the single-origin coffee.”
Americans across Mexico reported similar stories to El Jalapeño, which is, it should be confirmed, also suffering from the exchange rate and is not pleased about it and who will be travelling on mechanically questionable third-class buses until such time as El Jalapeño either turns a profit or the peso rises above 20 to what is currently a feeble, embarrassed, and entirely inadequate greenback.
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