Wednesday, February 12, 2025

I speak Spanish better than you do: The dark side of expat relationships

The combative nature of expat relationships in Mexico was recently on full display in one of Guanajuato’s Facebook chat groups. The initial question was innocent: a person asked why it can be so difficult to get change in Mexican shops (he should have tried 20 years ago!) Some responses were helpful and informative, but a few were very harsh, saying in effect, “If getting change is so important to you, go back to where you came from.” 

I asked the administrator of this group, John Fiori, about this kind of hostility, and he told me he noticed a repeated set of themes that people become contentious about, which he doesn’t hear in face-to-face conversation. These include: 

Guanajuato might look like paradise (and maybe it is) but relationships between residents can sometimes be fractious. (Feather and the Wind)
  • Don’t tip too much, because it messes with the local economy. 
  • Similarly, don’t pay too much for your house.
  • Don’t take a job from a Mexican.
  • You should make Mexican friends, like I do, rather than hang around fellow gringos.  
  • San Miguel (or pick the town) is filled with gringos, which is why Guanajuato is better.
  • You need to speak Spanish.
  • We are foreigners, not expats.
  • We moved here, but now you can’t, because Guanajuato is full.
  • You’re not prepared enough to move to Mexico.
  • Don’t try to change Mexico. Just go home.

I cringed when I read these, because I have been guilty of some of them. In 2018, when my husband Barry and I became aware how many new people were moving to Guanajuato, I felt threatened, as though I had some territorial right to the city that superseded theirs. But I got my comeuppance when I ran into a resident who had lived in Guanajuato much longer than we had. I mentioned to her that I felt overwhelmed by the influx of newcomers. “That’s how I felt when people like you started coming,” she said. Touché!

I notice my desire to sometimes one-up other foreigners. “Barry and I have lived here 20 years,” I boast, as though this confers some moral superiority. And I feel envious of my peers who have more Mexican friends than I have. As these examples show, foreigners unite around language and culture, but, based on my experience and others I’ve talked with, competition, hostility, and anxiety can also be part of the mix. 

Social media and FOMO

Social media apps on a smartphone
Social media can help us stay connected with one another, but it can also make us feel left out sometimes. (Brett Jordan/Unsplash)

Barry and I usually arrive in Guanajuato in late November, not long before Mexico’s extended holiday season — from Día de la Virgen to Noche Buena to Día de los Tres Reyes. The season is challenging, because gringo parties abound, and we often aren’t invited. Since we don’t live here full time, people don’t necessarily think of us. Or who knows, maybe we’re not invited for some embarrassingly personal reason! 

Ironically, I’m not much of a fiestera, a party animal, and I usually feel very cozy spending winter evenings in our sala at night, reading and watching movies. But I still feel hurt if we’re left out, especially when I scroll through photos of private parties that people post on Facebook. “Do you have to showcase a gathering where not everyone is invited?” asks my inner 12-year-old.

Then my adult self tries to reframe it. They’re simply sharing their pleasure, not intending to be hurtful. Be happy for them, I tell myself. But no matter how hard I try, I still feel like I’m back in the eighth grade, wanting to be part of the popular crowd. This year my solution was to log out of Facebook for awhile, and that helped. 

I don’t believe people go out of their way to exclude others. After all, Barry and I host an annual Boxing Day party, and this year, because too many guests makes me anxious, we kept the invitation list small. Probably others feel the same constraints. 

A man with a megaphone is mobbed by a crowd. Looks like a contentious expat relationship.
Do we need to constantly broadcast our feelings about others? Probably not. (Sushil Nash/Unsplash)

Fiori thinks group activities are “easier to see in Guanajuato because there are relatively few of us, so what everyone else is doing is more visible.” I agree, especially because Guanajuato’s expat community is a village within what is already a small city. If we were talking about gringo parties in big cities like Mexico City, Guadalajara, or Querétaro, there would be much less of a sense of “insider” and “outsider.”  

Criticism of other expats

For the entire time we’ve been here, I’ve heard gringos in Guanajuato making sweeping generalizations about those in San Miguel, even people they didn’t know. “They all live in gated communities.” “They’re not embedded in the culture.” “None of them speak Spanish” (though many Guanajuato gringos don’t speak Spanish, either.) 

One year, while in San Miguel as a presenter at the Writers Conference, I mentioned this to a local expat. “That’s what we say about the folks in Lake Chapala,” she said, laughing. “None of them speak Spanish!”  

Early on, I asked one of my first teachers how she viewed the foreigners in Guanajuato, versus those in San Miguel. She shrugged. “You’re all gringos, wherever you live,” she said. That put it in perspective! These nuances that seem so important to us were negligible in her eyes.

Like other gringos in Guanajuato, I make an effort to accept the cultural values I find in Mexico, which sometimes differ from my own. But recently I’ve decided to spend just as much effort accepting and appreciating the divergent values I find in my own tribe.

Louisa Rogers and her husband Barry Evans divide their lives between Guanajuato and Eureka, on California’s North Coast. Louisa writes articles and essays about expat life, Mexico, travel, physical and psychological health, retirement and spirituality. Her recent articles can be found on her website, authory.com/LouisaRogers.

14 COMMENTS

  1. You,host,a party (small) once a,year yet you expect ro be incired tieveryone Else
    ‘S party. You get what you give you admit you spend. Most of your time quietly so make yourself open up be receptive you sound like a boring couple

  2. In my opinion, many of the situations you describe are gringo issues. They are many of the issues that I disliked most about life North of the border. They tend to arise out of competition, wealth, ego, etc. In Mexico I try to view myself as a guest. I assume no one cares about my social status, or lot in life. I actually consider those things detrimental to my happiness. I simplified my life in Mexico, I couldn’t care less about who may be better off than me financially or socially. I assume that others feel the same way about me. I know that most people in Mexico could never retire, let alone have residences in two countries. I do my best to assimilate to my surroundings and leave as much of my American life behind. I personally try to live like a local. It is the most refreshing and enjoyable part of being in Mexico. All the superficial aspects of American life disappear and I try to blend into the background. After all, it is because of me and the millions of expats and long term guests, regardless of how long we’ve been here, are dislocating locals from their neighborhoods, raising prices, demanding English be spoken more and more, and driving change that many Mexican citizens never asked for. We are a privileged class and should try to live like the locals, not like upity gringos. Every day I wake up in Mexico I am grateful that I no longer have to live with the pretentious, superficial concerns I had in the US. I treat people as I would like to be treated and leave my BS in the US. I am so much happier and rarely have the issues you speak of come up. I downplay my career and my former life in the US. In Mexico, I simply come from a family farm and had a career in sales. Rather than I manage a 10,000+ acre family farm enterprise and was an executive sales professional for some of the top CPG companies in the world, managing tens of millions in corporate sales, managing contracts with the largest retailers in the US and abroad. One is the simple truth, while the other is an ego driven pissing match to one up my friends and neighbors to justify why I needed to live in this neighborhood and drive that German automobile. To be invited to the best parties and have a certain social life and be seen at the “it” events. In Mexico I avoid all that. I am truly happy and have nothing to prove. That’s just my perspective, it seems to work for me. I also avoid social media which I believe helps tremendously. 🤙✌️&❤️

  3. I echo Norse Hombre’s comments; I too avoid social media… happily Facebook free since 2015 and no Instagram account. I have never been on TikTok. On the flip side, over the course of 15 years here in Mexico I have made a concerted effort to find local friends, much of them found through playing sports.

  4. We’ve been here over 16 years and have seen pretty much everything on that list. Our lifestyle mirrors that of our neighbors in Ajijic and that could be described as upper middle class Mexican. We don’t have the German car, they are a PIA when it comes to maintenance but, like them, we drive a nice one. Our relationships are divided between Mexicans and expats and we studiously avoid what is called the “A List” here. That crew loves to try to be more Mexican than others, unable to see what a caricature this is.

    Our closest relationship in Mexico is with an artisan family from Oaxaca whose children we have sponsored at Iteso University. They are like family to us. Our other closest relationship is with a young orphan care missionary couple.

    It is absolutely true Ajijic is an English speaking enclave. Almost all the business people here speak English which is a real deterrent to getting more fluent in Spanish. How different is this, really, from similar mostly expat communities up north where all the businesses carry signs in Spanish and that is what they speak?

    Assimilation is a multi generational sort of thing. If we had children they would be much more integrated into the language and culture. Among our circle are a couple of younger families with children and this is exactly what we see happening. The kids are completely bilingual and bicultural.

    Our approach is simple: Do the best we can with the language in our quite old age, notice and respect the culture, avoid the “ugly expats” one finds in any such community and live out and love our days here. It truly is the best place either of us has lived and we are truly grateful to finish our lives here.

  5. Yes. Yes. Yes. And then there’s the pecking order around who lives full time or part time. And who stays the longest.

    I do find my Spanish classes full of really nice learners ‘we are all in this together to do our best’. But there are some real haters in Facebook groups here in puerto Vallarta.

  6. During the year before I moved here, as I worked out the fine points of my retirement, I taught myself Spanish from a book and have used my (intermediate) Spanish since day one. I have always lived in predominately Mexican neighborhoods in Ajijic. But why must I even state that?
    I gravitated towards the Mexican culture early on, going to the very fun fiestas and such, and found the gringo events a little comparably boring and out of the way since I didn’t have a car. I then became even more aware of the pre hispanic history here after learning Mayan Cosmology from Actah, the Mayan Messenger who came through here before 2012, which brought me into much more meaningful contact with like minded Mexicans.
    In my everyday life I simply did not encounter any nearby gringos who actually lived here full time. That is not a snob issue, it just became tiring to try to befriend people who were always going “home” somewhere else. Why even bother? My home is here.
    The other issue which few see is being single in a crowd of almost always married gringos. They simply don’t reach out for meaningful communication with single people who are.
    With my limited Spanish I made friends in my neighborhood around the noise issue. They all hated the grossly over amplified noise as much as I did. I encouraged them to call Chapala and complain, otherwise nothing would ever be done. Chapala needs to hear complaints from the Mexicans so this would not appear to be a gringo issue. I have room to talk because I have 20 years of performance experience utilizing sound equipment, so I know how it works and that it is generally incompatible with the outdoorsy concrete and brick construction here in Mexico. My Mexican homeopathic doctor told me he gets lots of patients who need remedies for stress because of all the noise. Surprise surprise. I can truly say that we achieved results in the modification of the super loud noise and that the situation today overall is better.
    But Mexicans have their own extended families which are very strong and they just don’t “need” to be close friends with outsiders. I accept that.
    After years of being here full time I still have no close gringo friends.
    The real key is not just learning Spanish, even to an intermediate level, but learning to be polite and cheerful as a default as are most Mexicans. Learn how to really connect even on simply things. Americans simply do not learn that growing up.
    Few gring@s here are aware that they really do seem rude to Mexicans. I won’t say they are all rude, but I can say the only rudeness I have seen here has been from the foreign population. Acculturating yourself can be a very positive transformative experience.

  7. . . . when my espanol ( pronunciacion, gramatica, verb tense, use and placement of pronouns, por verses para ) is corrected by mis vecinos, the local tienda, heck even mi maestra en la escuela . . . I know I am doing something right and respectful . . .

  8. What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual!
    what do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual!
    What do you call someone who speaks only one language? American!!!

    My American daughter and Italian son in law, and three year old grandson moved to Lisboa from FL last year.
    They speak English, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese fluently. My grandson speaks Italian and English fluently and learning Portuguese at his preschool. As we’ll be visiting them several times a year, we’ve already begun taking Portuguese lessons and hope to be fluent some day!

  9. I am existentially confused by expats’ comments and observations about the country they’ve “chosen” to live in and live out their lives.
    I am Tex-Mex. My mother’s mother and grandmother came to Laredo, TX from Aguascalientes, MX, expecting to meet up with my grandmother’s husband, a Federalista officer who unfortunately was killed in the Revolution. My grandmother met an “American” Cajun railroad worker with whom she had 7 1st generation “Americans”. I’m part of the 2nd generation of that “American” family.
    My father’s father was an indigenous Tejas Indian, and my grandmother was a Spanish/Tejas mestiza, another generational reference. One of my cousins was the first to marry a “gringo”. It was both a claim to fame and source of shame. She both “sold out” her family’s history and “bought into” life in the USA.
    I am 78 now, and, as mentioned, am existentially confused by expats’ reasons and explanations for leaving their “native land” and critiques of moving into what was and continues being my ancestral home, which provided a cradle to the “American way of life”, and continues giving to the USA natural resources, products and even a labor pool.
    With the worsening of “the American way of life”, brought on by exploitation of resources and labor, and supported by myopic, mendacious leadership, pools of expats have bubbled up throughout Mexico. Lower cost of living and medical care, low cost housing, seemingly inexhaustible and very affordable “house staffs”, unending entertainment sources: all-in-all, a most welcoming Disney Land and World.
    Hence, the existential question: ¿Cuál será el por qué de seguir ofreciendo bienvenida y refugio a nuestros vecinos del Norte, mientras ellos nos seguen considerando y tratando como su premio y juguete?

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