Muy Caliente Summer Edition
By Gustavo Arellano
Dear Mexican: I’m wondering how Mexicans feel about the communities of American expats springing up all over Mexico (especially those who live near or in these communities)? Also, are there places in Mexico where it doesn’t get so hot that Americans are generally pretty comfortable year round? Could you name a couple of regions or areas? You know there may come a time when hordes of Americans start moving to rural Mexico seeking a lifestyle with less stress, less air pollution, fresh locally grown food, etc.
Listo Pa’ Jubilarme
Dear Ready to Retire: Hombre, not all of Mexico is the Sonoran Desert, you know? The great thing about the Empire of the Sun is that there are climates for everyone. Like the Caribbean experience? Veracruz is for you. Prefer something a bit cooler, but just as colonial? San Miguel Allende, Guanajuato es para ti! Love more of a surfer lifestyle. Baja, baby! Or love the mysticism that is massive rainstorms in an urban area? Mexico City, chulo, Mexico City! All the places I mentioned, by the way have robust gabacho communities, just some of the estimated half-million Yankees estimated by the State Department that live south of the border year round, and the mucho more who pop in for a couple of months. Mexicans tolerate those gabachos, although we can’t stand that many of them don’t assimilate, are loud, and don’t bother to learn the native language. But we don’t worry too much—we’ve ensured they can’t amass too much power by banning foreign ownership of land, disallowing birthright citizenship, and making it fiendishly difficult for them to find work, measures enacted we don’t end up with the same immigrant morass the United States has with you-know-quién.
Will I ever be able to tame my spicy ecuatoriana? She keeps talking mucho basura about Mexico and talks about Ecuador like it was the Estados Unidos! Shut my spicy up once and for all!
Bicho Raro
Dear Oddball: Ecuador? We gave the country its greatest achievement in its two-century existence by allowing them to play our soccer squad to a 1-1 draw earlier this year, and have fed information to Ecuadorian officials in our respectively Pyrrhic drug wars—and that’s how she pays us back? Your chica has no reason to hate on Mexico, and definitely has no reason to wistfully reminisce about a country whose greatest contribution to human society is teaching us that guinea pigs make a tasty dinner. Ecuador is so forgettable that Colombians make fun of their own citizens for sounding like Ecuadorians. I suspect your chica is just tired of people mistaking her for a Mexican in this country, kind of how everyone in South America mistakes Ecuadorians for Peruvians, or has absorbed too much Know Nothing anti-Mexican rhetoric. Since I suspect you’re a Mexi, you know what to do: let the words and arguments come to a silence, and let the chorizo run rampant over her Andes.
GOOD MEXICAN OF THE WEEK: Dave Zirin is not a Mexican, but he might be the last sportswriter in America who thinks the coming Major League Baseball All-Star game in Arizona should still be moved due to the state’s reprehensible anti-Mexican S.B. 1070 bill. Zirin has always sided with the undocumented and blasted Know Nothings across the board, and his proudly progressive politics and sharp mind forge some of the most gripping columns published in this country—and that his subject matter happens to be sports, historically the refuge of apolitical pendejadas? Someone buy Zirin a bottle of Corralejo! Read more over at edgeofsports.com and for Christ’s sake, buy his A People’s History of Sports already!
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