San Miguel de Allende, Charities, Questionable Motives?


by Douglas Bower - Date: 2007-04-18 - Word Count: 1957 Share This!

Doesn't anyone realize that unless limitations are established on what Americans can do after they move to Mexico, they will change the cities to which they flock until Mexico is no longer Mexico, but is merely another USA?

Many Americans in Mexico do not Expatriate, they Fakepatriate. (Notice I said many…not all Americans). They think they expatriate. They become hostile and aggressive if you suggest they don't. They will threaten you. But, when push comes to shove, they are nothing more than Fakepatriates.

They've created little Americas. They like very much what they've carved into the precious heritage of the unique culture of Mexico…a country in which they are guests. They love the fact that they've been able to push aside the local and national Mexican culture in order to make a place for themselves and the things that pertain to their American tastes. They deny they've done this. They will protest most vehemently and their umbrage will even take on the nature of threats.

I've been writing in various venues for the past four years about this very issue. At the time I began, I could find no one else speaking out on the effects the Americans Fakepats are having on the local communities. I dared to address fakepat issues in San Miguel de Allende and even where I live, Guanajuato. The predictable results have been denial, anger, threats, wishes that I would die, and even threats to beat me up. All prove my contention that there is something dead and rotting in what these folks erroneously call "The Expat Community."

I mean, really. Why do they need an expat community to begin with? If they really expatriated to Mexico, then would not the following be so?

"Expatriation is the process by which an intense integration occurs whereby the individual of another culture is eventually absorbed into the new culture. This includes absorption into the new culture's language, celebration of holidays, observation of local events, politics, if allowed by law, in the new country. Also, it would include the development of intense interpersonal relationships with neighbors in the new country."

If, for the sake of argument, this definition is true, then why in God's name does anyone have to go around identifying themselves as a member of the expat community? Shouldn't they be so absorbed into the community into which they've claimed to expatriate that they offer their identification as a member of the local community? Do you get this? My wife and I do not tell anyone that we are members of the American expat community of Guanajuato. We identify ourselves as members of the community of Guanajuato­, PERIOD!

When someone asks us, as touring gringos here often do, "Where are you from?" we tell them: GUANAJUATO. After the look of horror and confusion leaves their faces and they close their gaping mouths, they ask us, correctly I might say, "Where are you from originally?"

Do not miss the point here. We do not identify ourselves as American expats living in Mexico but as Americans absorbed into the new culture. This culture is now our culture. We have no umbilical cord that attaches us to America.

Is this not what expatriation truly is?

The creation of an "expat community" is the attempt to not only create a "Little America" but is also a definitive act to strengthen that umbilical cord leading all the way back to the United States.

I recently engaged in a verbal donnybrook with someone from San Miguel de Allende who claimed there was no American Expat (fakepat) community there. "There was no American enclave," she said. They, the gringos, are all nicely absorbed into the local Mexican community and all was nice and sweet in that colonial Mexican town. Every American has been neatly and profoundly integrated into the Mexican community. She even, now get this, disputed the long-known fact that few of the fakepats can speak enough Spanish to survive.

They who protest what I've been writing all these years resort to the argument that, since I don't live in San Miguel de Allende, how could I possibly make such observations? In other words, they resort to a Beg The Question Argument in implying that I would have to live in San Miguel de Allende in order to make a legitimate comment about life there. And, if I lived there, I could not possibly come to the conclusions that I have. I wonder if I did move there (hell would have to freeze over so I could skate on the ice) and still came to the same conclusions what they would say then?

The point is that I am not the only one making these observations now.

In an article in the L.A. Times, a lady visiting San Miguel de Allende made this comment about the Sunday House and Garden tour she took:

"It was at this point that I realized that if I really wanted a taste of Mexico, I might as well go home to Echo Park. The tour wasn't so much a backstage pass to aspirational cultural immersion as it was an English-only how-to guide for getting away from it all without giving anything up. Each dwelling was mostly notable for just how thoroughly the householders had managed to bring the comforts of the north into the wilds of the south."[1]

And let me assure you of this: The San Miguel de Allende Fakepats regard their little American enclave as such a sacred cow that they will resort to all manner of attacks and threats in retribution for your freedom of expression­--they're not a Jeffersonian Democracy in their new American colonies here in Mexico.

Sheila Croucher, a professor of political science at Miami University in Ohio and author of "Globalization and Belonging: The Politics of Identity in a Changing World," made these observations about San Miguel de Allende:

San Miguel de Allende attracts one of the largest foreign populations in Mexico.

Most do not learn the local language and reside and socialize within an isolated cultural enclave. These immigrants practice their own cultural traditions and celebrate their national holidays. Grocery stores are stocked with locally-unfamiliar products that hail from their homeland.

American professionals largely work illegally in San Miguel and pay no taxes.

They typically do not pay their servants the Social Security taxes required by law.

The illegal businesses run by the American gringo community rips off the local San Miguel de Allende government in excess of more than four million pesos a year in unpaid taxes.

Some Americans are actually illegal aliens and do not bother with proper documentation.

Some are even involved in the Illegal Drug Trade and take drugs across the different Mexican state lines.

(You won't read this stuff in the tour and expatriation guides. I guarantee it!)

What I want to know is just what do all those people who have been sending me seething hate mail say to this? Just why won't they offer a well-reasoned, carefully constructed counter argument to the things that I've listed in this essay? Instead, 99% of the mail I receive consists of threats, profanity, wishes that I would die, and doubts that I even live in Mexico. Isn't this sort of vitriolic response indicative of the character of the Fakepats in that town?

Am I wrong? If I am, where are the rationally created counter arguments?

So, am I engaging in hyperbole here? Am I stretching the truth? Am I not at all in tune with what's happening in SMA? Am I clueless? Listen to what one of their own recently wrote regarding their Fakepat English/Spanish Library:

"The Biblioteca Pública officials apologize to the community for having to increase protecting the books. As of March 30, no tote bags, schoolbags, suitcases or packages can enter the Library. Women may enter with handbags no larger than 12x12 inches. The cause for these new rules is, of course, book theft. Ali Zerriffi, President of the Library urges those who object to the changes to not use aggressive behavior and foul language directed toward the staff."[2]

Aggressive behavior and foul language? Thievery?

I've not been making this stuff up. In more than 212 articles and two books, I've been documenting this stuff.

What really is appalling is that many of the Fakepats write me and tell me that I am wrong in not mentioning all the "good things" they do for the people of San Miguel de Allende.

Here's why I don't. I cannot bring myself to do so since I do not trust the motives of the so-called charitable do-gooders in that Fakepat enclave. Yes, now here goes the admission. The Fakepats in San Miguel do offer charity to the locals who are poor and downtrodden.

But, does that give the Fakepats the license to:

"…not paying income tax or lodging tax. They are typically not paying Mexican Social Security to their domestic help. Franyuti estimates that unlicensed business in the city costs the local government more than four million pesos a year--an excess of $360,000 in lost taxes and fees."[3]

Aren't you taking from the city in services and not paying for them with your taxes?…"But, oh, it's ok because look how charitable we are to the poor and downtrodden?"

You are straining the infrastructure of that town.

You are taking from San Miguel in city services and playing the charity card as your excuse for not paying your taxes.

How is your charity that sends young people to college going to pay for your Mexican neighbors' tax bill that is sky-high because you take, take, and take but do not return?

The locals have to carry the higher tax burden because you, who can and should, won't.

Are the American Fakepats the saviors of the poor little brown people?

(This, the poor little brown people, was actually said to me once here in Guanajuato regarding the situation in SMA.)

A Real Expat about sums it up:

"I am an American living in the central area of México, and we seem to have an uncontrolled immigration problem here as well . . . every day I walk by the central plaza of the little and charming town I have chosen to live in, and it sickens me to observe a multitude of decrepit old men and women - gringos, mind you . . . sitting there, poisoning the atmosphere with their pathetic attitudes towards the locals, pretending to appear as the redeemers of the people with their disgusting little dogs which they treat better than they would treat their own sons and daughters (which by the way, wouldn't be seen dead in the proximity), talking big about their homeland and the big money they made, all the while bargaining to pay 25 cents less to the old lady who sells tortillas as her only income. We abhor these gringos as much as you abhor the illegal aliens in your country. Why don't you take all your relatives back to your "beautiful" homeland? If it is so great, what in the blazes are you doing here?"[4]

And, I couldn't say it any better than this:

"As witnesses not of our intentions but of our conduct, we can be true or false, and the hypocrite's crime is that he bears false witness against himself. What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core."[5]

[1] Monday, February 26, 2007; Flack over "Echo Park in Mexico"; Meghan Daum

[2] Info SMA newsletter (April 9, 2007 issue)

[3] "They Love Us Here": American Migrants in Mexico; By Sheila Croucher--Winter 2007

[4] I got this quote from a San Miguel de Allende chat room. I have no idea who said it. This shows just how bad it has become in San Miguel de Allende.

[5] Hannah Arendt (1906 - 1975), On Revolution (1963)


Related Tags: mexico, guanajuato, san miguel de allende

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