I Moved to Mexico, Again

In August, I moved to Mexico, again. This time with my husband and two toddlers. People keep telling me, "Wow that's amazing, I wish I could do that but…" and then they go on to tell me about their job, finances, family obligations, etc. The thing is, this move has been more than a decade in the making. Before Tiago and I even got married we made it a goal to live abroad with our kids so they could learn Spanish and Portuguese. We've both lived abroad numerous times and know what it takes to figure out the bureaucracy of visas, bank accounts, and housing.

And it's not easy to do. This required shifting careers to have more flexibility, a lot of luck, a ton of courage, spending a ton of money, and disappointing the people we care most about: our immediate tight knit families.

But we were willing to go through it all because our underlying why is so strong. The pull is ancestral. Moving to Mexico is a chance for me to heal the intergenerational trauma of my ancestors having to leave Mexico, and for me to connect what Alexis Pauline Gumbs calls, “the divided histories in my body¹” being Mexican-American.

I grew up with grandparents from Mexico who only spoke Spanish to me, but I always responded back to them in English. We didn't really have conversations, even though I spent a lot of time with them growing up.

I stumbled upon a painful genre of TikToks making fun of "No Sabo Kids" that pushed on that gushy shame spot inside of me. No Sabo kids are children of Latino origins who don't speak Spanish, who incorrectly respond to someone talking to them in Spanish, "No Sabo Espanol."

It feels worse to be shamed by people in your own community. I hope those Latinos making fun of No Sabo kids are able to put in the time and effort for their kids to learn Spanish because it truly is a gift to be bilingual.

When I shared with a friend my shame about how I speak Spanish, they asked, "Is that your fault?" I responded with tears instead of words.

It's not my fault. Those words absolved me of my guilt.

And I've made it a life goal of mine to speak Spanish.

When I was 18, I returned home from a 5-week study abroad program in Mexico and for the first time I had a real conversation with my abuelo Angel. He shared with me the story of meeting my abuela, being stunned by her beauty on the bus in Tijuana. My abuelo at this time was already traveling to work in the US. He was the pride of the family, helping other family members get jobs and settled in the US. My grandmother's family was poor. Everyone from her Pueblo in Zacatecas, Mexico was displaced when the government decided to build a dam through it. My grandmother ended up in Tijuana, where she earned $10 a week as a muchacha cleaning and cooking for a family. My abuelo told her he would pay her $10 a week to quit. Soon after they were married.

A year after I heard this story, my abuelo died. I'm so grateful to have had a brief overlap in our lives where we could connect through language.

I kept my goal alive by taking Spanish classes, reading books in Spanish, singing Spanish ballads on the guitar, and traveling through Latin America often. Since the time I studied abroad in Mexico at 18, I thought I have to come back to live here to really "be fluent."

I had my regular life crisis that occurs every 3ish years when I was 31. I was engaged and finally adulting with a 401K and a West Elm couch, but life was stagnant. My quarter-life crisis hit, "Is this it? Do I just work every day, calendar my friends weeks in advance, then have kids, then retire?"

I decided I had to move to Mexico then or else I would never do it.

As hard as it was to leave my job, community, and life in the Bay Area, I was more terrified of drifting unconsciously into a stale life. I imagined my life being like driving, arriving at my destination and not remembering how I got there.

I spent all of 2019 living in Mexico City. It was a magical time where I reconnected with my artist-self. I took daily dance classes, learned to oil paint, and even took a Spanish-learning improv class which culminated in a play that we wrote and performed in. But when the pandemic hit, and we were already pregnant, we left suddenly.

I knew I wanted to go back to Mexico with my kids. It was just a matter of figuring out the best timespan in our lives.

In March, Tiago made a Mexican friend at a conference. Tiago shared our dream of moving to Mexico with the kids and he said, "Come check out my town. It's the best place for raising a family." He showed us around the town and we loved it. We made a plan to move there in 2025 and told our families. But we realized once we made the decision, the only reason we weren't going sooner was because of not wanting to upset our families and spreading out the logistical hurdle of moving. But we realized it would be better sooner while the kids were more tied to us than to their friends and while our parents were healthy.

Five months later we moved to Mexico.

But my doubts didn't go away with arriving in Mexico. During the pandemic a surge of Americans descended on Mexico City and my media feeds highlighted the discourse on gentrification and cultural appropriation, even documenting how taco stands were reducing the heat in their salsas for all the gringos. I saw a TikTok of a Mexican woman yelling at an American woman speaking English while pushing a stroller saying, "Learn Spanish. Go back to America."

Seeing these trends, I felt the horcruxes in my body pulling apart inside of me from being Mexican-American, ni de aquí, ni de allá. In the U.S. I'm a woman of color whose Native American side of the family was displaced and whose Mexican side was displaced, whose family was quarantined to a low-income industrial community with high levels of toxic pollution, whose family worked hard so that after three generations, my generation could go to college and jump social classes.

In Mexico, I'm an elite, privileged American with resources to live wherever I choose.

I'm both colonized and colonizer.

In my writing, I notice that I default to emphasizing my challenges, my traumas, always trying to add to my street cred, "I know what it's like to struggle." It's a habit from my decade working in woke nonprofits, but now I don't want to admit that I am a nepo-wifey living off my husband's income. It's easier to identify with being colonized than to acknowledge my role as colonizer - someone who benefits from privilege and can cause harm to others. Because I don't want to identify with the oppressor, I keep reifying myself as a victim, as if that could somehow offset my current advantages. That privilege grows exponentially in Mexico, where I can't pretend that "I'm one of the people."

I have to hold that I am not just a victim and not just an oppressor, being both of these makes me something different. They don't cancel each other out. There is some equation where their combination magnifies into a unique power, even when facing all these sides is deeply uncomfortable.

A lifetime of living in a divided body has made me face down discomfort everyday. When people say, "I wish I could move to Mexico," I wish I could explain to them the complexity of letting go of all your comfort, exchanging the knowns for unknowns as if it's as easy as exchanging dollars for pesos. Dealing with months of trámites to get our visas, bank account, and a car registered; arriving in the rainy season with daily power outages, sometimes that last for days.

And what discomfort I faced arriving in Mexico is nothing in comparison to what it was like for my grandmother arriving in the US at 18, newly married, pregnant with no English. My grandparents arrived in a nation hostile to their existence, but they fled poverty, became homeowners and even landlords, and created intergenerational opportunities. While they had to leave Mexico for their survival, I get to return for healing.

Living in Mexico has challenged all my preconceptions. Growing up Mexican-American in California, my image of Mexico was shaped by the stories of those who left, childhood visits to Tijuana where we had to use an outhouse, and the media portrayal of danger. I have family members so worried about me thinking I am dodging drug cartels dropping off my kids to school.

But I get to experience the Mexico my grandparents never could – I live in the Lake Tahoe of Mexico city, a mountain town where celebrities have their vacation houses. My kids go to one of the best schools in existence, not just in Mexico, but anywhere where the teachers focus on socio-emotional learning with a farm, forest, and garden on the campus. We have been so welcomed in this community, with dinner and party invites every weekend.

In owning my privilege, my dual identity has become a gift rather than a burden.

As a Mexican-American, I can draw from both cultures to create something new. Each culture offers gifts that help balance the other's weaknesses. The reality is that social mobility in Mexico is hard - my family needed to leave to access opportunities. My success is the product of good public schools, mentors, scholarships and programs designed to help me climb the social ladder.

But now in America, the middle-class dream requires endless hustle just to afford basics like childcare. In Mexico, earning in dollars remotely allows me to step back from that grind and focus on actually living.

In the US, we have the benefit of having structure to our work and environment that make us good at being productive, but that can take a lot of magic out of life. In the US, community requires careful planning - coordinating schedules weeks in advance, squeezing friendship between work deadlines and laundry and meal prep.

But in Mexico, connection happens organically. When you meet someone cool on Saturday, they invite you over to hang on Sunday. A quick coffee shop stop becomes an impromptu lunch with friends. When our car got stuck on a bad road our first week, the only person I could call for help was our landlord who arrived within minutes to help. These moments teach me what it means to truly live in a community, where people rely on each other.

While I took for granted the smooth roads, reliable power, and pristine playgrounds back home, here where infrastructure is less predictable, I've learned to surrender and trust that things will work out. I stopped being a hypervigilant, no plastic, organic mom, buying only the top-safety rated everything, because here I operate under a belief system that kids are resilient and don’t need everything to be perfect.

I've discovered that when I can't control everything - from power outages to potholed roads to questionable water quality - I have to just surrender. But with that I find myself worrying less and having gratitude for every day. I'm learning that there's a difference between necessary caution and the illusion of control that comes with American bubble-wrap parenting.

Perhaps my greatest privilege is the freedom of movement - the ability to flow between these countries that my grandparents' immigration status made possible. While they came to the US through the bracero program seeking survival, I can now travel freely between California and Mexico, planning visits around holidays, weddings, and work. This mobility is a gift I never take for granted, knowing it's a freedom many families still long for - the ability to maintain connections across borders, to blend both worlds into one continuous life rather than having to choose between them.

Yes, I'm a latina who stumbles over my Spanish grammar. Yes, I'm someone whose grandmother was pulled from school at age 8, and now my children attend one of Mexico's finest schools. Yes, I'm the product of my family's American Dream who chose to return to the place they had to leave. All of these things are true simultaneously. In embracing these seemingly contradictory truths fully, I'm not just healing my own split identity - I'm creating something new, a bridge between worlds that my children can walk across freely, proudly carrying forward both their Mexican and American heritage.

Footnotes

1 - Alexis Pauline Gumbs uses the phrase “the divided histories in my body” in her essay, “The Sweetness of Salt” in the book Pleasure Activism. I read these words and I couldn’t stop thinking about how well they described how I feel.

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