That Deep Romantic Chasm

A vision in a dream

A few days ago, I was driving along a highway that climbs up and down a small mountain chain in Central California. It is a windy road, a bit dangerous in spots, but nothing that can’t be managed if one takes one’s time. This highway has 2 traffic lanes in each direction, and I was in the fast lane because there were some slower trucks in the other lane. I was driving about the speed limit, when a car suddenly darted out from behind me, pulled ahead and brake-checked me.

Brake-checking, if you are blissfully unaware, is an agro driving maneuver wherein a car that is in front of you suddenly applies its brakes for no reason other than to cause a downstream reaction forcing the car(s) behind to notice and suddenly brake themselves before plowing into the rear-end of the brake-checking vehicle. People who “brake-check” are usually hostile, dysfunctional types who hate anything that doesn’t serve their own interests.

Anyway, this car brake-checked me and the driver started pointing with his right arm in an exaggerated motion that I should be over in the right lane, not the fast lane. I’m not one to easily get caught up in other people’s drama, so I just rolled my eyes and reflected, like I often do when I see something twisted happening in the U.S., that this kind of behavior just doesn’t exist in Mexico.

I’ve done things while driving in Mexico that are just completely egregious and wrong - and no other driver even batted an eye. If I did these same things on roads in the U.S., other drivers would completely loose their minds. I suppose there are cultural studies I could refer to and write about, explaining why people in the U.S. act so stressed out and angry in their cars (hint: people in the U.S. are stressed out and angry), but this is not the article for that. Instead, this article is about my sort of pollyanna reflection that this aggressive driving maneuver wouldn’t happen in Mexico.

Breaking down the romanticism of my initial reaction, I realized that what I was really sensing was that this type of aggression typically does not happen in the parts of Mexico that I choose to live in and visit. Immigrants to Mexico from the U.S., Canada, and other “wealthy” countries have the luxury of immigrating to the “nice” places. You don’t see a lot of YouTube videos extolling the charms of expat life in the pueblos of Frontera Comalapa or Chicomuselo in the state of Chiapas where cartels control most aspects of civilian life. You don’t see those videos because the people who make “Mexico is so charming and safe” videos rightly would not go to those places.

No, people immigrating to and visiting Mexico from the US and Canada get to pick precisely where in Mexico they want to be. And even once there, they typically have the resources to relocate if things start to go south in their current situation.

The breakdown is that there is a bit of a romantic gulf between how most of us U.S.-bred Mexico lovers think about Mexico, and how the average person living in a low-income pueblo or barrio and struggling to make a living thinks about Mexico. A struggle, quite often, that is played out against a backdrop of cartel activity - theft, extortion, threats, and worse.

In the event, many (most?) Mexicans don’t have the luxury of mobility. Both family connections and economic constraints make relocating to a “nicer” area prohibitive. There are a lot of people in Mexico who would certainly take offense to my un-vocalized but nevertheless felt-in-the-moment notion that Mexico is so much better because bat-shit crazy U.S. things don’t happen there. The thing is, bat-shit crazy Mexican things happen in Mexico.

I don’t want to come off sounding anti-Mexico - anything but. I am very pro-Mexico (obviously), and there are so many facets of life the way I live it in Mexico that I would find hard to give up. And while I’m an average middle-class nobody in the U.S., I am so very privileged compared to most of my Mexican compatriots. But I don’t want to appear - even if only to myself - as someone who is living in Cinderella’s castle, completely oblivious to the serfs who are struggling just beyond the moat.

When we talk about how “amazing” Mexico is, we also need to pay a bit of mindshare to the notion of how “amazing” Mexico isn’t. Fair and balanced - I sound like an ad for a news network. But the truth is, for every YouTuber or TikToker out there singing Mexico’s praises while their margarita glass grows dewy with condensation just out-of-frame, there are tens of thousands of Mexicans thinking “damn, I’d sure like to be in the place where you came from”.

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Postscript: The astute English Lit fanatics amongst you may have recognized that I stole both the title and subtitle of this article from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan. Whatever. It’s in the public domain. I’ll probably steal from it again.