The village of Jomulquillo is located in the Mexican state of Zacatecas and is where my father was born. It stopped in front of the rancho's lone corner store after darting in front of vacant homes.
Most of the population of Jomulquillo had left for East Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley decades earlier.
The man who slowly emerged from the pickup was middle-aged, white and wearing sunglasses. He asked if there were any houses for sale, but he didn't know. Everyone was confused by the sight of a gabacho in a tiny hamlet up in the mountains of central Mexico.
There was a chorus of polite but firm nos.
I asked him what he was doing in the US.
The man said he wanted to move here. It costs too much back home.
He complained about liberalism and how he wanted to spend his retirement in peace. He wanted to know if there were any houses for sale in Jerez.
Nope, that's right.
The man drove off after getting back into his truck. Didn't mention gracias.
It happened in my front yard 22 years ago but I can still remember it.
When I hear my friends talk about moving to a foreign country because the U.S. is too much, the image of that guy is always in my head.
I tell my friends that this most American of religions, one seemingly more popular than ever, its pews filled with disciples both conservative and liberal, young and old, but all with the money to move, is not something to be taken lightly.
In Portugal, I found former residents of the Golden State taking advantage of the economic situation of the country, which is one of the least prosperous in Europe. Kate Linthicum sent a dispatch from Mexico City.
In both places, natives complain that new Americans are pricing them out of their homes and not bothering to learn local traditions. Protests against the newcomers were documented by Jaweed and Kate. The longtimers argued that Americans should know that their presence doesn't make a difference in the life of wherever they are.
Many Americans were interviewed by Jaweed andKate. defiance, not just indifference, but also defiance.
One transplant told Jaweed that he didn't want to leave everything about L.A.
One person told Kate of Mexico City that it reminded him of being in a friendlier place like Brooklyn.
It's nothing new to see the ugly American stereotype. In the past, snowbirds turned the south of the border into a suburb of Leisure World. Los Angeles and New York have a lot in common. Half of middle-class San Diego has retired to an apartment in either Ensenada orRosarito.
I don't mind people leaving their homelands for a better life in another country. This new generation of expats is not like that. The type of people I call California quitters are privileged people who want all of the easy and no of the hard and decamp for what they think is the better life at the smallest amount of hassle.
It is terrible that they end up in foreign countries and live large while their neighbors struggle.
Some of these expats insist that they are not immigrants. The differences between the two groups are much the same as those of a refugee and a tourist.
The good life is what expatriates chase. Immigrants can't. Immigrants know that if they fail, the cushion of their home country will break the fall.
It is possible for expatriates to move whenever and wherever they please. The immigrants can't. Immigrants become part of their new homelands and expatriates connect to the countries they live in in the most superficial ways.
Immigrants get better.
The movement of Americans to Mexico reminds me of what happened at the turn of the 20th century, when American industry moved en mass and stole billions of dollars in wealth while adding nothing to the country. After reading Kate's piece, I called up Adrin Félix, an ethnic studies professor at the University of California, Irvine, who studies Mexican migration.
He chuckled when I told him about my Jomulquillo story and said he had heard similar stories in the past. He hates the term "expat" because it's different from people who are forcibly displaced.
Félix said that Americans coming in with their money fundamentally change local economies, making them more dependent on dollars that can easily flee in what he called an "extractive industry." The new residents skip through Mexico in a mobile cocoon that protects them from the real world around them.
He said that the surrounding areas were hit hard by violence and poverty. Expats are impervious to that.
Someone is playing a game of life on another person's server.
It's a privilege to be American, and allowed, but they should at least be transparent about their advantage.
The story was originally published in the LA Times.
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