It's been a painful, shameful, embarrassing spectacle, even from the distance afforded by living in Mexico, to watch what passes for a debate on immigration among the Republican presidential candidates, led by Donald Trump.The more extreme and ridiculous his positions have become—starting with his opening campaign blast promising that he would build a two-thousand-mile wall …
Continue reading A not-too-modest proposal for reforming the American immigration system
Not to turn this into a complaining and kvetching post, but during the past eight weeks I came to appreciate Stew's observation about how ungodly convoluted, frustrating and time-consuming even simple transactions can become when you live in Mexico.Take the oven in our six-year-old stove, which was manufactured in Celaya, a town about an hour …
Continue reading When American consumer expectations met Mexican customer service realities
While cruising around on the internet a few days ago Stew found a report on the Fox News site—a news source we generally avoid except for laughs—that cars sold in Mexico don't have to meet many basic safety requirements imposed in the U.S., Canada or Europe, such as air bags or anti-lock brakes. In fact, the dirt-cheap Nissan Tsuru …
I used to believe, naively, that a "home invasion" was a melodramatic synonym for "burglary" until two weeks ago, when at about ten-thirty at night four punks in their twenties broke into the small ranch of a retired American couple in their late sixties who live a few miles deeper into the countryside than us. …
Enchiladas, tequilas and mariachis we know, but who would have imagined Mexico as a living laboratory of free-market-to-the-max, let-'er-rip economic policies, a place where the heads of corporations and service providers can wheel and deal pretty much unregulated except perhaps for the long shot of an angry consumer coming after them with a gun?Rand Paul, …
How are your abuelitos doing I asked Félix last week. His grandparents have been on my mind ever since Stew and I brought them a Christmas despensa, a holiday shopping bag of groceries containing flour for tortillas, corn husks for tamales, cooking oil, sugar and other Mexican staples that we supplemented with a couple of packages of …
When our house was still in the dreaming phase, circa 2008, Stew and I envisioned an enclosed front yard that would hold a collection of subtropical plants somewhat in the style of an English walled garden. It would provide a lush break as one entered the house, between the semi-desertic outdoors and the indoors.It was …
He's a slight but genuinely Mexican man, so our gardener Félix is not prone to bouts of crying, blubbering, trembling or fear-stricken stammering—least of all in public—yet that is what he was doing when he came into my office ten days ago."Alfredo, they are going to kill my family!" he said without any preambles."Who, what, why?" …
This week, the week of August 25, the MEGA supermarket in San Miguel de Allende started putting out Christmas merchandise. Considering Mexicans go on celebrating until January 6, this may be the longest holiday season in the Christian world.###
The church Stew and I attend, a non-denominational enterprise with a sketchy doctrinal corpus but a strong commitment to good works in small villages surrounding San Miguel, had organized an outing to Fajardo de Bocas, located about ten miles from our ranch, to inspect a domestic gray-water treatment plant some members had built at a …
El Rancho Santa Clara 