A One-Time Expat and Her Return to Mexico
Old Naomi recalls life there as Kid Naomi, in the spaces where she grew
After childhood experiences in San Miguel de Allende in the 1960s, when her parents moved the family there for four years, Naomi Marcus makes a return to Mexico – to a fond old home, to memories.
Have you ever wondered about retiring to Mexico?
Not me, no expat life for me; no, I wondered how it would feel to go home to Mexico again. Over 60 years after leaving, I spent October in my childhood town of San Miguel de Allende, in the central highlands of Mexico.
My parents, in an amazingly original move for the time, took us out of our safe California bubble, out of school, away from our pals, and drove us in a blue VW van thru Mexico to San Miguel. I was 9 years old. My siblings were 6 and 3.
We stayed over four years.
Like Brigadoon or Shangri-La, San Miguel de Allende, at 6,200 feet above sea level, appears like a mirage out of the clouds. Its church spires and bell towers pierce sapphire skies studded with frothy clouds, the mild air kisses your skin, and the sun is gentle as warm honey.
When I asked expats at a bar, Kenny’s Place (owned by Kenny from Indiana), “Why San Miguel?” several replied they googled best weather in the world year-round and got San Miguel and Nairobi, Kenya.
Yes.
Famous for its expatriate gringo community and its glorious climate, it’s no longer a cheap haven for dreamers and writers and artists, many who arrived in the ’50s and ’60s. The G.I bill paid for young veterans to attend Spanish and art classes at the newly established Instituto Cultural de Bellas Artes, and they flocked to San Miguel in the 1950s. My dad, a writer, found a rich community of artists there in the early ’60s, from Europe and the US.
Today’s San Miguel gringos are those who read Travel and Leisure, wealthy retired business people, lots of Texans.
Memories that linger upon her return to Mexico
As soon as we walked into our rental house, the scent of San Miguel came back in a flood: the smell of cool adobe and gas in the kitchen – that particular Mexican cooking gas odor blended with adobe-clay and straw.
Then the sweet fresh smell of the brief afternoon deluge: the sudden rain on the dusty stones, the sky darkening like an ink bottle turned over and spilled. The sizzling smells of braziers charring meat, chilis, tomatoes and onions, smells that grab your nose aggressively as you walk by.
Oh, beware those mouthwatering smells, rue the day you eat from those street vendors! My mother, (who grew up in Shanghai and knew about dysentery) forbade us to go near those stands!
But eating fresh tortillas from the tortilla factory, the charcoal and hot corn scent like perfume, that we were allowed. And oh, how fine those tortillas tasted 65 years later.
Here comes the hail, brief and huge, here is the light that my dad called Christ Rays: the sun slanting down in streaming golden pockets, anointing a block, a house, a park, in a brief radiant canopy.
I wanted to revisit my school, the two houses we’d lived in, the bullring around the corner (where I saw many bullfights; my parents were “When in Rome, do as…” types), the Instituto Bellas Artes where I learned classical guitar, the hot springs where we had splashed many an afternoon away, the ice cream shop where I’d first tasted coffee ice cream!
Stepping differently
My little girl brain took the elderly Naomi through the streets she’d skipped along, only now I stepped cautiously on the cobblestones. I remembered our address.
We’d lived at 11 Calle Huertas. Our steep block was unchanged from 66 years ago, and I was thrilled to see our green gate was painted the exact same green. When I knocked, the now-96-year-old landlady and her caregiver opened the door. That landlady remembered el Señor Marcus (“con la barba, verdad?” with the beard, right?). We laughed as I showed her photos of us in her house in 1964.
The patio, the stairway, the plants, all the same. But the comfortable house had been remade into three apartments, all Airbnbs run by her daughter. ”Todo cambia” she said, (everything changes).
The school of her youth
I attended Escuela Santo Domingo, a private school run by an order of Catholic nuns. They called me “La Israelita” due to my Jewishness. My first month there, the nuns kept bringing me to the chapel to convert me but I always cried, till my mom stormed up the hill to the Madre Superior’s office and declared, “NO MAS, NO conversions!”
We wore navy blue uniforms and marched in all the Mexican national holiday parades. Old Naomi wandered the playground where kid Naomi learned to march in formation (Mom not too happy about that either), and sing patriotic songs.
I remember the catcalls, men calling out after me as I walked home from that school, even at age 11. “Ay Mamacita, mamacita” (hey, little mama.)
It was annoying but not scary. It got worse as I turned 13.
Now, men on the street respectfully step aside for me to pass.
I saw no gringo kids at my alma mater, and I learned there is now a private Waldorf school in San Miguel de Allende.
Like San Francisco, it appears there are more dogs than kids. The Mexicans who support the retirees and the tourists mostly live in outlying villages.
As I wandered through the Jardin, (Central Square), I heard the ancient beggars wrapped in their rebozos calling out from the same corners as 65 years before, their pleas blending with the endless bells.
While visiting the converted 17th-century convent where I learned classical guitar, I watched bustling art classes in the bougainvillea sprayed courtyards; retirees sculpt, they bronze, they weave, they cast, they spin pots, they paint, they sketch.
Dressed in the San Miguel retirement uniform of baggy shorts, huaraches, and floppy colorful straw hats to protect their Northern skin, they appear prosperous and cheerful, like Kenny who runs the bar.
The return to Mexico, where others now make their home
When I was a kid, the directory of foreign residents was a mimeographed handbound volume called The JUARDE directory (sound it out). Now of course there is a Facebook page for expats and one for potential expats, a FB page for the local yoga people, and one for the vegan people.
Upon my return to Mexico, I visited friends, a young Bay Area couple who’d just moved to San Miguel with two young sons, 5 and 3. The boys were in the local Waldorf school.
Back in San Francisco, these friends (and digital nomads) had queried me about our family’s San Miguel experience, as they were thinking of doing the same, and I’d encouraged them.
They’d had a rough entry as the boys got sick the first month, but a U.S.-trained Mexican pediatrician (they’d bought a local medical plan) made a house call at midnight for 30 US dollars, treated the boys with medicine he brought, and reassured the parents.
In 1965, when an alecran (scorpion) bit my sister, our housekeeper Vincenta laughed at my mom’s fear, sucked the poison out of my sister’s chubby arm, spit it out, and said, “No es nada, Señora, no es nada.” Then she rubbed a garlic clove on the wound. That was the end of that.
This couple were in awe of my parents’ pre-internet bravery, “How did they know about schools? How did they find a place to live? How did they think about health care? How did they learn Spanish?”
I had no idea, but they never seemed daunted; I knew they hired a retired elegant physician to tutor them in Spanish at home every afternoon in our courtyard, and they both were fluent in six months. But they really wanted to speak well.
When the couple told me they were currently studying Spanish online, I was appalled, “Are you kidding me?” I spluttered, “You are HERE in MEXICO, GET A TUTOR.”
I have no statistics on how many of the 10,000 San Miguel expats speak the language, but my fluent Spanish has been my parents’ lifelong gift to me and my siblings. Gracias!
The changing faces of drama, bullfighting, and Naomi
At age 13, I took drama and Spanish classes at the Instituto Allende, a private arts school which had no problem letting a precocious teen pay to attend.
To my chagrin, Instituto Allende is now an expensive wedding venue. When I made the pilgrimage to my favorite classroom, a cleaning crew was there gathering up dozens of discarded bouquets and corsages and centerpieces.
I asked if I could have one bouquet, and they pushed a bunch into my arms.
The classroom and little theatre where I recited passages from Shakespeare and Cervantes are now used for weddings, birthdays, and celebrations, other kinds of performance.
Kid Naomi liked drama, and maybe that’s why she loved the bullfights and went often, paying extra pesos for seats in the sombra (shade) as opposed to seats in the sol. She even hung around after to watch them slaughter the dead bulls.
Now, here at the bullring, my husband asks Old Naomi, “How could you stand that? Didn’t you feel bad for the bulls?” Correct, Old Naomi wouldn’t go to a bullfight today. She has evolved.
What was astonishing was how much I remembered; how little the town had changed physically, yet how enormously the expat population had changed: Now instead of art studios and ateliers, people build mansions and monster homes and shop in fancy grocery stores as elegant as any Whole Foods in San Francisco.
In the ’60s we carried a basket to the open-air produce mercado and patronized the only Super Mercado run by the spinster Sanchez sisters. Ah, how thrilled we were when they began to carry Cheerios and Frito Lay Chips.
Old Naomi could never live there now.
My parents could never live there now.
But Old Naomi came home with a lot of compassion and respect for Kid Naomi; how well she managed the machismo, how well she navigated adolescence in a new country, how many Mexican songs she learned to sing and play. Really well. Thanks to Lilo, the Mariachi who (how did my parents find him?) came to the house with his notebooks of songs.
Old Naomi came away with new respect for her parents’ bravery and fortitude. How I wish I could tell them that now.
PHOTO CAPTION, TOP: Courtyard of Bellas Artes where Naomi Marcus studied guitar. Photo taken after her return to Mexico.
Naomi Marcus was raised on the Big Sur Coast and attended UC Santa Cruz, majoring in Russian. She got her graduate degree in Journalism at Columbia University and will soon attend her 40th reunion. She worked in the USSR as a tour guide and interpreter in the hopeful 1980s. She came back to California, married, and worked as a social worker with immigrants and refugees, and her last job was as a vocational counselor with the severely mentally ill, at UC San Francisco’s dept of psychiatry. She has written for the SF Chronicle, Mother Jones, American Photographer, and many other publications.
Also from Naomi Marcus:
A 2023 Trip to Antigua, Guatemala
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