If Nobody Is Sitting on the Fountain it Might Have Pee All Over It
Self righteous shit talk target this month: the gringos of Mexico City. On gentrification, grief, and parties.
**~la traducción a español aquí~**
The last few months, in order to have water in my house for the day, I’ve had to sit in my kitchen every morning and run a pump 15 minutes on, 5 minutes off for a few hours. While I do that, I drink coffee, read the news, and wonder how I am going to explain this world to the baby growing in my belly.
My house is dreamy looking: built in the ‘50s, cute moldings, white with lime green trim, huge windows, a porch, a roof deck, a garden with a 30-foot palm and a 20-foot monstera. It looks like it belongs on a beach. But its walls are full of humidity, literally crumbling. The pulmonologist says my lungs are irritated from breathing wall dust. When I moved in three years ago, the water worked fine and the walls were holding up. My rent was 35% less, too, before the exchange rate changed. Lately, this house feels like a metaphor for everything.
When I moved to Mexico City 9 years ago, there was 30% more water coming out of the city grid and rents were about 25% of what they are now. Most gringos who lived here were journalists, artists, and weirdos. I think most of us knew each other. Mexicans were mostly incredulous and entertained by the idea that we wanted to live here. “Really?! You like it!??!?!”
I was in love with it. My heart fluttered for every virgen in a nicho, for every rotulo of a giant cartoon torta, for every cement truck painted with giant colorful animals. For the art deco lettering on the buildings. For the cumbia and reggaeton and banda. For the endless clever innuendos. For being able to smoke in taxis. For jacaranda season, moss season, ofrenda season. For the mezcal and the marimbas and the mangos con chile. And obviously for the tacos.
Also huge was being able to afford rent only by writing. Moving here gave me back the 30-40 hours a week I’d been working menial jobs in NYC to buy myself a few hours a day to write. And gorgeous, light-filled apartments with breathtaking views. People would ask me, “why Mexico City?!??” Ha!
It’s a very different city now. A verdadero flood of gringos has changed it. For the last few years, I’ve been making fun of people for saying that. Because “if they think that’s true, their idea of Mexico City is all of about 5 neighborhoods.” Pretentious bullshit to mask the grief. It’s undeniable that if Mexico City was ever “truly magical” as a much-despised viral tweet once suggested, some of that magic has died. Death by horrible gringo vibes. We’re not as responsible for the rent hikes as people think—it’s mostly the financialization of real estate + poor public policy—but we are responsible for some of it.
The gentrification process here is not only violent in the spatial sense. Strong tenants’ rights laws mean landlords turn to physical measures to remove people from their homes. To make room for gringos, they hire groups of thugs to physically drag people out of their houses or businesses, sometimes by their hair when they try to exercise their right to stay.1
In Roma, Condesa, and Juarez, most of the small businesses have already closed because gringos don’t buy tortas or get their shoes repaired. In their places are one million sushi bars and sterile, minimalist cafes full of open laptops. The gringos speak loud English at Mexicans. They take pictures of people’s children. They haggle with street vendors who probably don’t eat three meals a day. They’re sure everyone’s trying to rip them off. Some blond girl at a party asked my (non-cocain-using-or-selling) husband if he could sell her some cocaine, probably because he’s dark and has a fade.
Nobody is entertained that we want to live here anymore. I no longer have the same endearing conversation with every taxi driver who wants to make sure that I have tried or will try ALL OF THE FOODS.2 An old lady in my corner store told me to go back to my country the other day. I get it.
There are two kinds of gringos here now. The guilty woke ones call themselves colonizers, apologize all over the place. They are often intent on finding and having a more “authentic” experience. They have Y Tu Mamá También fantasies of being adopted by a cute fishing family who will recognize the purity of their souls when they finally find that “less-touristy” beach. They hunt Mexican friends to have Mexican friends.
The basic gringos work corporate or tech jobs, do not speak Spanish, do not try to speak Spanish. Mostly they want to have Instagram-able apartments with Acapulco chairs and monsteras in them and go clubbing and eat at fancy restaurants. They do not pretend to be otherwise. They do not care about making Mexican friends.
Most of the gringos buy lots of drugs from the people who keep this country in a grip of terror. Very few have any idea of or curiosity about what’s going on around them—neither in the broad nor literal sense. They don’t read the news. Don’t know Mexican history. Don’t know how power is brokered here or by whom. But they also have an incredible blindness to their immediate surroundings.
An example: yesterday in a park where many people bring their dogs to play, I saw a gringo wearing what looked like multi-hundred dollar, off-white pants sitting on the side of a fountain reading (of course) The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin. Dozens of other people were at the park standing around while their dogs played, but nobody else was sitting on the fountain. Because it was covered in fresh dog pee.
Another example: Gringos often fail to notice how quietly Mexicans tend to speak. My husband says the quiet talking is a legacy of colonial subjugation but I see a raw power in it. A diss, a joke, or a nugget of truth all pack exceptional punch delivered at an even-toned, just-audible volume. Gringos yell-talk in restaurants, pissing off entire dining rooms full of other patrons, which they also fail to notice.
They insist Mexico City actually is really safe. (It is not.) They assume open container. They do drugs in public. I heard a kid in the airport say on the phone, “It’s Mexico, there’s literally like no rules.” (There are.)
The gringos have come to the movie theater, but they are sitting in it with their eyes closed, plugging their ears, and humming. They did not come here to watch the drama-bordering-on-horror that is the actual movie. They came here to star in the Eat-Pray-Love romcom in their heads.
They came for a bohemian adventure, for something “realer.” They think decay is the absence of capitalism, but it’s just the other side of NAFTA. They don’t want to see that this moment of intense, violent gentrification and the tension and darkness it produces is the authentic experience. So they do more projecting than looking.
Not only is it unethical to take advantage of unthinkable levels of wealth inequality without being willing to, at the very least, bear witness to that wealth inequality and the violence it produces, especially when you are exacerbating that inequality, but it is also just kind of fucking bizarre to want to live in a country and not want to know anything about it.
It’s like the men I went on dates with who talked about themselves for hours, never asked me a single question, and then at the end said, “I really like you, let’s do this again.” They meant it but were unaware that what they actually enjoyed was the experience of exercising their power, of luxuriating in taking up space, of telling their own stories.
Mexicans have an expression, pena ajena, which means “adjacent embarrassment.” I get a lot of that. And shame and guilt.3 I don’t like seeing other gringos around all the time and being reminded that I am that same asshole.
I am also resentful out of pure selfishness. The other gringos are taking up all the good apartments. I’m already rent stressed and I’ve been desperately apartment hunting for months while this money-eating monster grows in my belly. Apparently, I can no longer afford the kind of home that my millennial, was-promised-a-401K ass feels entitled to—the kind that would make a good setting for my romcom—without getting a full time job, which I am not (yet) willing to do.
The best reflection I have of my own ridiculousness is my mother in law. She grew up with a dirt floor, daughter of an illiterate bricklayer. She didn’t get to finish school, but she’s whip smart and has worked extremely hard and has made prudent choices in her life. She owns her house. When she looks at my finances, she says: “Buy. Of course you have enough money to buy.” She means buy something I would never consider living in—something like her house. She is right; that would be the smart thing to do.
Instead, I refuse to acknowledge that my class mobility is downward. I invest in the aesthetic of my present over the viability of my future. The distance between what she sees as reasonable and what I’m willing to settle for is the size of my denial. It’s huge. That’s the case for a lot of us here.
At the end of the day, I’m doing the same thing most of the other gringos are: whatever possible to sustain our unsustainable standards of living. The rapidly diminishing value of the dollar is a concrete metric; the privilege we come here to exercise is shrinking. We don’t want to see the real movie of our own lives, either. But it’s getting really hard for me not to with the walls of my dream house literally crumbling.
So I’m trying to hold my eyes open and watch the damn movie. The more I do, the more I am forced to grieve. Grieve the future I was promised as a child, the idea that I can write for a living, the Mexico City that didn’t have a gringo infection or a housing crisis, the idea that my own presence here wasn’t violent.
My own people are driving middle-class Mexicans out of the center of their own capital city. My own people have now killed 24,000 Palestinians in my name. Every morning, I run a pump to extract dwindling water from the ground, read the news, and ask myself how I am going to explain this world to the baby growing in my belly.
I will try to explain that:
It is worth it to watch the movie unflinchingly.
All of the tragedy and destruction and entropy make what works and what thrives more unlikely and therefore more gorgeous.
Even while grief wounds, it opens new dimensions of joy.
The importance of dancing cannot be overstated.
These are lessons Mexico teaches me over and over when I’m willing to watch the movie. Mexico parties hard. And you can’t see how beautiful and poignant Mexican parties are if you won’t look at all of the violence, the trauma, the unthinkable injustice. The parties end at dawn after hours and hours of dancing with someone putting on sad songs and everyone crooning and crying together.4 You have to dance but also cry to sacarle el jugo de la vida. Grief and joy are inextricable. Mexicans seem to get that better than we do. That’s why I’m so glad I’m going to raise my kid here.
Choose denial over grief and time will wear you out.5 I’ve been grieving and it’s making me feel lighter. Grief is less fun than denial in the short term. But denial is heavier than grief. Choose denial and you don’t get a chance to learn about your date or find out if they’re hilarious or to let the fucking insane, dark, gorgeous city you live in shake you alive. And I think that’s true no matter how nice your apartment is.
In 2022, Tarah Knaresboro and I collaborated with researchers Biaani Cantu and Christian Scott to study gringo migration and what could be done to remediate harm… We came up at the end of it more lost than found to be honest. Biaani and Christian ended up concluding that any meaningful measures would need to come from the government. But Biaani did collect these accounts of displacements, which we have permission to share publicly. They’re in Spanish but Google Translate exists.
Mexicans have a genre of conversation I call Listing Foods. They do it to foreigners but also to each other. One says a food and the other says “MMM” and then the other says another food and they go back and forth listing and MMMing like this for long stretches and it is a very serious exchange.
An exception: I do love watching middle class gringos make wealthy Mexicans writhe in disgust. Wealthy Mexicans are white descendants of the original colonizers––the wealth distribution structure has barely changed in this country in centuries––with zero wealth shame or low-key sensibilities. They are rude as hell to service workers, rarely making eye contact, which is basically the extent of their interactions with people beneath their social class. And they are furious that gaggles of loud middle class basic white girls in floral Urban Outfitters dresses and packs of bros in shorts can afford to eat in their restaurants and drink in their bars. Watching their distressed faces as they watch their elite spaces get desecrated is 🤌.
My favorite writer, Alma Guillermoprieto, opened her perfect essay “Mexico City” with the epically good first sentence: “Mexicans know that a party has been successful if at the end there are at least a couple of clusters of longtime or first-time acquaintances leaning on each other against a wall, sobbing helplessly.”
Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote:
Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown'd,
Let darkness keep her raven gloss:
Ah, sweeter to be drunk with loss,
To dance with death, to beat the ground,Than that the victor Hours should scorn
The long result of love, and boast,
"Behold the man that loved and lost,
But all he was is overworn."