For me Mexico was nothing like I expected it to be. Everything you see about Mexico in the news is such a rarity that it is almost laughable that they try to make it seem like the norm there. In reality Mexico was the cleanest and most up to date country I have been to. It felt very similar to the United States even though I spent the entire time not once seeing anyone that wasn’t a local and very rarely did I meet people that spoke English. The food was great, the vibes were great and I can not emphasize how clean the entire country is.
I was lucky enough to do a road trip throughout almost the entirety of the eastern coast and central region of Mexico. I wanted to stay away from the well known tourist destinations to the west and to the south like Cancun.
Food
With all that was good in Mexico, the first and number one thing I have to highlight is the food. There was not a single miss my entire time there. You can eat every day at a new place in a town no more than a mile by a mile and not eat at the same establishment twice in probably months and this is what I felt was true all over Mexico. The food was very cheap and many times it was hearty good nourishing food. On the other hand I also have no problem with eating what most would consider junk food and there are plenty of top tier treats and street foods that wouldn’t exactly be in a dietitian magazine.
There is a great thing when it comes to food in Mexico and that is no matter how expensive the place you are at or how cheap the place you are at in Mexico. The food will always be cheap and delicious.
Information from worldobesity.org
On the other side of things, many have said and have also told me that Mexico is the most obese country in the world because of their diet, but the stats actually say otherwise. Mexico does not even crack the top 30 in terms of national obesity percentage. On the other hand in many small towns throughout Mexico you can find a spike in obesity due to what many would call “the American diet” being forced upon the people in these smaller towns. For instance a place such as San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas, where CocaCola have a manufacturing plant, the water is completely undrinkable. From my understanding it’s from the local water source being used for the plant leaving water completely undrinkable. This has led to natives in the area to drink almost only Coke and Coke products for breakfast, lunch, dinner and after a workout. This has led to a spike in obesity, diabetes and other complications that result from a high sugar and artificial sweetener diet. I only assume this is similar in other towns in Mexico where American food corporations have set up shop.
I have also heard conspiracy theories from people that are anti-medicine and believe you can cure cancer with berries and fasting, that say the Mexican diet in total is some sort of psyop put onto the Mexican people by the US government and corporations. Which to some extent is true, with all of the fast food chains that are in business in Mexico, but the same is true for relatively all of Latin America and almost anywhere in the world. I think this idea downplays the Latin American Governments as willing participants, but also on a more culturally significant and ugly level a lot of these people I have met would go on to say that even the cuisine that was there for generations, if not pre-columbus, is also part of the American psyop. Which do I have to explain why saying a nation's well known historic and traditional cuisine was really created by some guys in a US conference room is problematic?
Like all conspiracy theorists you have to figure out what is true, what is not and what is downright made up with no basis in reality. I should note that the group of people I am referring to also voiced their anger towards the natives in a small island community in Central America getting access to pharmacies and medicine as a “mark of Satan coming”. All of them are also Ex-pat, free spirited, but also conservative at the same time types, but more of that in a later article.
The Cleanliness of Mexico
Secondly it is like I said before, Mexico is the cleanest country I have been to. I traveled all up and down Mexico and from the biggest cities to the smallest towns the country is spotless compared to anywhere else I have been. The people there take much pride in keeping things clean. It was a day and night contrast of the typical “Mexico is a shit hole” narrative you see in many forms of media. Every evening in the small town I was staying in ,Huejotzingo, the shop owners and locals would come out and sweep up the streets and leave out food for the stray dog population. In many places, but not every place I have traveled to, the stray dog population is almost as important to the community as if they were human (hyperbole).
When you get to bigger cities such as to the north in Monterey, government employees walk around cleaning the city up to the point I think that I didn’t see anything more than a handful of trash on the ground and I think that could be an overestimate.
Is the Border Really an Issue
The next thing is traveling through Mexico and going up to the border and crossing over into Texas, I noticed something. Mexicans like Mexico and there is not such a big admiration to live in the states as the media portrays. The quality of life is relatively the same if not slightly better in many places and of course there are some places that are worse, but overall I think it’s more even than American politicians make it out to be. For a lot of Mexicans leaving Mexico and going to the states is no different than living in South Dakota and moving to North Dakota. Your way of life overall does not change much. Most of the people I met that had worked in the US and came back to Mexico simply did it because there was an opportunity to work in the US and not because they were in dire need to move to the United States and chase a better life.
I think what we see about the border in the news is overblown. I think a lot of what we see at the border is regular migration but because of the idea of Mexicans taking jobs and people ,especially white conservative people, want to paint the border as an issue we get all of this “information” about why the border is an issue.
I also to some extent don’t believe in borders the way we have them today and I don’t believe immigrants are stealing jobs, because every job I've heard of a Mexican stealing was a job that many Americans wouldn’t do in the first place.
I want to take a moment to talk about how vast and beautiful the entire country is. If you want a beautiful beach they have that. City life? they have that. Small town vibes? They have that. It is all very accessible and really an all inclusive vacation destination. While me and my dog took our road trip through Mexico we stopped in some of the most random but beautiful small, little villages that spanned from the mountains, to the beaches, to the plains.
Road Trip
I landed in Mexico a few days before Cinco de Mayo. I needed a car for a few days to make my way to the U.S. to take care of some things for my mother’s estate. Because of the coming holiday I was forced to rent the car for a week because the rental office would be closed. Now, this was not the worst. I now had a means to turn my quick trip to the border and back into a road trip. I started in Huejotzingo and made my way to the carribean beaches in Veracruz. The roads and highways were perfectly paved and well manicured, something that I was not expecting. After a couple of days in Veracruz I made my way north to the border. I spent very little time in Texas, but made sure I got barbecue and a piece of all my favorite fast food places I had missed. I also took the opportunity to get some supplies for when I returned to traveling Latin America. I didn’t even spend the night in Texas. I went down to Monterey and spent the night there. Monteray was one of my favorite cities I had been to in Mexico. It looks very futuristic compared to other cities I have been to. To me it looked like Venice Italy, Los Angeles and San Antonio combined together and then were pushed into the future. After a couple days in Monterey I made my way back to Huejotzingo.
Fight on One Weeks Notice
After my road trip I headed back to the small town, Huejotzingo, I was looking forward to staying in for a bit. It was two hours outside of Mexico City and an hour outside of a pretty fair sized city called Puebla, so if I wanted to go out for a night on the town it was not that hard to get to one of the most famous cities on planet earth.
Anyway, the Monday after my road trip I stopped into a small gym that I had walked past a few times. I had all my gear and I was ready to train. The gym was run by a coach that was a Taekwondo black belt, but had opened up what I would call a freestyle kickboxing gym.
After just my first hour there, the coach asked me if I wanted to fight on Saturday. I want you to remember per my last article I had just received a concussion about two or three weeks earlier in Cuba while training. So of course I did what any sane person would do. I accepted his offer to fight. I spent the next four days before my fight doing a weight cut and training my ass off for the fight, but also teaching and training the other guys as well.
The day of the fight, Popocatétl, the volcano in the region exploded and left ashes raining from the sky. So by the time I had reached the city of Puebla for my fight, I was covered in ash.
After me and everyone else cleaned ourselves off we weighed in for our fights and got matched up. I think I was fight number ten on the card or somewhere around there. I got matched with a young guy, about 18 or 19.
During the fight things got a bit interesting. I was in Mexico and we were fighting under Mexican kickboxing rules. The only problem is I never asked what the rule set was and I come from a Muay Thai background. So after holding my clinch too long and also constantly forgetting I can't do inside leg kicks I found myself getting deducted a point in the first round. After that, in the second and third round I was so frustrated with not being able to do most of the things I wanted to do in the fight. I just threw outside leg kicks while looking at the ref with a face that read “is that okay?” And kept my boxing heavy uptop to let my opponent know he was being beaten.
At the end of the fight I found myself the victor and that's when things became interesting because me being a random American fighting in some random city in Mexico the people started to treat me as if I was Eddie Guerrero. Everyone asked for photos and asked me what the hell I was doing in Mexico.
Back to the Food
Well right after my fight, after months of traveling, I was eating at a local restaurant down the road from where I was staying and I finally got “Consuelo’s Revenge” . I was bed and bathroom ridden for over a week.
Mexico City
I apologize Mexico City, I was not familiar with your game. I went out a few nights in Mexico City, but after an hour or 2 on my first night the only thoughts going through my head were “I get it now” Mexico City is a great city. It is a place where you can go out and do anything and everything you want to do. If it is day or night, it does not matter. I feel very fortunate because I have read and heard that the city was being gentrified by Americans and Europeans, but I didn’t run into a single expat that had moved there while I was there.
Final Thoughts
I am going to be honest, I have nothing bad to say about Mexico. Not one thing. That’s pretty much that. Everything I can think about to say negatively about Mexico is something put on to Mexico by foreign entities and in my experience there did not in any way ring true.
I know many people who say they have had horrible run-ins with the police or that they find Mexican people hard to trust, because they were robbed or things were stolen from them while in their hostel. For me none of this was true. Maybe because of the destinations I chose to go to, but it all makes sense. If you are going to go to a country and only participate in and patronize the vacation destinations and expat communities I think any one native to the area would have a problem with that.
Growing up in New York I have grown to despise gentrification and the only thing different between Gentrification and neo-colonialism is if it happens in your own country or abroad.
I would like to add when you travel within these routes that other travelers take especially where I currently am in Central America. You often never hear these nightmare stories of thievery and someone almost having their head chopped off with a machete from the person themselves. It is always someone you meet who knows someone who heard the story while sitting around a hostel.
With that said, there are still dangers to traveling especially if you happen to be a woman. And danger is doubled if you are a woman traveling alone. So although most horror stories you hear of people in Mexico or anywhere else should be taken with a grain of salt if it's not coming from the person it actually happened to. It is still important to take care of yourself at all times and be vigilant and aware.
Good piece.
Put it simple: Mexico and the Mexicans is in every detail better than the US. That's your beautiful essay in one sentence.
If you look at the healthcare system, the factor is at least 10. In Mexico, healthcare serves health and not greedy millionaires called medical doctors.
And that's the same in the US — Mexican immigrants are mostly better people than others. Meanwhile, I work only with Mexicans if possible. Americans are delusionists regarding their importance.
But this you can only see if you have traveled the world ...