Why We Left an Anthology of American Women Expats

by Janet Blaser

  To live and work in Latin America was something I’d known for years I wanted to do, and I knew I would absolutely regret not seeking out the opportunity when I had the chance. But ultimately, making the decision to move abroad wasn’t something that happened overnight. I can look back over the six years prior to that decision and pick out individual moments that, over time, accumulated to finally give me the courage to take the leap.

  One such occasion was the vow I’d made on the plane ride back from Guatemala. Another moment of clarity came when talking to a friend about our mutual career-related uncertainty. I was discussing dissatisfaction in my job and mentioned how I’d always dreamed about working in Latin America, addressing it more as an afterthought than a real possibility. When I finished, she said she could see my whole demeanor shift when I talked about Latin America; my eyes lit up, the passion came through in my voice, and there was no doubt it was something I should pursue. I knew she was absolutely right. I’d known it all along, but time and again had brushed it off instead of truly accepting it and taking action to move towards it.

  To all the young people aspiring to travel or live abroad yet hesitating due to fear, social pressure, career norms or any other reason, I urge you to fully listen to that yearning rather than ignore it. Acknowledge those moments of clarity each time they occur. I had made a vow to myself to come back to Latin America, yet in the subsequent years I saw myself getting sucked into the what-I-“should”-dos rather than prioritizing what I knew was right for me both personally and professionally.

  There are so many excuses we can make for being unable to pursue a life abroad, but too often the sole roadblock is ourselves. If you’re thinking about moving abroad but feel hindered by various factors, try to look at them objectively. Are these things directly blocking you from pursuing your goal and completely out of your control? Or are they circumstances that could be overcome in some way with a bit of effort? In my experience, it was almost always the latter.

  I wholeheartedly acknowledge that my viewpoints come from a position of significant privilege. I’m grateful to have had the background, resources, education and health that enabled me to embark on this journey. Almost every day I try to remind myself this is not an opportunity available to everyone, and to therefore make the most of it. I also strive to remain highly conscious of the fact that my parents made a similar move more than 40 years ago out of necessity, whereas I’m lucky enough to pursue it as a lifestyle choice.

  I do think that those who have the privilege and opportunity to live abroad, even for a short time, should absolutely take advantage of it. Really. Don’t just seize the day, seize the world. And I’m beyond convinced that aside from being a fun adventure or unique learning experience, this journey has helped shape me, and countless other expats, into more informed, empathetic and empowered global citizens. Perhaps it may be too idealistic, but I think that living, working or just traveling abroad are some of the best ways to reduce ignorance, enhance empathy and spark action to combat some of the world’s most important issues.

  Born and raised in New York City as a first-generation American, Emilia developed an affinity towards foreign cultures and languages at an early age. After taking Spanish classes in high school and college, she discovered a deep appreciation for Latin American culture during summer jobs in Guatemala and Bolivia. Upon graduating from Duke University in 2013, Emilia held various roles in marketing and digital media in the U.S. before deciding to move to Mexico City to complete the Princeton in Latin America fellowship, working at the non-profit Endeavor to help provide mentorship and support to high-impact entrepreneurs across the country. She is now living and working in Mexico City indefinitely. In her spare time, Emilia enjoys (poorly) dancing cumbia, eating all kinds of Mexican cuisine, rock climbing, kickboxing, and embarking on adventure travel.

  8. “The Long & Winding Road”

  Kerry Watson

  Lake Chapala, Jalisco &

  San Blas, Nayarit

  Living in a foreign culture is like holding a mirror up to your own culture. Each discovery in the new place also teaches you about yourself, about your old place. Each word you learn teaches you something about your native culture, too. Each event that happens to you is either better or worse than your old culture, and in the end everything adds up to create an experience that’s either better or worse than the place you came from. It’s like the goldfish that doesn’t know it’s in water because it has never been anywhere else; it must leap into the air to realize it has returned to water.

  Today when I watch an American TV show—it can be nearly any show, really—I’m struck by the incredible number of unquestioned assumptions and waste depicted in each scene. Waste of money and time and energy, earning and maintaining and paying interest several times over on huge houses, with huge rooms to furnish and fill that you will rarely if ever use. Huge offices that need to generate huge money to stay in business, huge cars to transport yourself from the huge house to the huge office. And the assumptions that this over-production and waste is absolutely normal.

  This over-consumption and over-production means that an average person “needs” a couple million dollars to retire in order to maintain this massive lifestyle. How many people are going to become millionaires in their lifetimes? Very few—and not very many of those who strive for this carrot-on-a-stick. But what happens if you strip away most of the over-consumption and over-production down to what’s meaningful and actually necessary in your life? Why, then you can retire and lead a blissful life, perhaps even retire early. Especially in Mexico.

  I, too, am guilty of over-consumption and over-production. But my mirror into another culture is the reason I’m aware of it. You can read, for example, studies that “heat map” homes and show only a small fraction of a house is actually used. But unless you’ve been elsewhere, lived where the assumption is not “bigger is always better,” you have no way to apply this learning and quickly forget about it. How many people can live happily in a house? One? Two? A dozen? Eighteen happy people once lived in the Mexican home I now call my own. Do I have 18 times more happiness than they did? Hell, no!

  The cultural mirror into another culture also teaches you to question the values you were brought up with. Is efficiency always an important value? Is standardization really important? Does business always come before pleasure, work before family? You learn that there are good points and also bad points to everything, depending on what values you hold dear. When Mexicans say family first, they’re not parroting words, they actually mean it. They’ll drop a ladder to bring something their child needs to their school. Family IS first.

  It’s been a very long process of acculturation for me, of accepting Mexican culture as my own preferred culture. Starting in my 40s I spent more than a decade going back and forth, spending anywhere from six months to two years here, before retiring “a little bit young” in Mexico. (I’m younger than most retirees.) Before that I spent most vacations and holidays exploring Mexico and dreaming of living there one day. Until I moved here though, I was always juggling my love of horses with my love of being in Mexico. Let me tell you how I got here.

  I grew up in Minnesota, where the dreary grey winter skies can go on for weeks without a break in the clouds. I can say without much irony that all the food is white: white pasta casseroles, mashed potatoes, white bread, white rice, lutefisk. (I’m not exactly sure what that last one is, but being a Norwegian dish, it’s surely white.) I’ve seen white snow in June and in August, and our suburb was overwhelmingly white folks, relentless conformity, and all I could think of in high school was how to get out of this white, white place.

  One day in high school my casserole-making mom decided to try a new, exotic dish for our family; she told us it was called “tacos.” Tacos. Living close to the Canadian border we’d not heard of this dish before. She bought McCormick seasoning packets and taco shells and painstakingly followed the instructions. Although
I’m sure it was very mild, it was the pizazz-iest food our family had ever tried. My sisters crinkled their noses at the spicy dish, but for me, it was like a party in my mouth and it triggered dreams of living where everything wasn’t either grey or white.

  So picture little white-bread me: Signing up for high school Spanish class was the next-most exotic thing I had ever done. I remember naively thinking on my first day of class “Oh, so we just have to learn the Spanish alphabet and pronounce all the words ‘their’ way, hola instead of ‘hello.’ This is oh-so-easy!” Cringe. Day two I actually learned there are words beyond the cognates (words that are similar in both languages) and that it was going to be a bit trickier than I’d expected, but I was still hooked.

  What I loved about my Spanish class—and what I still love today about speaking it—was that it was communication, language, puzzle-solving and pattern recognition, interpersonal skills and culture lessons all wrapped up into one daily class. My young teacher was married to a man from South America, which opened up vistas for me I’d never before considered in our small town. You can marry someone from another culture? I was so provincial I didn’t even know that was possible.

  Our senior high school class trip with my BFF, Jan, was our first taste of being treated like adults. We landed in Madrid under a brilliant flamenco sun. Two blondies going to the discotecas, young soldiers under the dictator Franco winking at us while holding machine guns, young love discovered and lost and discovered again at the next town. A home-stay in Segovia in an unheated, cold-water flat with a grandmotherly woman taught me that you can do laundry in an apartment with a washboard and be perfectly happy with life, even joyful. Returning home to be treated like a child again was an almost unbearable culture shock, and I’m sure I was miserable to be around. I debated “what is womanhood” with my mom. I had tasted freedom, adulthood, the excitement of being out on my own and making my own decisions. Hispanic culture was forever imprinted on my young brain.

  When I learned that the University of Mexico in Mexico City offered free tuition, I was ready to fly down there immediately, despite not even having airfare to my name. But my ever-practical and well-read mom could only think of the student uprising of 1968 where police had shot into a crowd of unarmed student demonstrators, and she nixed that idea. My next idea was becoming a flight attendant so I could fly to all these places. I was so determined to get out and see the world. Mom again said nope, no flight attendants in the family. I went into the military, came out with the GI Bill, went to college and eventually married one of my former college professors.

  In search of sun, in my 20s we migrated south on IH-35, the central highway that goes from the Canadian border to the Mexican border. It had been solid grey skies for 45 days and I pretty much snapped. The weather improved the farther south we went, and by the time we reached Austin to visit friends it was blue skies. Austin is about a third Hispanic, so I got to keep my Spanish in practice. Laredo was only a few hours away. It was a great blend of my dreams.

  Throughout my adult life I was always in a hurry to get wherever I was going, and I learned pretty quickly you could get a lot more leverage using your brain rather than your body. For example, if you work with your muscles you’re depreciating and using up your body. That’s a 1:1 ratio, or perhaps even less since you may be destroying your body. But if you work with your brain, you’re not using it up, you’re just keeping it well-exercised. If you must work 40 hours a week, I reasoned, you should try to get as much money (leverage) for that time as you could. For example, at minimum wage it may take 50 years to save up enough to retire. At 10 times minimum wage, it may take just 10 years. This is also affected by your personal spending rate.

  There are only a few ways to get maximum leverage of your time, mainly being in commission sales or running your own business. So for much of my life I ran my own business, polishing off my education with a master’s in business to get as much leverage for my work hours as I could.

  When my husband and I discovered the venerable “People’s Guide to Mexico” it quickly became our Bible. The book talked about Mexican culture, “why” they do the things they do, not just where to stay for cheap grins. With vacation time and that guide in hand, we made the 25-hour journey in a land-shark mobile to San Blas, with three drivers driving around the clock dodging cattle in the road, drivers without headlights and of course, topes. This was in the days before the toll roads were built, so each segment of the highway wound from one plaza to another, like connecting a game of dot-to-dot. You wended your way into town following obscure or hidden or non-existent signs, drove around the town square, then back out of town. Repeat this snake pattern dozens of times, and then you’re in San Blas.

  As far as we were concerned, San Blas was the cultural center of the universe. It had a special energy. San Blas is a former shipping port whose glory days were more than 100 years ago. One hurricane after another has rearranged the town and coastline repeatedly. A hurricane caused the place to become famous for the longest wave in the world, and surfers flocked to the area for decades. A later hurricane changed the underwater topography, and those glorious surfing days are but another memory. Nevertheless, the town still has special energy to me, and it still draws many people from all over the world who feel it too. I knew this was my destiny—if not San Blas, certainly Mexico.

  I remember meeting an elderly American woman living happily in a stick hut near the beach on a dirt road named Las Brisas. “What a magical life!” I remember thinking. I hoped I could be that woman someday.

  While still in my 20s, my husband and I managed to save up enough money working for ourselves to “retire” to San Blas in an old Ford van that we converted to a rolling home. We had nearly worked ourselves to death with our own business. We sold everything we owned, including our horses, and recuperated in the San Blas sun for months. We met young folks from around the world who’d worked hard, bought four houses and used the income to perpetually travel the world. Others who worked their way around by teaching English. Since this was the old days when Mexican bathing suits were still knee-to-chin black lumps, I sewed and sold bikinis. If at the time I were wise beyond my years, this would be where my story ends with happily-ever-after. But of course, it’s not.

  It was in San Blas I first heard the Mexican parable of the fisherman. This is where an insufferably smug MBA on vacation meets a Mexican fisherman who is living a perfect life fishing a few hours a day, laying in his hammock, playing with his children and romancing his wife. The only problem is that it’s a subsistence life. The MBA analyzes the situation and sketches out a plan, explaining to the fisherman exactly how he could work his ass off for 25 years building a massive fishing empire. The fisherman asks what all that hard work will get him. The MBA replies that the fisherman can retire and fish a few hours a day, laze in his hammock, play with his kids and romance his wife.

  This tale always stuck with me, yet as much as I wanted to, I could never just let go and trust the universe enough to enjoy that subsistence life. This may sound strange, but life was too easy to be retired in one’s 20s. I’d needed to relax, but I finally got saturated with relaxation and I felt like I was rotting and dying. I spent several months convincing my husband I needed to ADD some stress in my life. I had an unsatisfied need to “prove myself,” to make it in the business world. I didn’t want to just sit back and crow, “I could have made it if I tried! I just didn’t try.” This innate need to prove myself also became the undoing of our relationship much later on. At the same time my biological clock also started ticking, becoming an overwhelming alarm clock that wouldn’t shut up. My husband didn’t have a need to prove himself or have a child, but he understood my needs and kindly accommodated. We went back to Austin and sold the van.

  I wanted to have my baby born in Mexico, but when the time came, I couldn’t manage the logistics of traveling to the border to have my baby in a clinic on the other side. This was going to be my
one and only. So we had her in Austin, at home with midwives. I went back to college, worked full-time, and we built a house with our own hands all at the same time. Stress, yes; I wanted stress and it’s stress I got. I wanted it all! Life became complicated and it was all wonderful and stressful and fun at the same time.

  I worked my way into high tech and ended up building a good life. I lived mostly in Austin but did a stint in Silicon Valley, where I was able to own a horse again. I was lucky enough to work for several startups including Netscape. Mexico became an annual pilgrimage, or a stop on a cruise. My daughter and I learned scuba and we became avid fans of Cozumel. Each time I returned to the U.S. the culture shock was a little more jarring. The endless variety in our huge, gleaming supermarkets was overwhelming for a few days until I adapted again to being back, when it would again seem normal.

  I worked in web project management at a time when all websites were custom-programmed, and I started a consulting business, Pithy Productions, Inc., which I still run today. When the World Trade Center fell, I was watching it on TV as my major client called; their offices were a few blocks from the W.T.C. and they were closing down for a few months. I was far away from New York, but the collapse stranded me and my business.