From the Editor’s Desk: The Unquiet American (Premium)

As I write this, we’re on the final day of a three-week-plus trip to Mexico City and that means we can’t really enjoy it despite the sun and perfect weather: We have all kinds of cleaning up and packing to do, and a friend of my wife is visiting our apartment later this month, so it has to be even cleaner than usual. But the last day of any trip is a weird limbo, a time when we reflect on our experiences here and voice that familiar wistful desire to each other that we should just stay here and never go back home.

We can’t do that. But we did book our next trip to Mexico, for February, this past week and that eases the looming discomfort of knowing we’re leaving, for sure. That annoyance I feel when the United app pops up on my phone’s lock screen with a notification that it’s time to check in for the flight home. That terrible early alarm on the dark morning of the flight. The airport. The cars to and from on both ends. All the terribleness that needs to happen so we can enjoy being away. As I’ve often quipped, I love being in other places, it’s the travel I hate.

I’m not sure how obvious this is from the outside, but I still grapple with this place, Mexico City, and what it means. We have been accepted into an ever-widening community that includes people and places all around us, people who know our names, are happy to see us, and wave to us from inside stores and restaurants as we walk by. This is the culture many in the United States, especially, don’t understand or even think about. I certainly never did.

But that’s the nature of life, right? You learn more about some things out of necessity. When our son almost died as a one-year-old from bacterial meningitis and became deaf, we had never heard of cochlear implants or their magical ability to restore hearing, and that was a game-changer for him and us. This thing that was never previously on our radar was suddenly central to our lives, and it has been ever since. My wife, son, and I have literally helped others facing the same unwanted problem make the right decision for them, and my wife even appeared in a video promoting the vaccine that would have prevented our son’s illness in the first place.

This place in Mexico City isn’t on the same level as our son’s health and well-being. But it is a major life change. Mexico was of no interest to us at all previous to the COVID-era travel bans that led us down this strange path. But whatever, everything changed and here we are. And in coming here again and again, in literally investing in this place—financially, of course, but also with time and our minds and hearts—we feel a certain sense of, if not ownership, perhaps community and kinship with the area and the people who populate it. We are a part of this. It is us and we are it, if you will.

And that leads me down some troubling paths.

Our apartment is in a neighborhood called Roma Norte and it, like nearby Condesa, is popular with tourists and expats. I am not comfortable with that, do not like it one bit, and I accept the hypocrisy of that statement: We don’t come to a foreign country to be among Americans and other English speakers, we come here to immerse ourselves in this place, in this culture, and in this language. Our goal is to blend in as much as possible and to adapt to here, not the reverse. We will never do so fully, of course. I mean, look at us. But we try.

Many do not try. And this rankles me.

A recent story in CNBC highlighted what is, to me, the problem. “On a walk through some popular neighborhoods, you may hear more English spoken than Spanish, and see cafes crowded with remote workers on laptops,” it notes. Fortunately, that is not our day-to-day experience here, as our apartment is in one far corner of Roma Norte, on the edge of the less refined and not-yet-gentrified Roma Sur neighborhood, and so we can walk for several minutes in any direction and never see a flipflop-wearing American carrying a MacBook Pro to one of what seems like an infinite number of coffee shops. But they’re out there. And if we walk further, to the north and west, there are more and more of them with each passing block.

We could debate this topic endlessly without resolving it. Americans and other tourists bring money and that helps some local businesses to some degree, of course. But it also harms the locals who cannot afford the ever-increasing housing prices here and the small businesses and local restaurants that these tourists would never bother to visit in the first place. It will lead to many of them closing up for good as the neighborhood changes and the workers here commute in from elsewhere.

That we are part of this problem is undeniable. And while we can and do argue that the apartment we bought existed before we found out about it, we also try to do what we can by frequenting local restaurants and businesses that do not cater to tourists. And those people are among the acquaintances we have here now, the people who smile and wave when they see us, the people whose businesses were, yes, a bit intimidating at first, to us as outsiders, but are now friendly and familiar and part of this community we care for so much.

The issue I have, especially—my wife looks at me worriedly when I bring this up, which I do all too often—is really about disrespect. And it’s not universal. The tourists we run into here are often friendly and quiet, and they want to learn not just about the best places to eat and visit but also about the local customs and norms. We have had many conversations with those types of tourists, and it’s always appreciated. But there are exceptions. And as we walk further north and west from our apartment, those exceptions become, if not the norm, certainly far more common.

You know what I mean. The loud people. The obnoxious people. The people who treat this place like it’s a day at Disney World, where everyone they run into is put there to serve them, immediately, and in their language. They come, they take advantage, they leave.

We had the perfect encounter of this kind last night in our favorite restaurant in the area. It’s in Condesa, a magnet for U.S. tourists, and because of its location, some of the servers do speak a bit of English. Since we’re obviously American, we’re always asked if we want the English menu, but we do not. We conduct this entire experience in Spanish as much as we can. And we do so quietly and without drawing attention to ourselves.

The table of four next to us handled things a bit differently. They spoke English exclusively, and they did so very loudly, also exclusively. They gesticulated wildly and yelled across the room whenever they needed a waiter, which they seemed to need almost every passing minute. More than once, the loudest of this loud group, a woman, actually grabbed the waiter’s arm as he turned away to bark about some further need, and sometimes even to just tell him a story, if you can believe that. A story he did not understand. This woman went on to spill a martini on the table and one of the other diners, triggering an explosion of movement and sound as the four of them exploded upward to escape the mess.

My mood darkened throughout this episode, and I kept silently hoping—OK, not so silently—they would just get up and leave. But there were always more drinks and more food.

And then it finally happened. Our waiter was serving a large party of (very quiet) locals to our other side when the American woman said, loudly, “Excuse me!” After not receiving an immediate response, escalated it while waving her arm. “EXCUSE ME! EXCUSE ME!! EXCUSE ME!!!”

It’s hard for me to explain what one would need to do to get anything resembling anger out of the typical local here. We’ve never seen it, not once. Indeed, we have never heard anyone who lives here even raise their voice on some path to anger. And this waiter, this poor man, did not disappoint. However, he did surprise us with his response to this crazy outburst.

“Ma’am,” he began, quietly and in English, as he turned to look across our table at the woman. “One minute.”

My wife and I looked at each other in astonishment and then burst out laughing. “Do you have any idea how much it takes to get a local to be that direct with a tourist?” I asked, rhetorically. Of course she did. We’d never seen anything like it. It was incredible. Awful and wonderful at the same time.

You may be wondering about the emergency that triggered this outburst. Well, good news, it was important: She wanted a beer.

And you may be wondering how we handled this. After all, I’m about as Type-A as they come, and I have absolutely told people in restaurants to keep it down when they were behaving badly. And I really wanted to do so last night. But this was Mexico. Out of respect for the people around us, not just the wait staff but the other diners, I held my tongue and didn’t become part of the problem. Yes, it was difficult.

But when the waiter came to our table minutes later with the bill, I leaned into him and said, nodding towards the other table, “Lo siento por los Americanos” (“I’m sorry about the Americans”). He burst out laughing and had to compose himself. Which almost made it worth it. But that’s just one of the things we’re trying to do here, learn the language. And in this case, I could tell that I got this simple statement right, or that I was at least understandable.

I feel like it’s the least one should do.