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Mexico

Living Abroad

These Are The Best Countries For The Budget-Conscious Expat

Vietnam, Mexico, and Indonesia are the best destinations when it comes to finances, according to findings in the Expat Insider survey.

Global expat community InterNations conducts one of the biggest annual surveys on life abroad, Expat Insider. In 2022, close to 12,000 expats representing 177 nationalities took part and shared their thoughts on life abroad — including their finances.

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Migrants, Fentanyl, Cartel Violence: U.S. And Mexico Must Both Rethink The Border

Mexico and the United States must collaborate to tackle a dual problem of violence and drug use hurting their countries.But first, they must stop playing the blame game.

-OpEd-

MEXICO CITY — An unstoppable force is about to smash into an immovable object. The fentanyl crisis in the United States has become, beyond the reach of any single election, a vital threat to its society. And while the key to the problem, as with all narcotics abuse, is around consumption, Mexico can hardly absolve itself of responsibility when the fentanyl is sourced here. Moreover, it is connected to our own, massive crime problem.

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All of this means that there is yet another reason for authorities on both sides of the border to help each other.

I am reminded of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, set in the French Revolution. Dickens mocks the French revolutionaries who claim to be fighting for liberty while decapitating all and sundry.

Likewise there's no squaring safe streets in Mexico with a drug epidemic next door: drugs like fentanyl finance the cartels that terrorize Mexican cities and neighborhoods. Or put another way: Drugs sold in the United States pay for the guns they fire at Mexicans!

Not surprisingly perhaps, given his irrepressible optimism, Mexico's president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, rejects both components of the problem. He says no fentanyl is made in Mexico and crime here is under check, which would mean people are deluded in both countries.

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Spy In The Patriarchy, Diary Of A Transgender Man

The author describes his experience as a transgender man: How his physical transition has given him access to new spaces and conversations that were previously inaccessible to him as a woman, and how it's made him feel like a spy within the patriarchy.

MEXICO CITY — At the beginning of my social transition, I felt like a spy. The 250 milligrams of testosterone that entered my body every twenty-something days brought physical changes that gave me access to spaces, conversations, and situations that were previously foreign to someone perceived as a woman.

When I found myself in those situations, I laughed, imagining I'm a spy, embedded deep inside the patriarchy.

If you met me for the first time, you wouldn't know that I spent 20 years of my life being perceived as a woman. As the Spanish writer Paul Preciado says, the strangest thing about becoming a man is keeping intact the memory of the oppression.

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The sudden changes in my body became clear when, on a lonely street at night, a woman changed sidewalks when she saw me walking towards her. I felt strange; I felt the need to run after her and explain that I wasn't one of “them," that I'm trans, and that she didn't have to worry about me. But imagining the scene made me laugh at how ridiculous it would be to run after a total stranger, and just scare her more.

I noticed this too when I went to clubs and partied during my first few months on testosterone. I felt my space invaded as strangers touched me in places where before they weren't even allowed to touch by mistake.

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How Mexico Is Leaving Its Trans Citizens In ID Limbo

Without the option to change their ID documents to reflect their gender, trans residents in Chiapas and 12 other Mexican states are denied certain rights.

SAN CRISTÓBAL DE LAS CASAS — When Santiago Santiago Rodríguez began his hormonal transition a year ago, he discovered that he wouldn’t be able to change his name and gender on his documents in his home state of Chiapas, which doesn’t have a law regulating the administrative process.

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He decided to have his name changed in Mexico City, one of the country’s 19 states with a gender identity law, a type of legislation that guarantees a person’s right to modify their birth certificate through a simple administrative request. Fewer than half of the country’s 32 states have such laws.

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LGBTQ Plus
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LGBTQ+ International: Book Ban In Tanzania, Mexico's "Lesbomaternal" Rights— And Other News

Welcome to Worldcrunch’s LGBTQ+ International. We bring you up-to-speed each week on a topic you may follow closely at home, but can now see from different places and perspectives around the world. Discover the latest news on everything LGBTQ+ — from all corners of the planet. All in one smooth scroll!

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LGBTQ+ International: UK v. Scotland On Gender, Uganda Ends “Vagabond” Laws — And Other News

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Society
Aline Suárez del Real Islas and Mar García

In Mexico, Influencers Make Castoff Clothing Cool

Young consumers around the world increasingly seek out secondhand and alternative clothing markets — making Mexico City’s flea markets, or tianguis, suddenly and surprisingly popular.

MEXICO CITY — The shouts of vendors mingle at the hodgepodge of stalls selling food, fruit and household items at the tianguis Las Torres, a flea market in eastern Mexico City. Beneath the tents, heaps of clothing are mounded on containers, planks and tubes. People examine garment after garment, holding them up to judge their size and draping their choices over their forearms and shoulders. The vendors watch from above, yelling prices and watching for occasional theft.

Bale clothing, or secondhand clothes, often called “ropa americana” (American clothing) here, is widely available at stalls in the open-air markets, or tianguis, of Mexico City and the State of Mexico. These garments, often illegally smuggled from the United States, used to be an affordable apparel option for Mexican families.

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Green
Patricia Zavala Gutiérrez

Mezcal, The Trendy Spirit Has An Ugly Secret

As demand soars for the traditional spirit, so does the mountain of waste created in producing it. Producers see creative, sustainable solutions.

PUEBLA — Mezcal, Mexico’s traditional agave spirit, has enraptured palates across the country and abroad. But as demand soars, a more bitter note emerges: the amount of waste its production generates and the risks that poses for the very environment that sustains it.

Like tequila, mezcal is a distilled beverage produced from agave, a plant native to the arid and semiarid zones of the Americas. Both mezcal and tequila are produced by cooking and fermenting the piña, the heart of the agave, and distilling its juice. The byproducts of these processes are highly polluting, resistant to decomposition, and potentially toxic for aquatic life if dumped in rivers without treatment.

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Society
Abril Castro Prieto

Colonialism Of Childbirth: How Racism Slammed Into My Surrogacy Experience

In Mexico, it's common to hear the term "improving the race" when a darker skinned person dates someone who is white. The author came directly in contact with these prejudices — and Spain's discrimination of people from its former colonies — when she went through surrogacy.

On my 26th birthday, my black, lesbian artist friend Kara Lynch gave me Angela Davis' autobiography. Together with Lynch and several artists and writers from the borderlands of Tijuana and the United States, we formed the first openly feminist collective in Baja California, Mexico, in 2002 — the Interdisiplinario la Línea. We wanted to make visible the work of great undiscovered Mexican writers and artists.

When she handed me the book, I remember Lynch telling me that it was an indispensable text “for us, as women of color”. At first, I didn't understand if her "we" was really for me.

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