Deciding Where #6 – Few Gringos or Many?
Do you want to live among many or few of your fellow gringos? Because both scenarios are available. First of all, how’s your Spanish? (You do speak, or are learning, Spanish, aren’t you?) If it’s rudimentary or nonexistent, you’ll need to stick to places with enough fellow English-speakers around make life possible for you. I personally would find this kind of limitation unacceptable.
How sociable are you? If you depend heavily on the company of others for your well-being, and your Spanish is less than adequate, again, better keep to areas with a good supply of potential friends/drinking buddies/backgammon partners, or whatever.
Moving to a foreign country can be isolating, even if your language skills are okay. If you move with a spouse or partner, you’ll be thrown together far more (especially at first) than you ever were in your former life when you both had jobs, buddies, yoga classes, etc. It can be stressful on the relationship. Having ready access to some new buddies can be helpful.
If you’re engaged in absorbing work and used to spending lots of time alone, then access to social resources is not such a big issue. I usually spend the day painting (or more recently, writing this). We’ve made friends here, but don’t see them very often — much like when we lived in the states — because everybody is working.
The advent of the internet has been a huge boon to wanderers everywhere, allowing people to stay connected to friends, information, reading, and entertainment from just about anyplace in the world. It can really take the edge off living in an otherwise isolated situation.
A big advantage of living in a gringo-rich area, possibly even more important than the gringos themselves, is the resources that tend to collect around them. The thing that springs foremost to my mind is English-language libraries. (I really miss the Public Library!) There was one in Merida and I understand there’s one in the Lake Chapala area. There is also, I understand, a big organic vegetable gardening enterprise there. Things like professional pet-sitters, English-language bookstores, and English-speaking doctors are also more likely to be found in expatriate areas.
The big, obvious disadvantage of choosing an area with a large gringo population is the inflated prices you’ll find there. Most of the expatriates from the US or Canada that I’ve encountered are pretty prosperous (at least compared to us), and they tend to drive up housing prices disastrously. This was occurring in Merida when we were there, and has long been true of places like Ajijic and San Miguel de Allende. So, if you’re operating on a shoestring, you will have to go further afield (and speak Spanish) to encounter affordable housing either to rent or to buy. In a large city, like Guadalajara say, you could just explore the non-gringo areas, but smaller places are likely to be expensive across the board. We didn’t even bother checking out San Miguel when we were looking for a new location, because I just assumed it would be too expensive.
It is of course possible, with enough money, to live in a gringo enclave so insular you can’t even tell you’re in Mexico, but that’s not the kind of life we’re talking about here in shoestring-land. In order to taste the delights of the real Mexico, and also to cope with day-to-day life, it is necessary to acquire a decent amount of Spanish (it doesn’t need to be fabulous, just usable). Then you will be free to establish your other priorities and pick and choose accordingly.