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Tom Herzog's avatar

I lived in Ensenada for 13 months around 2021. I've never felt so belittled and unwanted in my life. It was worse for me than the Philippines. It wasn't so much that people openly showed hostility to me, rather virtually everyone simply ignored me. No one ever made eye contact. No one said "hola" much less "hola amigo." Granted I'm not a real charismatic person. But I couldn't help but detect an underlying, sort of simmering hostility toward gringos in general and me in particular.

(I can't help but wonder and speculate if some of my fellow Americans preceding me to Mexico perhaps put their arrogant, superior attitude on display thereby leaving many Mexicans wary of the gringos and their bad attitude?)

In addition I almost was hit by cars a couple of times due to drivers who simply weren't looking where they were going. (Much like the Philippines: addled, distracted probably stupid drivers who step on the accelerator first and think second if at all. Often ignoring cross-walk right-of-ways to pedestrians.)

The one time I was foolish enough to walk into a bar in Ensenada the bar maid immediately glared at me before I could even pull up a bar stool. I ordered a beer, drank it quickly, left her a good tip and "vamosed" with alacrity before someone took too much of a disliking to me.

Are Americans hated this much all over the world or did I just happen to pick two unfavorable countries (Mexico and the Philippines) to end up in?

To be fair, the one exception to all this was a guy in Ensenada who was a street vendor on the same block where I rented an apartment. He sold these very good seafood cocktail cups. He would fill a Styrofoam cup with this tomato sauce mixture he had concocted and then add shrimp and raw oysters with a local hot sauce and limes if desired. It was delicious. It was obvious that this guy was 100% native American. Unlike a lot of Mexicans in that part of Mexico he didn't speak a word of English. Come to think of it I'm not sure he spoke Spanish either. I always tried to tip him well. Rents were so low in Ensenada I could afford to be generous to the point of extravagance with tips for the first time in my life and it was a pleasure to do so. Knowing that by giving 20 or 25 pesos I might be providing him (and other hard working servers) with half again his day's wage (or at least a good portion of it.) And this guy was on that street corner with his vending booth from seven a.m. until eight or nine at night, six days a week. By the way, limes and avocados, grown locally, were virtually given away they were so cheap. I recall you could buy four or five avocados for about the equivalent of one U.S. dollar and limes were sold by the bagful for about the same low price. But it was almost impossible to find lemons. Fortunately for me there was an American chain grocery store within walking distance of my apartment, "Smart and Final" was the store's name. Coincidentally, when I Iived in Sacramento (at least before I got priced out of my apartment), the same corporation had a store about the same walking distance from my Sacramento location.

To be perfectly fair, (that is to say not all Mexicans hate all Americans) now that I think about it there was a coffee shop where a bunch of local surfers hung out in back. One afternoon, trying to read, I was struggling with the bright sun streaming in the front window. One of the surfer guys saw what was going on and he very kindly found a sort of camera shade device that he set up for me to provide me with shade. Since I was a regular in that coffee shop the device was kept available for me when ever I dropped in. Very kind of them. The liability or downside of that coffee shop was they not only had no posted business hours; but it was "iffy" what time they would open or even if they would open at all on a particular day. Many days I arrived around nine a.m. only to find them closed and me half fuming impatiently while I paced up and down the boardwalk across the street waiting for them to open.

I departed Ensenda hastily and unexpectedly when I got into a row with my hot-headed property manager. Considering the fact that he had a duplicate key to my apartment I felt it prudent to pack-up and leave without spending another night there. Not wanting to be knifed in my sleep.

All I can say is, "adios, amigos."

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Troy  Skaggs's avatar

Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz's advice to the American farmer in the 1970's was "get big or get out". As if the American farmer had a choice in the matter.

My maternal grandparents, teenagers during the depression, from very humble Germanic backgrounds were able to acquire and operate a thriving farm between the two of them. The postwar years were good to them and I remember a well tended southern Illinois farm with dairy and beef cattle and hogs in the eighties although I often heard talk of how things were changing.

Some of the happiest days of my life were detasseling seed corn during junior highschool summers. Kids had been walking those rows late July, early August for a couple of generations. Aside from the usual punkery, those times in the early nineties were still idyllic and innocent. Part of me has stayed in those fields and I won't let it go. I remember sitting on the front porch of the house that I grew up in and watching a summer thunderstorm roll across the fields of wheat and soybeans across the yard. It was hypnotic and those thunderstorms are still worth watching. To this day, I make it a point to walk the treelines on the edges of fields. It's a forlorn feeling when I think about the ass fuckery that subsistence farmers worldwide have endured at the hands of American agribusiness. It's criminal and it's appalling.

While I don't relish the idea of a James Howard Kunstler World Made By Hand (a fun series of books) future, if it means the end of Earl Butz's sick warning, I'll consider my options.

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