
One of the cool things about San Miguel de Allende is that it’s the birthplace of Mexico’s independence. San Miguel de Allende has a lot of texture, be it very bloody and treacherous, and it has a lot of history that the whole country studies and is interested in, so it’s a focal point for the independence.
Historically, at least for expats, I know that in the 1950’s, after World War II, a few servicemen frontiered down here, and there was an art school where my mother went in 1973.
My parents tell me stories about how completely provincial San Miguel de Allende was, and how most of the local women didn’t wear shoes. For example, when I was a kid, there was no real grocery store in San Miguel de Allende; there was only one little place that sold things that, for example, would be out of toothpaste for a month, so when toothpaste would come to town, we’d all stock up and it would be a big deal. You couldn’t find anything foreign here is San Miguel de Allende; everything was domestically produced and sold. It was like the 1920’s in the States.
Before, all the sewers in San Miguel de Allende were open, and it smelled. San Miguel de Allende has definitely been polished incredibly since then. I sometimes reminisce about how it was. San Miguel de Allende had a naïve charm- there was something very beautiful and rough around the edges, untouched.
I remember when I was a kid, all the streets in San Miguel de Allende were cobblestones, but there was only soil between the stones. When the rains would come, a lot of the streets would wash away. The ones that were recently done would have grass grow between all the stones, and it was just beautiful. But the population then was only a fifth or a tenth of the population now, so San Miguel de Allende is a town that some would say is bursting at the seams today.
As Americans living in San Miguel de Allende, we’re always curious as to why privileged Mexicans haven’t found this place, why they don’t love it here, and why they aren’t coming to San Miguel de Allende. In the last 5 years the wealthier Mexicans may have realized this, and they’ve become accepting of it, and have embraced it.
One Easter there would be this many people from out of town and it seemed like the next year it was triple, quadruple, fivefold the number of people. When the town gets slammed with people, I don’t even go out. We stay home or we go to our place in Pátzcuaro.
I’m worried that San Miguel de Allende is going to be overwhelmed. We live in the desert, and they want to have golf clubs and do a lot of tony hotels that use a lot of water. I cringe a little bit that there’s the chance that everything would just be completely maxed out for ephemeral lucrative possibilities by the powers that be, and that there wouldn’t be enough green space or enough protection or conservancy as everything that needs to take place when a one-horse town gets discovered.
Nobody from outside San Miguel de Allende is going to care. Local Mexicans have to be champions of protection of their own town and it’s up to them, because we can beat our drum to no end as Americans living here in San Miguel de Allende, but this is somebody else’s town. We love San Miguel de Allende and we embrace it, but we have to be honest with ourselves that we don’t own it. We never will. San Miguel de Allende belongs to the people, but the people really have to make the choices and can’t have that conquest mentality of return on investment in the least possible time, which is part of the psychology of the Mexican culture.
There’s definitely a premium placed on get rich as quick as possible, because you don’t know what might happen tomorrow. But power corrupts, and when you have finite amount of green space around the town, and if you just sell to the highest bidder and let him do whatever he wants, San Miguel de Allende is going to become an ugly town soon- a town with no water, or a town that could become an eyesore.
(Holy Week Procession, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, pictured.)