Mexicowoods—An Expatriate Life

Monster Truck

We occasionally visit Querétaro to shop the big box stores (Costco, Sam's Club) or to see medical specialists. A narrow highway takes us east from San Miguel de Allende. Lately the trip has become arduous. Construction crews have torn up the road, widening it in anticipation of the crush of visitors expected to arrive later this year for the Mexican Independence bicentennial celebration. Along the way traffic gets shunted onto rutted, narrow dirt detours barely capable of handling passenger cars much less busses or large trucks.

As I headed out of San Miguel one morning, I saw a huge truck and trailer parked beside the highway. I thought, "No way is this thing going to make it through the construction zone." Four hours later, on my way back from Querétaro, I came upon the selfsame truck, now some ten miles farther down the highway. I joined a line of traffic that had been stopped to wait for the passing of the gigantic rig.

The massive load required two big Kenworth diesel tractors to get up the grades in our mountainous part of the world. The traction provided by sixteen drive wheels had to be increased by the weight of large concrete blocks chained to the rear of each tractor. A draw bar on the front of the lead tractor left open the option of attaching a third tractor if needed.

I just love this stuff.

I couldn't tell the load was, but clearly it was exceedingly heavy. Wider than a single highway lane, it required a trailer 48-wheel trailer—the biggest I've ever seen. The load was secured to the trailer with many chains and cables. To my eye, they didn't appear substantial enough to survive a serious tilt.

One thing for sure: no mishap would be caused by excessive speed. The rig rumbled down the road at two miles per hour. Crew members hopped on and off at will, checking clearances on corners, eying iffy sections of pavement, and directing traffic around the thing.

What was it? Where did it come from? Where was it going?

Whatever it was, it passed unidentified through the states of Guanajuato and Querétaro, demonstrating if nothing else that Mexican industry is capable of building and moving some really big machines.

Fixing Pila Seca

Potholed streets are getting new surfaces. I see construction crews all over San Miguel de Allende. Everyone has to endure inconvenient street closings and the snarled traffic that ensues. Apparently some federal money came in, so workers are tearing up the roads, filling potholes, re-setting cobblestones.

As late as last year, masons set paving stones in dirt just like in the Seventeenth Century. What little concrete they used they mixed by hand. They filled spaces between stones with a runny plaster slurry—painstakingly poured from cut-off plastic Coke bottles.

Today they use ready-mix from the Cemex plant out on the periferico—a sudden leap into modern times.

Construction methods quickly revert to the Nineteenth Century though. Laborers fill wheelbarrows from the cement truck and dump the concrete onto the street where its needed, a few square feet at a time.

Masons spread the mix and set cobblestones one at a time. Apparently the ancient art of cobblestone paving can't be mechanized.

Just before opening to traffic, Pila Seca looks pristine. Gone are the lumps, the loose stones, the potholes.

Built to newer construction standards, the street looks smoother than I've ever seen it.

Cobblestone streets don't last long. Unlike concrete or macadam roads, they need re-paving every few years. But they form an important part of the character of the Centro Historico, so we all put up with the vibration and jolts that prematurely degrade the suspensions of our vehicles, the stumbles and falls when our feet catch on uneven stones.

Despite the expense, the inconvenience, the hazards of cobblestone streets, we love their look, and we'd vigorously oppose any movement to modernize them.

Bailing Wire Fix

Even in this time of economic crisis, plenty of colonial houses undergo renovation. Where does the money come from?

The other day I walked past scaffolding built to support workers replacing a cantera window. It looks unsafe.

Two posts rest on the sidewalk, steadied by buckets full of rocks. Holes pounded into the wall receive two beams wedged in place with scraps of wood. Tying the beams to the posts: bailing wire.

The whole lash-up illustrates 1) attitudes about worker safety, and 2) problem-solving ingenuity. On the whole, I admire the builder's minimalist approach. But up north, he'd be cited for a rig like this.

Parachutists

The floor of the Valley of Mexico has long been paved over: woods cut down, lakes drained and filled. Flat land is gone: room for new housing exists only on steep mountainsides.

No orderly plan exists for developing the hillsides. No official policy permits such construction. Instead the expansion of Mexico City is in the hands of paracaidistas—parachutistshes—savvy individuals who occupy and squat on marginal land. Using bribery they acquire proper titles and the necessary permits to cut in roads and to bring in water, sewers and power. As soon as houses are compete, they sell them and descend onto the next vacant land up the hillsides.

The history of Mexico City is of uncontrolled growth. The government has repeatedly proved it cannot rein in the developers. North of the border, unckecked suburban sprawl like that along I-15 in Nevada is the result of cozy relations between presumably respectable housing corporations and the government agencies who are supposed to control them. In Mexico City, it's done by individuals on a much smaller scale. But with enough paracaidistas busily working away, the effect is the same.

Over the River and through the Woods

Grandma and Granddad have passed on, but Laura's mom and her three brothers have hung on to the old family home and the twenty acres of mountain land it sits on. The simple house contains three bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen and a genuine parlor. The latter is kept neat as a pin and appears to be used mainly for company (which we are not). The one small bathroom created an intricate logistical dance among four adults and visitors. During our stay, we learned to cope.

The original house is old. Signs of nineteenth-century construction methods can be seen. These ceiling boards show tool marks from a scrub plane. The boards were cut from trees felled on the homesite and flattened using the gently curved plane blade. The work must have taken many hours and a lot of sweat.

The family calls this log shed the Apple House. The old orchard at the front of the main house suggests it was used to store fruit.

The Apple House is actually a small log cabin. Log ends are locked together using a triangular notch. I suspect this approach is easier (but less stable) than cutting the usual rectangular notches.

Above right, grooves in the sides of the logs give convincing evidence they were squared with a broadaxe—a tool generally seen only in antique shops.

On the inside of the Apple House, mud chinking between the logs can be seen. Built by Laura's great-grandfather, the family claims his thumbprints can still be seen pressed into the mud.

Living in old houses is one thing: my former home on Aldama in San Miguel dates from the mid-eighteenth century—far older than this mountain home. But what makes this place special is that it has been occupied by the same family ever since it was built over a hundred years ago. To its owners, its history has more significance than any colonial Mexican mansion could possibly have for Johnny-come-lately expat newcomers.

Laura's mom, her uncles and cousins and their families all crowded into the old house. We had to take turns sitting, the place is so small. We cooked a country ham. We harvested last-of-the-season squash and potatoes from the garden and ate those too. We found enough windfall apples and pears to make a pie. One of Laura's uncles picked guitar and sang. And in this way, we continued the chain of life that has come down through the generations in this old family home.

A Ruin on Chorro

Rarely do I see decaying buildings in nicer American neighborhoods—like San Francisco's Pacific Heights for instance. Houses in probate or encumbered by ownership disputes may get to looking rough for a little while, but time is money, so such issues tend to get wrapped up quickly. Then the houses get spruced up and sold, or sold and spruced up, and streets regain their usual manicured look.

Not so in San Miguel de Allende. It's not uncommon to see a decaying ruin right in the middle of a row of elegant homes, standing out like a bad tooth in a starlet's smile. Behind this door on Chorro, a street of million-dollar homes, lies an urban wreck.

Mexican houses can remain in neglect for decades. I noticed a large home on Aldama seven years ago, the roof of which had already collapsed indicating many years of disintegration. I find this incomprehensible. Even as a ruin, the house is worth a small fortune.

How come? Are owners too poor to keep up their properties? Probably not—wealthy people own the houses in these neighborhoods.

Maybe some are in limbo over ownership disputes. Civil matters can drag on interminably in Mexican courts.

I think the most probable explanation is that these homes are owned by Mexico's aristocracy, whose holdings are so extensive they don't have time to attend to all of them. Maybe they simply lose track of them.

Whatever the immediate causes of property neglect, owners seem uninterested in making investments work. Norteamericanos are averse to idle assets: property should serve a need or produce income. Apparently for some Mexican people, just holding it is enough.

Truth in Advertising

A poster on the fence surrounding the Rosewood Residences building site in San Miguel de Allende provides an impression of how the development will look: upholstered chairs on a terrace overlooking a gently curving street that leads to a view of the Parroquia in the distance.

The photograph below shows what it looks like today.

 

The uppermost spire of the Parroquia can just be made out behind the building on the right.

Desarrollo de San Miguel

This scene was so jarring, I had to share it: a huge building site in the center of San Miguel de Allende. Our iconic seventeenth-century buildings: the Parroquoia, the tower of the San Francisco Church, and the dome of Las Monjas struggle to be seen through rising cranes, concrete pumps, and rebar.

Until now, most construction here has been low-tech. Men mix concrete in piles on the ground and haul it up ladders in five-gallon plastic buckets. They shape stones by hand with hammers. A large job might employ a hundred abañiles, few of whom own tools and none of whom possess safety gear.

By comparison, this work is being done in modern mechanized fashion by developer Bald Mountain de Mexico. Their operation is more like what I would expect to see in the States.

Called Rosewood San Miguel de Allende, the project will comprise a five-star hotel and high-end residences. One source claims house prices will start at $800,000. I haven’t heard what hotel tariffs will be, but I bet I’m safe estimating they’ll be somewhere north of $500 per night—well out of my price range.

Development projects like this have triggered protests. A group called Basta Ya a la Destrucción de San MIguel has mounted demonstrations.

Photo: Basta Ya

One thing is for sure: San Miguel has changed from the sleepy little village discovered after WWII by aspiring artists come to study under the G. I. bill. Today the well-heeled are visiting and moving in. We saw it happen in SoHo. We saw it happen in Sonoma. Like it or not, the trend is inexorable: artists discover a place, the wealthy follow, and the artists, priced out, have to move on.

Comments:

"...artists discover a place, the wealthy follow, and the artists, priced out, have to move on." The sad truth of excellent places to live, here today and gone tomorrow. SMA will follow the foot steps of Acapulco. John Calypso | Homepage | 07.13.09 - 8:54 am | #

they might want to re-think this one. if they screw up the human scale of SMA, it doesn't have a beach or the ocean to fall back on as an attraction, unlike acapulco. nancy | Homepage | 07.13.09 - 10:11 am | #

This is very interesting. My wife and I were in SMA a couple weeks ago and were surprised to see the new commercial center out where the Gigante used to be. It reminded me of a similar place on the far outskirts of San Antonio, Texas. We liked it. I don´t see how this will send artists packing. They simply won´t be living in this snazzy new development. Let them stay in their colorful hovels in El Centro. So SMA is changing. Ain´t no holding it back. Protesting is futile. I wonder how much the Gringos had to pay those Mexicans to hold that protest for them. Felipe Zapata | Homepage | 07.13.09 - 10:18 am | #

Oh, don't you know, you don't know what you got 'til it's gone. They tore down Paradise and put up a parking lot. Bob Mrotek | Homepage | 07.13.09 - 2:09 pm | #

Minimum Wage

Minimum Wage

12/06/07 06:33 PM Filed in: Mexico

Here we have a gang of men digging a ditch. The line continues around the corner at the far left of the picture; there's probably 40 workers in all.

The ditch is to accommodate conduit for underground power lines. In the US of A, this work would be done with four guys and a backhoe. Apparently the city likes to provide employment for as many of its citizens as possible, so they're doing the digging by hand. Besides, there's the possibility that the city's backhoe is being used for other purposes; say, digging irrigation ditches at someone's hacienda—someone with juice.

OK. That was cynical. We've made great strides fighting corruption. I'm confident that such abuses are almost a thing of the past.

So how much are these guys being paid? By law, the minimum wage is around $50 pesos per day ($4.50 US), but it's unlikely anybody works for that. You certainly couldn't live on so little, even if your family had several wage earners.

The workers in the photo are probably being paid $130-$150 pesos per day ($12-$14 US). You can't live on that either, but these are among the highest-paid laborers in Mexico. By contrast, the minimum wage in the US is almost $47 for an eight-hour day, more than ten times that of Mexico. Nobody works for that either; at least not in California, where the state-mandated eight-hour minimum wage is $60, and especially not in San Francisco, where it's $76.

I find it hard to imagine that any fence could deter migration to the north, given that huge pay differential.

If nobody in Mexico works at the minimum wage, why does the government legislate it? Well, certain taxes are based on the minimum wage, which is increased every year for inflation. That way, when the minimum wage goes up, the social security tax goes up automatically.

But of course, there's a loophole. For example, you may pay your laborer $150 pesos per day, but when you pay social security taxes, you'll claim you're paying him the minimum wage, $50 pesos. Unless you're really honest. Or really stupid. Everybody knows you're not paying minimum wage, but everybody goes along with the fiction that you are. So your actual social security tax payments are only a third of what the law says they should be.

It gets better. Policymakers know full well what's going on, so they set the social security tax rate to account for the cheating. That way, there's enough money to fund the social security system, keeping the administrators happy, and everybody else figures they're getting away with something, making them happy.

The minimum wage affects fines: for traffic violations, building code violations, urinating in public, whatever. Fines are figured in salarios minimos (minimum daily salaries). A friend was fined approximately six salarios minimos for failing to wear her seat belt. Another fine, for speeding, was a whopping 20 salarios minimos —$952 pesos.

You probably see that something something is seriously wrong here. How could even relatively high-paid workers afford to pay a speeding ticket?

The answer is they can't. Utterly can't. Not a chance. So they offer the cop a bribe. The cop doesn't solicit the bribe; he doesn't have to ask. The stupid fine system does the asking for him. So from time to time we are treated to the sight of a State cop standing beside his highyway cruiser emblazoned with the words "No más mordida" (no more bribery), pocketing a proffered $100 peso note. Solo dos salarios minimos.