Hound Dog
Aug 29, 2010, 2:14 PM
Post #16 of 23
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Re: [vietnamvet] Update on cost of living, please.
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My experience since 2006 living in Highland Chiapas indicates that roni should have no problem living in Mérida or its environs on the budget he projects if he lives prudently and I wish him luck there. Mérida is a great town and we only passed on moving there back in ´06 because of the hot and humid weather. If heat and humidity are not an issue with you, roni, have at it.
I also wish to respond to vietnamvet´s comment below:
Hello cookj5,
I think you hit it right on the mark. I'm relocating to Mexico (Motul) in Oct, and my purpose for the move is a simpler lifestyle. I may choose to splurge once in a while, but in general, not living beyond my means. Some of the monthly expenses I've seen by expats are what the locals live on in a year. It's saddening to see the actual poverty level of the average citizen, dirt floors, no water connection, etc. What I don't understand is the continued expansion of stores such as, Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and others to Mexico, It's like bringing in a Bloomingdales to the south side of Chicago.
I must add my thoughts to others who have expressed surprise at vietnamvet´s above comment. About half of each year we reside in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas and the other half we reside in Ajijic, Jalisco. I point this out because these two disparate parts of Mexico are so different and the ex-pat experience in each area is also so different for those who plan to settle in these respective regions for any prolonged period of time that I thought that vietnamvet and others puzzled by the apparent paradox of middle-class and upper-middle class purchasing power coexisting with dire poverty like that found in Southern Mexico might like to hear from at least one of us residing in both the Lake Chapala ex-pat community and the Chiapas traditional Mexican community who has observed these contrasting lifestyles over time. From my personal experience living in and visiting Mexico extensively from Oaxaca State to the Yucatan Peninsula, I would say that life for the ex-pat in Motul would be more similar to life in Chiapas than life at Lake Chapala but, as is true everywhere, where one lives is only part of the matter and the way one chooses to live is more important if one is seeking an enriching life experience.
Chiapas is the poorest state in the Mexican union and there is widespread and often hopeless poverty there although the reader must avoid assuming that great poverty automatically translates into great misery per se. Many in Chiapas live in poverty so profound that they literally live outside of or are only tangentially touched by the peso economy. Yet, in Chiapas´ three largest cities, Tuxtla Gutierrez, Tapachula and San Cristóbal de Las Casas, one finds numerous big box and upscale department store outlets from Liverpool to Sears to Walmart to Sam´s Club to Chedraui to Soriana and Soriana´s high-end City Club and Home Depot and on and on and; I might add, Walmart and Sears - two American retail stalwarts, appeal to a much more upscale clientele in Mexico than they do in U.S. podunk towns. Why is that, the foreign observer might inquire? Here amidst all this poverty one finds numerous retail outlets meant to appeal to the middle and upper-middle classes. To make the puzzle even more intriguing, there are very; and I mean very, few foreigners living in or visiting Chiapas except on whirlwind tours that pass through town dropping a few coins at tourist oriented joints along the way. The foreign observer might be even more perplexed at browsing about Sam´s Clubs´s enormous new box store in San Cristóbal and noting that the cavernous shopping floor is chock-a-block with colorfully dressed but supposedly penurious indigenous people shopping in large groups and loading up with all sorts of things from cell phones to chiclets sold in bulk they can later have their children resell at a profit piecemeal to tourists down at the city´s principal plaza.
Well, the fact is that places such as Chiapas, with its relatively large and often quite sophisticated middle class, are sometimes repositories of much greater wealth than is apparent to the superficial observer. It is not so much that there is no wealth in places like Chiapas as much as that that wealth that exisits there is less equitably distributed among the population in general than, say, in Sacramento or Council Bluffs or Lake Chapala´s Ajijic. That´s what happens when oligarchies rule in isolation and institutionalize self-serving corruption over the 500 plus years since the arrival of the Spanish. If one´s motivation for moving to Southern Mexico and its cultural, if not altogether geographical, cousin, the Yucatan Peninsula, is a "simpler lifestyle" then my advice is that one adopt a live-and-let-live attitude acting equitably and respectfully toward others within the confines of one´s newly adopted region and determine to mind one´s own garden.
(This post was edited by Hound Dog on Aug 29, 2010, 2:21 PM)
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