When we first visited Guatemala, back in the late 80s, Gringotenengo was used as a pejorative for a few of the towns around Lake Atitlán, such as Atitlán and Panajachel, which tended to be overrun by a specific type of expat hippie. Let’s just say that none of the locals were opening holistic healing retreats.

San Miguel de Allende is about an hour outside of Guanajuato. It’s a picturesque mountain town that’s home to the peak capitalism version of Gringotenengo, with one of the largest expat communities in Mexico, representing a full 10% of the total population. Guess what else San Miguel is known for? Mexico’s most severe income inequality. But I’m sure there’s no connection.

Then there’s the subtext, which is that expats, at scale, are a destructive force. Like locusts. A few are fine, but once they’ve settled on your town, you’re fucked. Unsurprisingly, a huge part of the income inequality is driven by housing costs. New construction is almost exclusively luxury housing, with prices starting at about $500k USD and going up, way up, from there. That’s obviously unattainable for locals, whose average income is about $270 USD/month.

Of course, it’s not just expats skewing housing construction. It’s also tourists screwing the rental market. Like many popular tourist locations, San Miguel’s long-term rentals have been turned into short-term Airbnbs, taking them off the rental market and further driving up prices for the remaining stock.

The tourism pattern is also notable. The 10% of the local population that’s expats is American, Canadian, and European. In other words, overwhelmingly white. The same holds true for the tourists. While there are clearly Mexican tourists, there are a lot of white people in San Miguel, especially compared to the other cities we’ve visited. Oaxaca had its share of gringo tourists, but a fraction of San Miguel’s. And in Chetumal and Guanajuato, we’ve gone weeks without seeing any other gringos.

Which brings up one of the things we specifically didn’t care for about San Miguel, and which, I think, reflects poorly on us. We are, truth be told, gringos. And while we’re not following a tourist cadence, we are to all appearances tourists. Spending time in relatively gringo-light locations means that we don’t see ourselves reflected. But in San Miguel, we were surrounded by our doppelgängers. Everywhere Dorothy looked, there were women of a certain age in straw hats and graying blond hair. Everywhere I looked, there were men of a certain age in shorts and baseball caps. This is why we don’t selfie. We know what we look like in context, and we don’t care to be reminded. In San Miguel, there’s no avoiding the ugly truth. We’re tourists.

The clash between surface and subtext plays itself out most violently in the retail space. It’s not like there are no goods and services that cater to locals, but the imbalance towards high-end retail is pronounced. Throughout the entire Centro, it seems like every other building houses a boutique. Not handicrafts shops, boutiques, beautifully curated and displayed, with goods from all over the world, not just Mexico. We saw some amazing Italian glass, but buying Italian crafts in Mexico in order to mule them back to the US just didn’t make any sense to us.

The entire effect is very Calle Rodeo. Because it’s not just the quality of the goods, it’s the pricing. San Miguel doesn’t just appeal to expats in general. It appeals to incredibly wealthy expats, which is another key factor impacting the local economy.

Just a few blocks from our hostel was an amazing compound called Fábrica La Aurora. It occupies a massive old textile factory, and has been broken up into literally dozens of gallery spaces. Fine arts, housewares, local handicrafts, antiques, imports… The range was astonishing and the quality was breathtaking.

As were the prices. We found a gallery that featured a single artist, Marilo Carral. She makes paintings, jewelry, shrines, and a beautiful fiber-based take on the traditional plastic Acapulco chair.

We loved her work, but knew it was out of our range. To say nothing of the shipping costs. However, there was a small 8″x8″ oil painting that I thought might be attainable, so I asked. $1,200. As for the above, we checked out the prices on her website. Chair: $1,200. Settee: $2,250. Painting: $9,600. Which is one of her cheaper paintings, which top out at $22,000. Also notable: everything priced in USD. They know their customer.

Those prices aren’t unreasonable for real art. Not at all. And everywhere we’ve been has had a few “real” galleries that specialized in fine art, and were, I’m sure, priced similarly. But the sheer concentration, the density of this class of retail in San Miguel was like nothing we’ve seen.

The Elephant In The Room Is A Cathedral

I’ve gone this far without mentioning San Miguel’s most iconic visual element, Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel. It dominates the Centro and can be seen from all over town.

The church itself was built in the 1600s with a traditional Mexican facade. Its current ridiculous pink sandstone Gothic skin was added in 1880. Nearly every news source you can find tells the same story: that the local architect who designed the facade, Zeferino Gutierrez, was inspired by postcards of Antoni Gaudi’s Gothic folly, la Sagrada Família in Barcelona. The only problem with this story is that Gaudi didn’t begin work on the Sagrada until 1883, and worked on it his whole life. Gutierrez may well have been inspired by postcards of Gothic European churches, but Sagrada wasn’t among them.

The interior was similarly Liberace themed. The Spanish certainly knew how to wow the natives.

It’s charms notwithstanding, it was impossible for us to feel anything but ambivalent about San Miguel. The expat assault occurred before the city had any reasonable chance to develop policies to defend itself, and the damage has been largely done. It’s not at all clear whether there’s anything the city can do at this point to roll it back.

Ultimately, I’m glad we went, it for no other reason than the object lesson it provided in what happens when we take our belief systems with us when we move. We are the ultimate invasive species, and, like kudzu, will destroy whatever environment we deposit ourselves in.

It’s funny, because one of the reasons we undertook this adventure was that we were sick to death of the predations of third wave capitalism, and wanted to experience how the rest of the world managed itself. The sad answer is, just fine, until we show up in numbers. It’s helped make us super aware of treading lightly and minimizing our impact, and that’s a good thing.