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American
baby boomers grab land in Mexico By
Caroline Overington, The Age news online
For
about 100 years, it was generally accepted that Americans moved to Mexico
only if they were on the run, avoiding the draft, or addicted to drugs. That
attitude is changing. As The New York Times reported last month,
slowly but surely, hectare by hectare, parts of Mexico have become like US
colonies, where English is the main language, and the dollar is the local
currency. Huge
tracts of land, especially along the Baja Peninsula south of San Diego,
are now owned by Americans. Not directly, of course, since it remains
ostensibly illegal for foreign citizens to buy land within 100 kilometres
of the Mexican coast. Yet West Coast accents are everywhere. "It's
the new land rush," said Jim Hogg, 48, who is part of that rush.
"It's no longer 'go west, young man'. It's 'go south, old man, and
eat shellfish all day'." What
he means is that most of the new arrivals are retirees, who have found
themselves active at 65, but not rich. Pensions in the US pay about $US800
($A1100) a month, and you can't live in Florida or coastal California on
so little money but you can live in Mexico. Or, as the Financial Times
put it: "Baby boom, meet property boom." The
trend should not be overstated: the traffic between Mexico and its wealthy
neighbour is still almost entirely one-way, with 500,000 people trying to
cross the border every year (that's just the number the US catches). But
it can no longer be ignored. Some real estate agents, who clearly have a
vested interest in this matter, say there may be as many as 1 million
Americans living in Mexico, many of them in exclusive retirement villages
on the Pacific Ocean coast, where two-bedroom units cost about $US150,000
(not bad, considering the daily wage in Mexico is around $US5). Not
everybody is retired, of course. Mr Hogg lives in a village of 350 houses
in a mountain range more than 600 kilometres south of the border. In the
US, he was an anthropologist. Now, he installs water systems for Mexican
Indians. "I'd been coming to Mexico for around eight or nine years
before I finally moved, after September 11, when I just got really
uncomfortable with what my Government was doing," he said. "Of
course people thought I was crazy. They say it's Third World. I say it's
more Second World. On a par with Russia, maybe." Mr Hogg likes
Mexico's "fewer rules". "The
US can be claustrophobic," he said. "Like when you drive a car,
they can pull you over for a chip in the windscreen, or not wearing a
seatbelt, or your tail-light is out. "In
Mexico, kids learn to drive at the age of 12, and the police are
completely corrupt, and you can skate around most things. And people leave
you alone. There's a benign neglect that I like." In
the village where Mr Hogg lives, homes cost around $US500 to build,
although he lives in a massive house with thick stone walls and huge
fireplaces, built by missionaries, and which came with staff. It cost
around $US20,000 - a tenth of what a family home costs in his home state,
Washington. Others
are doing even better. Talk to Nadine and Henry Laxen, although not
between the hours of 2pm and 5pm - that's their siesta time. The
rest of the time, it's bridge, tennis, walking on the beach, or taking in
a movie at a cinema where the popcorn costs 80 cents. Mr
Laxen, 50, met his wife, Nadine, also 50, at Club Med in Mexico in 1990. A
year later, they bought a house in Mazatlan. He was already retired (at
33, actually, after making a small fortune in computers in the 1980s) and
"when Nadine and I got married, I retired her, too". The couple
spend about nine months of the year in Mexico, "but get out in the
summer, when it's 100 degrees and 100 per cent humidity, horrible". Mr
Laxen said friends always ask him about "bandits, the peso, and the
quality of the water". He tells them to use US banks, water filters,
and commonsense. "But if they come up with a business idea, I pour
cold water on it," he said. "Working here is just awful. The
system is very corrupt. Do you know what the difference is? It's the Magna
Carta. The English have an 800-year tradition of equality and democracy,
and the Spanish have a system of patronage, and that breeds corruption. So
it's better to come if you just want to retire." Mr
Laxen has detected little debate about whether more Americans are welcome,
or whether they are changing the local culture. "Americans are well
treated because they spend money," he said. "And Americans don't
come to Mexico to look for jobs, so there's no problem. I haven't heard
anybody saying it's a takeover of Mexico." Americans are getting around the rules on property ownership because the Mexican Government changed its laws in 1997 to allow foreigners to buy land through Mexican trust funds held at Mexican banks. Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging |
