My favorite bar in Oaxaca, Mexico, was a two-story local haunt-meets-restaurant-meets-event space frequented by Mexicans and foreigners alike. The default watering hole for misfits and artists, Convivio had hosted drag shows, goth nights, and 1980s new wave DJ sets since opening in 2016. New bands cut their teeth before a forgiving audience who wanted them to succeed. Lovers shared cheeky cigarettes out the window and mezcal spilled on the dance floor. It was an homage to youth, to self-expression, and to Oaxaca. It was where disparate communities found home.
Convivio was covered in rótulos, the iconic hand-painted signs that adorn mercados and food stalls across Mexico. They immediately grounded visitors in a sense of place: You could be dropped blindfolded into the dim bar, open your eyes, and guess that you were in Mexico, despite the diversity of the clientele. My favorite art piece, done in the same blocky color gradients that advertise bandas and cumbia concerts along roadsides, simply read: Me ves y sufres. “You see me and you suffer.”
The bar closed before Día de los Muertos in 2022. The owners couldn’t keep up with the rising rent prices in the city.
Two years ago, I became one of the 1.6 million U.S. citizens the State Department reports to be living in Mexico. Like many before me, I fell in love with its culture and people during my travels around the country and applied for temporary residency at a Mexican consulate. The city of Oaxaca de Juárez, where I live in southern Mexico, is a trendy destination for national and foreign tourists alike, and has seen a 77 percent rise in visitors since 2020 alone. A government report noted the explosion of Airbnb’s popularity across Mexico, with the 12,704 units listed in 2014 growing to 321,541 by 2021.
Beyond the resulting strain of gentrification in Mexico’s urban centers is the dramatic water shortage crisis stemming from low water tables and privatization of the water supply throughout the country. Last year, Oaxaca’s public water distribution slowed in response to drought conditions, an antiquated infrastructure, and inadequate government oversight. As the country’s general elections approached in June 2024, a series of increasingly dystopian campaign slogans formed a visual white noise around the city. I passed by their ads on my daily walks to the gym—the same gym I am largely motivated to attend because I can shower there, unlike in my apartment, which regularly runs out of water without notice. I stretched for my workouts beneath images of a municipal candidate promising that “With changes comes water.”
Leading up to the elections, one neighborhood in Oaxaca City blocked the federal highway to protest the lack of public water. Some households reported that the government had not made deliveries to their zone for more than sixty days while prioritizing the city center, where tourists stay. No ability to flush toilets. No water to wash dishes. No showers. In that time, residents of Oaxaca endured a heatwave with daily temperatures of ninety-five degrees.
The rattling hum of private water deliveries is the cicada of Oaxaca. The bed and breakfast across the street receives daily pipas—non-municipal water pumped into cisterns to withstand the gap until the city’s next delivery. The center of Oaxaca is an obstacle course of firemen’s hoses as pipas run into hostels, Airbnbs, and businesses. Friends on a recent visit told me there was no signage in their hotel that even hinted at a water crisis. They left right before the wildfires started in the largely Indigenous towns just outside of the city. The communities took to social media to ask neighbors in Oaxaca to send pipas—they had no water to fight the fires. Local WhatsApp groups were flooded with requests for Gatorade, sandwiches, shovels, and masks for community members digging trenches to contain the destruction. We dropped off donations at local businesses, just as Americans around the United States are doing for the victims of the Los Angeles fires.
Tourism forms an enormous part of Oaxaca’s economy, and these visitors won’t come if they believe they won’t have regular access to water. The state received 5.6 million tourists in 2023, and the Tourism Secretary reported the sector created 175,000 jobs in just the first few months of the same year. Beyond the tourists passing through are the foreigners, like myself, who call Oaxaca home, and who live in this magnificent city during a time of increasing displacement for locals from the city center due to rising rent prices and a lack of water. You hear anecdotally that the salsas have become less spicy in Mexico City to account for the increasingly foreign palate. In San Miguel de Allende, an idyllic pueblo mágico in the state of Guanajuato, one out of every ten residents is an immigrant, most from the United States. It is perhaps unsurprising that despite only being its eighth largest city, San Miguel has the highest cost of living in the state.
Me ves y sufres. Am I the harbinger of doom?
Puerto Rican musician Bad Bunny’s latest album, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, is a celebration of Puerto Ricans both on the island and in the diaspora. It also speaks to the sadness of losing one’s homeland to the clutches of colonialism and gentrification—not what you’d typically expect from a number-one charting album. In the song LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii (“What happened to Hawaii”), Bad Bunny draws parallels between the U.S. annexations of Puerto Rico and Hawaii. In both places, tourism and the privatization of resources continue to result in the displacement of locals.
Quieren quitarme el río y también la playa Quieren el barrio mío y que tus hijos se vayan
“They want to take the river and beach away from me They want my neighborhood and for your kids to leave”
International migration is not a recent behavioral development, but the power imbalances that exist within twenty-first century mobility have unprecedented consequences, seen even on domestic levels, as Bad Bunny notes. I want to live in a world without borders and I believe that migration is a human right. It would, however, be foolhardy for me to act as though my moving to Mexico is equal to a Mexican moving to the United States. Americans don’t need a visa to enter Mexico and are generally granted a 180-day stay automatically. Residency is relatively easy to obtain for those who want to put down roots and pay taxes here. The U.S. dollar offers purchasing power out of reach to my Mexican counterparts. I have several friends here whose tourist visa applications to the United States have been rejected despite their jobs and English fluency. They don’t receive the reciprocal access to my country that I am granted to theirs. They can’t afford the rents in Oaxaca that I can manage. Their migration to my home city would not disrupt a local economy by driving up prices for goods and services.
At what point are expats and digital nomads absolved of their impact on their host communities? Is it once they have residency? Once they are fluent in the local language? Once they are married to a local? Once they earn a local salary instead of that of a stronger foreign currency? At what point do they cease to be expats and become immigrants? Expat implies that this is a temporary stopover on the way to another place yet unknown. When does the transition to permanence begin?
I have called Oaxaca home for the past two years, but I am not from here. Prior to moving, I called Portland, Oregon, home, though I am not from there either. My Mexican friends tell me that I shouldn’t feel guilty for my impact as a transplant here, and that it’s the local governments who should be held responsible for allowing their own corruption and greed to inform the same local policies that result in water shortages and a housing crisis. Corporations are the ones buying up the water anyway. Is it their opinion that matters? When I pass the urban graffiti shouting “GO HOME GRINGO!”, are they not talking to me? Am I what happened to Hawaii? Me ves y sufres?