Canadians flock to western Mexico, but not necessarily San Miguel de Allende
By David Agren, Jan 19, 2007
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Canadian retiree Dan McTavish, who has lived in Ajijic, Jalisco, for more than a decade, listed several reasons why so many of his fellow Canucks settle in the Lake Chapala area instead of San Miguel de Allende or any other part of Mexico’s interior. |
Like many Canadian expats, he mentioned the weather as one of the main factors. The microclimate surrounding Lake Chapala is decidedly less chilly and often described as “perpetual spring.”
“Canadians come to Lake Chapala because it is not as cold as San Miguel,” the former Toronto native said. Additionally, “It is near ... Guadalajara. I can get off an airplane from the US or from Mexico City [on my way back from Canada] and be at my home in 35 to 40 minutes.”
While San Miguel de Allende has a noticeable Canadian community—estimated at about 15 percent of the expatriate population —Canadians seemingly dominate the Lake Chapala area, which is considered the largest enclave of Canadians outside of Canada, except parts of Florida in the wintertime. (Quebeckers, for some reason, have an affinity for Florida.) The Canadian Club is a social group based in Ajijic (pronounced ah-hee-heek), a village with cobblestone streets on the north shore of Lake Chapala. Three thousand Canadians live in the Lake Chapala area year-round, and the number swells to around seven thousand after the snowbirds arrive. Their influence is hard to miss, and it goes beyond seeing a large number of vehicles with license plates from Canadian provinces.
Along with organizing their own club—which is open to anyone, regardless of nationality—Canadian veterans started an air force club. At least one housing development was marketed almost exclusively in Canada. StarChoice satellite dishes dot many rooftops, drawing in Canadian television programing. (The StarChoice signal is apparently stronger in Mexico than anything beamed down by a US provider.)
Besides the weather, Canadians interviewed for this feature cited additional reasons for choosing the Lake Chapala area, including easy access to amenities. Guadalajara is only an hour away, and the airport, which is bigger and served by more airlines than the airports in León and Querétaro, is even closer than the city. Canadian expats also cite a sense of community, friendliness and lower prices as reasons for living in the Lake Chapala area.
| Lake Chapala lacks some of San Miguel de Allende's glitz and has yet to be romanticized in print. There is no local equivalent of Tony Cohan’s On Mexican Time. It draws far fewer tourists, and with the exception of writer D. H. Lawrence and two former Mexican presidents—both of whom have checkered reputations—previously living in the area, few high-profile people have resided at Lakeside. | |
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(Elizabeth Taylor is rumored to have spent time in the area, though.) For many Lakeside residents “Lakeside” is the local slang for a string of communities on Lake Chapala’s northwestern shore), the lower profile and lack of tourism suits them just fine.
“No tourist trade folks live here,” writes Trudie Nelson, an Ajijic real estate agent and former Toronto resident. “Living here is a totally different experience from living at the coast.” Or living in San Miguel de Allende, for that matter, although similarities exist. Development is rife and some longtime expatriate residents lament that Mexican residents are being forced out of certain areas —especially downtown Ajijic—due to the influx of wealth.
“When we moved here, the neighbors were mostly Mexican,” said Allan Rose, the former honorary Canadian consul in Guadalajara, who owns a spacious home just a few blocks up from the lake in central Ajijic. “Slowly they're disappearing.”
Expatriate amenities and opportunities to contribute are plentiful in the area. Many good restaurants have opened at Lakeside and many expatriates volunteer in local organizations, including the local Cruz Roja, Amigos del Lago and Niños Incapacitados, to name a few. The annual Chili Cookoff highlights the social calendar each February. Most Lakeside expatriates shop in nearby Guadalajara and attend cultural events such as Jalisco Philharmonic Orchestra performances in the historic Teatro Degollado. Housing prices have also skyrocketed in recent years, but they still lag behind those in San Miguel de Allende. According to Damyn Young, another Canadian expat and real estate agent in Ajijic, “Before, you could buy a massive house for US$300,000. Now, you can buy an average house for that.”
Lower prices, more than anything, though, seem to draw Canadians, who only five years ago were receiving just six pesos for each Canadian dollar. The Canadians’ thriftiness resulted in jokes, including this oft-told jest: “What’s the difference between a Canadian and a canoe? A canoe tips.”
“There’s an element here that’s thrifty,” Young said, adding that clients he speaks with tell him that San Miguel is much more expensive. “People can still live within a close proximity to downtown Ajijic” for less than they could live in the San Miguel de Allende centro. Word of mouth, he said, also brings Canadians south in droves. Well-established tourism links between western Canada and western Mexico also help.
Initially, according to Allan Rose, accidental tourism fomented Lake Chapala’s popularity with Canadians. He said that the now-defunct Canadian Pacific Airlines used to fly between Canada and Buenos Aires, Argentina, twice a week, and the plane would refuel in Guadalajara. During the lengthy layover, some passengers would head south from the airport for a day trip to Lake Chapala, which is the largest body of water in Mexico and at times is in a perilous environmental state.
Acapulco later became a popular destination with Canadian travelers, but when flights to the granddaddy of Mexican resorts were full, travel agents would pitch customers on “a city with an unpronounceable name,” Rose said.
Like San Miguel de Allende, where Americans and some Canadians came to live cheaply after World War II, Chapala (the largest town at Lakeside) attracted a similar, if less-studious, crowd. Rose’s wife, Norine, described many in the early expatriate group as unpopular relatives being supported in a cheap, but distant place, almost like exiles.
And it wasn’t always so Canadian. When the Roses arrived in the early 1980s, the expat population roughly mirrored the normal population ratio of Americans to Canadians: 10:1. With time it changed, which prompted the Canadian government—at the urging of the US consular agency in Guadalajara—to ask Rose to serve as consul in 1984. “Their purpose was to get the growing Canadian community off their backs,” he recalled, adding the Americans threw a grand party upon his appointment.
The growth in the Canadian community, though, started making Rose’s appointment very full-time. He eventually arranged for a consular agent to take over affairs in Puerto Vallarta, and finally, in 1996, a regular consulate was established. Rose also helped establish a short-lived consular office in San Miguel de Allende, but finding a serious consul proved difficult.
“It was a very political appointment,” Norine Rose recalled of the person who briefly ran the office, adding that the consul was social and work wasn’t being done as it should have been. The office, though, had clients. “His assistant had plenty of work to do,” she commented. (Canadians in San Miguel de Allende are now served by the Canadian embassy in Mexico City.)
The consulate in Guadalajara, one of nine in Mexico, has grown with the increasing Canadian population and the expansion of trade links resulting from NAFTA. It has gone from three to nine employees in a little more than a decade and will move into larger offices in January.
Down at Lakeside, the growing Canadian population also saw the need for an organization that would deal with their needs, addressing issues such as Canadian pensions, health-care questions and other uniquely Canadian things, so a chapter of the Canadian Club was formed in 2002. The club’s advent initially ruffled feathers in Lakeside, especially with some Americans. Norine Rose recalled Americans asking, “We’re not good enough to look after your interests?”
“They thought it was going to be very divisive,” she adds.
Canadian affairs tend to be less divisive in expatriate circles as a rule—especially in politics, which stirred intense passions for Americans at Lakeside in 2004 and 2006. During the 2006 Canadian election, Norine Rose set up a voting information table at Ajijic’s Lake Chapala Society but found few Canadians willing to sign up for ballots.
“[Virtually] everyone came up to me to tell me why they wouldn’t vote,” she explained.
Canadians living in San Miguel de Allende tell a similar story of observing US political tussles.
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“A lot of Americans talk about politics,” said Dan Ferguson, a Canadian ceramic artist and five-year resident of San Miguel de Allende. “In the US, you often get polar opposites on every issue. In Canada, we’re pretty middle-of-the-road.” |
Canadians, of course, settle in San Miguel de Allende, too, but in much smaller numbers. The town, though, receives more attention than Lakeside in the Canadian media. A quick scan of newspaper archives found more than three times as many mentions of San Miguel de Allende in 2006. No one who was asked could really explain why fewer Canadians find their way to San Miguel de Allende, although Dan Ferguson asked: “Is Ajijic cheaper? “It’s a national trait to be frugal and be careful with your money,” he explained.
When describing themselves, Canadians often use words such as “modest,” “reserved” and “unpretentious,” things some people interviewed said were less common in San Miguel de Allende than at Lakeside.
“It’s cold in San Miguel—not just in the climate, but also in people’s reception,” Allan Rose commented, explaining that he and his wife, Norine, originally considered settling in San Miguel before coming to Ajijic. Norine Rose added, “There’s a more modest lifestyle here,” which perhaps appeals more to Canadians than the sophistication and trendiness of San Miguel de Allende.
Out with the Old—to ALMA!
By Pat Frey
Saturday, January 27, 10am–1pm
Jacarandas 148, Colonia La Lejona
Free hourly transport across from Espino’s
It’s a new year, and ALMA (Apoyo a los Sanmiguelenses Ancianos, A.C.), the charity that provides housing, meals and health care to the elderly of San Miguel, is gearing up to make your old furniture and appliances available to the less fortunate at affordable prices. These larger items bring in good returns at ALMA’s Bodega thrift store, which is open to all on the last Saturday of every month. The income from the Bodega sales is then used to support the residence. Your donations, especially those large, still-useful items you have recently replaced, can help to support the home’s ongoing operations. The last Saturday of January is coming up soon! Please bring your donations to the sale or call Rosalie Gower (154-0186) in advance for pick-up.
Multiplying remittance money for community benefit
By Cliff DuRand and Atahualpa Caldera
Global Justice trip to Soasnabar
Saturday, January 27, 9am–4pm
300 pesos
Next Saturday, the Center for Global Justice will visit a rural community with a unique project. Soasnabar is harnessing remittance money sent home by its men working in the United States to build a church for this community of 150 households.
Remittances are the second most important source of foreign exchange for Mexico. This country’s emigrants sent an estimated US$24 billion back home last year. Only oil brings more revenue, and that is only because of its current high price. Remittances even exceed foreign direct investment. It might seem the Mexican people are investing in their own country, but most of this is to support household consumption, not productive investment.
However, a government program initiated in 1993 seeks to harness some of this remittance money to help finance social development through infrastructure improvements. If a community will commit some of the remittances it receives to some such public project, that money will be matched by each of the federal, state and (since 1999) municipal governments. That multiplies the funds threefold and is making improvements in roads and bridges, water systems and other facilities in poor rural communities possible.
Although this three-for-one program has been around for a number of years, the municipality of San Miguel de Allende did not implement it until 2005, and then only on a limited scale. In its first year, the Department of Social and Human Development provided support for seven communities out of the 500 in the municipality. Last year, it supported four projects, some of them continued from the previous year.
One of those is a two-year project in Soasnabar, a community of 600 persons located 8 kilometers southeast of the city, where the first stage of construction of a church (officially referred to as a community center) is nearing completion. It is a large, modern building with an opening in the roof where a dome will be built someday. Water stands on the floor from the summer rains. Nevertheless, this bare space is already sometimes used for community meetings. However, church services are still held outside in front of an adjacent small chapel.
The Soasnabar community has raised 200,000 pesos for this project, which has been matched by 600,000 pesos of government funds. In many other communities where emigrants have left to work in the same area of the US, hometown associations have been formed (there are an estimated 1,000 hometown associations throughout the US). These groups have often pooled some of their money for projects in their hometowns. In the case of Soasnabar, however, those who have emigrated have dispersed, so the pooling of funds took place locally. At a community meeting it was decided to build the church and divide the cost among the families. It was the job of 20-year-old Esmeralda Gallegos, the town treasurer, to collect the 200,000 pesos and oversee the expenditures on the project.
That is a big responsibility for a young woman with only six years of education. She is helped by 75-year-old Don Guadalupe, who is the leader of Soasnabar and its delegate. They work closely with Primitivo Luna, who is the field representative for this area from the Department of Social and Human Development.
The combined efforts of the community and the SMA municipality will provide a fine new facility for this community. But unfortunately, its construction has not provided any direct economic benefit. This is because none of the workers on the project have been local, even though most of the men work elsewhere in construction. Luna explains that the contractor for the community center/church hires workers from poorer states such as Veracruz, Zacatecas and even Chiapas, who are cheaper than workers from the San Miguel area. So, rather than the community’s 200,000-peso investment coming back to its members as wages, it goes to hire workers from afar. Elsewhere, other projects are sometimes able to make use of local labor as well as material resources. And that might become possible in Soasnabar in the next stage when the finishing work begins.
But for now, work seems to have halted on this project. Luna explains that this year’s state matching funds have not been forthcoming due to election-year expenses involving the changeover of administrations. But he is committed to finishing the project, with funds from elsewhere in the budget if necessary. But that may depend on who continues to work for the municipality as its administration also changes.
Soasnabar’s community center is one of hundreds of such social investments throughout Mexico made possible by remittances from immigrants working in the US. There are some communities that refuse the matching funds of the three-for-one program, saying that government should pay the entire cost of roads and bridges and water systems. Another point of contention is whether the program should be extended to financing productive projects such as dams, irrigation and wells that benefit some members of a community but not the community as a whole. The line between public and private is not always clear.
The fee for the Center for Global Justice’s trip to Soasnabar includes transportation, comida and translation costs. Advance reservations are necessary and can be made by calling the Center at 150-0025 or by email at info@globaljusticecenter.org. Pick up your ticket at the office between 9am and 1pm weekdays.
Memorial for Sareda Milosz January 25
Memorial for Sareda Milosz
Thursday, January 25, 1pm
Sala Quetzal, Biblioteca Pública
Insurgentes 25
152-0614
On Thursday, January 25, at 1pm in the Sala Quetzal of the Biblioteca Pública, there will be a memorial gathering for longtime San Miguel resident Sareda Milosz, who died December 8 after fighting melanoma for many years. All her friends are invited.
Sareda’s beloved brother, Richard Ludwig, will attend. Sareda chose to spend the last five weeks of her life at his house in Nevada with him and his wife Sandy.
People who want to speak or contribute in some other way at this event are asked to write to Lucina Kathmann at
lucina@unisono.net.mx or call 152-0614.
Memorial for Sue Reid planned
Sue Reid, 74, a longtime San Miguel resident, passed away in Houston on January 11, 2007. She was a Houston native and attended the University of Houston. In order to pursue her career as an artist, she moved to Mexico and spent the last 25 years in San Miguel de Allende. She was preceded in death by her daughter, Carol Michelle. She is survived by her children, Susan Reid Smith, Terri Reid Alford, Chip Reid, Jim Reid and Mark Reid.
Sue was known by all for her many efforts to develop parks, plant trees in neighborhoods and raise funds for schools and local orphanages in San Miguel through her work as a member and president of the Garden Club of San Miguel and other charities.
A March memorial in San Miguel is being planned in her honor with her family in attendance.
A eulogy will be published in the January 26 issue of Atención. Contributions from friends can be sent to
edit@atencionsanmiguel.org
before January 22.
Tributes to Phil Maher
Col. Philip J. Maher was the most dedicated public servant most of us ever met. He touched all of our lives in many ways. When we entered the hospital or the library, his work there was for us. Certainly, when we needed help from the US government Col. Maher was there as their representative, calming our fears and softening our frustrations. Few knew that he and Muriel spent his Christmas vacation visiting American prisoners in jails around the area, bringing them soap, razors and other small necessities.
But it is as a man and a friend that we wish to pay tribute to Phil Maher. In his 37 years living in Mexico he touched the lives of so many, Americans and Mexicans alike.
We will miss him as a friend who graced our home with Muriel at his side and entertained us at their home.
Goodbye dear friend—you will not be forgotten.
Lee and Hy Asheroff
Getting the chance to interview “the Colonel,” San Miguel de Allende’s former US consular agent, this last time was challenging, to put it mildly. When word leaked out that a replacement had been found for Phil, nearly a year after his announcement that it was time to retire, I called his office and asked for an interview time. The response was immediate, and polite: Could I please come in at 1pm on the following Tuesday? This time was set because Colonel Maher felt things would be quiet around the office and we’d have time for a good talk.
No sooner had I turned my tape recorder on than the Colonel received an urgent phone call. Could I make it the next day?, he asked. The next day, he tried to give me time, but it didn’t work out. When I seated myself in front of him in his private office with the large, ornate desk, he informed me: “I’ve had a bad hair day—can we reschedule?” This was no whim on his part. Not only had he been called away from his home early that morning to attend to some US expatriates who had been robbed and badly beaten, he was also now on his way to talk with the victim of a rape that had happened the night before.
The next time I visited Phil Maher in his office, it turned out that his retirement—for which a party in his honor had been scheduled the following weekend—was delayed for an indefinite amount of time. The approval process for his replacement had been slowed down, and Phil was going to have to stay in the job for a while longer. He hoped it wouldn’t be more than a couple of months.
It was quite a bit more than a couple of months. Finally, early the next spring, it seemed as if things were moving along. The Colonel had said “enough!” a month or so earlier and had left the job. A new consular agent was on the way in. I telephoned out to Phil and Muriel Maher’s house, and I was sitting across from him at a small desk within a couple of days.
The results of that interview were published in Atención in May 2006, and then again just recently, after his death.
Phil was a journalist’s dream. He listened carefully to the questions I asked him; he answered them directly and articulately and with great intelligence and humor. He had a store of wonderful stories to tell. He allowed his essence to show through—of a capable, giving, caring man who had devoted all of his life to service of others: his country, his family, his community.
How lucky we of San Miguel are to have had this wonderful human being among us.
Eva Hunter