Lecture with Slides
Seventy years of 
foreigners in San Miguel
Arturo Morales Tirado
Tue, Mar 17, 1:30pm
Teatro Santa Ana
Biblioteca Pública
Insurgentes 25
50 pesos 

Four generations, four attitudes By Arturo Morales Tirado

With the passage of seven decades, we have experienced four generations of foreigners and non-native Mexicans (not born here) in San Miguel. For convenience, we can group them by decades as postwar, counterculture, consumers and co-existers. They enriched the cultural diversity of this small city and the four generations also reflect historical moments.

The postwar influx of foreigners slightly predates the war, beginning 70 years ago with two men who fell in love with San Miguel de Allende and were committed to it. They were US citizen Stirling Dickinson (who died in 1998 in a car crash here) and the Peruvian Felipe Cosío del Pomar. They founded the first summer program of the arts and handicraft school that is today Bellas Artes.

Following them in the forties and fifties, the first big wave of foreigners in the twentieth century arrived in San Miguel morally shocked by the drama and tragedy of the Second World War and the birth of the Cold War. San Miguel offered a unique place to live, with less than 25.000 inhabitants, a continental climate and historical, cultural and natural heritage preserved by accidents of local history.

In the counterculture of the sixties and seventies, with new social paradigms practiced from Prague to Paris, Kent to Mexico City, San Miguel was an open city. The new “mestization,” foreigner and Mexican couples, diluted both cultures. Their bicultural children were open to the world and yet their multi-culturality was rooted within the traditions and ethnic wealth of San Miguel.

Consumers followed the end of the idealistic dreams. In the eighties and nineties, San Miguel saw the arrival of another generation of foreigners, often out of context and outside the evolution of the city.

The fourth generation arriving in San Miguel at the beginning of the twenty-first century have new attitudes. They want to coexist and they make an effort with the local population to be part of this cosmopolitan community.