How We Came to Live in Mexico

This title sounds like one of those essays
That you write after coming back to school in the fall
"How I spent my summer vacation"
... but I guess it's kind of like that.

In 1996, my daughter Georgia,
was procrastinating on writing her essay
to accompany her application to UC Berkeley
So John, my husband,
whose work is as a graphic recorder,
put a wall of paper up and drew pictures
about what she was thinking about,
of the things she loved and hated,
the fantasies that captured her imagination,
plus things she thought she wanted to do with her life,
it was apparent from the work they did together
that she wanted to travel
get some experience in the world.
flamenco dancing comes to mind,
but Spain was out of the budget,
and we discovered San Miguel de Allende
through a service that placed young people
in foreign places throughout the world.

In September 1996,
she signed up for three months of Spanish Classes,
at the Instituto Allende, in San Miguel,
she stayed in a semi-family house,
came home at Christmas to tell us
she was moving back down for good.
And she did,
I came to visit,
leaving the rest of the family home,
fell in love with it immediately,
as almost everyone does
it is one of those special places in the world.

At that time, you could live
on about $150 a month,
she rented a tiny tiny house
down the street from friends of ours
who also live here.
I think she didn't quite know
what to do with herself for a while,
but over time, she began meeting people,
had a Mexican boyfriend, whose family
might be responsible for her rapid
fluency in Spanish.

Back home,
we had a family reunion in Oregon
both of my brothers, I discovered,
were selling Antiques on Ebay
I got the idea of selling Mexican Folk Art there also
I started by making a trip every three months,
Georgia and I would hop on buses,
visit little (and big) villages all over Mexico
I would bring back boxes with me on the plane,
take pictures with my digital camera that took
questionable quality 480 x 640 pictures
sold it all and hopped on a plane again.
During this time, I was working full time,
taking HTML computer classes at the JC
so that I could build a family genealogy website,
a passion of mine.

About a year went by,
I created a website for the store, got a URL,
purchased shopping cart software,
I was in business on the web.
This was about the fall of 1997
I had created a database of customers
from Ebay sales, and magically,
the business took off, growing every year
until I was able to quit my day job.

Back to Mexico,
Georgia and I had spent all this time
educating ourselves about Mexican Folk Art
making lists of artists we wanted to meet
and going on discovery journeys -
into the wild, so to speak,
to find artists whose work we loved.

This was not always so easy,
Since there was
No directory of artists
No directions to their houses
No telephones
No way to communicate.
We would go into an area
Befriend a taxi driver,hire him for the day
Go into the various villages and farms
Where often, even the people in the village
Didn't know where to tell us to go
Ssometimes we would drive up and down streets
Knocking on doors,
Asking people if they knew so and so...
Sometimes, they knew but wouldn't tell us
WWe could tell they were withholding
But we were persistent,
And managed to gather
A solid group of artists together.

Then, we had to deal with ordering from afar

One trip, after searching for 3 days,
we finally met an artist
Who we had been looking for,
Felipe Gomez, a 94 year old Oaxacan toymaker
Primitive wood toys made of wood,
Day of the dead skeletons and ferris wheels
With skeletons and devils in them,
Some of them 5 feet tall.
We were thrilled to have finally found him
Working in a tin building, dirt floor,
In 100 degree heat
With his 25 year old son,
And 1 year old grandson
We placed an order
For several hundred dollars of these toys,
Gave him a deposit,
But he didn't write
So we couldn't get a receipt.
Nor did he have a telephone to call him
Nor was there a way to arrange getting the order to us
Nor did he know when the order would be ready.
Nor did he have a bank account,
No we could not pay him
Nhen the order was done

Emilano, our taxi driver
offered to go by in a month
to check on the order,
have us send him the money
then he would go pay,
pick up the order
and ship it to us.
We had one of those moments
where we were rolling our eyes to ourselves,
thinking that this sounds like a good way
to lose our money,
never see our merchandise
never see the taxi driver again
so in English, we talked it over
decided that we could afford to lose a hundred dollars
said OK to Emiliano,
shook hands with Felipe and his family
and drove off.

As we were leaving,
Emiliano, who had seen our nervousness,
asked if we would come see the house he was building
we were hot, tired and drained
hungry, and in need for a shower
but we said yes,
And he drove us to the other side of Oaxaca,
a town we were not yet familiar with
went into his home, a concrete shell
with just a few windows covered in Disney curtains,
sat on the couch next to each other,
hands in our laps, sweating,
wondering what we were doing
his daughter ran to the little tienda
bought a bottle of Fresca for us.
We had a cold drink, a tour of the house
learned his plans and dreams for finishing it,
met his wife, and he took us back to our hotel.
We realized that we had made a friend

A month later,
Georgia received a call,
our order was ready, send money
We did, the order came, and that
was the beginning of our friendship
with Emiliano and his family, who still,
is our driver whenever we go to Oaxaca
still picks up and ships our orders
from Oaxaca and it's surrounding villages.
We have many stories like that
and have developed many friendships
in similar ways, around Mexico.

Since Georgia lived in San Miguel
it was always the landing place
and home away from home
where I worked, got inspired,
and came to love Mexico.
In the last couple of years,
we have done a turnaround.
Georgia now lives in Texas
with her boyfriend Brian,
she got a job, bought a car,
bought a house and has a dog.
She's happy in the states again
and we've moved into our house down here,
our roles have flipped -
I buy and manage the artists and customers,
she does the shipping from Texas

Suzanne

Remodeling Our House

We bought our house
In March 2006
and spent a year remodeling it,
with some breaks in between.

It's been almost two full years
so it has things like furniture, plants and art,
you'll have to imagine that it just feels lived in now.

The process of working in another country,
in materials that are foreign (brick and concrete),
along with a crash course in construction education,
the names of 16 different kinds of bricks and their uses, for instance,
the cultural and language barriers to cross,
made it an interesting, challenging experience
to say the least, not to mention fun,
when it's not frustrating as hell!
Speaking of fun, I have decided recently
to never do anything again in my life
for more than 6 months,
if it isn't interesting and fun.

So, we fired our architect early on
and worked directly with 2 families of albaniles -
Fausto & Fausto hijo,
Cesar and Lorenzo,
Father in law and son in law,
who brought it all to completion,
and have remained friends with us.
This year, we plan to close in the terraza
It's a nice fantasy to be out under the tile roof
Looking at the city, but the reality
Is lots of wind, right at the time of day
You want to go up and hang out.
So we'll make it into
with lots of glass, to be able
to enjoy the views and light year round.

We have a lot of funny stories
About the search, purchase,
and process of closing the escrow
Plus the remodeling
Which was really a total trashing
Of just about everything
Starting all over again.
Which I will fill in with stories
A little later.

Mexico House