Writer and longtime San Miguel resident, John Scherber, was nice enough to allow us to republish the following excerpt that was originally published in San Miguel de Allende: A Place in the Heart. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.
A Place in the Heart
People visiting San Miguel often wonder what it’s like to live here. It’s hard not to picture yourself kicking back under the loggia of a colonial style house, spending evenings down at the Jardin listening to the mariachis, and watching the raucous religious and civic parades. It has happened that some wake up on the morning they’re supposed go back home and find that they’re unable to leave.
I’d been here about five or six months when I started wondering how much more there was to it. And it wasn’t all pluses––the downside could get worse than not being able to find chocolate chips at the market.
So I wrote a book about the experience. I called it, San Miguel de Allende: A Place in the Heart. It wasn’t about me. I hadn’t been here long enough to know anything, so I had conversations with 32 people who did know something about the experience.
One I spoke with was a painter named Linda Vandiver. She talked about her encounter with Mexican neighbors a short time after she moved here:
“I was still living with my uncle and the neighbors invited me for a special dinner. He was a mechanic and she sold little things when school got out [a vendor of snacks at the edge of the school grounds]. She had three children, and we were all around the table having dinner. It was a very special dinner she had cooked, and I felt so honored because I knew they were poor. While we were eating dinner someone knocked at the door.
“She answered the door and an old lady came in and was asking if they had any extra food. My neighbor pulled out another chair and brought the lady to the table and sat her down. She got her a Coke and brought her a plate of food. And I went home and I cried. I still cry because it touched me so much. That’s when I realized that this is where I ought to be. I knew I would stay here.”
San Miguel is a town that draws creative people. It is a hive of writers as well as painters. One I talked to was Michael Grais, the screenwriter who wrote Poltergeist, and a number of other successful films. Let me quote from that conversation:
Grais now has the feeling of being in a creative atmosphere, but one of a much more relaxed kind than he was used to. “There’s not the feeling that you’re competing with everyone around you. There’s no big Hollywood contingent here. No one cares where you live, how big your house is, because no one can tell where anyone’s at, in that regard anyway. There are successful people living here in all kinds of strange environments.” San Miguel is a town of inward-looking houses, where the condition of the street walls often tells nothing about what a person might find inside, or who.
“We fell into a very eclectic and wonderful group of expats: writers, sculptors, painters. No one seemed pressured to do much of anything other than what they wanted to do.” He looks at me as if to say how utterly strange that is. It’s hard not to notice the recurrence of words like pressure, enslaving, limiting, competition, escape, burnout, mindset.
Yet San Miguel and expatriate life doesn’t work for everyone. I spoke at length with Dave Richards, an expert in voice-over Internet technology. After several years down here with young children, he and his wife concluded that they couldn’t earn enough to pay for three kids in college and save for their own retirement. Reluctantly, with much soul searching, they decided to move back to the U.S.:
“Many, many hours there were tears, there were talks. We didn’t sleep. It always came back to, ‘this is going to give us a chance [to make financial headway] for the first time. Not only that, we’re going back to a situation where we’re a lot wiser. We’re not going to go back to San Jose and buy a $1.5 million house. We’ve rented a house for $2,000 a month. We’re going back frugal. We know frugal now because we’ve been in Mexico for three years. We thought we knew what it was when we lived in Marin County, surrounded by Range Rovers and I drove a new Ford truck because I wanted to be frugal. You live there surrounded by multimillionaires and you think you know what frugal is. Frugal is, ‘Not the Italian marble counter tops, we’re just going to go with the domestic marble counter tops when we remodel our kitchen again.’ That’s what was frugal.
“Now it’s like none of that matters. We’re going to go with the linoleum. We’re going with a white refrigerator. We’re not going with the big, stainless steel aircraft carrier barbecue. We’re coming back completely different people, with completely realigned objectives.”
But exactly how are they different? What’s the detail?
“Here’s what we take away from Mexico. What’s important is how much time you spend with your kids. How happy are your kids? How well adjusted are they? How well behaved are they? And the better behaved they are, is almost always a key to how much time their parents spend with them. Poorly behaved kids grow up with maids and nannies who don’t really discipline them, don’t really teach them the core values that your parents taught you.”
I couldn’t help but notice that Dave and his family were not leaving because they were intimidated by American media accounts of murder in Mexico. On the contrary, they had found San Miguel a perfect place to raise three little blond, blue-eyed Mexicans of American descent.
When I started this book I made few assumptions about how it would go. Most people seemed interested, even eager, to participate. Few declined. I was not surprised, but what did surprise me was the extreme range and variety of attitudes and experiences that emerged from those conversations. No two people were coming at San Miguel from the same direction. Was the place in some way a universal attraction? Did it have something for everyone, or was it merely everyone’s panacea?
I’m not sure I could have answered that then, nor can I now, because what it is for me changes week by week. As a writer myself, working on my Paul Zacher series of mysteries set in in San Miguel, I see it with the eye of a detective some days, as one of my victims on others. There are six of them now available at Amazon.com, together with San Miguel de Allende: A Place in the Heart. Most of them can be had at bookstores in in San Miguel. I enjoy the fact that good writing has support in this town. Where I came from, it was much more about how big your riding mower was.