We paired down Christmas when we lived back in the States. Once the kids were grown and moved away, starting families of their own, our Christmas traditions narrowed down to the basics. We still attended the children’s mass on Christmas Eve (with close friends) at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in DC and ate till closing at a local Italian Restaurant that always expected us. Christmas morning was homemade cinnamon roles. The tree (now fake) went up sometime in mid-December and back in the box the first weekend in January. Sent out Christmas cards, but did little decorating, and certainly no exterior lights.
During our move to an apartment, downsizing in preparation fo retirement and expat life, all that was left of Christmas past was the religious observance. We put the old ornaments away, and even stopped exchanging gifts, since that just added to the stuff we needed to get rid of.
That paired-down approach continued once we got to Mexico. Without the change of seasons, Christmas falls into the same perfect weather as the rest of the year (yes, I know, as youse NOB shiver in the snow, you feel SO SORRY for us!). Gradually, we’re adding back to the Christmas traditions.
Of course, my official Charlie Brown Christmas Tree makes its annual appearance, along with one of Judy’s amazing quilts:
Here’s our new Mexican tree. Not enough evergreens here, so this captures the spirit:
In case you missed them in the last photo, yes, that is the complete set from Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer!
Another of Judy’s holiday quilts which made the cut to Mexico:
A child’s handicraft which survived the years:
and our latest additions. Expats drink a lot of wine–or at least we do–so you need to fashion up those ubiquitous bottles. We have little sombrero and poncho kits for them, but nothing says Christmas like a Santa wine bottle!
Normally, I am supportive of almost anything that encourages a deeper look at history: it is my favorite subject, and I firmly believe everyone can learn from it. In the case of the New York Times 1619 project, I’m willing to make an exception. The effort commemorates the initial shipment of slaves to the colony of Virginia. It is a slick, interactive, multimedia presentation. The Times seems to be telling us “everything you know is wrong.” Let’s see.
The problem starts with its stated purpose. To whit: “It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.” It is very useful to study the contributions of different groups to the American story, especially when the groups in question have been historically marginalized. But “reframing” history and asserting a different foundation are another story, literally a manufactured one.
What’s the harm, you might ask, and surely the Times will provide some balance in the work? Not so much. For example, one article posits that the American prison system is so violent because it is a direct descendant of the plantation system. Maybe the author was unfamiliar with the Stanford prison experiment, which showed quite clearly that prison environments breed violence. Perhaps the author has never heard of Chinese prisons, or Turkish prisons, or Mexican prisons, which are even more violent and have no link to American slavery.
This is what happens when you look at history through a soda straw: you might really believe the little circle you see is the whole truth, but you might also be totally missing the point.
Of course, slavery played an important role in the story of America’s founding. It is not for nothing that the phrase “(s)lavery is America’s original sin” has been bandied about since the nation’s founding. But was slavery unique here, and does American history need to be “re-framed” around it?
Let’s start with 1619. The Times gets the date wrong, as slavery in America began when the Spanish imported the first slaves to what is today South Carolina in 1526. The Anglo-centric version of history is grist for another blog post, another day, but you would think the nation’s ‘paper of record’ would have a little more, say, diverse view.
Slavery neither began in America nor ended here: in fact it continues to this day. Slavery began long before recorded history, when one family tribe fought another and had to determine what to do with the defeated survivors: kill them, set them free and fight them again, or enslave them. Slavery was such an endemic condition of history that even the Bible treats it as given, while suggesting it is unjust and should be abolished. Slavery happened whenever the strong confronted the weak. St. Patrick was a Roman slave of the Celts. The feared Janissary warriors were Christian slaves of the Ottoman Sultan. And so it goes.
Slavery was not unique to Africa, but Africa was certainly the continent most affected by slavery. Arab slave traders in 8th century focused on Africa since Muslims were prohibited from taking other Muslims as slaves; demand only accelerated when the Europeans colonized Africa in the 15th and 16th centuries. Yet the reason Africa was such a target for slave traders was that slavery was already endemic within Africa! Africans enslaved each other, and then traded their slaves to outsiders. The notion that Middle Ages Europeans wandered about the African continent catching locals as slaves is transparently silly. Arabs and Europeans provided the gold, and Africans provided the slaves.
In the New World, where did most of the slaves go? Of the eleven million slaves who survived the transatlantic passage, less than 400,000 (<4%) went to North America, 35% went to Brazil (the most frequent destination) with the Caribbean being the other large collective destination.
Was American slavery more brutal? All slavery was inherently dehumanizing and brutal, so we are talking about the subtle differences in inhumanity. Still, the reasons the American South didn’t need to import as many slaves was the natural rate of increase. By the outbreak of the Civil War, the slave population in the Confederacy had exploded six-fold to almost four million slaves, approximately one-third of the total population! This increase was due to obvious factors: more births, fewer deaths, and a longer life-span, since cotton plantation life (as horrible as it was) was nothing compared the Carib sugar plantations or the mines of South America. Sugar plantation and mine owners estimated their slaves were good for seven years of labor, at which point they died from chronic mistreatment. Americans in the south actually encouraged slaves to have children (even as they broke the families up for sale) and found uses for the youngest and oldest slaves. Both systems were horrible.
Was slavery uniquely essential to the US economy? Hardly. While the “molasses-to-rum-to-slaves” trade route is well-documented (remember the musical 1776?), and slavery was the basis of the southern plantation economy, it was not nearly as important to the overall US economy as slavery was to Brazil or Spanish colonial Cuba. Still, the 1619 project states “(i)n order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.” And this howler: “Perhaps you’re reading this at work, . . . (where) you report to someone, and . . . Everything is tracked, recorded and analyzed . . . . It feels like a cutting-edge approach to management, but many of these techniques that we now take for granted were developed by and for large plantations.” Phew! Missing a few centuries of Medieval economic development there.
“They’re willing, for a Shilling”
Is there anything that makes American slavery unique? Well, the most unique aspect of American slavery is our continuing fascination with it. About every other decade there is a renewed interest in the “peculiar institution.” No other former slave-holding nation spends more time or effort reconsidering the experience.
A second unique aspect is that while American slaves were considered property, they counted for purposes of political enumeration. Most people are rightly horrified at the Article I language in the US Constitution that dictates slaves be counted as three-fifths of a person. Few stop to think that this was exactly three-fifths more of an acknowledgment of a slave’s humanity than they received anywhere else. This provision was indeed a cynical political ploy to gain more representation for slave-holding states, but the fact remains–they counted.
By far the most unique aspect of slavery in America is this fact: America was the only country which fought a war to end the practice. Most nations outlawed the practice and let it gradually die. Haiti had a rebellion to forestall the re-imposition of slavery by France. Only in America, which was in Lincoln’s phrase “half slave, half free” did the sides battle it out. While the war was ostensibly about saving the Union (in the north) and state’s rights (in the south), the underlying cause was always clear: the Union was threatened by the challenge of slavery, and the ONLY state’s right in question was slavery. In the end, the cause of abolition made clear the real issue, and the pro-slavery side was decisively defeated.
The Times’ 1619 project is a thinly-veiled attempt to engage the fraught nature of US race relations today by polemicizing history. Racial tensions are indeed high these days, but the Times’ effort provides too much heat and too little light. We won’t solve the racial issues of today by inventing a new truth about the past. Perhaps the NYT should do a 2019 Project on itself, where only eight percent of the staff (and five percent of the leadership) are African-American.
Perhaps you’re familiar with the Oscar Wilde quote that “a cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” A witticism, yes, but prices are an important part of expat life, just as they are for any retiree or those still working. How many friends and family do you know who are furiously running on the career hamster-wheel, trying to make enough to pay-off college loans, provide quality daycare, and save for retirement, while simultaneously maintaining a standard of life driven by society’s dictates?
Those costs show up in real terms as prices. So I decided to list some of the prices we face as expats today at lakeside, using an approximation of the dollar-peso exchange rate (actually 19.4 MXP per 1 USD, but we’ll round to 20 to simplify the math). Some of these costs are a little higher, based on our personal preferences: for example, I could get a haircut at a local barber for 100 pesos ($5 USD), but I choose to go to a salon. I won’t add tips, as that is a whole ‘nother story.
Here goes:
Weekly newspaper in English: 20 MXP, 1 USD.
Haircut at a salon, with wash and scalp massage: 200 MXP, 10 USD
Basket of fresh fruit/vegetables at market: 140 MXP, 7 USD
Sorry, we ate one avocado before I could snap the pic!
We don’t really buy clothes here, only because most Mexicans are so much smaller than us (we’re tall for Americans) that nothing fits: shoes are an impossibility! That will change, as I increasingly see younger Mexicans–especially muchachos–topping six feet in height. Likewise, electronic devices in general are more expensive here, but the Mexican peso has lost so much value (it was 14 MXP-1 USD when we bought our home) that such items are now competitively priced with the US.
Not the price of everything, mind you, but a useful survey and a brief explanation of how it is possible to retire–even early–when your costs in retirement are so low. Expat friends, feel free to add items you think are relevant in the comments, and others, ask if there is something specific you would like to know the price!
Have you ever run across the meme about “describing yourself in x words,” designed to make you choose among a limited number of possible descriptions and pick the most important? It’s supposed to be hard, and generally done to make you draw some hard conclusions about yourself and your priorities.
What makes it so hard is all of us have multiple affiliations: positive associations with groups, teams, tastes, beliefs, parties, species, regions, and countries. There are (of course) blood relations and marriage, faith and politics, sports teams and pets, languages and hobbies and interests. And they are good. Think about the pleasure of getting together with old friends, or family holiday gatherings (should they go well), being with fellow fans when victory is snatched from the jaws of defeat: does it get any better?
I have commented previously about the role college football has played in my life. I used to tell my daughters to spread my ashes in the north end zone of Notre Dame stadium (that was before they went to artificial turf, a story for another day). I’ll always fondly remember when my son-in-law Cody (like my daughter, a fervent Ohio State Buckeye) first met my fanatical Irish extended family. He deftly defuzed what could have been an explosive moment by saying “At least we can all agree that we hate Michigan.” Affiliations bringing people together!
By definition, such affiliations also divide us, and can become a source of real evil. The subject came up in the news recently when some political pundits were attacking a US Army Lieutenant Colonel for possible competing loyalties because he was Ukrainian-American and came to this country as a child. But set all those details aside; what I want to focus on is why the man was attacked in the first place. He was the target of attacks because it was politically expedient in the no-holds-barred political deathmatch that is Washington, DC, today!
Political mudslinging is nothing new, but it has reached epidemic proportions. I regularly receive social media reposts of the most vile sorts from both my progressive and conservative friends. I’m not talking about a reasoned explanation of why “Medicare for all” is the wave of the future; I’m talking graphic comics or pithy mis-quotes designed to fuel rage. I find these reposts very helpful, since FaceBook has a “hide all future posts from” function that helps me avoid these sources without losing my friends. In this way, my friends are providing a useful service: they send me things to show me what NOT to see ever again!
What surprises me is that most of the people engaging in this behavior simultaneously decry the level of discourse. They’ll claim ‘the other side started it’ (has that ever worked?) or ‘they’ll say something worse’ (preemptive bad behavior? a novel approach!). Sorry, folks, the level of hate out there is so high because many of us consciously choose to participate in it. If you second something offensive, or even fail to rein in the worst behavior by your friends, you’re complicit.
Affiliations work that way.
The Nationals just won the World Series. Somewhere, some Nats fans had a little too much to drink and the raucous, post-game celebration verged on a riot, but that didn’t happen, because some other Nats fans snuffed it out. When someone on my side of the political divide makes an outlandish claim in my presence, it’s my responsibility to correct them. It really is that simple.
It’s a good thing to profess a belief (political or religious), to really embrace it, to put its precepts into action. But when you run across opposition, you have to convince or proselytize or reason: not attack or condemn or cancel.
“OK, Boomer,” I hear some Gen Z out there thinking, “but we face REAL EVIL today. We can’t play by those outdated rules! We have to win by ANY MEANS NECESSARY!”
I admire the commitment to virtue, I really do. But today’s long list of challenges do not measure up to Slavery, Fascism, or Communism, to name just the 19th and 20th Century challenges. Those enormities were confronted by the truth, which is always more powerful than hyperbole, propaganda, or hate. So put down your phone, delete that tweet, and take a deep breath.
Affiliations work best when we accentuate the positive. Cheer on your team, promote your agenda, profess your faith in public. We are all the better for it.
Our former President did a pretty good job discussing this.
One stark challenge facing an expat is “how does one make new friends?” It is easy to forget how dependant we all are on our extended series of relationships: our friends. Leaving your friends behind–the people from your hometown, where you worked, where your children grew up–can be daunting enough, but is easily surpassed by the next step: where to find a new group of friends?
I had a lot of experience making friends growing up. In the seventeen years between my birth and taking the oath on the Plain at West Point, my family lived in eight different houses. Which may not seem that dramatic, but it also included one, six-year stretch in a single house! I attended three different high schools. I pretty much dreaded most moves, since as a card-carrying introvert each move required the dreaded “hello, I am the new guy here, please be my friend” routine. I finally mastered the process at my last high school, and it served me well in a brief military career.
Then Judy and I settled into Washington, DC, for the next thirty years. We did move around, gradually pulled ever closer, inside the beltway, like some comet being sucked into a black hole. Overstatement? DC is the place famous for Harry S Truman’s apocryphal quote: “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.” He didn’t say it, but it lives on because so many Washingtonians recognize its fundamental truth.
The answer is the same as it always was: to get out there and find people with similar interests. The challenge as an expat is exacerbated by the twin aspects of foreign languages and cultures. As Sam Cooke crooned:
Not really about friends, but you get the point!
“If I can meet ’em, I can get ’em, . . .” Luckily, an expat lakeside has numerous opportunities to meet people. This probably is the ‘secret sauce’ explaining why Lake Chapala is such a draw for North American expats. An expat here has all the ability to engage that friendly Mexican culture I wrote about earlier, but also can rely on a huge number of English-friendly groups and activities.
Our weekly English-language newspaper, the Guadalajara Reporter, lists fifteen different religious services each week, as well as some spiritual-but-not religious activities. We have at least three dramatic theaters, two cinemas, and several galleries. There are numerous classes for dance, crafts, languages, card games, and groups galore, ranging from a motorcycle club to Democrats Abroad. El Ojo del Lago, our monthly periodical, has two solid pages (small print) of non-profit organizations full of active individuals performing good deeds.
It’s digital: blow it up if you want to peruse the offerings!
Several expats acquaintances tell me that our area and San Miguel de Allende (SMA) are similar in that they both have well-supported expat infrastructure. Those who started in SMA but ended up lakeside say SMA is more stratified, more expensive, more cultured, and just busier. I’m sure the reverse set of expats (Lakeside>SMA) would call lakeside too blue-collar, too provincial, too small-towny. For beach-going expats, there is always PV, the Cabos, Cancun and Cozumel and Playa del Carmen. Merida is up and coming for a more authentic, but still tropical, experience. To each his own. Whatever your take on expat life, there are several locations in Mexico to try out, but not all have the same welcoming infrastructure!
We’re coming to the end of two weeks of substitute parenting. Grandparenting is still my favorite role, but this wasn’t a bad gig, either.
Henry doing the whole Big Brother thing at the bottom of the slide for Quinn
When I thought about the concept, the example which sprang to my mind was substitute teaching, which has so many challenges. Face it, the very concept of substitute teacher has yielded several movies which play the theme for laughs or tragedy. Yet substitute teaching has a few advantages, too: you’re not responsible for the ultimate success of the students, after all. You don’t have the built-in biases which develop seeing the same students behaving in predictable patterns day after day. There is a set term measured in hours or days, not weeks or months.
Henry and his Meemo, on the perilous swinging bridge
Substitute parenting has some of the same advantages. I don’t need to fix anything, just survive and ensure my grandkids do, too. Not that my Henry Danger and Quinn Rebel (real names, not aliases to protect the innocent) need any fixing, mind you. Oh, no, they were angels . . . of a sort. I believe Lucifer was one, too, once upon a time. For their part, I am sure they found this semi-parental version of “Gramps” far too stern. Several times they looked at me like “what, you can’t be serious” when I gave them some direct verbal order . . . they seemed unfamiliar with the concept. One time Henry even said the same out loud. That’s when the grandparent overcame the parent in me and I just laughed out loud.
Henry enjoyed following the marked path; he was less happy when Gramps decided to go cross country
Survival is a low bar, but necessarily so. Have you seen what passes for toys today? Henry got nerf guns for his birthday. They come with safety glasses, magazines (the kind for extra ammo, but the guns were revolvers, so what the heck?), a Captain America shield and a utility vest. “Great,” I thought, we’ll try a little live-action, first-person shooter game. Since I wanted Henry to “gear-up” I decided to wear the safety glasses, too. Good move! Within five minutes, I had an enormous fat lip and would have been short one eye if not for the glasses! My girls had nerf guns back in the day, but the nerf arrows flew so slow you could dodge them. Not so today: these nerf bullets were lightning fast, accurate to the sights on the barrel, and packed a punch (according to my swollen lip). Henry learned that if your head is bigger than your shield, you will get shot in the head. Valuable life lesson there.
We went to the Church picnic, where I confirmed that all Church picnics everywhere are similarly disorganized. Food was cash-only, but then you needed to buy tickets for the cash-only food. Except they were out of hot dogs. At the Church picnic. For kids. But we were able to let Quinn run free on the playground and practice her climbing skills (very important, as she is three and ready to escape her crib. No need to thank us, Mom & Dad!).
So if Mom & Dad don’t respond quickly enough, just find the toe holds on the side of the crib. . .
Mostly we just followed the routine set down by their parents, and when we deviated even a little, Quinn & Henry were quick to point it out. The grandkids were willing to accept some small changes, but vigorously protested others. Judy took to responding “oh, well” when appeals to rationality or authority failed to convince them. Quinn found that amusing enough to quote it back to us when she didn’t like the outcome. Did I mention her middle name is Rebel?
Like I said, a good gig, only a few melt-downs (the kids, not us), no emergency room visits, and now back to GRAND-parenting.
Back in the States briefly to do some grand-parenty things, which brings a heavy dose of perspective. Bottom Line Up Front, as we used to say: all the things you endure as parents, when time and patience are limited, become luxuries to enjoy as grandparents.
I watched grandson Henry at basketball practice the other: ten six-year olds with one coach, trying to learn the fundamentals. That coach must have the patience of Job. It brings to mind the old joke about monkeys and a football (Google it; I can’t repeat it here).
Henry (#5, gold) looking all basketball player-y
We didn’t have such “youth sports” back in the day: sports started mostly around 5th grade, when the boys acquired sufficient motor skills–but not enough self-discipline–to play. I grew up in Indiana, where basketball is and remains king. You played basketball, or got beat up and called words which aren’t socially acceptable . . . today.
I recall practice being good preparation for the Military Academy: endless exhausting drills with much screaming and questioning of one’s manhood (remember, we were ten year olds). After enough berating, we could enjoy a little scrimmage, although there still was the terror of the coach blowing his whistle and yelling “freeze,” which induced a Pavlovian mixture of fight-or-flee. We had to stop exactly where we were, so the coach could point out some crime against humanity one–or occasionally all–of us had committed. Then it was back to the joy of the game.
Henry and his friends had no such experience: it was all joy. They travelled with abandon, shot when they should have passed (and vice versa), and sometimes wandered off into private flights of fancy. One young lad took a break from the action literally, heading to an empty space on the court to do a little break-dancing.
I recall taking my daughters to basketball practice so many years ago: a change in type and kind, since girls were left out back in my day. I knew they didn’t need the drill school I experienced, but what exactly were they doing? Team sports are an important part of growing up, but how much pressure to exert on skills versus fun? I over emphasized the former, but they had plenty of the latter. They couldn’t possibly imagine how much of an evolution that was!
Organized sports, especially Indiana basketball, was all seriousness growing up. We remembered the scores, the good and bad plays, the missed shots. In my case, especially the missed shots. I had what you would call substandard athletic skills. Okay, I had none. To borrow the Rudy quote, even in college I was ‘five feet nuthin’, one hundred and nuthin’, with barely a speck of athletic ability.’
I became adept at using my skinny lil’ bod to block out, because there was no other way I would ever get a rebound. I learned that if you ran fast enough, you would get a fast break leading to an uncontested lay-up, which I shot successfully around 50% of the time. Which was an improvement from any other shot I attempted, including free throws.
Basketball games were a mix of anticipation, adrenaline and pure fear at how I might screw things up this time, but still in some ways I enjoyed them. And it was a sport I was able to really enjoy when I finally grew into an adult body sometime in my twenties.
Was that high pressure approach wrong? Is today’s Let it Be better? I dunno. If you survive missing a tying free throw with a second on the clock in a crowded auditorium, life’s other strained circumstances are a little less apocalyptic. Still, screaming has never been an appropriate form of leadership (drill sergeants excepted), so why would it be for kids?
Most expats at lakeside quickly adopt the refrain that life here is wonderful. Soon after, they start to lament all the newcomers and changes ruining paradise. I’m a little guilty, too, though I resist falling into the trap mightily.
You knew this was coming . . . RIP, Ziggy Stardust.
I am less of a “close the door behind you, and please, everyone go away” expat and more of a “change is inevitable” one. One hopes for the best and prepares for the worst, as they say.
What’s new in the few years we’ve been expats? Plenty, just in a physical sense. Due to the growing demand of (relatively) wealthy expats with need of medical services, we now have:
A new hospital, and
a new cardiac clnic, rising behind the old facade of a car wash (in yellow)
a senior living facility, under construction. Think they’re marketing to gringos?
Restaurants come and go (as in either move or close) all the time. Old timers blamed the boom and bust cycle of the off-season, when part-time expats flock home. We full-timers enjoyed the quiet time and the ability to drop in for dinner without a reservation, but it was hard on the business owners. Seems like there is no off-season any more, just “way crowded” and “less crowded” periods. Which should have helped the restaurants, but now land owners have started hiking rents by as much as 50% a year! So a restaurant which was marginally profitable a year ago might be priced right out of its location.
Retail locations continue to grow along the carretera (main street). Sometimes we have a case of in-fill, where a small lot blossoms into a retail complex, but otherwise the development grows like a vine alongside the road between Ajijic and its nearest neighbor, San Juan Cosalá.
Once an empty corner in town, soon to be a shopping center
Mixed use shops and apartments (where are the apartment windows?) next to Walmart
West of town, this farm field is about to become a materials yard.
There is a constant need for more and different housing, both for the torrent of expats discovering lakeside and the Tapatios who want nice weekend retreats.
This was an empty field when we bought our home. Now its a muy moderno subdivision.
Anecdotally, I’ve heard prices have gone up so much that the rental market is beyond the reach of locals, and many long-time residents have given up resisting the prospective fortune they own by selling and moving out. It is the challenge of living where so many other people want to live, even if in doing so, they change the character of what they sought. It’s the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of living in paradise.
As Don Henley sang long ago, “you call some place paradise, kiss it goodbye.”
The development is for the good. In the past, our hospital (really more of a clinic) immediately sent emergency cases via ambulance to Guadalajara, but now they can be treated here. Eventually, the demand for housing will result in a demand for better services (like roads, trash collection, etc) although the lag will be considerable.
Even in the two and a half years we’ve been here, the physical scene has changed considerably, although I think the essential character of the place remains the same. The local pastor told me Ajijic is unique, in that there are three different villages: the locals whose families have always lived here, the Tapatios who vacation here on weekends and holidays, and the expats, both temporal and permanente. The mix remains about the same, and the three “thirds” still get along.
Paradise is a state of mind, after all. Oh, and the first rule of Paradise is (wait for it) like Fight Club: never talk about Paradise!
One thing that strikes tourists and expats alike is just how friendly the Mexican people are. That friendliness stretches from the mundane to the extreme. People greet each other throughout the day, with a “buen dia/tarde/noche” as appropriate. This may be becoming a rarity in the largest cities, where urban dwellers adopt the instinctive distrust of strangers the world over, but in small and mid-size towns, you talk to strangers. This is superficial, it’s true, but it evinces a culture’s approach to others.
Absolutely nothing to do with friendliness, but we had globos overhead yesterday!
Many visitors of all types have stories of a car breaking down somewhere in Mexico and the resulting group effort to fix the flat or find the part, which involves lives disrupted, friends marshaled, cousins called in, food shared, and eventual success with the absolute refusal to accept any payment for services rendered, time spent, or disruption caused.
Just a few weeks ago, we were looking for a specific grocery store in a giant plaza in Guadalajara, following the well-placed signs in the parking lot, which led us to the bottom of a parking garage and . . . no grocery store. But we did see the ubiquitous “car -washers,” Mexican men with rags and buckets that cheerfully offer to wash your vehicle while you’re shopping. We flagged them down and asked for directions, which they rattled off far faster than we could comprehend. We thanked them, then started to drive off, when we realized the man giving us directions had begun to sprint up the garage ramp, where he stopped and waved us on. We followed as he deftly dodged between lanes and pointed us around corners until we were in sight of the grocery, then he doubled back before we could even give him a final “gracias!”
Friendliness does have its downside. Despite that last paragraph, one generally does not ask locals for directions. Why? Because they are too friendly to say they don’t know where something is, so they give you directions to something like what you want, or to somewhere where other people are. In a similar vein, most Mexicans hate to say “no” as it feels impolite, so they often mean “no” but say “yes.” So you may ask if they can make something, they tell you yes, but then never get around to completing the deal, because they don’t really make such a thing. On the flip side, if you’re in a restaurant here, and happen to order something they’re out of, or that’s not on the menu, your waiter might still say yes. If you watch carefully, you will see someone from the cook staff sneaking out to the store down the street to buy the ingredients!
Most often, the friendliness of the Mexican people is abundant. Expat friends of ours tell us that they visit our local club, which sometimes hosts huge weddings for Tapatios (from Guadalajara). Many times our friends get invited to join in the fiesta. Not wedding crashing, mind you, just hanging out nearby, and of course, you must fiesta!
Mexico’s legendary friendliness is not just based on anecdotal evidence, although there is plenty of that. Internations, a global expat community, conducts an annual survey among expats, and Mexico perennially ranks first for the ease of making friends with locals and friendliness in general. And by friendliness, I don’t mean that false–almost obsequious–friendliness one encounters at an all-inclusive resort. There, employees are coached to bend over backwards for any request, and to do so with a smile. Out in real Mexico, the friendliness is more akin to treating others as you would like to be treated, and welcoming a visitor like family. It is not as if there isn’t the occasional rude waiter or smiling con artist, but that such people stand out most for not being common.
College football is back, which has fans everywhere saying hello to another season. So why am I saying goodbye?
If you watch any football game this year, you might notice something different about the uniforms: college teams have a patch celebrating 150 years of college football, while the NFL sports patches memorializing 100 years of the professional sport.
That’s not a typo: the amateur game preceded the pro one. In fact, college football was the second most popular sport in America in the 1920s (behind the national pastime, baseball, and just barely above boxing). Pro football at the time was a novelty, a sport with young men who should be working full time but instead continued to play football while holding down odd jobs. Pro football didn’t become the popular juggernaut it is today until well into the 1960s: the first four Super Bowls weren’t even officially called that!
The college game’s popularity transcended its elite beginnings as a sport mainly played by the well-known Eastern universities. How? Partly because even if the vast majority of people did not go to college, every family was proud of some relative who did, and adopted a university as a result. Additionally, colleges presented the sport as a manly ideal, where otherwise regular students demonstrated their masculine qualities on the “field of strife.” This was appealing because it presented the students as selfless teammates contrasted with the mercenary professional players. Finally, the sport prospered on regional and ethnic rivalries, so anybody could join in by taking sides and rooting for the (good) local squad and against the (evil) hated rival.
To maintain the distinction between the professional and amateur versions of the game (and to protect the latter’s popularity) the colleges developed rules for eligibility. The players had to be students, but could not have tuition paid by the school: the very idea of an athletic scholarship was forbidden as a contradiction in terms. Rather, schools were allowed to arrange work-study and other reimbursement programs to pay for the athlete’s tuition. However, players caught moonlighting for local professional/semi-professional teams could be disqualified, as it muddied the distinction between the sports.
Predictably, this approach led to elaborate cheating scandals: everything from make-work “jobs” at the university to state schools putting the entire team on the state payroll for essentially no work. This led the colleges to flip the paradigm, prohibiting any outside payment, but permitting the concept of athletic scholarships and promoting the notion of student-athletes. Once on scholarship, “student-athletes” quickly learned how to avoid taking classes, which led to more rules on minimum GPAs, semester loads, and graduation criteria.
There was always some level of rules-avoidance (nay, cheating), but the system held together in the main. College football remained a very unique and distinct sports phenomenon. But then a ton of money got involved. Where did the money come from? Ticket sales (80,000 fans x $200 tickets x 7 home games = $56 million a year), television rights, and merchandising. Once upon a time, the colleges regulated how many games were televised and how often teams were on “national” television, with an eye to preventing an unfair advantage in publicity. With the advent of 24 hour programming, ESPN and other networks made offers the schools couldn’t refuse, sending hundreds of millions of dollars to the institutions and making virtually every game available to fans on television.
Where did all the money go? College football became big business. Very big business. How big? The highest paid state employee in 31 states is the head football coach at one of the state universities (in eight more it’s the basketball coach!). Athletic departments expanded staff, facilities and amenities in a continuing competition to have the best. Currently, the reigning NCAA Champion Clemson Tigers have the best football-only facility (cost: $55 million dollars), which includes multiple pools, a nap room, mini-golf, and video games for the players.
Overall football scholarships actually declined from 105 (1973) down to 85 today due to the necessities of Title IX compliance, but rosters remained around 125 players: enough players to fill out 6 complete squads. The players went from seasonal performers to a year-round regimen: summer school to keep eligible along with unofficial summer work-outs (sometimes supervised by coaches), specialty clinics and expert training, then Fall camps, the regular season, finally post-season bowls and play-offs, then Spring football and more class work before starting the cycle again.
Funny if it wasn’t so sad!
The players got tuition, and eventually a stipend, and some freebies, but no pay; they were instead given the opportunity for a quality education. But just the opportunity. Given the demanding athletic schedule I outlined, serious academics were a luxury. Some schools shepherded student athletes into “gut” programs which kept them eligible but didn’t result in an education or a useful degree. Every school could trot out a star player who was also an Eagle Scout with a 4.0 GPA in Electrical Engineering: with 125 football players, you’re likely to have at least one. Meanwhile, many other players were only graduating in name, and others proved to be illiterate despite their degrees!
Meanwhile, the universities were reaping huge payouts . . . sort of. While some of the math (like the ticket example above) is pretty simple, there is no universal standard for reporting revenues and costs. Schools build ever-larger stadiums and keep the costs off the athletic department books or add in classrooms as a cover. Private schools can remain mostly mum. Even state schools can do things like reporting every athlete as “costing” a full scholarship at full tuition (sometimes out of state) when in fact, they “cost” nothing. Other schools move most of the athletic department into a privately-held association, avoiding both financial scrutiny and skirting the transparency requirements of any state “sunshine laws.” Large, successful programs make a lot of money, while smaller and less successful ones play along and hope for a windfall season.
Nicolae Ceausecu Memorial Stadium in South Bend . . . see the classrooms? Lotsa classrooms!
The players have taken the NCAA and the universities to court for the right to make money off the merchandise bearing their name and likeness or to just be compensated as employees. The results are mixed, but the cases and appeals are heading in the direction of allowing pay and benefits. The NCAA has preemptively increased direct stipends and allowable benefits in an attempt to avoid the inevitable. But the path forward is clear: since the academic institutions have treated college football (oh, and basketball, too) as a business, eventually the courts will insist student-athletes get their share.
So what? Back in the day, players walked off the field and got “golden handshakes” when wealthy alumni shook hands and palmed a fifty or a hundred over to star players. But the advent of a full pay-for-play era will tear up the existing system. It is a change in type, not in extent.
First off, some schools have ruled out paying players. My Notre Dame, Northwestern, Stanford, Duke, Wake Forest, Vanderbilt, the Service Academies, Boston College and the “Big 10″conference so hold, so they say they will not compete in an association (the NCAA) which does. In the era of paying players, small schools who don’t make much money may want to pay, but will probably have to drop out of the arms race (remember, their costs just went up). But this won’t stop the biggest schools and football factories: they will revel in the newfound freedom to emphasize the sports. What they don’t understand is the amateur nature of college football–even if it is a charade at times–is essential to its log term success.
The current useful fiction retains the patina of “student-athlete” from the past, so there are rules (even if fudged). Once the student athletes are employee-athletes, the university can’t make arbitrary rules about school attendance a condition of their football (work) performance. As one athlete already noted,
He did graduate, after all.
For the pay-as-you-go teams, they won’t immediately drop all pretense of student-athletes. They will probably start with limits on how much athletes get paid. But the amounts of money involved are large, and therefor largely corrupting. And if it’s a business, business rules (e.g., labor rights, antitrust laws) apply. Eventually, they must allow for the possibility of non-student athletes, but perhaps limit the numbers. Schools will avoid some limits by having teams associated with the university (The Gators associated with the University of Florida?). How will they limit how much a school can offer a high school recruit? How about an overall salary cap? Players will be free agents, changing teams/schools for better pay or more playing time: you can see the beginnings of that in today’s transfer portal.
College football will still be popular, and it will still make money. It will avoid the fake-student scandals of the past, although it will doubtlessly invoke new ones (look at college basketball, which skips the pretense of student athletes but must deal with many other problematic behaviors). Instead, college football will be what some already charge it is: simply a minor league for the NFL, only one with some odd attachment to places called “institutions of higher learning.” That will be a loss for the fans, the students, and the sport.
