We are expatriates in Mexico and have been for more than seven years. It has been both wonderful and horrible beyond imagining. We ended up here at the southern frontier for a few reasons: health, a slow life on a higher level than our income would allow in the States and because it reminded me of the Cuban area of Tampa where I grew up.

It was a great decision. It was a great mistake. One never knows which unless they did both things. It has been the best of times; it has been the worst of times. Dickens never even went to Mexico to write that line.

I might call this a recurring theme to this "sinister cabal". I have written on Manuel Alvarez Bravo, the great Mexican photographer, Edward Weston & Tina Modotti's love affair with each other and with Mexico, Alan Riding's book, Distant Neighbors and Bernal Diaz del Catillo's story of the Conquest.

My new photoblog
Expatriate Diaries replaces a more ambitious previous one.
It included a guide for foreigners in Mexico that I thought of turning into a book. However, Ken Luboff did something similar in Live Well in Mexico: "How to Relocate, Retire, and Increase Your Standard of Living". Ken Luboff's book has its own site: Live Well in Mexico.

How does his book stand in the pantheon of gudes and self-help works? Sometimes good and complete but too often weak and limited. Unless your situation is much like his; looking for Americanized communities in the colonial heart of Mexico, the book falls short of fulfilling its promise although there is a great deal of information in it about many of the puzzling parts of Mexican expatriate life.

We must start with the pictures since I, a photographer, always look at the pictures. They are black and white in a country and culture of color, amateurish and lacking in the most important thing they would bring to this book — information. OK. He is not a photographer but around San Miguel Allende there is little excuse for visually ignoring Mexico.

For a quick tour of some interesting places not in his guide; try my albums at Architecture and
Tropical Flowers.

Next is a reason the book doesn't relate to a lot of people. It is about the central, urban heart of Mexico which is far different from other parts of the country. It centers on San Miguel de Allende and Guanajuato along with Guadalajara and Lake Atitlan. As much as I would like to see San Miguel it is too high for my heart condition and so remains a mythical place where Kerouac's pal, Neal Cassady died, run over by a train. These places and every location he writes of are those with huge English-speaking populations. Here in Quintana Roo there are already places with big foreign communities: Cancun, Playa del Carmen, Tulum, etc.