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Building Boom: New construction is underway at the southern tip of Baja California Sur, the newest hot spot for establishing second (or third) homes. (Photograph by Joao Canziani) |
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They arrive by land, air and sea, with visions of the good life dancing in their heads. At first, their numbers are so small as to be barely noticeable. But within a few years they may end up taking over your street, your colonia, practically your entire town. They bring their curious native customs with them—skinny Frappuccinos, "personal watercraft," wireless Internet access—and replant them in foreign soil. Relentlessly, they remake the landscape in their own image, transforming derelict colonial-era manses into stunning million-dollar homes, and majestic swaths of lonely seaside acreage into $300-per-round golf courses. And though many of them make a diligent effort to learn the local tongue, befriend the natives and blend into their adopted country, others stubbornly resist assimilation: hanging out in their gated compounds with other English-speaking exiles, eschewing the local coffee shops and taco shacks in favor of Starbucks and Burger King, plowing their SUVs like woozy battleships through the narrow streets of picturesque 17th century towns.
Even before last year's massive demonstrations in downtown L.A., in which hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to protest what they regard as draconian immigration policies, U.S. politicians, the media and the public have fixated on the flow of human traffic across the border. But far less attention has been paid to a parallel phenomenon with equally profound implications: the growing hordes of U.S. residents who are roosting throughout Mexico and, to a lesser degree, Central and South America.
Today, an estimated 500,000 to 1 million Americans—or, as Mexicans refer to them, norteamericanos—along with roughly half that many Canadians make their homes in Mexico, either as permanent residents or part-timers. Though many of the newcomers are semi- or fully retired, others hold FM2 and FM3 visas that permit them to work in their new country. And though the Mexican Constitution places certain restrictions on them, such as prohibiting involvement in Mexican politics, norteamericanos generally enjoy open, privileged lives compared with the millions of Mexican illegals skulking in the shadows of the underground U.S. economy.
In coming decades, these middle-class transplants and rat-race dropouts are expected to surge to perhaps 10 times their current number, as home equity-rich baby boomers from places such as San Diego and Tucson go searching for second (or third) homes in the expatriate hot spots of Ensenada-Playas de Rosarito, San Miguel de Allende, Puerto Vallarta, Merida, Mazatlán, Oaxaca, the Lake Chapala region outside Guadalajara and at the southern end of Baja California Sur.
If the northern Baja corridor of Tijuana-Ensenada-Playas de Rosarito was the Normandy beachhead of the U.S. invasion, then Baja California Sur is the real estate equivalent of the Battle of the Bulge. It's ground zero of a symbolic showdown pitting advocates of culturally and ecologically sensitive, sustainable growth against U.S. transplants and aggressive developers who are bent on the Florida-zation of one of the planet's truly remarkable corners. Americans who want coastal Mexico to become a Southern California satellite, packed with strip-mall mini-marts, glib housing projects and yacht-crammed marinas, are facing off with Americans who understand that—despite their wealth and the advantages that come with holding a U.S. passport—they still are guests of another country with its own rich culture, where few qualities are more highly prized than good manners and humility.
Only about two hours by air from LAX, the southern tip of Baja Sur already is turning into a surrogate Orange County or Malibu. Plenty of boldfaced names have vacationed there: Tobey Maguire, Jessica Simpson, Lance Armstrong, Bill Gates. John Travolta reportedly celebrated his 50th birthday at the ultra-exclusive One&Only Palmilla resort.
Plans call for the area—which promotes itself as an "elite" and "high-end" destination—to swell by hundreds of thousands of people in coming years. Hotels and private homes are rising fast on stunning, once-desolate beaches, even while much of Baja Sur remains short of potable water and electrical hookups. Workers are pouring in from other parts of Mexico, many of them now living in shacks, but hoping eventually to ascend to the lower middle class, as some laborers in Cancún and other tourist-hungry parts of Mexico have done.
The question about all of this rapid development and purported upward mobility is, of course: At what cost? And who will pay it? Can Mexicans and Americans work together in Baja California Sur to create a culturally vibrant community based on mutual respect that boosts both groups' overall quality of life? Or is Baja California Sur merely the next Cancún or Baja Norte waiting to happen, the next missed opportunity for creating something more imaginative than another expat Sun City-by-the-Sea?
From the dusty front stoop of the Cabo San Lucas fish market she runs with her husband, Juana Cota can see the mushrooming of the American dream, south-of-the-border style.
Cota's small store sits on Avenue Leona Vicario, one of the main commercial drags traversing the sprawling shantytowns that encircle this booming leisure world for U.S. vacationers, businessmen and retirees. Far in the distance, you can see the dramatic rock formations that give the area its photogenic fame, as well as the proliferating luxury hotels and condo developments that cater to foreign sun-seekers. Cota inhabits a very different world, where the houses are slapped together out of scraps of wood, cardboard, concrete bits and whatever else is on hand, and most roads are pitted, unpaved dirt. One recent afternoon, a woman still wearing her white waitress tunic trudged past a mountainous open-air dump near Cota's store on her way home from work.
You might suppose that such striking social inequalities would breed resentment toward wealthy American interlopers. But for many Mexicans here, the opposite appears to be true. Though their jobs pay very little by U.S. standards—typically between $137 and $186 a month, plus health benefits—restaurant waiters, hotel workers and private housemaids working in Cabo San Lucas now are able to buy or upgrade homes in the working-class neighborhoods of Lomas del Sol, Caribe and Palmas. (According to Mexico's labor department, the minimum wage in Baja California Sur is about $4.57 per day, and the average for hotel and restaurant workers in Cabo San Lucas and San José del Cabo is $6.22 per day.) Many of her family members have been employed in such work, and Cota herself previously worked as a maid for a U.S. couple.
Though many people from Mexico's impoverished rural areas risk their lives crossing into the United States in search of work, Baja California Sur actually attracts laborers from other Mexican states such as Sinaloa, Sonora and Jalisco. They're lured by wage scales that are typically double or triple what they left behind. "God willing that a lot of tourism will come," Cota says. "Without North Americans, we wouldn't eat."
Whatever your views on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the North American Free Trade Agreement or the movie "A Day Without a Mexican," there's no denying the growing interdependency between the U.S. and its southern neighbor. In raffish border zones and hedonistic beach resorts, day-tripping tourists and college kids on spring break bring not only noise, trash and sometimes obnoxious behavior, but also desperately needed jobs for Mexicans. In more genteel enclaves, such as Puerto Vallarta, Cuernavaca and the exquisite provincial cities of Oaxaca and San Miguel de Allende, Americans have sent housing prices soaring, but also have supported many local charitable and cultural projects, including schools and health clinics.
Mexicans welcome the higher living standards and abundant conveniences (smoother roads, safer hospitals) that Americans have brought with them. In places such as the southern tip of Baja California Sur, practically everyone—from car rental agents and charter fishing boat operators to strolling musicians and massage therapists—depends on Yankee dollars to survive.
"What foreigners bring to the country is to lift the quality of life. They invent, they create sources of work," says 52-year-old Manuel Sanchez Icaza, who owns Mexico Lindo, a store that sells jewelry, watches and art at an American-style shopping mall that faces the marina in Cabo San Lucas. He reckons that "99% of our market is North Americans."
But norteamericanos leave a big footprint in less appealing ways. In "God and Mr. Gomez," Jack Smith's 1974 book about the rewards and trials of building a weekend home in Mexico, the late Times columnist summarized the demographic and cultural tsunami already sweeping across Baja. "It was obvious," Smith wrote, "that Baja had been discovered by a new wave of Americans; not the hardy lovers of the wilderness, but the affluent ones who wanted to get away, though not too far, and in comfort. The dam was busted; the boom was on."
Smith was writing about the northern cap of the nearly 800-mile-long Baja peninsula, near Ensenada, where he and his wife built their home. Today, the boom that Smith observed more than 30 years ago is still going strong, and the $10,000 that he and his wife originally budgeted for their getaway hacienda might not cover the cost of a gated community's guard shack. The average price of a new condo in Baja Norte is $300,000. Donald Trump recently broke ground on a luxury development, the Trump Ocean Resort Baja, north of Rosarito, that will include upscale restaurants, a spa and more than 500 condos costing (for the project's first phase) from $279,000 to $3 million apiece. Though ripple effects from the U.S. mortgage-lending crisis are likely to wreak havoc on the Baja Norte vacation home market, this is likely to be a temporary blip in the continuum of frenzied development.
Some partisans of the area extol the gentler, more authentically Mexican character of certain slices of Baja Norte, particularly the Valle de Guadalupe wine-growing region that extends from Ensenada north toward Tecate. But to all intents and purposes, Baja Norte is becoming an extension of the San Diego-Tijuana megalopolis, where many expats go for their healthcare, banking and other services.
Then there's Baja California Sur.
A torrid, rocky outcrop more island than peninsula, studded with cactus taller than an NBA forward, Baja Sur is still otherworldly and magnificently untamed in many spots. Though other parts of Baja Sur are rapidly opening up to development, the most aggressive entrepreneurship is occurring at the southern extremities, between the state capital of La Paz and the tourist-friendly twin cities of Cabo San Lucas and San José del Cabo. Separated by about 20 miles, these cities are merging into a single metro area known as Los Cabos, with a current estimated population of 180,000.
Even before last year's massive demonstrations in downtown L.A., in which hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to protest what they regard as draconian immigration policies, U.S. politicians, the media and the public have fixated on the flow of human traffic across the border. But far less attention has been paid to a parallel phenomenon with equally profound implications: the growing hordes of U.S. residents who are roosting throughout Mexico and, to a lesser degree, Central and South America.
Today, an estimated 500,000 to 1 million Americans—or, as Mexicans refer to them, norteamericanos—along with roughly half that many Canadians make their homes in Mexico, either as permanent residents or part-timers. Though many of the newcomers are semi- or fully retired, others hold FM2 and FM3 visas that permit them to work in their new country. And though the Mexican Constitution places certain restrictions on them, such as prohibiting involvement in Mexican politics, norteamericanos generally enjoy open, privileged lives compared with the millions of Mexican illegals skulking in the shadows of the underground U.S. economy.
In coming decades, these middle-class transplants and rat-race dropouts are expected to surge to perhaps 10 times their current number, as home equity-rich baby boomers from places such as San Diego and Tucson go searching for second (or third) homes in the expatriate hot spots of Ensenada-Playas de Rosarito, San Miguel de Allende, Puerto Vallarta, Merida, Mazatlán, Oaxaca, the Lake Chapala region outside Guadalajara and at the southern end of Baja California Sur.
If the northern Baja corridor of Tijuana-Ensenada-Playas de Rosarito was the Normandy beachhead of the U.S. invasion, then Baja California Sur is the real estate equivalent of the Battle of the Bulge. It's ground zero of a symbolic showdown pitting advocates of culturally and ecologically sensitive, sustainable growth against U.S. transplants and aggressive developers who are bent on the Florida-zation of one of the planet's truly remarkable corners. Americans who want coastal Mexico to become a Southern California satellite, packed with strip-mall mini-marts, glib housing projects and yacht-crammed marinas, are facing off with Americans who understand that—despite their wealth and the advantages that come with holding a U.S. passport—they still are guests of another country with its own rich culture, where few qualities are more highly prized than good manners and humility.
Only about two hours by air from LAX, the southern tip of Baja Sur already is turning into a surrogate Orange County or Malibu. Plenty of boldfaced names have vacationed there: Tobey Maguire, Jessica Simpson, Lance Armstrong, Bill Gates. John Travolta reportedly celebrated his 50th birthday at the ultra-exclusive One&Only Palmilla resort.
Plans call for the area—which promotes itself as an "elite" and "high-end" destination—to swell by hundreds of thousands of people in coming years. Hotels and private homes are rising fast on stunning, once-desolate beaches, even while much of Baja Sur remains short of potable water and electrical hookups. Workers are pouring in from other parts of Mexico, many of them now living in shacks, but hoping eventually to ascend to the lower middle class, as some laborers in Cancún and other tourist-hungry parts of Mexico have done.
The question about all of this rapid development and purported upward mobility is, of course: At what cost? And who will pay it? Can Mexicans and Americans work together in Baja California Sur to create a culturally vibrant community based on mutual respect that boosts both groups' overall quality of life? Or is Baja California Sur merely the next Cancún or Baja Norte waiting to happen, the next missed opportunity for creating something more imaginative than another expat Sun City-by-the-Sea?
From the dusty front stoop of the Cabo San Lucas fish market she runs with her husband, Juana Cota can see the mushrooming of the American dream, south-of-the-border style.
Cota's small store sits on Avenue Leona Vicario, one of the main commercial drags traversing the sprawling shantytowns that encircle this booming leisure world for U.S. vacationers, businessmen and retirees. Far in the distance, you can see the dramatic rock formations that give the area its photogenic fame, as well as the proliferating luxury hotels and condo developments that cater to foreign sun-seekers. Cota inhabits a very different world, where the houses are slapped together out of scraps of wood, cardboard, concrete bits and whatever else is on hand, and most roads are pitted, unpaved dirt. One recent afternoon, a woman still wearing her white waitress tunic trudged past a mountainous open-air dump near Cota's store on her way home from work.
You might suppose that such striking social inequalities would breed resentment toward wealthy American interlopers. But for many Mexicans here, the opposite appears to be true. Though their jobs pay very little by U.S. standards—typically between $137 and $186 a month, plus health benefits—restaurant waiters, hotel workers and private housemaids working in Cabo San Lucas now are able to buy or upgrade homes in the working-class neighborhoods of Lomas del Sol, Caribe and Palmas. (According to Mexico's labor department, the minimum wage in Baja California Sur is about $4.57 per day, and the average for hotel and restaurant workers in Cabo San Lucas and San José del Cabo is $6.22 per day.) Many of her family members have been employed in such work, and Cota herself previously worked as a maid for a U.S. couple.
Though many people from Mexico's impoverished rural areas risk their lives crossing into the United States in search of work, Baja California Sur actually attracts laborers from other Mexican states such as Sinaloa, Sonora and Jalisco. They're lured by wage scales that are typically double or triple what they left behind. "God willing that a lot of tourism will come," Cota says. "Without North Americans, we wouldn't eat."
Whatever your views on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the North American Free Trade Agreement or the movie "A Day Without a Mexican," there's no denying the growing interdependency between the U.S. and its southern neighbor. In raffish border zones and hedonistic beach resorts, day-tripping tourists and college kids on spring break bring not only noise, trash and sometimes obnoxious behavior, but also desperately needed jobs for Mexicans. In more genteel enclaves, such as Puerto Vallarta, Cuernavaca and the exquisite provincial cities of Oaxaca and San Miguel de Allende, Americans have sent housing prices soaring, but also have supported many local charitable and cultural projects, including schools and health clinics.
Mexicans welcome the higher living standards and abundant conveniences (smoother roads, safer hospitals) that Americans have brought with them. In places such as the southern tip of Baja California Sur, practically everyone—from car rental agents and charter fishing boat operators to strolling musicians and massage therapists—depends on Yankee dollars to survive.
"What foreigners bring to the country is to lift the quality of life. They invent, they create sources of work," says 52-year-old Manuel Sanchez Icaza, who owns Mexico Lindo, a store that sells jewelry, watches and art at an American-style shopping mall that faces the marina in Cabo San Lucas. He reckons that "99% of our market is North Americans."
But norteamericanos leave a big footprint in less appealing ways. In "God and Mr. Gomez," Jack Smith's 1974 book about the rewards and trials of building a weekend home in Mexico, the late Times columnist summarized the demographic and cultural tsunami already sweeping across Baja. "It was obvious," Smith wrote, "that Baja had been discovered by a new wave of Americans; not the hardy lovers of the wilderness, but the affluent ones who wanted to get away, though not too far, and in comfort. The dam was busted; the boom was on."
Smith was writing about the northern cap of the nearly 800-mile-long Baja peninsula, near Ensenada, where he and his wife built their home. Today, the boom that Smith observed more than 30 years ago is still going strong, and the $10,000 that he and his wife originally budgeted for their getaway hacienda might not cover the cost of a gated community's guard shack. The average price of a new condo in Baja Norte is $300,000. Donald Trump recently broke ground on a luxury development, the Trump Ocean Resort Baja, north of Rosarito, that will include upscale restaurants, a spa and more than 500 condos costing (for the project's first phase) from $279,000 to $3 million apiece. Though ripple effects from the U.S. mortgage-lending crisis are likely to wreak havoc on the Baja Norte vacation home market, this is likely to be a temporary blip in the continuum of frenzied development.
Some partisans of the area extol the gentler, more authentically Mexican character of certain slices of Baja Norte, particularly the Valle de Guadalupe wine-growing region that extends from Ensenada north toward Tecate. But to all intents and purposes, Baja Norte is becoming an extension of the San Diego-Tijuana megalopolis, where many expats go for their healthcare, banking and other services.
Then there's Baja California Sur.
A torrid, rocky outcrop more island than peninsula, studded with cactus taller than an NBA forward, Baja Sur is still otherworldly and magnificently untamed in many spots. Though other parts of Baja Sur are rapidly opening up to development, the most aggressive entrepreneurship is occurring at the southern extremities, between the state capital of La Paz and the tourist-friendly twin cities of Cabo San Lucas and San José del Cabo. Separated by about 20 miles, these cities are merging into a single metro area known as Los Cabos, with a current estimated population of 180,000.
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