The Gringas of San Miguel de Allende : They Came, They Saw, They Set Up Croning Ceremonies--How A Community of Women Grew and Flourishes in the Land of Machismo.

To Mexicans, San Miguel de Allende is the birthplace of independence; although Father Miguel Hidalgo issued the grito , or shout for independence, in 1810 from neighboring Dolores Hidalgo, the annual re-enactment takes place in San Miguel’s main plaza.

A new grito is heard in San Miguel these days, not shouted, but murmured. Quietly, in meetings at the Unity Church, in the waters of Escondido hot springs, over cups of espresso at El Buen Cafe, wherever the expatriates hang out. San Miguel is not as spacey as Sedona or as precious as Taos--there aren’t graphic ads proclaiming “Death begins in the colon!” in the local weekly--but here, in the heart of the country that invented machismo, you can now find hypno-therapy, lymphatic cleansing massages, ozone treatment, book clubs, goddess workshops, a local channeler, art classes, dressage classes, tai chi, yoga, crone ceremonies under the full moon and nearly daily AA and CoDA meetings. To regular visitors, the change is apparent: male to female, hedonism to introspection, bars to coffee houses. All this in a town that just a few years ago had a reputation as a hard-drinking, ass-kicking hangout, a blend of cowboy and Colonial where even a married woman would not be safe from unwanted attention if her husband left her side.

Two hundred and fifty kilometers north of Mexico City and a mile high in the heart of the Bajio, the agricultural heart of Mexico, San Miguel de Allende is a window on a Mexico of centuries past, when New World silver fueled the world’s economy and the Inquisitor held court. For nearly 70 years, it’s been a National Monument, a status that has kept the town of 49,000 free of neon, traffic lights and fast food. A long day’s drive from Texas, it has for several decades been a favorite destination for Americans: Artists discovered it in the ‘30s and ‘40s, followed in the ‘50s by ex-servicemen stretching out GI Bill benefits. In the ‘60s and ‘70s came hippies, backpackers and retirees. During the winter and summer, the transient population swelled with Canadian snowbirds, Spanish students and fledgling artists, drawn by the Instituto Allende, one of Mexico’s best art schools.

Then in the ‘80s, word spread through travel articles, and the gringas began to arrive. Unlike their male peers, many stayed. And they’re still coming. Over some gender-based network, the word has gone out: If you’re a single woman in search of deeper meaning, San Miguel is the place to live. You can work on yourself in Colonial style, complete with cable TV, maid service, weekly massages and a sense of safety difficult to imagine back in El Norte.

Some who come are familiar with Mexico and know of San Miguel from past visits; others have never been south of the border. They have drastically skewed the gender balance among the 5,000 or so expatriates--four single women to every unmarried man, says guidebook publisher Joanie Barcal. They are twentysomethings to geriatrics, although most are in the 30-to-50 range. They are a tossed salad of political types, hard-core feminists and free-spirited space cadets. They come to retire, to set up a business, to study art or Spanish, to write, to escape an abusive relationship, to heal from a painful divorce, to join a lover, to pursue a cowgirl dream.

Not many come to hang out and drift through the two-hour siestas and cheap margaritas at La Fragua bar--that can be done anywhere. San Miguel is for finding out who you are or who you can be: an artist, a publisher, a designer, a masseuse, a spiritual teacher, a writer, a therapist, a champion horse rider. And unlike Manhattan or L.A. or Houston or Boston, there is a concentrated and easily accessible community of women of all ages and backgrounds. The town itself seems to be a medium for healing and growth. Maybe it’s the air or the water or underground chakras or magnetic forces or simply the understood trade-off that one has made by coming here.

“It’s like Amazon Village,” says sculptor Rita Torlen, 50. “Never have I met so many accomplished women. I love it. I never understood what sisterhood was until I moved to San Miguel.”

“There is a force here,” agrees Barcal, 47. “This place has a strong female component. Single women feel safe here. There’s a sense of community and potential. I knew when I came it wasn’t find-a-mate paradise, but that wasn’t my purpose. My purpose was to be fuller, however that is.”

Betsy Parrish, 28, sits in the courtyard of La Parroquia restaurant, eating little black bean sopes and sipping coffee. “If you’re trying to make something work with someone else, possibly you’re ignoring what’s going on with yourself,” she says. It’s 11 a.m., and tiny brown sparrows hop around on the tiles at her feet, looking for crumbs. A large bougainvillea curves up along one wall and spills over onto the roof. She’s been in town for three years, studying art, helping out in local film projects and looking for answers in weekly therapy sessions. “I came here knowing there wouldn’t be anything serious or ongoing. It would be insular. You’re forced into dealing with your self.

“I think people in this town are either running away from something or trying to find something or don’t know what they want but didn’t want what they had in the States,” she adds. “Something about San Miguel makes you ask yourself what you’re here for. Obviously not for a career, so why did I leave? You start asking a lot of questions.”

Walking around the cobblestone streets of San Miguel, one has time for such questions. The hours are marked by the tolling of bells, the months defined by fiestas, the seasons by flowers, food and thunderstorms.

“In New York, you’re brainwashed into living in the Big Apple,” says Susan Porter-Smith, 47, a former scientific research editor for Reader’s Digest (where she filed, and settled, a landmark sex discrimination suit). She is now the head of the San Miguel Audubon Society. “I came to San Miguel, the people I met were bright, all my needs were satisfied. I thought, ‘What a fool I’ve been, spending so much time in New York.’ My friends (in Manhattan) thought I wasn’t utilizing my talents and wasn’t going to get ahead in life.”

“When I left New York and gave up my job at CBS,” says Torlen, a former scenic artist who has been in San Miguel for six years, “my friends said I needed to see a psychiatrist because Mexico was so dangerous. And I was in New York! Give me a break. I don’t hear gunshots at night, I hear firecrackers.”

FROM EL MIRADOR, A LOOKOUT POINT HIGH ON THE FLANK OF MOCTEzuma Hill, San Miguel flows away gracefully, an Impressionist landscape of purple bougainvillea, jacaranda and faded pastel walls, anchored in the center by the spires of La Parroquia. Sounds drift up on the wind: crowing roosters, braying donkeys, clanging church bells, the piping of a wandering knife sharpener looking for customers, the asthmatic chug of buses.

It’s not difficult to see why the gringas are drawn to this place, despite the knowledge that they will never truly be part of it. No matter their numbers, they will always be foreigners, will never totally blend into the local society if for no other reason than their presence itself breaks some of the culture’s most basic expectations. In San Miguel, men are supposed to gain identity and self-esteem through work while women are supposed to marry, bear children and devote themselves to their families. The American women have chosen a third path, establishing their own culture that revolves around freedom of choice, independence and appreciation of nature.

Native San Miguelense are typically reticent about remarking on the behavior of the female foreigners, but the women’s influence has been felt. “The women here have been working on themselves,” says Sergio Orrozco, a San Miguel psychologist. “That has had a very positive impact on the community.”

Croning ceremonies and ozone therapy may not translate easily into Spanish, but they’re far easier to live with than the happy-hour-fueled headaches of past visitors. Machismo aside, Mexico has a pre-Columbian appreciation of goddess-based religion, and younger Latinas are starting to participate.

Less easily comprehensible to the locals is the gringas’ willingness to sacrifice the joys of family. In San Miguel, a woman must have male protection to be a good woman. To choose otherwise is not fully understood, either by local Mexicans or friends back home.

“I think my Mexican friends feel sorry for me,” Torlen says, “but my friendships are all that more important. We make our own life here. Maybe it’s a Disneyland world, I don’t know, but I think it’s great.”

“A single woman after 23 is an old maid here,” says Kris Rudolph, the 29-year-old owner of El Buen Cafe, a small coffeehouse on a quiet street near the main square. “The Mexican women feel so sorry for me because no one will marry me. If they heard of a woman not wanting to get married, they wouldn’t believe it.”

Rudolph works long hours during high seasons--winter, Easter, August--juggling the problems of any small business plus some she didn’t expect when she came here 3 1/2 years ago: unreliable water and electricity, a nonstop search for supplies, bureaucratic red tape. Her friends back in Houston, she says, are moving up the corporate ladder and starting to have children, but when she goes home and sees the lifestyle, she doesn’t regret her decision. “They work all day, come home, watch TV and go to bed. They do that every single day. I like the pace here. I’m always in awe of how pretty it is.”

She’s straddling a hammock on the roof of a house down the street from her cafe. As she talks, Miguel, the six-foot bell in La Parroquia tower, begins clanging out the hour. She pauses until it’s quiet again and begins talking about the lack of eligible men in town. “I realize that if I stay in San Miguel, I’ll never get married. You’ll be alone the rest of your life and never have a family--so what’s more important? I’m used to having my two-hour lunches on the patio with the bougainvillea.”

But a solitary life in a foreign country has its drawbacks, even in Colonial splendor--especially if you’re not earning many pesos. By Mexican standards, the poorest of these women would be considered middle-class. On a frugal $500-a-month budget, though, an extra $10 is a fortune, the weekly food allowance is $20, a phone is impossible, and shopping for clothes means pawing through the second-hand piles at the Tuesday market. The scariest times, however, are illness. “I got sick for five days last year before anyone knew it--that’s lonely,” says Jane Evans, 47, a Canadian artist. She pauses and adds, “But I’m not as lonely as I was when I was married.”

And that’s the bottom line. Here a solitary life doesn’t mean loneliness and endless questions about when you’re going to get married and have kids. The single status is considered normal throughout San Miguel’s resident foreigners. Although the women are not necessarily delighted to be single, they accept the situation with some equanimity. There are no singles bars or marriage workshops; few of these women are looking for life partners among the small foreign male population, many of whom are there for the cheap beer, the accessible dope and the few interested women. Meaningful female friendship is not high on their agenda, although that situation is starting to change. “I belong to a men’s group that was sustained for more than a year, and there are other groups of mixed sex in which men do participate,” Orrozco says. “It’s like a small version of what is happening with the women.” This is not surprising; after big-screen football at Casa Mex’s, a group is the best show in town.

“Since there aren’t so many entertainment-type distractions here, the depth of friendship is what you do,” says Tina Estes, 40, one of the few openly gay women in town. “It’s what you rely on for entertainment, like the old days. We have meetings talking about the mysteries of the universe and the deepest parts of our personal lives, what we’re doing creatively. I didn’t have the energy to do that in the U.S., to feel those things, much less talk about them.”

Of course, San Miguel is a small town in Mexico, and women living on their own must face a certain amount of suspicion, says Ana Roy, knowingly shaking her head. She should know. She’s an Arizona expatriate who has lived in Mexico for 36 years, the last seven in San Miguel. However, she adds, “San Miguel is a place where women can be alone. It’s acceptable, it’s conceivable. But we also have the assumption, very deep and basic, that every gringa is a puta .”

Even though hordes of more sophisticated chilangas , Mexico City residents, invade the town every weekend, strutting around in tight shorts like Charo wanna-bes, it is the gringas that are clucked about. “It stems from the differences in independence and sexual freedom and openness about (sexual) matters,” Orrozco says. “In Mexico, a woman doesn’t acknowledge that she likes sex. It’s just a difference in culture.”

“It’s a small-town thing, where if you do something, within an hour the whole town knows,” says Rudolph. “When I was with my Mexican friends and trying to fit into the culture, I was becoming who they thought I should be. After a few months of that, I started hanging out with Americans because it was too stressful. It’s hard to have a relationship with a Mexican woman because they think all Americans are sluts.”

There is a different dynamic with the men--more distant, but less judgmental. Evans, who came four years ago on a grant, says she’s a committed feminist, and she finds many of the gringo attitudes toward gender roles infuriating. But she forgives, even appreciates, the sexual vibe of the local men: “Mexican men take a no. They expect a no, but they feel obligated to try. Whether you’re having sex or not, you have the option to say yes or no, which seems to have disappeared back home among my friends who are single.”

IN THE FRENCH-STYLE JARDIN THAT IS THE MAIN PLAZA OF SAN MIGUEL, REtirees, men and women, sit on benches checking the stock market and the sports pages of the Mexico City News, the only English-language daily in Mexico. They chat with friends, letting the morning slip away until it’s time for lunch and siesta and drinks. Locals call them Los Momios, the mummies.

Los Momios represent another strata of San Miguel expatriates. They are generally older, the few men awkwardly trying to adjust to life after the office and business and expense accounts and power. Their wives sit nearby, happily making appointments for bridge and cocktails and considering perhaps an art class at the Instituto. And they see young women like Rudolph and Parrish and ask them what they’re doing here. Why are they wasting their youth here in this tiny town in Mexico?

“There’s this notion (in the U.S.) that we’re all on this racecourse, and if you step out for a year or five, you’ll be 20 laps behind,” says Barcal, formerly a mental-health teacher-trainer for Los Angeles County and now the publisher of a bilingual guide to San Miguel. “But what you do with that time could make you 20 laps ahead in life experience. It’s not like you’re going into an absence of experience. You’re just having a different one.”

When Barcal first arrived six years ago, she knew only one word of Spanish: cerveza (beer) . Now fluent, she and three other women have just bought into a two-acre parcel of land 20 minutes from San Miguel, where they plan to build houses. The land is typical of the countryside: gently sloping arroyos and plateaus of mesquite, chollo, sandstone and granite, punctuated here and there by hot springs. Her neighbor on this parcel is Cilla Zweig, a buyer of Mexican folk art for Melrose Avenue’s Soap Plant.

Like Barcal, Rudolph and a handful of others, Zweig has carved out an economic niche for herself through the manufacture of folk crafts for export, giving steady work to tinsmiths, iron workers and ceramists.

Along with the lack of available men, limited work opportunities form the biggest obstacle for the gringas. Compared with other Mexican towns, San Miguel is not cheap, and therapy, massage, hot springs and maid service don’t come free. It took Zweig four years to develop her line of products, which now sell coast to coast in many different stores. Her success, she claims, is partially due to a change in perspective, from material acquisition to spiritual exploration. Ironically, she says, the less time she spent trying to make things happen economically, the better her situation.

“I used to be this self-willed person thinking it was me doing it all,” she says. “I started asking myself--what do I really want? I started looking deeper within and discovering something big, and it’s changed my life dramatically. In L.A., it was all gossip, work and fashion and what’s the latest thing,” she says. “I forgot about something bigger than myself. I don’t search madly for external things to bring me happiness because I know it doesn’t last.”

Spirituality is at the core of the American women’s culture here. Not necessarily the spirituality of organized religion but a looser definition: getting in touch with an inner self in whatever medium works, be it therapy or yoga or goddess rituals. The latter are particularly popular in San Miguel, says Ana Roy, because they symbolize “a recognition of the planet as a living single thing, and we’re all parts of it. It means the sacred nature of the whole reality: the cat, the rock, the cactus. It’s all alive, all part of the same system and all sacred.”

Near Zweig’s half-acre of land is Escondido hot springs, a series of outdoor pools, some covered, where Roy and her friends hold croning ceremonies for women turning 50. During the full moon, they gather around a mesquite fire and troop into the covered grottoes, discarding their bathing suits as they enter the hot water.

The first time the women held a ceremony at Escondido was two years ago, after an intensive goddess workshop. “At the last pool in the grotto, there’s a narrow entrance way,” Roy says, “and seeing one form, one body, one goddess emerge into the candlelight and down the stairs and into the water--it was a remarkable experience. Everybody was totally naked, and this was heavy stuff, especially if you’re older and fat. Crone comes from chronos , time. It means a woman who has grown wise with the passage of time. It’s a hard subject for women, especially someone who has invested all her energy, her whole life into looking right.”

If it sounds like life in San Miguel is a bit too New Age, a bit too odd, sometimes it feels that way too. April Wolfe, 46, one of the town’s two therapists, moved to San Miguel three years ago with her lover, Tina Estes. A year and a half later, she woke up one day overcome with the realization that she had sold her house in Portland, given up her title at the school where she taught and cashed in her retirement. Suddenly she panicked. She called Gail Keene, the leader of San Miguel’s Friends of Unity Church, and after a wide-ranging conversation, she calmed down. “(Biblical) Abraham went through that too,” Keene told her.

“My appointment book was jampacked in the States,” she says. “Then it all quit. Tina said to me, ‘You’re forgetting the magic here. Trust.’ Now I don’t even have a calendar.”

“You’re out there swimming toward you don’t know what,” Estes says. “But you’re definitely leaving one shore, so you’d better keep swimming through the uncertainty.”

Life is full of uncertainty. Perhaps that’s what makes San Miguel so attractive to the gringas. Here the uncertainties are when the rainy season will start, when will the water supply be turned back on, who will have corn mushrooms in the Tuesday market. For most, the biggest unknown, the one that is hardest to confront, is how long to stay in San Miguel. For the younger women, there’s the possibility of starting a family; the older ones worry about getting sick. But for no one, it seems, is there a fear of being alone. The community is the family, the town is the living room.

Life is full of trade-offs, and you always come back to the question, what makes you fulfilled? Is it your new PowerBook or the sound of the bell tolling from La Parroquia?