Rat-Race Refugees Seek Sanity, Serenity in Rural Mexico

In the 1960s, Suzanne Lopez was a city kid running a coffeehouse in Manhattan’s Soho district. Today she lives 3,000 miles away in Mexico, managing a jungle resort where meals are organically grown and yoga classes are held at dawn before a spectacular ocean vista.

Forty miles down the nearly virgin Pacific coastline, Denis Castaneda, a onetime film production worker in Paris, guides tours on horseback through cactus-laced forests and along empty beaches.

Stories of people forsaking well-paying jobs and fleeing the big city are about as common as rush-hour traffic jams. But these rat-race refugees took unusually long journeys, crossing language barriers and ecosystems to find the tranquil opposites of their urban lives.

“In France, they have an expression--you work, take the Metro and you sleep,” Castaneda said over a seaside lunch of fresh fish. “[With] a job near the sea, there’s not much money, but it’s good for the life.”

Foreigners increasingly are settling south of the border, wooed by year-round warm weather, lower prices and an easier life. But as once-placid havens such as Acapulco and Guadalajara become crowded, more newcomers are venturing to out-of-the-way villages from Puerto Angel on Mexico’s southern Pacific coast to Kino Bay off the Gulf of California.

Nearly half a million Americans now live in Mexico, up about 20% from 1990, the U.S. State Department says. While many are retirees, others such as Lopez and Castaneda go on a search for work that allows them to live according to values that they never could follow in their native countries.

In the mid-1960s, Lopez had had enough. She was living in Los Angeles after landlords forced her Figaro coffeehouse in New York to close, putting a Blimpie hero shop in its place. She was in her 20s and getting divorced.

“I was a basket case from the city,” recalled Lopez. After years of visiting Mexico, she finally moved in 1970 to Puerto Angel, a sleepy Pacific fishing village about 200 miles southeast of Acapulco.

Seven years later, Lopez and her new Mexican husband invested $15,000 to begin buying and developing land on a hillside canyon denuded by farmers. They planted native coconut, mahogany, oak and plum trees. They built guest rooms and bungalows in the growing forest. Iguanas, opossums, armadillos, boars and other wild animals returned, some reintroduced by Lopez.

Today, her Posada Canon Devata resort has 22 rustic guest rooms, including six bungalows scattered through the six-acre jungle. Signs explain that human waste is piped from toilets to fertilize the soil. Guests are asked to reuse bath towels to save laundry water.

Vegetarian meals, served in the open-air dining area on thick wood tables under a palm-frond roof, are made from food grown locally without chemicals--even the coffee beans.

The jungle plunges into blackness at night, with no electric lights to illuminate the stone paths. Visitors must use flashlights to avoid stumbling into gullies or thick brush.

Yoga classes for guests start before dawn on a rooftop terrace, the canyon’s highest point. As the group stretches and breathes, the morning sun bursts above the ocean horizon.

Moving to Mexico enabled Lopez to get back in touch with her love of nature that she felt separated from in the States.

“It feels good. It feels right. It feels sane and healthy and nurturing,” Lopez, 51, said one balmy winter afternoon under the cooling shade trees, her blue eyes sparkling below tightly bunned blond hair.

The resort’s ecological methods have become a model for the region. Protected against heat and erosion, water wells in the shaded canyon are flush during the dry spring and summer.

Lopez’s 17-year-old son and 22-year-old daughter, who help run the place, share her love of the Earth and this lifestyle.

For Lopez, the most important change was within herself.

“I’ve become much more Mexican,” she said with sharp resolve, as if retaining an American edge despite 26 years in Mexico. “I’m not into having things so perfect or feeling like I need to control things so much.”

Lopez and other longtime settlers, who have seen some expatriates give up on their dreams, warn that the move isn’t for everyone. Among the disappointed are young Americans who come to teach at Mexican universities but soon return home, disillusioned by low wages and few friends.

But Castaneda, like Lopez, found that he could return to nature in Mexico. Living in Paris in the early 1980s, he earned $50,000 a year from a film-production job and drove a Porsche.

He initially moved to Mexico City to work as a computer engineer. But during a vacation near Ixtapa on the southern Pacific coast, Castaneda decided to stay a few weeks to help out at a friend’s ranch.

He liked it so much that he never left. Eventually Castaneda moved southeast to Huatulco, a nine-bay coastal strip, and became a horseback guide at Rancho Caballo del Mar.

The life was ideal for the multilingual adventurer, who bears some resemblance to actor Patrick Stewart, Capt. Picard on TV’s “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

Twisting sideways in his saddle, Castaneda entertains riders by pointing out a soaring cactus at least 500 years old, chicle trees used to make chewing gum and termite nests that have thrived in the decades since anteaters were wiped out by fur traders.

Although he earns about one-tenth what he did in Paris, Castaneda, 40, says he has no regrets.

“This is my pleasure. I am a green man since a long time. The majority of people I receive are concrete men. They are very receptive. They see the trees and they open their mouth--ahh!”