Mexicans Are Fed Up With Ugly Americans…From BOTH Continents

Terrible tourists and expats from all over are being held to account. Your individual actions abroad DO matter

Photo by Dylan Posso on Unsplash

Sometimes, I quietly lurk in the comment sections of Facebook posts about news in Mexico, to get a feel for popular sentiment. Of course, with troll and bot farms in operation and politically motivated agendas galore driving online “discourse,” it all must be taken with a grain of salt.

But if you want to know what’s going on hyper-locally in Mexico, you can’t avoid “Face.” So I lurk and read to get a feel for the pulse of conversations around gentrification, the behavior of foreigners, and incidents like the one I’ll describe below.

I have to say I am seeing a definitive loss of patience by Mexicans who are being subjected to entitled, rude, and disrespectful behavior, which evidently came to a head around this one particular incident. *And it didn’t come from a gringo.****

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To summarize, based on the many posts I’ve read about the issue, a *racialized white Argentine man who resided in Tulum (whether legally or not is unknown) appeared to be out walking his dog in a wealthy neighborhood during the day. An observation of the video shows there was no one else around when a Mexican vendor — a brown-skinned man — selling pozol* (a traditional pre-Hispanic drink) was stopped by said Argentine and told he was not allowed to be there.

The Argentine filmed the encounter himself, made a big deal over filming the vendor’s license plates, threatened to post the video showing the vendor in the area on social media, and then proceeded to tell the Mexican vendor to “go back to his neighborhood.”

Phew. I need to take a breath before moving on.

The audacity is astounding.

Although I do not have any way of confirming this, commentors indicated that this particular area in Tulum is a public area. Whether there are or are not ordinances or other restrictions on selling pozol or anything else are not quite material to the broader issue.

That is, the behavior and disrespect. The pomposity, the entitlement, the bold assumption (even if the vendor was not supposed to be there), that this foreigner was within his rights to demand the vendor leave and spew “go back to your neighborhood” — language with an explicitly classist and racist charge.

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The reaction was swift and strong. The Argentine was quickly identified on social media and he was heavily doxxed — his residential address, phone number, and social media profiles were plastered all over Facebook.

His initial response to the backlash was equally — or perhaps even more — problematic: he cried victim and accused Mexicans of being xenophobic. The author of that post wasn’t having it, noting eloquently (translated from Spanish):

“With an arrogant tone and a mocking attitude, the foreigner claims that he is mistreated here, that there is rejection of outsiders, and that people’s reaction stems from hatred of foreigners. He says he feels like a victim, even though he started it all by treating a worker in his own land — someone born here, who lives here, and who has helped build what Tulum is today — as a stranger and a nuisance.

And to top it all off, in his posts and messages, he brazenly writes: “Just chilling here, zero stress, reading your xenophobic nonsense and the drivel of people without reason,” as if everything he did was right, as if people had no reason to complain, and as if his offenses were completely insignificant.

What’s most upsetting and infuriating is the total contradiction: he can decide who comes in, who stays, and who leaves; he can humiliate, prohibit entry, and mock; but when people complain and defend their rights, then he says they’re being discriminated against and that we’re xenophobic. What will never be allowed is for someone who arrives to think they own everything, to believe they have more rights than the locals, to mistreat the people who make this paradise possible, and even less so, to then play the victim, mock everyone, and accuse others of what he himself is doing.

People respond firmly: “Xenophobia is treating someone from here as if they weren’t from here. Xenophobia is telling a Mexican to go back to their neighborhood in their own country. And that, that’s exactly what you did.”

A protest march was announced, with the stated goal of ending at his residence on May 15; after this announcement he reportedly apologized. As noted, “Organizers argue the issue goes beyond one individual and reflects broader social discontent over gentrification, displacement of local residents, and discriminatory attitudes toward the local population. The protest also aims to highlight the need for respect toward the region’s culture and traditions, especially in a tourist hub like Tulum, where the growing presence of foreigners has intensified debate over the social and economic impact on local communities.”

I was unable to find any coverage of the protest itself after the fact, but it is a bit beside the point.

This is just one of the more recent incidents I’ve seen in which a non-Mexican is behaving with entitlement and disrespect toward locals, and locals took the situation into their own hands. In this case, a foreigner of unknown origin whose style screams “beach bum” is accused of repeatedly harassing customers for food at a restaurant and becoming belligerent if they say no — a Mexican who spent many years in the USA confronted him aggressively and explained the situation from his view. In this case, tourists of unknown origin (but who do not appear “white”) reportedly climbed the pyramids of Chichen Itza and were forcibly removed by local artisans.

The offenders in these cases are not “gringos,” but evidently a version of the “Ugly American” originating from outside the USA.

Also informative are the comments — overwhelmingly reflecting a specific animus toward people from Argentina. If you have any experience around people from Latin America, you will be familiar with stereotypes about Argentines as haughty, snobbish, dishonest, and grifting. While I don’t subscribe to stereotypes and treat individuals as individuals, it is clear that many of the Mexicans commenting on this incident don’t share my tolerance; it is also clear that the behavior of this particular person reinforced stereotypes about Argentines having a superiority complex.

Sure enough, many of the comments by people from the USA fell into typical patterns — stating that Tulum is already “ruined” by Mexicans who charge too much and flaunting their USD and tourism clout.

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These incidents underscore, for me, the absolute importance of our individual behavior abroad. What I have seen from many in the “expat” space is a tendency to point to systemic factors and underplay the impact that individuals have in this quest to be ethical migrants.

I see “expats” point the finger at landlords and real estate agents and local governments around the housing crisis.

I see “expats” opine that their economic contributions should balance the fact that they enjoy favorable policies that subjugate local populations.

I see “expats” online philosophize, and pontificate, and draw up statistics, and cry victim that they are “scapegoats” for bigger systemic issues, even as they admit they impose their own US standards of behavior, fail to learn the local language, celebrate the “cheap deals” they enjoy, and essentially absolve themselves of responsibility to behave in conscientious ways under the guise of the issue being “bigger than one person.”

I call bullshit.

This one incident with this one man has done severe damage to the reputation of his countrymen. The psychological impact of one person’s bad behavior on a collective understanding of foreigners is far larger than most people acknowledge.

Besides this, our own behavior and choices are the only aspects of these dynamics that we can actually control.

You can write an entire dissertation on the complex layers of international politics, economic trends, and cultural competency and it means absolutely nothing when you blatantly disrespect people in the ways reflected above.

When you migrate to another country, you are a minority — minorities must remember that we are representatives of the places from which we hail, whether we like it or not.

In my experience, giving respect gets respect in Mexico. Anything less, these days, might just get you the boot.

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*Gringo typically refers to someone from the USA or other English-speaking country, irrespective of race and color.

**I specify “racialized” white in acknowledgement that race is a construct and the categorization of people into different races is fluid depending on many things, including geographic context. The Argentine in question, by phenotype, would be considered “white” here — overwhelmingly exhibiting characteristics of European ancestry. In the USA, he would be considered “Latino,” which people in the US often mistake as a racial classification, although it is more accurately classified as an ethnic category. There are white, Black, Indigenous, Asian and other categories applied to people from Latin America, who are routinely grouped as “Latino” in the USA and Europe. This is a complex issue that I can’t do justice to in a footnote, but it is important because “white” Latinos have a long history of racial discrimination and oppression against Latinos with American ancestry who have phenotypes and heritage linked to those people whose land this originally belonged to, pre-colonization by Europeans.

Originally published at https://theconscientiousemigrant.substack.com.