San Miguel de Allende: Mexicans, Foreigners, and the Making of a World Heritage Site

Pulitzer Prize–winning poet W. D. Snodgrass once said of his wintering in San Miguel de Allende: “I think it pays to get out of your mother country, the place where you formed your basic restraints and limitations.” Echoing that sentiment, and drawn by cheap living in a colonial town, hundreds of foreign writers and artists have settled in this central Mexican locale since the 1930s. So have thousands more who simply craved a sunny place to retire, where domestic help and nursing cost a fraction of what they do at home. Annual legions of tourists have followed. San Miguel is not unique, havens of US and Canadian retirees now dotting Mexico from Ensenada to Mérida, but it was probably the first such enclave and is certainly the best known.San Miguel is therefore worth studying for what it suggests about the long-standing expatriate presence in Mexico, its cultural and economic impact, and the agency of townspeople in the face of foreign spending power and governmental designs to harness it. Lessons learned here (in an academic sense, but also in a public policy sense) can be applied elsewhere. Lisa Covert's San Miguel de Allende is thus an important addition to our understanding of modern Mexico as well as a rare case of taking Mexican tourism studies into a city-specific context. Strange as it may seem, we still await book-length scholarly histories of Acapulco, Cancún, and (post-1940) Tijuana and Mexico City.The popular view of San Miguel (not least among its expats) is that its growth as a bohemian and tourist mecca was driven by entrepreneurial foreigners. Covert acknowledges their crucial role, but she reveals that it was Mexican opera singer José Mojica who first put the town on the cosmopolitan map, and she challenges on various fronts the notion of outsiders rescuing San Miguel from underdevelopment amid local passivity. Many townsfolk advocated for textile production over tourism, and the success for many decades of the mill La Aurora shows a path that could have been taken had not state authorities excluded San Miguel from industrial initiatives. Concerted resistance came from activist Catholics, especially parish priest José Mercadillo, who for 30 years railed against corrupting influences; his sermons were echoed in the press and likely helped contain the presence of beatniks and hippies, who in one celebrated instance were jailed and forcibly shaven. In the struggle for the town's economic soul the Yankee dollar won, but many locals remained unsatisfied and many saw little benefit.In her final chapter, on the period from the 1970s to 2001, Covert questions the impact of expatriate hiring practices and philanthropy, contending that the former feminized the economy by offering little to male workers while the latter “reproduced the very structural conditions that exacerbated poverty” (p. 150). The chapter is both fascinating and problematic. While the author illustrates how expats paid their maids unfairly low wages (and how some maids launched successful challenges over unfair dismissal), she omits to say whether the local wealthy did any differently. Her economic critique of expat philanthropy is speculative and would properly require engagement with statistical and qualitative data. On the other hand, her general point that San Miguel has functioned as a model for neoliberalism—with attendant inequalities, such as those caused by escalation in downtown property values and rents—is suggestive and troubling.With its orange-hued packaging, featuring a gorgeous screen print of the city, Covert's book calls out to be picked up. But the text rather lacks the color that its cover implies, limiting both its readerly appeal and its sense of contingency. The author declines to let principal players come to life, either by rendering them as individuals—as opposed to representatives of a given faction—or by quoting them. The priest Mercadillo emerges as a mere embodiment of provincial conservatism. An amusing passage in which an expat waxes on “gracious living” proves all too rare (p. 176). Greater attention to character and ambience would not necessarily have lengthened the text, for the analytical passages include much repetition that could have been shorn. San Miguel boasts 16,000 foreign residents and hundreds of thousands of annual visitors, some of whom might have been prompted to rethink their imprint by prose of greater ambition.Yet as a work of scholarship, Covert's study is invaluable. Few monographs on modern Mexico interweave culture, economics, and politics so seamlessly and (for the most part) persuasively. Its breadth of sources includes several private archives and interviews with dozens of residents. The study enriches the historiographies of Mexican-US relations, Mexican industrialization, cultural imperialism, gender, and inequality. Although jargon creeps into the latter chapters, the style is uncomplicated. Given these advantages and a longue durée scope, running from 1935 to the near present, San Miguel de Allende is instructive reading for a host of scholars and eminently assignable to undergraduates.

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