The story of my understanding of my Mexican identity would be incomplete without some talk about where it all goes down – my family’s Mexican hometown for the past 25 or so years, Puerto Vallarta. Many of you reading this will know this city to be a vibrant tourist destination on the Pacific coast of Mexico, famous for its beautiful beaches, surfing, and enough tourist resorts to make any overly tan middle-aged American couple drool. While this is all true, and the city is a great place to vacation, it was also an amazing place to spend a lot of my time growing up.

 

When I was very young, like elementary school young, I would spend just about the entire summer and every possible vacation day here. Three to four months out of the year were spent in what felt like, and still feels like to this day, paradise. Amazing food, my grandparents, and a great neighborhood full of kids, both American like me and also Mexicans, who lived there year-round. I can confidently say that I had the best possible experience a Mexican could have living in this environment. My family home always felt like a refuge away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life and going back to Mexico remains the most calming and centering thing I have in my life. I have so many memories in that house and in that city. I remember going downtown with Papa Armando to explore the flea markets and buy cheap knockoff soccer jerseys. I remember going on long walks with Yiaya down the beach and collecting any shiny rocks that I could proudly bring back to my mom and show off.

 

This environment, one of sandy beaches and safety, is not one that the vast majority of Mexicans get to experience, and I fully acknowledge that my privilege in life does not end at my white skin. My family is well off by Mexican standards, and this privilege is one that compounds with the color of my skin in the still colorist society of Mexico. Let’s get into why I got to live this life of privilege: my grandparents.

 

My grandfather, Papa Armando, and my grandmother, Yiaya, both grew up in Mexico. Papa Armando grew up in Mexico City, and Yiaya in Nuevo Laredo (just across the Texas border from Laredo). They married young, and both worked incredibly hard for the entirety of their professional lives. Papa Armando quite literally lived out the “American Dream” of yesteryear (only his dream was in Mexico), as he worked his way up from handing out mail at IBM to being president of the company for all of Latin America. That’s right, people used to have career mobility to the point they could start in the mailroom and end up in the C suite. Nowadays wages have stagnated, and career mobility is a distant memory from a time gone by, but I digress. Hard work is in the bones and blood of every Mexican on earth. While Trump might have you think that Mexicans are lazy good for nothings that sit around all day and drink, yet they are also somehow simultaneously being lazy and stealing all the jobs (I still can’t wrap my head around this conundrum), the Mexicans I know work hard. Why do they work hard? Because that’s the only way they know how to work. My grandfather is no exception. This man instilled in me the concept of hard work from a very young age, and I can remember him getting on me about my schoolwork from the day I could talk. He also was the person who fostered my love of soccer and ensured that I learned the Mexican National Anthem so that I could sing it proudly when we watched the matches together on TV.

 

Yiaya had a plethora of different jobs, from running a car dealership to being a teacher, and she still to this day is the most generous person I have ever met. I wrote an article about her work with COVID relief for the Michigan Daily, but that level of charitability only scratches the surface of how good of a person she is. Yiaya moved to San Miguel de Allende, a town in the mountains north of Mexico City, to live on our family’s ranch and tend to the crops and animals, and she immediately became the sponsor for the local orphanage. She would come to San Antonio every year and raid my and my brother’s closets for any clothes that didn’t fit, or any we didn’t want, and she took them back to the orphanage. She funded education, food, and sanitary products for the children, and she got my brother and I to try and teach English to some of the kids whenever we were in town. Beyond her extensive charity work, much of which I am surely forgetting, she is the friendliest person I have ever known. One time we were in Mexico City, and she asked a young couple to take a picture of us together. This normally quick interaction turned into a 2-hour conversation, and eventually she would attend this couple’s wedding. This sort of thing isn’t rare for Yiaya, and there are dozens more stories I could tell of her making quick friends with random strangers all around the world. This attitude and demeanor are constant inspirations for me.

 

Both of these individuals, my grandparents, are my direct connection to Mexico in that they are the only members of my immediate blood related family that still live there.  They have both been such an immensely positive and inspirational influence on my life and have made me proud not only to be Mexican, but also proud to be a member of my family. I only recently connected the dots on how my connection to them influenced the deep connection I feel to Mexico as a whole, and also how it influenced my perception of Mexican culture. I think this is perfectly natural, or at least I hope it is. Afterall, the best role models I have had in my life, my mom and my grandparents, are all Mexican. It would be crazy for me not to associate all of these good aspects I hope to take from them with the shared trait, Mexican identity, that they all have.

 

Without Puerto Vallarta, and more importantly without my grandparents, my connection my Mexican identity would not be nearly as strong as it is. I am grateful to them for serving as role models for me throughout my life, and the lessons they taught me about hard work and compassion tie directly into my perception of what being Mexican truly means.

 

Before I wrap up this entry about Puerto Vallarta, I need to talk about a man who had just as big of an influence on my life as just about anyone else – Felipe. Talking about Felipe in the US always kind of feels like walking on eggshells, because the work he does wouldn’t really be familiar to most Americans, but I’ll do my best. Felipe has worked for my grandfather for over 45 years. Initially, he was just his driver in Mexico City. They developed a closer relationship, and now he is quite literally the everything man for Papa Armando. He drives, he cooks, he cleans, he maintains the house, he goes and gets groceries, he is the handyman, he makes sure my grandfather is taking his medicine, and he does just about anything else that is asked of him. Most importantly to me, however, he also was in charge of taking care of me when I was young boy visiting my grandfather for the summer. (I know this concept of a do it all employee who essentially lives with his employer is weird, but you will just have to take my word that it is not an uncommon set up for some families in Mexico and that Felipe’s line of work is incredibly well respected. I wish I had time to get into the implications of this work and what it means about broader Mexican society and socio-economic divides that plague the nation, but alas that will have to wait).

 

Felipe not only saw me grow up from when I was a toddler to my 22-year-old self now, but he also played a major role in my growth as a person. Many of my memories of Puerto Vallarta involve him more than anyone else. He took me to watch him play soccer with his local men’s league team and would let me come to the grocery store with him whenever her went. His son, Diego, would sometimes come with his dad to work at our house and he and I played together all the time during the summer. We would run around getting into mischief throughout my neighborhood, and when we would get caught I would always take the blame because I knew he would get in more trouble than I if he took it. Felipe protected me when someone accosted me in downtown Puerto Vallarta, and I always felt safer around him than anyone else.

I grew to love Felipe like a member of my family, and always lobbied for him to stay after work to watch that night’s sporting event with me. One time when I was around 15, Papa Armando – who was caught in his old school gross mindset of there having to be a hard line between Felipe’s professional relationship to the family and any friendly relationship – said no when I asked if Felipe could stay to watch a soccer game with us that night. I had asked him this without talking to Felipe first, but I got so upset that I began to cry so hard that I almost threw up. I told him that if Felipe couldn’t stay to watch, I would not speak to him for the rest of my 2 month long stay in Puerto Vallarta. He tried to call my bluff, and we didn’t talk for 2 weeks until he apologized, and from that day on Felipe stayed to watch soccer with us (it took some convincing on my end to get Felipe to be comfortable with this, but nowadays any sporting event feels incomplete without him there rooting along with us).

 

If you have looked at the about me section of this site, you can see me with Felipe and his soccer team. I struggled with what to refer to him as on that page, and I settled on Tío Felipe. We may not be related by blood, but he is family. Felipe is yet another familial connection I have to Mexico, and I am so thankful that he has been a part of my life.