The Irish Saved Civilization But I Couldn’t

When nothing in society deserves respect, we should fashion for ourselves in solitude new silent loyalties.

― Nicólas Gómez Dávila

I was at a gathering. Certain kinds of people call a barroom a gathering. Certain kinds. Most everyone was familiar, although nearly no one is here. An extranjero to us, and everyone else, had appeared, friendly, gregarious. He’d been adopted into the brotherhood of the bar tab already. I tried to catch up.

He had been partially disassembled by his country, then put back together pretty well, thank God. But he was a ship of Theseus. He was the same person, but not the same. He was wandering the world in search of new silent loyalties, although he skipped right over the silent part.

A friend pointed to me and said that’s _________. He’s a writer.

No one had ever said that before. Never. I’ve been called every damn thing, but never that. It was way down the list of things to be called, on some second page of a resume that never gets printed.

Al was there. He wanted another copy of my book. He’s a philosopher, I guess. Or maybe a Buddha. A wandering ascetic. Whatever he might be, people sit next to him and feel better. I have. He had a copy once, and liked it, so he gave it to the library. He said he couldn’t do without it, even one step removed, so I gave him another one.

A young girl swam in our pool. When she comes she hugs us and says, “Mucho gusto,” instead of all the wan greetings we’ve learned from our lessons. She wanted a book, although she cannot read English. I signed it in Spanish, or maybe Italian, or both, the language is like that sometimes. She held it like a missal. I’ll never forget it.

No one speaks English here, but my book is in the library. It isn’t in the library where I pushed the rock of my life up its hill, over and over. I fashion for myself in solitude new silent loyalties.

It’s Hard To Become a Mexican Resident, Part 4

[We’re recounting the difficulties in receiving a Mexican residency permit. It’s continued from here, here, and here]

The ongoing pleasantness at the Boston Mexican consulate continued unabated. Officially, my wife and I had separate interviews. The consulate official asked if my wife was with me. Of course! Well, fetch her out and let’s have a look at her! We’ll take care of both of you at the same time.

I hadn’t disappeared into the inner sanctum for enough time, so when I returned to the waiting room, my wife spotted me and made her charming Oh-No-What’s-Wrong Face. Did you screw it up already? If they chase you up the street, I’m going to pretend I don’t know you.

Relax, honey. They just want to talk to both of us. They’re nice. I know it’s hard to believe, but a person behind a counter in a government office can be nice. Serious, efficient, and thorough, but pleasant. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it myself. We’ve all become so inured to martinets in ill-fitting polyester uniforms, badges askew, GED intellects on display, barking orders at us in the lines at the airport that we’ve forgotten that the slightest bit of authority doesn’t have to devolve immediately into imperiousness.

I’ll give us a little credit on that score. We understood that we were asking Mexico for a favor, and acted like it. Let us live there. We weren’t in a position to demand anything. You could be turned away for most any reason. It doesn’t even require a pretext. I don’t like your sweater, so beat it is always on the menu. I’m as charming as a cactus, of course, but they couldn’t wait to invite my wife over for an extended stay. She was going to bring a cat, and me, and some luggage with her, that’s all. In no particular order.

The clerk had already pored over the financial portion of our requirements for a married couple. We had plenty to spare, so the questions for my wife were scant compared to mine. The Mexican woman was too polite to ask, Did you really marry this guy? You’re not a hostage or anything? Seriously? He didn’t hold the deed on your family’s farm, and force the marriage? He didn’t threaten to tie you to railroad tracks unless you said “I do?” You’re not blind? You really stay married to him on purpose?

She just went over all the documents and made sure they all assembled her maiden and married names in a regular way. People make trouble for themselves with their elaborate married naming predilections these days. We find hyphenated Americans do it to keep one foot out the door at all times, starting with the bridal suite.The consulate just wants to figure out who you are. Our apostilled marriage and birth certificates with Spanish translations helped here.

American naming conventions differ from Mexican in other ways, too. They have very traditional customs with four names, generally. That’s how you end up with María Fernanda López García and similar. First name, middle name, dad’s last name, mom’s last name. Husband might be José Antonio Hernández López. Same naming order. His name doesn’t change if they marry, hers can. She might add “de Hernandez” at the end of her full name, but I guess that’s dying out except for in very formal settings. Most just keep their names, same as hombres. A very few go the hyphenated route. When you have kids, they generally drop the mother’s names off the end and smash the two grandads names on there. María Fernanda López García marries José Antonio Hernández López and their daughter might be Consuela Hernández López. So it is possible to end up being a Hernández Hernández, but fairly unlikely.

Back to the action. We were informed by the internet (teehee) that it might take up to two weeks to receive the canje visa stamp in our passports. I dreaded the idea of another trip into the belly of the Boston beast to pick them up, but it was not to be. We were directed to wait in the aptly named waiting room, and it would be done for us shortly. We spent a pleasant hour or two chatting in broken Spanish and fractured English to the other folks waiting around. They were all Mexicans getting other documents straightened out. A fellow from Guanajuato and I hit it off a bit. He’d been living in Rhode Island not too far from where I grew up. There was a charming, round-faced little girl with delightful cartoon pigtails and an adventurous spirit marching up and down the aisles. She really liked the pictures my wife showed her of our cat. A balam! (the Yucatec Maya word for jaguar).

The “sarcastic” guard came out and gave us our spanking visas, and gave me another wink and a “You did good” one more time. We were instructed that the visa was only good if we entered Mexico within 180 days, and then once we landed, we had 30 days to finish the job at the INM, the Instituto Nacional de Migración.

Gulp. I guess now we have to move.

[to be continued]

It’s Hard To Become a Mexican Resident, Part 3

[continued from here and here]

Well, we’re going to play it as it lies, as they say in golf, or play it as it lays, if you’re Joan Didion. I’m a good writer, I’m not Joan Didion. Please note a certain ambiguity in that last sentence introduced by punctuation selection. At any rate, there are more holes in my narrative than any golf course, so we’ll just play through, and not argue about verb tenses.

So we’ve got all our paperwork in order (we think, who knows?), and an appointment at the Mexican consulate in Boston, Massachusetts. A while back I hinted at what I was doing in my essay I’m So Amtrak I Could Cry. Reader Jean sussed it out, for instance.

We were prepared to be disappointed, of course. Things being what they are, the disappointment buffet at any governmental restaurant is always well-stocked. You can’t always get what you want, as the poet Jagger once opined, but if you try sometimes, you get what you need. What we needed was a special stamp in our passports that had one more ugly picture of us and the word canje somewhere on it.

Canje is an interesting word. It was always explained to me to mean “change,” or maybe “exchange.” The official internet translated definition is: redemption. A good writer could get 10,000 words out of that comparison alone. I’ll just say it suits me just fine. I’m no Joan Didion, remember? In this context, canje is the process to change from tourist to legal resident.

My wife and I dressed for Boston winter, tried to paste down our cowlicks, and made our way to the consulate. It was on Franklin Street, a short walk from where we were staying.

If you’re in the mood for a laugh before we really get down to business, you can ponder on the tree of woe that the Boston Mexican Consulate has a Yelp! page. Talk about yelling at passing traffic from an overpass. It has seven reviews on there too. Five say the living is easy, fish are jumpin’, and the cotton is high. The other two were the kind of unhinged rants that Yelp! always provides for our amusement. An excerpt:

I went to this place to get a tourist visa, and the guy and the old lady behind the counter were completely unhelpful. They literally started making up documents that I should’ve brought with me and the guy was very sarcastic from the beginning. Funny how they don’t like it when Trump treats them this way, but they want to treat other people this way….. humanity is lost!!! Go to a different consulate if you can or travel to a country where a visa is not necessary.

I like this one a lot, because it’s dated just a few days from the date we visited, so I can verify or contradict it with some kind of authority. Lucas, my man, you sure are confused. Humanity is not lost, but you should maybe wear a bell so they can find you when you wander.

Firstly, what do you need a tourist visa for? If you fly into any major Mexican airport, they just stamp your passport with a 180 day limit, and you’re a tourist. Way back in the dark ages they used to give you a paper form to fill out on the plane, but that’s yesterday’s news, friend. It’s hard for people to be helpful when you don’t even know what you’re trying to do.

Secondly, I spent a long interlude with the people behind the counter, because I was being interviewed, and I brought more than a handful of gimme with me. And I can testify, your honor, that I thought the young lady behind the counter was the pleasantest, prettiest girl in Mexico, sent to the states to shame us. Well, I thought that until her co-worker walked by, and made me wonder how the Miss Universe pageant would get along without her. And they both spoke perfect ingles whenever they felt the circumstances called for it, which was nearly all the time with me.

“They literally started making up documents that I should’ve brought with me…” is a another hoot.  The word “literally” has become the English equivalent of saying ugh, or sneezing, or maybe farting. It has no meaning, just a sound, and a faint odor of mendacity.

They’re “making up” documents like birth certificates. You might not remember it, Lucas, but you and your mother were in the same room at the same time a while back, with a lot of people dressed in pajamas and wearing masks on their faces, surrounded by lots of machines that made various beeping noises. Originally, that description was reserved for the maternity ward at the hospital, but of course now if everyone is in pajamas, wearing face masks, surrounded by beeping machines, with a woman screaming expletives at everyone, you might just be in the checkout line in Walmart. But you were born, Lucas. They’d like you to prove where, and when. Kinda important.

“Sarcastic” is not le mot juste, either, if he’s referring to the guard at the door. He was ferociously armed with a clipboard, which might have frightened poor Lucas, but what he was, was funny, not sarcastic. He looked at my wife and me, and winked and said, “English or Spanish?” It went like this:

Me: I’ll try it in Spanish. Mi mujer y yo tenemos una cita para obtener residencia temporal.

Guard: [laughing] No, no, you did good!

So we took a seat and my name was called. That’s when I became a judge in the Miss Mexico pageant, without voting rights of course. The young lady took my binder, laden with documents, all copied into triplicate, each in a clear plastic sleeve with the corner clipped so they could be removed and re-inserted easily, in the order the consulate prefers. You know, you can use the internet for more than complaining about stuff on Yelp!

The consulate official flipped back in forth in the binder, scrutinized the bank statements with a gimlet eye, removed whatever copies she required to save, and then gave me the second-greatest compliment I’ve ever received about my behavior. The first was when my wife said, “I guess so,” when I asked her to marry me. But this was pretty good, too:

“Are you a lawyer?”

“No.”

“Are you an accountant?”

“No, I was a construction worker.”

“You must have been a very organized construction worker.”

[To be continued]

It’s Hard To Become a Mexican Resident, Part 2

[Note: continued from yesterday’s post]

Showing you’ve already got enough money to keep you in tacos and cervezas forevermore is called the Savings and Investments route. It’s the one we took. You can also show them that you make enough money every month to qualify instead of a single pile in the bank. It varies from consulate to consulate, supposedly, but it’s $4,400 a month, net, after taxes where we went. Got a spouse, or child to cart along? Add another $1,400/month per person. You have to prove you’ve made that much for the last six months, unless you go to a fussy consulate, and then it’s twelve month’s worth of proof. If you miss on the low side for ten minutes, the calendar goes back to zero and you start again. Even though it’s ostensibly any kind of income, it’s still aimed at retired people. Mexico hates anyone who will move there and take any Mexican’s job. They’d really prefer that you make that almost $70,000 a year completely passively. And, you know, spend it all in Mexico.

If you’re a digital nomad, you can find any number of places on the internet (teehee) that say that Mexico loves you. Hell, the current Mexican president ran an ad campaign inviting digital nomads to Mexico City when she was the mayor there. Later, she expressed solidarity with protesters chanting gringo go home, stop taking all the good apartments. So I’d keep the “nomad” part of digital nomad in the back of your mind at all times.

In any case, good luck proving to the authorities that you make that kind of dinero every month. If you’re a freelancer, the paperwork is nearly impossible to produce to their satisfaction. They understand W-2s, but your digital bank statements with weird money coming in fits and starts from all over will get you an adios muchacho as often as not. Most digital nomads simply enter the country on a regular tourist visa, which usually allows you to stay for six months. Then they bugger off somewhere else, and then re-enter Mexico later to get another six months. That’s true, unless the immigration officer at the airport doesn’t like the fact that you have no return trip on your plane ticket, and stamps a few weeks on your passport instead of six months. That’s happened to people we know.

Remember, these are all numbers to allow you to stay legally in Mexico for a single year. You’ll have to renew it every year for three or four years, keep your nose clean the whole time, maybe pay Mexican taxes if you’re still working some, including tax on your Social Security as if it was regular income, and pay a substantial fee each time (about $650 per person, per year), until they relent and make you a permanent resident. If you want to become a legal permanent resident right away, you have to have approximately $300,000.00 parked in your accounts for a year, or earn $7,400 a month, net, after taxes, and prove it for the last six or twelve months to their satisfaction. You’ll have to pay more for your spouse, too.

This is just the warm up for proving things, by the way. You’re going to need your birth certificates, and marriage certificates if you’re currently manacled to anyone ’til death or a divorce lawyer do you part. But you’re also going to have to prove that the documents are legit to their satisfaction. To forestall problems, you should send away to the secretary of state of the state you were born in, and married in, enclose your documents, pay a fee, and have them apostilled. If you’re unfamiliar with the Hague Convention of 1961 as it applies to your birth certificate, join the “I’ve never heard of an apostille club.” We meet every other Thursday, and liquor is served. An apostille is a way to certify who is who no matter where you’re from, or where you’re going. The apostille punches two holes through the cover sheet and your document, and certifies it’s real by putting a blue ribbon through the holes, and then affixes it with a giant gold seal. It ends up looking like the kind of document used to legally cut off Anne Boleyn’s head.

Whoah, there, big fellah. You’re not done yet. The Mexican consulate can’t be expected to read the underlying document, because it’s all in English and tied to the back of your apostille. So you have to hire a certified translator, who has to read all the info on the apostilled documents, and translate everything into Spanish. But you can’t separate the cover apostille from the document, so you have to take a bunch of pictures of it by rolling up the cover page every which way, peeking at various angles, and blend it into a kind of mosaic picture of the underlying certificate. Then they translate it into Spanish for you, with an official CERTIFIED TRANSLATION stamp and signature on the document. They generally spell your father’s name wrong, and the town clerk’s name wrong, and about a dozen other mistakes, which you correct for them so they can charge you money for this exact translation.

You’ll need passport pictures. Don’t smile or they don’t like them. I haven’t smiled in thirty years or so, but my wife’s face almost broke trying to look serious. Bring at least two copies. The internet (teehee) says you don’t need them, because they take your picture for your visa anyway. Whatever the internet might think, the consulate took the photos we brought and pasted them on our file, and would have sent us away if we didn’t have them. Oh, and by the way, you need extremely sharp photocopies of everything I’ve listed, including color copies for your passports, usually in triplicate. I compiled a binder for each of us, both over an inch thick. I used clear sleeves to hold the documents, which can’t have any staples, and if you three hole punch anything, go back to square one and start over.

[To be continued]

It’s Hard To Become a Mexican Resident, Part 1

Please note I said “resident.” I’m not talking about becoming a Mexican citizen, because that’s right up there with alien abduction and chupacabra ranching for practicality and likelihood. A married couple like us could, in theory, get divorced, go to Mexico, find two deranged myopic hard-of-hearing Mexicans and marry them, and thereby technically both become Mexican citizens. But unlike the US, if Mexico thinks you’re doing it for a dodge, they’ll probably tell you to pound sand anyway. It’s easier to explain this process if you just accept that you can live in Mexico like a Mexican, but you can’t live in Mexico as a Mexican. This is not ‘nam. There are rules. Boy howdy there are rules.

You can’t start this procedure in Mexico. If you’re a USian, you have to visit the Mexican consulate nearest you in the states. In our case, that was Boston, Massachusetts. That’s two states and a four hour drive away, but rules is rules. You need an appointment. Actually, if you’re a married couple, you need two appointments. The internet (teehee) and the consulate itself will tell you that you either can, or must, make your appointments using their online portal. It doesn’t work, and you can’t.

Hell, you’ll find out after trying to log in to their portal, over and over, that Boston doesn’t even have online scheduling. You can try calling if you don’t mind “Press 1 for Spanish.” Or more to the point, press whatever you like, you’re getting Spanish. They’d prefer (demand) you ask by email. We did, in English and Spanish. The consulate does not even acknowledge that they received it. You’re just supposed to wait, and wonder. After a few weeks, you can email them again. It feels strangely like pushing the elevator button even though it’s already lit, and you and four other people have pushed it already. You are strongly cautioned (by the internet again, teehee) not to get uppity with your followup requests. Just plead a bit. You won’t get an answer to that email, either. You’re instructed it might take up to six weeks to get any sort of reply to anything. And the answer might be two appointments days or weeks apart, months after the reply.

You can try consulate shopping. Wild tales of Vegas consulates passing anyone with a pulse and a few shekels in their pocket are rife on the internet (teehee), for instance. Others have reported luck, good or bad, all over the US map. We looked into going to the Philadelphia consulate, and a couple in Florida, and Houston, because we read that they might be faster than Boston, but we could never schedule an appointment online anywhere. It’s all broken, or we are. And being stranded in a strange city on an open-ended commitment to waiting around wasn’t appetizing. When we begged for appointments in Boston the second time, we lied only a little and told them if they had any cancellations, we’d show up on short notice. American dependability being what it is, they emailed us back with two cancellation slots on the same day a month in the future. God knows what we would have said if they said, “We have one later today.” I can talk faster than a car salesman, but I can’t drive faster than one.

So you’ve got an appointment, What’s required? for openers, you best be a good boy. Been arrested much? Forget moving to Mexico. They’ve got problems of their own, and they’re not interested in importing any more, unless you count me.

You’re going to need money, and I don’t mean toll change. The fee to apply for a residency visa is only $56 per person (in cash, not refundable if you flunk). That’s just the cover charge. There are several ways to demonstrate that you’re not (ever) going to be a burden to the Mexican state, and they all involve various sums you might not have. You might think you’re a rich American, so no sweat, but Mexico doesn’t care about your theoretical money. Equity in your house is theoretical money, for instance, or imaginary if we’re talking about 2009. They’ll also require documentos out the ying yang to prove said sums. For example:

The most common way to get permission to live in Mexico for 1 year is through solvencia económica. The sum required is based on a certain number of days of Mexican minimum wage, which is very minimum indeed, but they want to account for a lot of them in a row. It varies by consulate, and they change it every year, but you’re going to need about $80,000 in the bank to qualify. If you’re married, you’ll have to pay for your spouse, too, but it’s not double. You need somewhere between $2000 and $5000 more.

After you’re done puffing out your chest and sniggering about a paltry sum like eighty large, let me clue you in. Your net worth don’t mean jack shit. It better be in cash, or something close to it, or it doesn’t count. And you don’t get to “explain” anything. It’s “show, don’t tell” south of the border. You have to present 12 straight months of at least that much money on original bank statements. Dip one peso below the required amount for one hour six months in, and your clock starts again. If you’re one of those sexy people who does everything on your phone, including your banking, waving the balances on your Nokia phone at the consulate staff is going to get you precisely nowhere.

We had original bank statements, because we’re the last people on earth that get them mailed to us. We still had to get a credit union officer to personally stamp and sign every month, every page, and then write a cover letter on bank stationery that averred that both my wife and I had unrestricted access to all the funds for the entire 12 months. The look on the bank manager’s face gave me the impression she would have preferred that we rob the bank. It would have been less trouble. And if another month ticks over while you’re waiting for an appointment at the Mexican consulate near you (it will, and it did), you have to go back and get the latest ones stamped and signed, too. And by the way, the consulate wants several copies of every page in addition to the originals, and you better not have a staple in them, or any doodles or highlighting on the originals. When we got our interview, it wasn’t a formality. They looked at every page, and scrutinized every deposit. Got a windfall in there? Best be able to explain it.

[To be continued]