Abstract
Rachel Barber examines the cultivation of a “Mexican home” in the community of North American retirees in the Lake Chapala area of Mexico. She shows that the widespread adoption of a “Mexican-style” aesthetic reflects the migrants’ desire to connect with the culture of their new country of residence which, however, remains constrained by the social divisions and communicational barriers of the foreign community. She demonstrates that the retirees’ interpretations of the “Mexican home” reflect the foreign community’s sociocultural distance from the local Mexican community as well as the internal, class-based divisions among retirees. Drawing on Bourdieu’s understanding of the social significance of taste, her analysis of North American retirees’ taste in the “Mexican home” serves as a window into foreign retirees’ social repositioning processes as they define their belonging abroad.
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Notes
- 1.
The average benefits American retirees received from social security in 2019 amounts to $1503 USD (Social Security Administration, 2019).
- 2.
Participants were informed of the nature of the investigation and all interviewees filled out a consent form agreeing to the use of interview transcripts for academic publications and were given the option to appear under a pseudonym. Consent was given by the participants to use the photos that appear in the chapter (permission was given photo by photo).
- 3.
While the majority of the interviewees had traveled to Mexico before moving, only 5 out of 29 had visited areas that were not all-inclusive beachside resorts, border towns like Tijuana or the foreign community of Chapala. This echoes findings by Rojas et al. (2014) of retired migrants’ limited interest in Mexico prior to their move: while 370 of 375 (98.7%) survey respondents from Chapala and San Miguel de Allende had traveled internationally, only 41.8% of respondents had traveled to Mexico prior to moving.
- 4.
All interviews with Mexican participants were translated from Spanish to English by the author.
- 5.
In Mexico, gringo is a commonly used term to refer to U.S. citizens.
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Barber, R. (2022). A “Mexican Home”: Defining Belonging Through Taste Among Retired Migrants in Chapala, Mexico. In: Schweppe, C. (eds) Retirement Migration to the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6999-6_4
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