If you read guidebooks or travel articles about Mxico, you will read that Mexicans are wonderfully accommodating, friendly, warm, and generous to strangers. You will be given the impression these people are the Salt of the Earth and maybe even virtually Saints. You will be told things like, Mexicans are helpful to a fault and they will be so patient with you trying to learn Spanish. While this might be true, I have, of late, begun to doubt the multitude of clichs that pour forth from all the guidebook and article sources about Mexico.
About 18 months into our expatriation experiment, my wife and I began to wonder what was going on in the heartland of Mexico. The clichs we had read in our pre-expat research were, frankly, beginning to fall apart. The longer we lived here, the more we were beginning to see things that the guidebooks gushed about Mexicans congeniality werent necessarily true. Something wasnt adding up.
Guanajuato is about as much in the middle of the country as it gets. It is truly the heartland of Mexico. Here life is uber-provincial. The dictionary defines provincial as, a person of local or restricted interests or outlook; a person lacking urban...