I’m writing this introduction at the end of the summer of 2023, about six years after first flying to México to see a girl I met on Twitter, and three years since the pandemic turned one of my month-long stays into an indefinite one.
“How did you end up here?” is the question I’m asked most often when meeting people in person, or “how did you end up there?” when video-calling new work clients back in the UK who, until I tell them I live in México, are probably wondering why I’m wearing a T-Shirt when the whole of Britain is blanketed by sub-zero temperatures.
I always recite the main story beats: got talking to Kassandra online, booked flights, fell in love, did long-distance, visited just as COVID shut the world down, had the life-changing “what if I just stayed?” talk, got married, acquired dual citizenship, adopted Kass’ dog, and moved in together.
Friends who know I work as a copywriter tell me I should turn this experience into a book. Maybe. For now, a good old-fashioned blog feels like a nice place to write.
This blog isn’t a chronological love story, a series of travel articles, or a journalistic account of Mexican affairs. There are elements of all these things, certainly, but they’ll be stumbled upon, rather than used as starting points for writing.
My day job is in marketing, for better or for worse, so I write a lot of ‘content’ optimised for what people are searching for. I absolutely do not want to do that here.
Before deciding to open a blog, Twitter was where I would frictionlessly share my every fleeting thought about life in México. I’ve come to enjoy the app less and less in recent years, sadly, so here I am.
Mostly, this is a collection of anecdotes on the things I’ve seen or heard about about in México, in relation to the things that interest me: design, art, memes, architecture, music, language, movies, food, people, cities, media, and history.
I’m writing first and foremost based on what I learn from everyone around me, then occasionally filling in some gaps with a little bit of light research.
An entry about a piece of Spanish slang I’ve learned, for example, will primarily explain how friends have introduced me to the phrase, e.g. what it means, when it’s appropriate to use it, how the slang word came to exist, etc.
If I were to look up the phrase and happen upon an interesting bit of etymology, I’ll likely mention it, but if a blog post just becomes indistinguishable from a dictionary definition or news article, with no personal story, I won’t publish it.
None of this is supposed to be particularly comprehensive. It’s a pile of vignettes. Some slices of life. A stack of passing observations.
Again, my job is in marketing. For my entire career, I’ve been able to see every measurable datapoint on how people find, engage with, and share everything I’ve ever written. I can see tables of words that people are Googling to discover my work, access maps which show how visitors get around the sites I build, and watch screen recordings of people sneakily stealing my writing to use in their own stuff.
Here, I have absolutely no idea how many people are visiting, what they’re looking at, or where they are. I’m keeping this blog tracker-free. It’s quite relaxing having a little hole in the internet that I can scream into without really knowing who’s hearing. The only way I’ll know if you’ve read anything here is if you tell me you have. There are three main ways you can do this:
Old school! Everything I publish has a comment section. You can say something about what I’ve written, share your own anecdotes, reply to other people’s comments, etc. Classic.
For so long as the bird app remains at least partially usable, you’ll be able to tweet me at @jeeveswilliams. I’ll come back and put an addendum here if it ever gets run so deep into the ground that even I decide to jump ship.
You can send me an email at hola at memoriesofmexi dot co, or use the form below to email me.
To be sure: I’m never going to use your email address for anything other than, y’know, replying to your email. Human to human, like it’s 1999.
If I ever decide to make some sort of mailing list to send people alerts when I publish a new post, I will send you one email with nothing more than a link to join the mailing list.
You can ignore this email. Or delete it. You could even reply: “I trusted you. You’re just like all those other marketers.”
The city I moved to in México is Monterrey, a sprawling metropolis encircled by mountains in the northern state of Nuevo León. I came here after spending my entire life in Portsmouth, a dinky little island city on the south coast of the UK. In terms of physical geography, Monterrey is about as different from Portsmouth as it gets. Monterrey is gigantic, hot, dry, landlocked, surrounded by mountains, pocked by enormous skyscrapers and ugly American-style malls, largely car-dependent, hilly, and 500 metres above sea level. Portsmouth is small, rainy, occasionally humid, surrounded by sea, doesn’t have a single residential or business skyscraper, is completely walkable, flat, and has parts that are below sea level.
Though much of this blog will focus on cultural phenomena not necessarily tied to any one place in México, most of the posts about first-hand experiences with places I’ve visited will be centred within Monterrey. The majority of my time in this country has been defined by a. the limits of a long-distance relationship and b. a pandemic, so we’ve not gotten around too much just yet.