Aprender Cuesta
Gringo journal
Dear Radio Free Pizza gourmets,
As you might have noticed, it’s been about a month and a half since I’ve delivered a dispatch, bulletin, or spectacle. Maybe you've started to wonder what happened to me. To make it up to you for my absence, I’ve decided to tell you a little of what’s happened to me, in an autobiographical format that doesn't lean too much on the royal “we” and which instead keeps it all first-person: that is to say, welcome to this newsletter’s first journal.
(Yeesh! I find this so tiresome. I’m not a memoirist, I'm a deep-trends analyst and undercover fiction writer. But, here we are, and here we go: my sincere apologies if this homespun slop doesn’t meet our menu’s typical standards.)
But to put what’s happened to me in context, I’m going to have to go back a lot further than February 2025: in fact, let's take it back to December 2012, when I first visited Mexico City. On a whim born only the week before—though one which had doubtless germinated for years, given how much I adored Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, which first introduced me to the metropolis in text—I flew into town just to ride a bus two more hours to nearby Teotihuacán, the archaeological site of a bustling pre-Columbian city, where I and perhaps a few hundred others would celebrate the end of the Mayan calendar.
After spending the night in a nearby hotel, the other tourists and I hurried before dawn to the gates of Teotihuacán, rushing to beat the sunrise. We made it to the Pyramid of the Sun just in time, and dawn found me standing on its top level. There, I had the peculiar sense of history bearing down on us, though I didn't put any stock in the Mayan calendar: I just thought it would be a cool place to be on a day that in recent years the popular culture had been pumping up. Nonetheless, the air buzzed with anticipation as hundreds or even thousands gathered, drumming, chanting, and embracing the dawn of a new era. The energy was electric, a mix of mysticism and celebration, as if the ancient city itself pulsed with renewed life. As the sun rose over Teotihuacán, I closed my eyes and breathed it all in, feeling as if I had witnessed something extraordinary, even if the world kept turning just as it always had.
Then I took a nap on top of that pyramid for a couple hours.
After returning to Mexico City, I had the pleasure of launching one of my life’s great friendships when I met the host for my couchsurfing, who goes by the name of Chessterina and who on that trip introduced me to the pleasures of her neighborhood, Coyoacán: for example, the legendary bar El Hijo del Cuervo, and Museo Frida Kahlo. Chessterina would become the host on every trip I made to Mexico City until 2019, allowing me to sleep in a room above Estación del Té, the now-shuttered coffeeshop in Benito Juarez that she operated with her friend Marina (and now mine too), among others like then-barista Rodro, guitarist for the phenomenal Molinette Cinema.
For years after we met, I would spend college semesters for both my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in my hometown of Minneapolis, and spring breaks and summers in my room above Chessterina’s coffeeshop in Mexico City. On these trips I met my friend Dr. Edgar Avendaño Mejía, who has hosted me a few times since 2019, and whom longtime subscribers will remember from a spectacle posted last year, and who also introduced premium subscribers of this newsletter (as well as those familiar with my earlier podcast miniseries) to one of my life’s darker episodes. That transpired In March of 2018 when, on my second day back in Mexico, I had an epileptic seizure while descending a tile staircase in Estación del Té.
Not having yet lived through the 2020–’23 coronavirus pandemic, I hadn’t developed the same distrust of pharmaceuticals that characterizes me now. I never thought my anxiety medication would betray me, but looking back, the warning signs were there all along: the year before my worst seizure, the smaller ones had already begun—brief, disorienting jolts that I brushed off as stress or exhaustion. These included one attack that occurred while I was eating a torta in the park across the street from Estación del Té on St. Patrick’s Day 2017, one of several near-death experiences on that day that inspired Chessterina to nickname me Patricio, which of course bears some resemblance to the name “Patrizio”—as in “Patrizio della Luna.” (In the Nahuatl language, “Mexico” means “navel of the moon.”)
The fact that St. Patrick’s Day 2017 was the theatrical release date for T2 Trainspotting—the underrated cinematic sequel (as opposed to the unremarkably literary one) for the famous tale of Scottish heroin addicts—should have clued me in to the reality of my drug problem. I had been on benzodiazepines for years, leaning on them like a crutch, unaware (or unwilling to admit) that my body had become dependent. Then, one day, as I descended the stairs, everything unraveled. A sudden, violent convulsion took hold, and I lost control, my body collapsing before I could even register what was happening. Fortunately, my friends at Estación del Té managed to get my unconscious body to Star Médica, the private hospital in Colonia Roma, where the doctors gave me a 50/50 chance of survival.
Through a friend in Minneapolis, those in Mexico City managed to get in touch with my father, who cashed in his 401(k) to travel and negotiated with the travel insurance provider from my own airline ticket to have my body returned to Minneapolis on a private plane.
Some two-and-a-half weeks later, I woke up out of a coma in the middle of the night, slowly becoming aware of my endotracheal intubation. My first conscious thought was, “This doesn’t belong here,” and I removed the intubation myself—a very ill-advised decision, though I was fortunate enough not to suffer the damage to my vocal cords and trachea that it risked—before I stepped out of bed to use the bathroom, though of course my weakened legs couldn’t support my weight and I collapsed to floor, where I immediately began emptying my bowels. Nurses rushed into my bedroom, and I learned then that I had been in a coma and that they hadn’t been sure if I would ever wake up. But I survived, and then began frustrating months of physical and occupational therapy before returning to graduate school for the summer semester, where (I’m proud to say) I still finished my master’s degree a semester early despite my medical catastrophe.
Acquiring that degree opened the doors for me to high-income professional contracts, while the combination of travel insurance and Minnesota’s medical benefits for low-income taxpayers (as I’d been while in my coma) meant that I didn’t suffer the financial handicap of hospital bills. But my father hadn’t been so lucky, after cashing in his 401(k). Accordingly, he began to consider more seriously the idea of retiring in Mexico, where his social security would buy him a lifestyle of near-luxury compared to what he’d enjoy in the U.S. In the interest of paying him back, I decided to help.
However, I didn’t have many years as a high-earner, and not having had the savings or job history then and having too much student debt to purchase a home outright in the U.S., I eagerly invested in a pre-construction property in Puerto Vallarta, where the sea-level would better accommodate my father’s weakening lungs, signing papers in November 2019 for a condominium scheduled for delivery in February 2021—a span of time during which I’d earn enough to cover the purchase, and come out of it with a property worth much more than the cost.
Guess what happened in the meantime! That’s right: the governments of the world shut down the economy for fear of the newly declared coronavirus pandemic. But Mexico didn’t shut down to the same degree: as I recall, the country’s state of emergency lasted only two months before essential industries like construction started operating again. (Forgive me if these “journal” posts don’t put the same effort into fact-checking.) Still, the blow to projects like that in which I’d invested proved difficult for real estate developers to overcome.
Though the one developing the condominium project in which I’d invested still managed to limp along another year—during which time my father and I rented a home in Puerto Vallarta, where we drove from Minneapolis in January 2021 with a van full of his furniture that we put into storage, then expecting the condominium’s delivery before the end of the sales contract’s grace period in August of that year—slow sales led to payroll suspensions that led in turn to workers’ strikes, during which time the end of pandemic unemployment benefits forced my return to the U.S., with my father following some six months later to take advantage of Medicare as he addressed some newfound health concerns.
Though bridging loans allowed construction to begin again in the second half of that year, it only lasted a few months before the bank that had provided the developer his original mortgage placed a lien on the property after losing a court case (and its appeal against the judgment) that would likely force the liquidation of its assets—and then another lien appeared from the financier who provided the aforementioned bridging loan. Thus began about two years of annexes and modifications to my original sales contract while the developer continued courting other financiers, forwarding their letters of interest to myself and the other buyers to prove he was trying, and doing his best to sweeten our deals so as not to have to refund us with money that he didn’t have—or, otherwise, which he’d done his best to hide. During this time, my work as a consultant in technical writing kept me employed in lucrative positions, though ones in which the terms of the companies’ leases for their laptops kept me from working abroad.
Finally, toward the end of 2023, I’d had all I could stomach of the opportunity cost of having my savings tied up in a project that may never be completed. On the advice of my real estate agent and of the attorney I’d hired in the interim, I negotiated a termination agreement: supposedly those are easier to enforce than the refund protocols contained in the sales contract, if it should come to litigation. The developer signed that termination agreement in February 2024 before sending it to my attorney, and I returned to Mexico in April (my first time visiting since I left in 2021) to supply my own signature, and to finally acquire a temporary residency visa if, as expected, the developer failed to pay me and I needed to initiate litigation—and also taking the time to meet Marina and Chessterina at the latter’s new deli.
That termination agreement mandated the payment of my investment and contractual penalties by June 2024, with further penalties agreed upon if that payment didn’t arrive. Of course it didn’t, and so my attorneys filed a brief in the federal court in Guadalajara. Naturally I trusted them to handle my case with integrity; but instead, they deceived me. By August 2024, the court had already dismissed it as improperly formatted and inconsistent, but one of those attorneys misled me, claiming that the court had only requested an explanation while charging me for drafting a response. In reality, he was supposed to file a second brief, but he never did.
Of course, something else happened that same August: Mexico’s federal judiciary initiated an indefinite strike to protest then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s proposed reforms, which aimed to transition the appointment of judges and magistrates to a popular vote system. The judiciary argued that this change threatened judicial independence and disrupted the balance of power. The strike led to the suspension of federal court activities nationwide, impacting legal proceedings and raising concerns among investors and international observers. After nearly two months, the strike concluded in October 2024, though the judiciary continued to express opposition to the reforms, emphasizing the potential risks to the rule of law.
In the meantime, I negotiated with my employer to allow me to continue working for them from Mexico on a laptop matching theirs which I purchased only for the purpose of continuing to work, where I could oversee my case and take some greater comfort from simple proximity.
That judicial strike gave my duplicitous attorneys some cover for neglecting to file a second brief. Then, in November, the one who misled me in August lied to me again, telling me he had filed a motion for continuance—something that was impossible, given that the original brief had been dismissed and no second brief had been submitted. I would continue waiting for the federal courts to admit my case until this past January, when my inquiries with another attorney revealed the dishonesty of those I’d hired, which likely constituted the crime of simulating a legal or judicial act.
So, in February this year—on the same day I released the spectacle featuring the esteemed Daniel Natal, in fact—I returned to Puerto Vallarta, where I hired a new attorney and proceeded to liquidate the storage unit for my father’s furniture that I’d rented since 2021. Selling that furniture felt like dismantling my childhood piece by piece. Every item held memories for me—lazy Sunday mornings, family dinners, the quiet comfort of a home that no longer existed. Trading away the furniture I had grown up with, I felt a deep, aching sorrow settle in, selling off the tangible evidence of a life that had once been whole. The echoes of laughter, the warmth of familiar spaces, all reduced to price tags and transactions. And when the unit was finally empty, I stood there, staring at the hollow space, knowing I had just lost something I could never get back, and knowing meanwhile that my fight to recover my financial investment would continue for months or years.
Spending a month in Puerto Vallarta felt like dipping a toe into the life I wanted but couldn’t quite claim as my own. I wandered the cobblestone streets, drank mezcalitas at sunset, and let the ocean breeze convince me, if only for a moment, that I belonged. But the other gringos—the ones who had made this place their home—moved with an ease I envied. They had figured it out, found the way to stay, to trade in the grind for golden afternoons and slow, sun-drenched mornings. I watched them stride confidently toward the beach, their tan lines permanent, while I remained a visitor, counting down the days until my departure, knowing I’d be leaving behind more than just a vacation.
Now I’m back in Mexico City, the city I’ve always preferred above all others, waiting again for news of progress in the courts—which I understand have admitted the latest brief, assuming I can trust my lawyer’s word—and still caught between past and future, haunted by thoughts of what could have been. When I first decided to invest in a pre-construction property in Puerto Vallarta, I never imagined I’d end up trapped in a nightmare of uncertainty: I only wanted to pay back my father with a beautiful retirement in paradise. Obviously I regret taking the risk I did, investing in a real estate development that’s still only half-finished more than five years after work first started. But the best I can do now is wait on the courts and hope that the dream I bought into doesn’t turn into a total loss.
Meanwhile, other aspects of my life now demand my attention: a business slowdown at the company where I’ve been working as a consultant for the past two years has led them to trim their staff, meaning that as of April Fool’s Day, I’ll be out of a job. But still I walk the streets, sip coffee on rooftops, and let the city’s hum drown out the echoes of dead dreams, of failed investments, and of ongoing legal battles swirling around me as I wait for the resolution with which I can finally move forward.
Even so, I remind myself that life goes on, and that someday this chapter will end as so many others have: with a new beginning. Until then, at least, I have the free time again to distract myself with new issues of this newsletter. A lot has happened in the past month to introduce fresh chapters of many stories I’ve been covering, and to give me a lot of content to produce and release. So, if you’ve made it this far, think about supporting my work as a premium subscriber: help me see some return on the time invested to distract myself while I wait to see if I can recover my losses. The story isn’t over yet. Let’s turn the page together—because, trust me: there’s plenty more to come.
What a fiasco! My uncles finally squeezed me out of my house so I can relate to watching the old disappear in a whirlwind. For what it's worth good luck in court.