Hola! Welcome to A Year in Oaxaca, a twice-weekly newsletter about life in Mexico. Please click on the pequeño corazón (the little heart) if you like what you’ve read, and/or the revolving arrows (the restack button) to help this newsletter reach even more adventurous and curious people.
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Two weeks ago, I launched a new newsletter called The Casita Chronicles, wherein I’m documenting the construction of a small house in Mexico from start to finish. But what I foolishly didn’t anticipate is that even with significant help from an architect, designing a house from scratch, figuring out permitting, considering materials, and doing all of the other ten thousand things that go into this sort of project, adds an incredible layer of complication on top of my already existing responsibilities.
The truth is that this newsletter, A Year in Oaxaca, likely is coming to an end in its existing form. I started this newsletter as a way of journaling about what it was like to move to and then live in Mexico, and so that I could develop material for a book documenting that mid-life transition. I’ve now written enough words to fill probably about 3 volumes but have left myself no time to actually write the book, let alone the multiple fiction projects I’ve had simmering away on the side in various states of development.
Something has to give, and because it makes me virtually no money, it will probably end up being this newsletter.
A huge part of the issue is Substack itself. Substack sells itself to writers by essentially promising them that if you put your writing into its ecosystem you’ll tap into a large community of readers who will not just enthusiastically consume your thoughts but will also pay for the privilege. Of course, that’s a fantasy.
Substack, like any social media platform—and it is a social media platform—deliberately promotes people whose work has virality, meaning it encourages not just sensationalism but also a very particular type of very familiar content built on hot takes and openly sleazy self-promotion. Feeds are chockablock with “coaches” that will tell you how you can transform your newsletter to make it more economically viable, which obviously doesn’t work, because of it did those coaches would not be spending all of their time coaching and would instead be writing fun, presumably thoughtful things for people who are not existentially stressed unemployed journalists.
The platform is also strongly biased towards surfacing the writing and posts of people who are already successful and famous, whom the platform actively recruits and then heavily and deliberately promotes. If you have a relatively modest subscribership, such as my own, you can’t expect the platform to help you grow because it’s not interested in doing so, or even designed to make that happen.
The work-to-profit ratio on Substack increasingly doesn’t make sense for me. After three years of posting more or less twice a week, my posts are becoming longer (and thus more time consuming to write and edit) and also more specific and idiosyncratic. My days of doing broad strokes journalism about Oaxaca are over. We’re locals now, and given how many subjects I’ve already covered, to break new ground I have to write about topics that seem to have little appeal to casual readers. Turning A Year in Oaxaca into a straight up travel blog also makes no sense because AI will simply ingest and parrot back that information while deliberately guiding people away from my newsletter. Unless the fundamental nature of the internet changes (and I do think that’s possible), there’s no point in doing that kind of writing, as my own words will just be used against me.
What makes the most sense is for me to disable the paid option for my newsletter, give prorated refunds to the people who paid for a year up front, and then post here occasionally for free without any sort of set schedule or commitment.
I’d rather keep writing this! This newsletter represents, at least so far, my greatest and most consistent efforts as a writer. I’ve written many (many!) hundreds of pages. It would be a shame to waste that. So, before I kinda/sorta quit this platform, we’re going to try something new to give me some time back, and it’s something that feels utterly ridiculous. We’ve hired someone to cook and clean for us and they start next month.
In New York City, my wife and I paid $4300 a month for a 700 square foot 5th floor walk-up apartment with no dishwasher or washer and dryer and no garbage chute, meaning we had to walk our trash down six flights of stairs to the building’s garbage bins, which were hosted in a roach infested cell in the basement.
Our apartment was also aging rapidly. Our sheetrock wasn’t installed correctly and so, as time went on, it increasingly began to sag, with the screw holes becoming visible beneath the paint and plaster. Our floors canted inwards at a visible angle, with the entire building sagging towards the center, leaving a sort of growing slope. Our ceilings also had perpetual minor leaks due to a severe fire some years before we moved in that wasn’t correctly repaired. The apartment was decidedly not luxurious, but it had great light, two bedrooms and one and a half bathrooms, some semi-private roof space, and was located at the corner of West 86th and Columbus Ave, which is one of the best possible intersections in the city. It remains to this day my favorite place I’ve ever lived, and even though it was small and in a lot of ways kind of shitty, we felt wildly fortunate to have found it.
We lived a great life, but not a particularly luxurious one, and that certainly changed when we moved to Mexico. We were propelled into a life of luxury so far beyond what we had previously experienced that even now, three years later, I have trouble accepting it.
We are not by American standards wealthy, but by merit of the exchange rate and how Mexicans tend to compensate each other, we live a life of luxury that would never in our lifetimes have been attainable in the United States. We live so absurdly well that it makes me sort of emotionally queasy. It feels almost unjust to have so much comfort in a place where the vast majority of people make do with very, very little.
The luxury isn’t why we moved, either. We emigrated to Mexico for reasons that were mostly non-tangible. We were drawn here, and especially to Oaxaca, by the culture, artistry, food, climate, and sheer friendliness of the people we met. It is a place that is both physically and culturally beautiful. But I am, if not materialistic, certainly an enthusiastic consumer and purchaser of beautiful things. Before we moved I pictured a beautiful home filled with local art, patios studded with potted succulents and cacti, and fresh and inexpensive dinners in local restaurants. We’ve found all of that here. But what also came with our relocation was the ability to hire people to do things for us.
In fact, not only can we afford to hire people, we’re able to do so and to compensate them generously. When I recently asked our nanny, Liz, if she’d thought about looking for nursing jobs, a field she has a master’s degree in, she said to me that we pay her better as a nanny and give her better benefits and flexibility than what she’d receive working as a nurse here in Oaxaca, including (or perhaps especially) if she worked for the government, which is a major employer of healthcare professionals.
But while Edgar is our property’s caretaker and Liz watches Leo, what we don’t have is someone to cook and clean. Originally Liz was going to help us clean, but Leo, our gigantic, constantly active toddler needs such constant activity that there’s simply no way Liz can find the time to do so. Instead Andrea ends up doing the lion’s share of the cleaning and I do all of our cooking.
I’ve been loathe to give the job up. Given that I’ve been a food and travel writer for more than a decade now, even the idea of hiring someone to cook for us felt especially bizarre. Cooking is my job, dammit, and not only is it something I love to do, it’s a household responsibility I take quite seriously. Part of Edgar and Liz’s compensation is that every day I prepare lunch for them, and the idea of offloading that to someone else felt not just incredibly privileged, but like I’d be shirking my responsibilities as a husband, father, and employer.
But the truth of the matter is that we can afford to hire someone to do these things for us, and removing some of my responsibilities is pretty much the only possible way I can keep writing this newsletter while also managing our home and making time for my memoir and various novels. So we’re going to try it out, and if giving me a few hours a day back doesn’t work, this newsletter as it currently exists will come to an end at the start of the New Year.
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