San Miguel De Allende and Savannah Night

Savannah Knight and I are having a fight. We are miffed at one another and are going at each other like tongs and hammers. It is a "he" said and the "she" said sort of thing taking place on my book's page on Amazon.com. It is getting hot and heavy and frankly she's wrong.

Now, I am not talking about the lovely and sumptuous R&B artist Savannah Knight. She is a beautiful woman, if I might say so, but it is not this babe with whom I am at war. Rather, it is someone using her name as a pseudonym to post "reader's reviews" on that portion of the Amazon.com's author's book pages where you can review the books you have purchased from them. To Amazon's credit, I have to tell you, they are doing things to prevent this Reader's Review, something that is supposed be a forum for a book review, from becoming a forum for over-stimulated nutty people who have nothing better to do than threaten the authors.

"Savannah" claims to have read my book in which I write about expatriation issues and in which I am sharply critical of Americans who move to Mexico and set about changing the place where they've moved into little Americas. In that book, I take sharp exception to American enclaves, American grocery stores, American-only gated communities, and the hardheaded resistance to learning Spanish and integrating into the culture. My point is if that's what you are going to preach in America about immigrants who come to the States to live, learn the language and integrate in the culture, then you should practice what you preach.

Poor, poor Savannah doesn't get it. She made as the premise of her "reader's comments" (which Amazon removed for its vitriol) and in her comments on the other Reader's Reviews, that she 1) lives in San Miguel de Allende, 2) never thought otherwise about learning Spanish, and 3) lives in Mexican neighborhoods and pals around with Mexicans, and 4) because she's never experienced what I have, what I wrote cannot possibly be true. Do you love that logic?

GOOD FOR HER!

I used San Miguel de Allende as an example of how not to expatriate in the book in question.

What the poor dear just didn't get is that:

The vast majority of gringos, in San Miguel or elsewhere, don't speak enough Spanish to be able to save their lives even they had to.

Self-absorption, I guess, though I could be wrong, was so strong in this person posing as Savannah Knight (she couldn't be honest enough to use her real name as I most certainly have in my columns and books) that she felt not only compelled to write the most vitriolic comments yet on my book at Amazon's site, but she also felt compelled to call the author (yours truly), "bitter" and "resentful."

Why Americans think they are all Dr. Phil's and can make clinical judgments on someone's psychological state of mind, I will never begin to fathom.

San Miguel de Allende and its foreign population, composed mainly of rich Americans, is an interesting test case for the expatriation experience gone bad. It is so interesting, by the way, that academics from America are just beginning to conduct research projects in San Miguel de Allende. And, when I say bad, I don't mean Gone Bad for the gringos but for the poor locals who suffer the indignity of losing their town's unique Mexican identity and being forced to live and shop outside the center of their own Mexican town.

Look, if there is a standard by which true and genuine expatriation into a foreign country occurs, then what would you call those who violate that normative and prescriptive expatriation standard? If the following, for the sake of argument, could be accepted as the normative and prescriptive standard for expatriation to Mexico, then what do we call those who do not follow this standard:

"Expatriation is the process by which an intense integration occurs whereby the individual of another culture is eventually absorbed into the new culture. This includes absorption into the new culture's language, celebration of holidays, observation of local events, politics, if allowed by law, in the new country. Also, it would include the development of intense interpersonal relationships with neighbors in the new country."

If this is something we could agree on as the standard for expatriation, then aren't those who violate this standard, and in some cases willfully, NOT EXPATS but FAKEPATS?

I mean, aren't they?

As I said earlier in this piece, Good For Ole Savannah, if she's learned the language, is assimilating the culture so that she might fully integrate into Mexican life, and has intense personal relationship with her Mexican neighbors.

However, the poor thing has her head buried in the sand if she thinks what I wrote about in the book she deplores isn't happening around her.

Recently, a prominent academic from a well-respected American university finished a research project on some of the very issues I pontificate in my book, the one Ms. Knight loathes.

Here are some of this professor's conclusions about the American gringo population in San Miguel de Allende:[1]

• San Miguel de Allende attracts one of the largest foreign populations in Mexico.
• "Most do not learn the local language and reside and socialize within an isolated cultural enclave. These immigrants practice their own cultural traditions and celebrate their national holidays. Grocery stores are stocked with locally unfamiliar products that hail from their homeland."[2]
• American professionals largely work illegally in San Miguel and pay no taxes.
• They typically do not pay their servants the Social Security taxes required by law.
• The illegal businesses run by the American gringo community rips off the local San Miguel de Allende government in excess of more than four million pesos a year in unpaid taxes.
• Some Americans are actually illegal aliens and do not bother with proper documentation.
• Some are even involved in the Illegal Drug Trade and take drugs across the different Mexican state lines.

This is the San Miguel de Allende about which Ms. Knight claims I know nothing. These are the issues I've mentioned (minus the drug involvement...I knew of it but could not confirm it) in the book. Savannah Knight thought it appropriate behavior to blast to smithereens and taint the positive comments on my Amazon.com page.

I wish I could say this is the first person that has tried "killing the messenger" because they were unable to deal with the contentions of the message.

Why...why...why can't the Savannah Knights of the world who read something with which they take exception take on the premises, examine them critically, and offer a counter argument with convincing proofs of why I am wrong and they are right?

Isn't that what civility demands?

And, civility, is that it?

They can't because they are not civil people, or civility is lost on them, or they simply don't know how to argue critically and rationally?

Why do grown adults lash out like schoolyard children who are ill equipped to handle grown-up issues-all they can do is act like children?

I don't know.

[1] Sheila Croucher is a professor of political science at Miami University in Ohio and author, most recently, of Globalization and Belonging: The Politics of Identity in a Changing World.

[2] http://banderasnews.com/0703/edat-americanmigrants.htm