The Year We Moved to Mexico

The whole thing started with Spanish lessons.

I had been studying Spanish for about a year and a half, mostly because I had always wanted to learn another language. At first, it was just a daily habit: vocabulary practice, podcasts, and television shows where everyone seemed to speak three times faster than the people in my lessons.

Then I started watching videos made by Americans who had moved to Mexico. Some were retirees. Some worked remotely. Some had moved with their families. They walked through neighborhoods, visited markets, talked about food, and showed the ordinary details of daily life.

The more I watched, the more I wondered: Could we actually do that? Not someday. Not after retirement. Could we do it now?

At first, I brought it up casually, the way you mention an idea without really expecting it to become real. “What would you think about living in Mexico for a year?”

It sounded a little ridiculous when I said it out loud. We had a home, work, responsibilities, and a daughter in elementary school. People do not usually wake up one morning and move their family to another country just because one of them has been practicing Spanish.

But instead of immediately listing all the reasons it would never work, we started asking how it might. Could we work from there? What would we do about school? Where would we live? Could we bring the dog? What would we need to sell, store, or leave behind?

The more questions we answered, the less impossible it seemed.

Things moved surprisingly quickly after that. Only about four months after I began seriously considering the idea, we were on a plane to Puerto Vallarta to close on a condo. Even now, that part amazes me. We went from watching other people live in Mexico on a computer screen to signing paperwork for our own place there in less time than it takes some people to decide what color to paint a bedroom.

Our condo was in Nuevo Vallarta, not far from the ocean. The area was quieter than Puerto Vallarta, with long beaches, palm trees, and warm evenings that made you want to stay outside.

The first few weeks felt almost like an extended vacation. Everything was new. We were figuring out grocery stores, driving routes, restaurants, school schedules, and all the little things you normally do without thinking. Even simple errands became adventures.

I had studied Spanish, but studying a language at home and using it in daily life are very different things. In a lesson, you know the topic. In real life, someone asks you a question you were not expecting while a truck is backing up, music is playing, and three other people are talking nearby.

Sometimes I understood perfectly. Other times I caught one word, smiled confidently, and hoped I had not just agreed to something important. Most people were patient with me. They seemed to appreciate that I was trying, even when my grammar was wrong or I had to stop halfway through a sentence and start again.

Our daughter started third grade at a bilingual school, which was probably the biggest adjustment for all of us. We worried about whether she would feel comfortable, whether she would make friends, and whether learning in two languages would be overwhelming. As parents, you can convince yourself an experience will be wonderful, but then you have to send your child into a new classroom and hope you were right.

She handled it better than we did. Before long, she was talking about classmates, teachers, and school activities as though this had always been her life. She heard Spanish every day and picked up words and expressions much more naturally than I did.

One of my favorite memories from the school was their Halloween celebration. Halloween in Mexico was familiar enough that we recognized it, but different enough to feel special. The school was full of costumes, decorations, music, and children running in every direction.

At one point, the children began smashing cascarones over one another’s heads. Cascarones are hollow eggshells filled with confetti, and the kids were having the time of their lives chasing one another around and cracking them over their friends.

There was confetti everywhere—in their hair, on their costumes, across the ground. Our daughter came running over with bits of colorful paper stuck all over her head, laughing and looking for someone else to chase. It was chaotic, loud, and completely joyful.

That is one of the images I still think of when I remember that year: children running around together, not worrying about who came from where or which language they spoke at home.

On weekends, we explored as much as we could. We spent time in Sayulita, a small surf town north of where we lived. It was colorful, busy, and full of energy, with surfers carrying boards through the streets, little shops, restaurants, music, and people gathered around the main plaza.

Sayulita could be crowded, especially on weekends, but it had a personality that made us keep going back. We would walk through town, stop for food, look through the shops, and watch surfers out in the water.

Near our home in Nuevo Vallarta, the beaches felt completely different. They were wide and open, with plenty of room to walk. We spent afternoons swimming, looking for shells, or simply sitting and watching the sunset.

Those sunsets became part of the rhythm of our life. Sometimes we would realize it was getting late, walk down toward the water, and watch the sky change from blue to orange and pink. It was the sort of thing that might have felt like a special occasion back home, but there it was simply what we did on an ordinary evening.

That may be what I miss most—not one particular beach or restaurant, but the feeling that beauty had become part of our everyday routine.

Living there also gave us the chance to experience Mexico beyond the coast. One of our trips was to Oaxaca, which we loved almost immediately.

There was art everywhere. We saw murals painted across buildings and walls, and we spent hours looking through shops and markets filled with handmade crafts. Textiles, pottery, carved and painted figures, jewelry—everywhere we looked, someone had made something beautiful by hand.

We met artisans and heard about the traditions behind their work. Even when my Spanish was not good enough to understand every detail, I could sense the pride and history in what they created. Oaxaca made a deep impression on all of us. It felt colorful and creative, but also connected to traditions passed down for generations.

Mexico City was completely different: enormous, energetic, and full of more history and culture than we could possibly take in during one trip. We visited museums that could have taken days to explore properly. Our daughter was still young, so we tried to balance long museum visits with food, parks, and breaks whenever everyone’s attention started to fade.

Then we visited the pyramids at Teotihuacán. Standing there and looking down the long avenue between those enormous structures was unlike anything I had experienced before. It is one thing to see ancient places in photographs. It is another to stand beside them and realize that people built them, walked among them, and lived their lives there centuries before you arrived.

We climbed, explored, and tried to imagine what the city had looked like at its height. By the end of the day, our legs were tired and we were covered in dust, but none of us wanted to leave.

Over that year, Mexico gradually stopped feeling like a place we were visiting and started feeling like home. We developed routines. We had favorite restaurants and familiar roads. We knew where to buy groceries and which beach we preferred. Our daughter had school friends. We were no longer trying to fit every experience into a vacation schedule because we knew there would be another weekend.

That was one of the great gifts of living there rather than simply visiting: we were able to experience ordinary life.

We learned more about Mexican culture, but we also learned how much we still did not know. Mexico is such a large and varied country that every place we visited felt distinct. Nuevo Vallarta was different from Sayulita. Oaxaca was different from Mexico City. Each had its own food, traditions, pace, architecture, and personality. The longer we lived there, the less we thought of Mexico as one simple thing.

After about a year, family needs made it necessary for us to move back to the United States. It was not the ending we had imagined when we started. Part of us had hoped we might stay longer or find a way to keep that chapter going.

Packing up was much harder than arriving had been. When we first moved, everything ahead of us was unknown and exciting. When we left, we knew exactly what we were saying goodbye to: the beaches, the routines, the school, the warm evenings, and the feeling of having taken a chance together as a family.

But I have never regretted doing it.

That year changed the way we thought about travel, family, and what was possible. It taught us that sometimes you do not need every detail figured out before beginning something. Sometimes a question is enough.

Could we do it?

Four months later, we were closing on a condo. Soon after that, our daughter was attending a bilingual school, I was using my imperfect Spanish every day, and we were building a life in another country.

We went to Mexico expecting an adventure. What we found was a second home. And even though we eventually had to leave, our love for Mexico came home with us.