The Mexico we weren't expecting
Laura-Lise Jeanine Wong is the author of Immersing in Mexico: How our family moved, adapted and built a life here.
When my first article for Mexico Featured was published, about our experience putting our Canadian-educated children into the Mexican school system, a reader left a thoughtful comment about the educational inequality that exists in Mexico.
He made a valid point. Our children's experience at a private Mexican school isn't necessarily representative of what is available to children across the country. It's something I'd deliberately acknowledged in the article, because the differences in educational access here are very real.
But the conversation that followed got me thinking about something else entirely. Not whether Mexico has poverty or inequality, because of course it does, but about how much of Mexican society many of us actually see, particularly those of us who immigrate here from Canada or the United States.
After five years of raising our children in Puerto Vallarta, I've realized there's an entire Mexico that many foreigners don't seem to expect to find here. And sometimes I wonder if part of the reason is surprisingly simple: who do we actually meet?
We live in Puerto Vallarta, a tourism town. For many foreigners here, particularly those who retire here or spend part of the year here, a significant portion of their interactions with Mexican people happen within the service economy. The waiter at the restaurant. The housekeeper who cleans the condo. The gardener. The construction crew. The maintenance guy. The taxi driver. The hotel employee.
Those are all real Mexican lives, of course. But they aren't a representative sample of Mexican society any more than the person serving you dinner in Toronto represents the Canadian economy. And yet, if those are most of your interactions with Mexican people, it would be incredibly easy for that slice of life to become your picture of what an average Mexican life looks like.
I hadn't really thought about that until we started talking about the response to my first article. Because our children accidentally gave us a window into a completely different Mexico.
Their school is a private Mexican school. Fewer than five percent of the students are foreign. The overwhelming majority of the families around us are Mexican. And let's just say nobody told them Mexico was supposed to be poor.
I'm being cheeky, obviously. Mexico has very real poverty. But I've lost count of how many times over the years I've sat in the seemingly endless line of cars waiting for school pickup and thought that apparently we're the broke foreigners here.
There are beautiful homes. Expensive vehicles. Family businesses and professional careers. Kids in private school while simultaneously participating in soccer, dance, gymnastics, martial arts, music lessons and whatever else can possibly be squeezed into a seven-day week. Families travel. Kids travel internationally for competitions.
And then there are the parties. My God, the parties.
If you want to destroy the stereotype that Mexican families don't have disposable income, I invite you to attend a Mexican child's birthday party. We've been to children's parties with entertainment, elaborate themes, professional decor, dessert tables, catering and enough production involved that I'm reasonably certain some of them cost more than my wedding.
None of this means everyone in Mexico lives this way. That's precisely the point.
We've had friends visit us from Canada who were genuinely surprised by the Mexico they encountered. One friend commented on how many nice cars there were. It wasn't an offensive observation. He wasn't looking down on anyone. He was simply surprised. But I've thought about that comment many times since, because surprise tells us something about the picture we had beforehand.
Of course there are expensive cars in Mexico. Of course there are surgeons, engineers, architects, lawyers, executives, entrepreneurs and successful business owners here. Of course there are Mexican families with investment properties and vacation homes and children studying abroad. Mexico is a country of nearly 130 million people. Why wouldn't there be?
And yet somehow, for many of us who grew up in Canada or the United States, those people were largely missing from the version of Mexico we were shown.
We knew about poverty. We knew about low wages. We knew about migration to the United States. We knew about corruption and cartels. We knew about resorts, beaches and the smiling people who worked in them. We knew considerably less about the Mexican family pulling up in a luxury SUV to collect their children from school before heading off to their next activity.
That's a strange gap when you start noticing it.
There are numbers behind some of what we've experienced, although defining a "middle class" is notoriously messy in any country.
INEGI, Mexico's national statistics agency, attempted to quantify the country's social classes using household data. In 2018, before the economic disruption of the pandemic, it classified 46.7 percent of Mexican households as middle class. In urban areas, that figure was 55.5 percent. In pandemic-affected 2020, those figures dropped to 42.2 and 49.8 percent respectively.
Those numbers don't describe every Mexican family, nor do they erase enormous regional differences. In fact, the differences within Mexico are extraordinary. Mexico's newest multidimensional poverty figures make that impossible to ignore. In 2024, 29.6 percent of the population was considered to be living in multidimensional poverty. But that national number ranged from 66 percent in Chiapas to 9.9 percent in Baja California.
Both things can be true. Mexico can have tens of millions of people experiencing poverty and millions of middle-class and affluent families. Perhaps the problem isn't that one of those Mexicos is real and the other isn't. Perhaps it's that foreigners tend to hear much more about one of them.
There's another complication when we talk about income in Mexico: a tremendous amount of economic activity happens outside the formal economy.
According to INEGI's preliminary figures, Mexico's informal economy accounted for 25.4 percent of GDP in 2024.
That doesn't mean official statistics are meaningless, and it certainly doesn't mean we can simply assume that everyone has undeclared money hidden somewhere. It does mean economic position in Mexico can be more complicated than looking at someone's formally reported salary and deciding how well-off they are.
Businesses operate differently. Families pool resources. Property can be passed through generations. People have multiple income streams. Formal employment is only one part of an enormous economy.
That's another reason I've become cautious about assuming I understand someone's financial situation here based on the measures I grew up using in Canada.
Foreigners living in Mexico talk a lot about the "expat bubble." Usually we mean foreigners who only socialize with other foreigners, speak English, eat at foreign-owned restaurants and rarely integrate into the community around them.
But I think there's another kind of bubble that is harder to recognize. You can interact with Mexican people every single day and still experience only a very narrow slice of Mexican society.
You can know the names of every waiter at your favourite restaurant. You can chat with your housekeeper every week. You can know your gardener's children and joke with the guy who comes to fix your air conditioner. Those relationships can be warm and genuine. But if nearly every Mexican person you know entered your life because they were providing you with a service, you still may not have a particularly representative picture of Mexican society.
I don't say that critically. For a long time, I wouldn't have recognized it either.
Our children changed it for us. School put us into rooms we wouldn't otherwise have entered. Birthday parties, soccer sidelines, graduation events, parent chats, science fairs and school trips introduced us to Mexican families simply as other families. Not employees. Not service providers. Not people whose job required them to interact with foreigners. Parents.
And that's where the picture became much bigger.
None of this is an argument that Mexico is secretly wealthy and we've all somehow missed it. That would be just as ridiculous as reducing the country to poverty.
Mexico's inequality is profound. In 2024, 38.5 million people were living in multidimensional poverty, including seven million in extreme poverty. Those numbers deserve to be taken seriously. But another 42.3 million people were classified as neither poor nor vulnerable under that same multidimensional measure.
Those people are Mexico too.
The wealthy family is Mexico. The middle-class family is Mexico. The working-class family is Mexico. The family struggling to put food on the table is Mexico. The surgeon is Mexico. The waiter is Mexico. The business owner is Mexico. The housekeeper is Mexico. One does not make the other less real.
Maybe that's what has bothered me about the way Mexico is sometimes discussed outside the country, and occasionally even by foreigners who have lived here for years. The world is full of shades of grey, but Mexico is so often painted in extremes. Paradise or dangerous. Cheap or luxurious. Rich foreigners and poor locals.
After five years of raising our children here, the Mexico we know doesn't fit particularly neatly into any of those boxes. And perhaps one of the most useful things our children have given us isn't simply a life in another country. They've given us access to parts of that country we might never have seen otherwise.
Because if all we'd ever known of Mexico were the people we met while being served by them, I'm not sure we would have understood just how much of Mexico we weren't seeing.