Dear Friends,
Why are we more concerned with eating the rich than helping the poor? Why do we want to take down those at the top more than support those at the bottom?
The other day I was cycling through Oaxaca’s Mixteca Alta, one of the poorest regions in Mexico. It’s the kind of place where a typical meal consists of instant noodles with imitation Doritos and a squeeze of hot sauce and lime. (Pretty fucking delicious, I’m not gonna lie.) I was near San Simón Zahuatlán, Mexico’s poorest municipality:
The poorest municipality in 2020 was San Simón Zahuatlán, Oaxaca, where 99.6% of residents live in poverty. In 2019, human development in the municipality, located in the state’s Mixteca region, was comparable to that in Yemen, the United Nations said in a report.
I stopped at a wooden shack to refill my water bottles and stuff my jersey with snacks. Three young girls, pictured above, and a boy were slurping their noodles in silence while watching TikTok videos and playing games on their smartphones.
When I sat down to join them, they put their phones down and tried to stifle their giggles. I wasn’t sure if they had ever met an American before, but boy did they think I was funny. Once the giggling subsided, I peppered them with questions. How far was their school? Were their classes in Spanish or Mixtec? How did they have better phones than me? (More giggling.) Who were their favorite TikTok influencers? What games did they like?
We had so much fun. And they had questions for me too: Where was I from? Who taught me to ride a bike? Why was I riding alone?
Across the street, a group of middle-aged men were drinking beers under a tree. They didn’t look happy or sad or angry. They barely looked alive.
I paid the owner, a Mixtec woman in her 70s, for my drinks and snacks. I gave her a tip and she said that god blessed me. The only decoration on the bare walls was a large calendar photo of the president, his gaze turned upwards like a prophet. Maybe AMLO would bless me too.
It was 92 degrees and I still had another 45 miles to ride back home. I put on the new Four Tet album and wondered about the differences between the lives of the kids I had just met and their peers in the US. They go to school, do chores, hang out, and stare at their phones like any other kid. Who’s happier? Who is more optimistic about their future?
Back home, I got curious and discovered that as of 2011, an estimated 150,000 Mixtecos live in California and 800,000 live in Mexico.1 So how do Mixtecos born in the United States differ from their relatives in Oaxaca?
That evening, I watched the 1995 documentary Oaxacalifornia (available to stream for free on Vimeo) about the migration of the Mejia family from the Mixteca Alta to Fresno, California. 25 years later, the same production team picked up the story where it left off, focusing on the third generation of the Mejia family and their identity struggles in Oaxaca and the U.S.
The third generation of Mejia teenagers feel out of place in the US and express a longing to move to Oaxaca. Their Mixtec relatives can’t understand why they’d ever consider leaving the US, where they have so many opportunities. I guess the grass is always greener.2
I found another documentary (just 30 minutes long and streaming for free) co-directed by two Triqui teenagers living in Washington State who visit their relatives in Oaxaca for the first time.3 It’s a lovely, short documentary that will make you think differently about the people who pick your strawberries. I was struck by the hurried dissatisfaction of the Triqui family living in Washington despite their relative wealth, compared to the calm contentment of their family in Oaxaca despite their relative poverty.
Is it simply that those who are dissatisfied are more likely to leave? Or does American culture encourage dissatisfaction? Or is it something else?
All this week, I’ve been thinking about the juxtaposition between the four smart, funny kids slurping their noodles and the drunk middle-aged men sitting silently across the street. Is that the future that awaits them if they stay? And what would their future look like if they were to leave, as many others have, in hopes of providing a better future for their children, only to hear their children express a wish to return to Oaxaca because they don’t feel accepted in the US?
For now, fewer Mixtecs are leaving for the United States and more are returning. In Mexico, and throughout Latin America, economic inequality is declining. My instinct is that it’s a good thing — not to eat the rich necessarily, but to create more options for the poor. Hopefully, more options make for better lives.
Finally, I was hesitant to include the photo of the three girls above without blurring their faces. After all, I’m certain that by the time I re-open the time capsule in 20 years, it will be routine to reverse image search anyone.4 Does that mean they are likely to come across this post ten or twenty years from now? If so, I hope they leave a comment or send me a note. I’d love to hear how they’re doing.
🧰 A useful tool: Poe
A new LLM model is released nearly every week. And every week I seem to find a new use for them (thanks largely to
’s prompt library and ’s new podcast, How Do You Use ChatGPT?).But I was getting annoyed at having 10 tabs open in my browser and copying and pasting prompts from one site to the next to compare their responses. Fortunately, Poe is a mobile and desktop app that brings together all of the main models, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama 3, Mistral, and others.5
👏 Kudos:
Kudos to the Centro Binacional para el Desarrollo Indígena Oaxaqueño for their 30th anniversary of providing services and legal advice to indigenous Oaxacans living in California.
Have a great week!
David
Roughly one out of five Mixtecos live in California and one out of every four live in the United States.
In an interview, the director recounts the origin of the films:
I was in a small town called Magdalena Jaltepec and one day I heard people on the street who spoke in English with their children. Normally you only heard Spanish or Mixtec, so it was a surprise. I asked them where they were from and they invited me to their house. Grandfather Leo is a gardener who lives in Fresno, California; they invited me that same October to Fresno and I found the difference of his life in the two places impressive: in Oaxaca, he is a king, the prodigal son who returns with money to build a house, and in California he has a modest life. The difference seemed to me to be a good theme for a movie.
Three of the largest indigenous groups in Oaxaca are Zapotecs, Mixtecs, and Triquis. The Triquis — whose language is similar to Mixtec — are generally perceived to be the most isolated and marginalized.
But then I saw how they were already uploading photos and videos of themselves and each other.
Oddly,
thinks there are few differences between the main models, which makes me wonder how much he has used them.
Aside from the tangible, metric-able benefits of moving away from Oaxaca, I'd like to think that those four kids might have had their paths changed incrementally by a visit from a Gringo (respectfully) such as yourself. Not to add heavy notes of colonizer mentality, but a friendly visit from a foreign cyclist in their lil part of the world, might make them wonder about the rest of the world a bit more than the guys across the street did, when they were kids.
When asked how he thinks AI will affect computer programmers, one of my students responded today that programmers will become prompt engineers.