Is Mexico the Anti-Slop?

In Mexico, meaningful materialism is easier to find than you’d think.

This AI-generated image of “slop” is, itself, slop.

Last week, the New York Times published an essay titled “Living the Slop Life,” a story describing the proliferation of slop—the term typically used to describe low quality content produced by A.I.—in the daily life of Americans. Fast fashion, clothing so cheaply made it’s basically designed to be thrown out, is slop. Fast casual food, made carelessly to be eaten without joy over an ephemerally short lunch break, is slop. And social media, unquestionably, is slop.

I’d never heard the word slop used in this particular way before, but the usage feels apt. Being a modern American means being deluged by low quality crap. Marvel movies, hard seltzer, vapes, deliveries from SHEIN and Temu, all are modern day pacifiers, entertaining but ultimately hollow detritus from a bored civilization. I think that our decision to move to Mexico was motivated, at least in part, by an effort to escape from this sort of junk, and to live a life of generally better quality.

Oaxaca is a place where quality isn’t hard to come by, just as the United States is a country where the opposite is true. Anyone working in modern day America knows that corporations don’t value true expertise, or at least they’re unwilling to pay for it. Similarly, normal Americans can’t afford to hire true experts because they can’t afford to pay for quality. Employment is steady but wages are stagnant, and no one I know who isn’t independently wealthy is financially thriving. A good therapist will cost you somewhere in the range of $250 an hour, cash, and a good psychiatrist is closer to $600-800 an hour. A well-built modern house made from old-growth lumber and stone, and not sheetrock and tyvek, if you can even find such a thing, could be millions. Even just a meal at a nice restaurant that uses fresh, local ingredients and meat that wasn’t factory farmed could cost you between $30-50 for an entree. Who can afford all of this?

Here in Oaxaca, that metric is largely reversed. The things that are the best quality are often far less expensive than the things that are slop. A freshly made agua fresca, a drink made from fresh fruit blended with water, might cost the equivalent of fifty cents or less, while a bottle of soda might be a dollar. A pair of handmade leather huarache sandals costs less than a pair of Nikes. A set of locally made ceramic plates, bowls, and cups is far more affordable than one manufactured in China and sold in a department store. 

Mexico’s problem is one of self-esteem. While Trump’s recent tariff nonsense has prompted a bit of a movement to encourage Mexicans to buy products made in their own country, Mexicans still largely believe that the things they make for themselves are inferior to those imported in from other countries. Mexicans are very class-conscious, and that’s especially true in Oaxaca, the second poorest state in the country. Owning and using Mexican things, made locally, is something poor people do. Owning things that are non-Mexican, that are expensive, signifies that you’re economically (and thus socially) succeeding.

Nowhere is this dynamic more transparently displayed than at Liverpool, a chain of Mexican department stores that provide an experience quite similar to visiting a Macy’s. Liverpool is the favored shopping destination for many of Oaxaca’s wealthiest residents because it carries American brands. But just because the clothing and appliances come from the U.S. doesn’t mean they’re well-made. If you actually look at the construction of the things being sold you’ll see that the general quality is often quite low—slop from wall to wall—while prices are extraordinarily high, far more than you’d pay for the exact same thing in the United States. Quality isn’t the point, though. The rich don’t need to hand down or mend a pair of pants, and so they don’t need to be concerned about whether something is designed to fall apart. The value of the thing lies in what it signals socially; whether it’s actually a well-made object is irrelevant.

But for everyone else, quality is vital. When you have limited resources, things need to last, and they need to be affordable. I’ve written many times about our carpenter Edher and how the many projects he’s completed for us (including our spiral staircase) cost much less than their factory-made equivalents. If we’d gone to Liverpool and purchased a factory-made bed frame and compressed fiber bookshelves we would have paid far more than we did for the objects custom designed and made to our exact specifications. In Oaxaca, the same is true for rugs, utensils, plates and bowls, candles, and even clothing. The things made by hand here in Oaxaca are, by and large, less expensive than the things made by oppressed people working in foreign factories.

This dynamic even (and perhaps especially) applies to food in Oaxaca. Every day of the week a car drives through our town selling steaming hot tortillas out of a cooler in the trunk, and those tortillas have the telltale signs of being made with Maseca, a type of bland, almost flavorless industrialized corn flour sold throughout both Mexico, Central America, and the United States. But the tortillas hecho a mano (made by hand) from heirloom, nixtamalized corn sold one town over, in San Sebastian Etla, cost less per kilo than the shitty industrial ones. Vegetables are more affordable than meat, leading many people to use pork and beef as more of an accent than the main ingredient in a meal. The food in Oaxaca is by no means free from industrialized and processed ingredients, but they don’t form the bulk of the cooking here. Not all restaurants are equal and true craft remains an intentional act, but the baseline for life is closer to heirloom than it is to industrial.

Mexico isn’t a magical place where everything is perfect and beautiful and hand made, like some sort of mystical agrarian society free from commercialism and advertising and influencers clogging up traffic on busy sidewalks. Slop can also be fun sometimes, and there’s joy to be had in consuming something that you know is bad for you, physically or spiritually. But it took leaving the United States to realize the degree to which the quality of the things in our lives had been sacrificed for expediency, and in Mexico, where life is far less convenient but also, in some ways, more fulfilling, slop isn’t the dominant way of life.

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