Life in Mexico After the 2024 U.S. Election

Life in the aftermath of the U.S. presidential election.

Author’s Note: For the next year I’ll be writing The Oaxaca Postcard Project, where every day of the year I’ll send a postcard, free of charge, to a different subscriber. Paid subscribers will receive their postcards first. If you’d like to receive a postcard please sign up using this form.

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Like so many others we were crushed by the results of this month’s presidential election in the United States, but we also weren’t surprised. This is exactly why we moved to Mexico.

There is a psychological theory called “genetic memory,” which posits that from birth people are hardwired with the memories of their ancestors. This doesn’t mean they literally have and can recall the memories of their parents, grandparents, and other ancestors, but rather that the experiences of their forebears have been encoded into their DNA.

This theory is subject to actual, empirical research, but it also just makes sense. We know definitively that a person’s DNA changes over the course of their life in response to both their environment and their direct experiences. It’s easy to understand without any sort of scientific education or training that exposure to radiation and toxins can change your DNA. What a lot of people don’t know, though, is that your DNA can also be changed by your actual experiences.

Trauma can, and does, literally change your DNA. And since DNA is passed on from one generation to another, what you experience in life is transmitted to your children via your genetic data, and so on down the family line. Your children won’t be able to directly recall those memories, but your experiences are literally a part of who they are from birth, and it’s theorized that influences their thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and predilections.

I am of Jewish heritage and am also mixed race. My grandpa, Bill, was Black, and the family genealogy traces back his ancestors to enslavement. Bill also always claimed that the family had Native Americans in it, although he was never able to provide much evidence. Either way, being subjected to oppression and tyranny is encoded into my DNA. I think it’s one of the reasons that not only did the waking, reasoning part of my brain say, well before this election, “Maybe we should live somewhere else,” that sleeping, coiled reptile part of my brain, the part that whispers in the dark and helps keep me alive, said, “You need to get the fuck out of here while you still can.”

I can’t speak for how the entire country of Mexico feels about the election of Trump, but it’s broadly bad news and people are worried. Our friends in the United States, those who aren’t in denial, are terrified. Emigrating from the United States has never looked better.

Leaving your country, home, family, friends, job, and culture is terrifying. There are days when I would gladly give up all of the comforts we have here to be back in New York. To see our friends, to be able to walk into a familiar restaurant that greets us with a smile of recognition. To hear the sounds of Columbus Avenue, and feel the crunchy dirt under my feet of the path that circles Central Park’s reservoir. To feel once again like a blood cell being pumped through the veins of the great, fetid, wonderful beast that is New York City.

But now, especially right now, I doubt we’ll ever live in the United States again. The dangers of mass and school shootings, failing schools, underfunded hospitals, surging rents and impossibly expensive homes, decaying roads, highways, and bridges, and an open embrace and acceptance of corruption and fascism say that no, there is no future there.

So here in Oaxaca, on the side of a hill, we breathe deeply to steady ourselves and we wait to see what will happen, especially as Andrea and I have both begun to receive messages and emails asking us, both tentatively and directly, what it was like to leave the United States, what the process is like, and how difficult the paperwork is, from friends and colleagues who are scared for their lives and the lives of their children and spouses and are thinking not that they want to leave, but that they have to.

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