Hecho en Mexico

Troncones, Mexico

For the past week we’ve been staying at a vacation villa owned by an American, on Mexico’s Pacific coast. This villa, like many others along the coast here, is built in a traditional “rustic” Mexican style. Polished concrete walls and floors, wooden pillars from tree trunks, built-in-place wrap-around seating, exposed wooden beams, smooth beach pebbles inlaid in the floor marking boundaries on the pool deck and around rooms.

Everything is hand made and customized for this place. I imagine a worker with a wheel barrow full of small flat stones laying every one of them by hand into the concrete floor. And there must be thousands of these stones – probably gathered from the beach out front. The doors are all custom made, as are the tables and chairs, presumably by local carpenters in their workshops (“tallers” en espagnol). The outdoor shower is crafted from a large tree branch, found and finished for this use. There is no Home Depot convenience to be seen – no drywall, no factory finished cabinets. Even the side tables are built by hand.

Mexico – at least in the areas I know, which don’t include the major cities – is a place where people still make their living crafting useful things that others need. Although I know this is not the model for a hyper productive economy, it comforts me. It is also fundamentally not a feature of our post-industrial economies of the north. And this I find troubling.

I remember a previous visit to Mexico during which we were invited to tour a new beach house for sale. It had been built and was being sold by an American. Home Depot construction throughout. The owner touted its advantages over Mexican-style homes, oblivious to its utter lack of charm or anything that could be called artful. It was a soulless place and left me feeling depressed for the rest of the day. It also brought to mind an old Oscar Wilde quip about Americans knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.

In our modern economy there are few opportunities for people who want to craft useful things that others want to buy – excepting perhaps the current craft brewing craze. (My view on that: the day of reckoning will soon come and there will be consolidation. And maybe some blood.) In place of opportunities for making useful stuff people need, we pin our job creation hopes on the tech sector, where a mindless App like SnapChat can achieve a market value of $30B within a few years of its creation – by a couple of 25-year-olds. I fear for our future.