Finding home in Mexico, one ordinary day at a time

In July, I spent two weeks in New York visiting family. By then I had been living in Querétaro for almost two years, and the trip gave me an extended stretch away from the daily life I had built here. I enjoyed seeing people I love, moving through places tied to an earlier part of my life, and hearing English everywhere without having to work for it. Somewhere during those two weeks, I began thinking about going home, and I realized that the place I meant was Querétaro. I noticed the language only after it had already formed in my head. Home has always been a complicated word for me, attached to places, people and periods of my life that do not fit together as neatly as they once did. New York holds family and history for me, and Santa Fe was home before I moved to Mexico. Both remain part of me in different ways. When the visit was ending, though, I was ready to return to my house, my routines and the life waiting for me in Querétaro. Finding standard ground in new routines The author now has a new house in Querétaro, and a new home in Mexico. (Mark Arcuri) Much of my first year in Mexico was organized around the experience of having moved. There were residency matters to settle, work to reconsider and a language I could use only imperfectly. I was learning how to do ordinary things in a place where the assumptions behind those things were often different from the ones I had known. Even buying bread could become a small encounter with the fact that I had crossed a border and was learning how to live on the other side of it. I wrote about one of those encounters in my first Mexico News Daily column, when I described standing in a panadería three weeks after arriving and realizing I had answered the wrong question twice. At the time, that moment helped me recognize that I had crossed from visiting Mexico into living here. I understand that crossing differently now. Becoming a resident happened fairly quickly. Becoming someone whose life is here has taken longer. William Bridges spent much of his work distinguishing change from transition, a distinction that has occupied me professionally and personally for years. Change describes what happens in our circumstances. Transition is the internal process through which we gradually reorganize ourselves around what has happened. A person can move on a particular day, carry boxes into a new house, complete the required paperwork and still need considerable time before the new life begins to feel inhabited from the inside. The year Querétaro translated me and taught me a new grammar for living The quiet shift from novel to familiar I spent much of my first year somewhere in that internal reorganization. Querétaro was the place where I lived, and I remained aware of living in Querétaro. I noticed differences constantly. I compared things with the U.S. more often than I realized, translated language in my head and carried an ongoing awareness that I was still learning the rules. The newness was sometimes exciting and sometimes tiring, and in either case it reminded me that I was elsewhere. That awareness has begun to recede. I still notice Mexico, of course, and some days I notice it a great deal. My Spanish remains a work in progress, and I continue to encounter situations that remind me how much I have to learn about the culture I entered. Increasingly, though, a day in Querétaro is simply a day. I work, decide what to eat, answer messages, run errands, spend time with people I care about and go to bed without having spent much time thinking about the country in which any of it occurred. When I imagined moving to Mexico, I naturally imagined the parts that made Mexico different. I thought about the pace, the language, the culture and what it might feel like to build a life here. What I could not imagine was the eventual disappearance of much of that self-consciousness. A life becomes familiar through repetition, through doing ordinary things often enough that they become part of the day instead of evidence that the day is happening somewhere new. Building history through small moments I saw another version of that recently in my own house. For nearly a year, my dining room table was simply there. Then I finally set it, and the room looked inhabited in a way it had not before. A week later, two kittens, Frida and Georgia, came to live with me, and suddenly there were food bowls to fill, veterinary appointments to arrange and two small creatures learning the boundaries of a house they seemed determined to investigate completely. Their arrival made the ordinariness even more visible to me. I did not experience adopting them as another milestone in my relocation to Mexico. I experienced it as bringing two kittens home. They entered a life that already existed here, and within days they became part of its routines. I now spend considerably more time wondering what they are getting into than thinking about the fact that all three of us happen to be doing this in Querétaro. My relationships here have changed in much the same way. Friendships now have history. There are conversations that refer back to other conversations, familiar jokes, plans that get made and changed, and the ordinary accommodations people make when they know one another well enough to stop explaining everything. My second column grew out of recognizing how much being known here had changed me. Home seems to take shape partly through that accumulated familiarity, when a place contains people who know something about who you are and expect you to still be there next week. Accepting the ongoing learning process There’s no calculation for the amount of time it will take for the realization to sink in that Mexico is now your home. It’s different for everyone. (Zion Arellano/Unsplash) Mexico can still stop me in the middle of an ordinary day. Yesterday I was at the dentist when a Paquetexpress delivery driver called because he had a package for me. What I understood afterward was that he was asking a very simple question: Was the gate I was trying to describe gray? Under the pressure of a phone call, with no gestures or context to help me, I could not get there. We eventually understood enough of each other to call it a draw, and he left the package. A few minutes later I was back to whatever I had been doing, amused at how quickly an ordinary day can remind me that there is still plenty I am learning. Perhaps this is the part of relocation we talk about less often. We spend a great deal of time thinking about leaving, arriving, adjusting and belonging. Eventually the move itself begins to occupy less of the story. The new country becomes the place where birthdays happen, friendships acquire history, kittens move in, groceries need buying, packages get delivered after imperfect phone calls, work gets done, and you leave for a while and find yourself thinking about going home. That was the word that caught me in July. By the end of the visit, I was ready to go home, and there was no question in my mind where I meant. Mark Arcuri, PhD, is an integrative wellness coach, Associate Dean, and writer based in El Refugio, Querétaro. His first book, “A Life Aligned: The Journey to Allowing the Magic in Your Life” (A Life Aligned Press, 2026), is available in paperback, ebook and audiobook, and opens a trilogy on the inner work of transition. The second, “Paradise (re)Discovered,” arrives this fall. Learn more at drmarkarcuri.com.