I had been to San Miguel de Allende once before. I was staying with two friends, Jessica and Mario, in Queretaro and we drove up for the afternoon. Just as we arrived it started to rain and I spent the entire afternoon slipping and sliding down the cobblestone streets, focusing all my attention on the ground. Jessica and Mario both kept reminding me how many Gringos lived there, how it was nothing more than a tourist trap, that it wasn’t real Mexico. It was obviously not cool to like San Miguel de Allende. It meant you were a tourist and not a traveler.Not that I ever got the chance to make up my mind. Every third step I nearly fell on my ass, my flip flops flipping and flopping all over the slippery wet stones. We ended up walking around what this trip I found out was only one-tenth of the town and then returned back to Queretaro. I left neither impressed nor unimpressed.This trip I wanted to have a better look around. At times, it’s easier to get to know a place when you’re not with people who have already been there. The drive, climbing and twisting through Guanajuato’s hills dotted with pine trees, was easy. The dark clouds faded away and the climate turned perfect just as we reached the outskirts of San Miguel.Heading towards the center we passed old colonial homes being fixed up by architects and construction firms that looked straight out of Southern California. Retired couples from Scottsdale were surely waiting to move in. After passing a shop advertising “Foot Long Subs” we got to the plaza and I forgot I was in Mexico. Everywhere you looked, there was an American. In fact, I’m sure that the American:Mexican ratio is greater in San Miguel than in San Diego.I didn’t know what to say, what to think. Jessica and Mario were right I figured. This place is wack. Look at all these Gringos, listen to their god-damn Spanish, look at their condescending expressions. I looked over at Laura and for the first time the whole trip she looked low on confidence. And she looked angry.I could understand. Everywhere you looked there were poor Mexicans waiting on rich Americans. All of the Americans were white. They were mostly liberals, will probably be voting for Dean. They smiled sympathetically when small dark-skinned girls came up trying to sale lollipops, but they did not buy them. A few of them put their hands on the girls heads, thinking how photogenic the girls are but realizing it was not p.c. to ask to take a picture, especially without buying the lollipop.This was my impression of San Miguel. I asked Laura what was wrong, could see it in her eyes, and she said it made her sad to see Americans traveling so leisureley here, having Mexicans waiting on them with big fake smiles, while there are so few Mexicans that are able to travel to the U.S. without swimming across a river and working their asses off.I was thinking the same thing. I was a little confused: here I was, a Gringo traveling throughout Mexico feeling uncomfortable seeing other Americans. It didn’t seem right at all. We were hungry and went to check out the foot long subs. When a forty-five year old Texan came out to ask us - in English - what kind of sandwich we wanted, I was sure we were in the Twilight Zone. He had so much confidence, towering over us, staring at us like there was nothing unnormal about the situarion at all. I was at a loss for words.I asked for the Chicken Ranch … bread toasted. While we sat, waiting for our Texas Ranger to make our sandwich I had a look around his place. I could hear video game noises coming from the back and sure enough, around the corner were five huge flat screen TV’s connected to Sony Playstation 2’s. American and Mexican kids were killing each other with laser guns and heat seeking missiles and they were having a good time doing it. The owner’s son, with a California surfer complexion not at all like his father, was watching the front counter while his dad made the sandwich. A Mexican kid who looked even more like a Southern California surfer came up to him asking, in Spanish, how to make the game two person instead of one.The kid was at a total loss. He spoke Spanish well enough, surely passing his eighth grade Spanish class with an A, but the colloquialisms were beyond him. He nodded, agreeing to walk over with the kid to check things out. Then his dad came out, strutting proudly, with the sandwich and explained to us that it was overfilling, that it would be messy and be sure to take plenty of napkins. I think we stilll looked shocked because he started speaking to us - both of us - as if we didn’t understand a word of English. “Messy, messy - need lots of napkins,” holding up the napkins for us to see. He had a friendly smile on his face and his eye brows were turned down sympathetically.We took our sandwich to the plaza and ate in silence. It was big, it was messy, and it was damn tasty. I was thinking to myself, “what the hell is this guy doing: Coming to Mexico, not even speaking Spanish, sitting around and spending all his time playing video games, taking pesos from kids, and making the occasional sandwich.”Then I realized, that’s exactly what he was doing and there was nothing wrong with it. There was something lacking for him in Texas and he decided to move here, to be with his children, to do what he wanted to do. He was hurting no one. For all I know he was helping. There was no basis for my anger against our sandwich artist.Thousands of Mexicans - though under completely different circumstances - come to the United States and do nothing but play video games, watch soccer on TV, and make the occasional burrito. To live and let live. All of a sudden I felt guilty of some kind of self-hate for feeling so antagonistic towards the American tourists and habitants of San Miguel. Towards the end of our stay, I wanted to live there too.After our sandwich, it was off to check out the libary. I fell in love - the most amazing library I’ve ever seen. Not in size nor selection, but it is everything a library should be. Walking through the entrance arcs into the cobblestoned Spanish plaza, I was elated. It was a modern utopia. Mexicans, Americans, Europeans - young and old, hipsters and hippies, bikers and national geographic subscribers - were all sitting around tables and fountains reading, teaching, learning. The walls of the plaza were covered with shelves upon shelves of popular paperbacks in every language imaginable. Inside the rooms of the giant colonial hacienda were more books - more than you could picture - books that have been on my “must read list” for years. There was another small plaza with a reasonably priced cafe, the english weekly of San Miguel is upstairs along with internet access. Posters throughout the library in both Spanish and English announced cultural, arts, and social events going on throughout the area. The mayor of San Miguel, one of the posters announced, was having a question and answer audience - in English - with San Miguel’s foreign community.I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, reading, hearing … the small snippets of conversation and language lessons. Everyone was so happy, so content. Laura and I seemed to be the only skeptics that wealthy Americans and not as wealthy Mexicans could live in such harmony, that there wasn’t any kind of Marxist class cleavage or good old fashion Yankee hating.San Miguel de Allende seemed to be the poster child of Neo-liberalism. Everyone was working to make the place better. Everyone was working for him/herself, wanting to better his/her own life as well as improving the community in the process. (A note: there were at least four copies in both Spanish and English of every work of Ayn Rand and Adam Smith) But it really seemed to be working - I’ve never seen such ambition and contentment before. It had never occurred to me that capitalism could bring about a kind of Utopia as well. I forget who coined the term, or exactly how it goes, but one of the old-skool forefathers, when drafting the constitution, envisioned the United States as “the city on a hill,” a shining example for all humanity. San Miguel seemed to me like the closest I’ve seen to the American model of the “city on a hill.”After some of the most amazing burritos I’ve ever had (though not the typical burritos we’re used to, these are filled with rajas, mole, picadillo, and barbacoa) we headed down to the Instituto Allende, also housed in an old beautiful colonial hacienda, but with walls covered by brightly covered murals rather than bookshevles. The institute serves three purposes: it is an accredited private college offering bachelors and masters degrees in Fine Arts. It also offers two and four week extension art classes to local residents and passing tourists. And finally it is a gallery, a place to enjoy a cocktail in the upper patio while reading the newspaper or walk around the grounds admiring the sculptures and canvases of visiting artists and artisans.Like all of San Miguel, the institute was filled with happy carefree faces. There were artists of every age. Young mexicans in corduroy with purple hair and sixty something white-haired Americans were discussing color arrangements and painting techniques. I had never seen anything like it. I thought back to all my classes at UCSD, all the history and political theory texts that I would have read anyway, paying the tuition or not. The literature classes hyper-dissecting works of genious with an intellectual jargon to make professors feel important, books that I have since reread and learned to love.I felt a tinge of regret, wishing that I had studied something more useful like fine arts. Learning the processes of painting, sculpturing stone, forging metal, design theory. Here I am now, after all those bullshit classes, with all those bullshit big wig professors, and their bullshit texts (often royalty presents to their friends or themselves) and I am more than conviced that I would be better informed had I spent the four years reading the New York Times, the Nation, and the Economist every morning.Now I spend my free time trying to teach myself what I could have learned throughout college - systems, design, web publishing, communication, programming. These were my thoughts, walking around the immaculate campus, admiring the work and tallent of the artists. Laura got some information at the front office for her younger sister, an art student who will soon be starting college, and then it was time for us to head off for Queretaro. After my initial skepticism, the initial bad taste in my mouth, I left San Miguel de Allende not wanting to leave, wanting to be a part of what was going on.