Kate’s Blog

Mexico is fabulous, don’t get me wrong. If I could, I would stay indefinitely. However, there is one thing that I will not miss when I return home. The white price. You see, for every item here there are two prices. There is the (albeit flexible) Mexican price that is reasonable and cheap. And, there is the price for people like me. Tall, thick accented-whities who have “I HAVE A LOT OF MONEY. PLEASE RIP ME OFF” written on their foreheads. You hear one price for the first guy & when you ask 20 seconds later the price has doubled or tripled. In Thailand things are even less subtle. The prices are stated publicly and are listed one for natives, and another higher price for “falangs” or foreigners.

I just got back from a trip to a border town between Guatemala & Mexico, La Mesilla. Not sure what it is about border towns, but they seem to be magnets for cheap souvenirs & the generally nasty.

I went with a friend who regularly visits the border to buy clothing to re-sell to clients. She convinced me it was the land of quality apparel at amazing prices. I went with lots of hope & money with the intentions of buying some uniforms for the girls I’m in charge of at church.

Turns out it is just the land of thin non-absorbent towels with large tigers, plastic Chinese ballerina fountains & horrendous skirts with bad flower prints, for the most part. The majority of the wares, tacky as they were, did not seem very cheap. She later told me that every vendor offered her the “white price” because I was with her, looming in the backround of the transactions with dollar signs for eyes. When she insisted that the prices where twice what they had offered the week before, they simply shrugged and nodded towards me as they said, “things change, prices change.” With my caucasianess, I brought a big white curse for her bargaining that week.

I don’t mind paying for things like weird souvenirs this way. After all, there is no Mexican price for them since Mexicans don’t buy chili magnets that say “Cancun” on them, tie-dyed T-shirts with kokopelli dancing across the front or nesting dolls made out of painted orange peels. But, for food in the market, local transportation and event admissions I would like to pay the price, not the white price.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 9th, 2007 at 10:38 pm and is filed under Travel, Mexico, Interests. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.