At the Saturday market in our neighborhood in San Miguel de Allende, my daughter is starting to lose it. We’ve already demolished the snacks I swore would last all morning, and the stalls are a maze with stacks of freshly fried chicharrón and grills smoldering under giant agave leaves. An abuela at the tortillería catches my eye, smiles, and slides a warm tortilla straight from the comal into my daughter’s hands. The impending tantrum dissolves and the world rights itself.
Parenting outside the U.S. holds up a mirror. You start to see what you once took for granted back home and how much Americans might learn from other cultures: the ease of children playing, napping, and eating in public plazas, or the practicality of ending a birthday party with a full-on piñata beatdown instead of a single polite cupcake.
In Mexico, our days are punctuated by food rituals that are also language lessons and citizenship classes. At the same time, I’m passing down my own kitchen—Texas breakfast tacos, Hanukkah latkes, the Hotcakes my grandfather made when I was a child. Food is the vocabulary we use to belong in two places at once.
After school on hot afternoons, we hunt for paletas. She wants limón; I want mango con chile until I remember I’m forty and heartburn is real. The fruit stand owners hand her slices of watermelon instead, call her “Yuni” (replacing the American j in Juniper with that comfortable lilting y) and ask about her friends at preschool.
I love watching her cautiously try spicy candies with her classmates at school, something she’d never do with me. Sometimes dinner is guayaba tamales torn open and dipped into coconut milk, other times it’s stringy Oaxacan cheese dribbled over fresh corn tortillas she made that day with her babysitter. Other days we sit on the patio with a bowl full of rambutans or guayabas and practice new words—masa, piloncillo, jamaica. These days, she’s correcting our pronunciations but humoring us nonetheless.
She seems utterly at ease in Mexico, a country she’s lived in nearly half of her life. I’m so grateful we landed here at an age when “normal” is still being written. My three-year-old is by far the happiest of all of us here, and that makes the challenges of intercultural living so much easier to bear.
Of course, there are days when I miss food from home. On Hanukkah my husband makes matzah brei and we call her grandparents and argue over the best dipping sauce—applesauce or sour cream. When they visit, we spend hours at the only Jewish deli in town and pig out on egg salad, fresh pickles, and delicate slices of babka.
I didn’t grow up crossing borders like my daughter. My family’s map was a tug-of-war between worlds: a decaying trailer home in a working-class West Texas town and a new build in a Dallas suburb where students parked half-million-dollar Lamborghinis in the high school lot. I was always the rich kid in the poor town or the poor kid in the rich one, and at home in neither. Maybe that’s why watching my daughter inhabit two cultures so easily both thrills and unsettles me. She moves through spaces that once felt closed to me and makes them hers.
She loves the purple public buses that take us into town. They’re a little run down, and the brakes (and music) can be particularly loud. At first it startled her, but after a few good rides she tolerates it for the joy of bobbing up and down over cobblestones. On one of our first trips, the bus was crowded and a ten-year-old girl slid her five-year-old brother into her lap so I could sit down with my nervous toddler. No sighs, no spectacle, just space made for a tired mom. When we got off, the entire bus, driver included, waved goodbye to my daughter. She beamed for three blocks.
Of course, not every public moment is picturesque. We still have the occasional operatic scream, but most days the world seems designed to make room for children. From here, the U.S. looks so different. I remember feeling anxiety in restaurants as my toddler flung noodles onto the wall and dribbled crumbs everywhere. I thought it was cute when she plopped herself next to a table of strangers and watched them eat, but the patrons found it strange.
In Mexico, kids are an expected part of daily life. They seem to have a right to do what their adults do. I never feel like I’m imposing here, simply by existing with a young child, the way I often did back home. None of this is to say that Mexico is perfect or that the U.S. is not generous; it’s to say the defaults are different. Here, generosity often speaks through food.
Living abroad is not uncomplicated. We bring U.S. dollars into a city strained by tourism. Our presence is not an easy fact, especially since I know what it feels like to be pushed out of a city I love by outsiders with deeper pockets. So I try to practice a quiet kind of gratitude: listen more than I talk, accept correction with humility. When I don’t have the right words, I let food speak first: muffins for her teachers at school, chocolate chip cookies for our beloved empleada, a fresh té de jamaica for our favorite fruit vendor. It’s hard to be a loud, careless expat when you’re busy sharing comfort food with people you care genuinely about.
On nights when both worlds feel close, I set the table with a sense of mischief. I slide a plate of latkes next to a stack of fresh tortillas. Pizza comes out of the oven with queso chihuahua bubbling and pickled jalapeños on the side. My daughter toggles between Spanish and English as naturally as she reaches for refried beans and then hummus. She holds up a churro like a wand and says dulcita, perfectly. Then she licks cinnamon sugar from her fingers and asks for more—of everything.
Food is the first dictionary she reaches for, and maybe the only one we need right now. Between markets and holidays, paletas and potato salad, she’s learning that home is not a single address but a table that keeps widening. And I’m learning, right alongside her, to let what we eat teach us who we are becoming.
