“Mexpats”: A growing movement of Black Americans are moving to Mexico, hoping to find refuge from racism

A growing number of Black Americans are choosing Mexico as a new home, drawn by lower living costs, new opportunities and, for some, a desire to escape the racism and daily pressures they associate with life in the United States.

Filmmaker Ebony Marie Bailey explored that movement in the PBS documentary “The Afro Mexpats,” following three Black women – DJ and music curator Jené, longtime peace activist Patricia Ann-Talley, and independent travel agent Kamara – as they described what it means to build a life in Mexico while navigating race, nationality, language and privilege.

Bailey, who narrates the documentary, said the experience can be complicated. She feels the benefits of being a U.S. citizen while also being Mexican-American, yet she is still frequently treated as an outsider because of how she looks.

“When I arrived here six years ago, it was rare to see people who looked like me,” Bailey said. “But I’ve seen a change. There are more of us here.”

Jené Finds A New Life In Mexico City

Jené, who works as a DJ and music curator, said she moved to Mexico City after growing up in Portland, Oregon.

She had been living there for about two and a half years at the time of the documentary and described people as welcoming and curious about where she came from.

Many are surprised when she tells them she is also Mexican.

Jené said her mother was born in Mexico City and grew up in Iztapalapa, while her father was born and raised in Portland. That family connection allowed her to obtain dual citizenship.

Even members of her own family questioned why she would move to Mexico.

“¿Por qué estás en México?” she recalled relatives asking.

For Jené, growing up as a Black Mexican girl in Portland did not feel unusual because it was simply the life she knew, although she noted that Portland was once known for being one of the whitest cities in the United States.

Since the pandemic, however, she has noticed far more foreigners moving into Mexico City.

That has made it somewhat more common to see people who do not fit traditional expectations of what a Mexican person “looks like.”

Still, appearance remains important.

Jené said she often feels like an outsider because people do not assume she is Mexican, even though she has Mexican citizenship and family roots in the country.

“I’m always going to be seen as a foreigner just because I navigate the world as a Black woman, even if I am Mexican,” she said.

Patricia Ann-Talley Says Mexico Became Home

Patricia Ann-Talley’s path to Mexico began decades earlier.

Born in Detroit in 1951, she described growing up during segregation and said much of her childhood was shaped by limits placed on her because she was both Black and female.

“Being a girl, and a Black girl, I was always defined by what I could not do,” Talley said.

Every time somebody told her she could not do something, she said, she wanted to prove that she could.

She eventually traveled to Mexico while pursuing graduate research, originally intending to go to Acapulco. Hurricane Paulina forced her flight to divert to Zihuatanejo instead.

Talley had never even heard of the place.

She later learned that both Acapulco and Zihuatanejo had historical connections to Africans who arrived in Mexico through Pacific ports.

Over time, through her peace work and relationships with local communities, she settled into the area.

“This is home now,” Talley said after nearly 30 years in Mexico.

For her, the move represented more than cheaper living or warmer weather.

Talley said that after experiencing what she considered a greater degree of freedom in Mexico, she felt she was finally being defined by what she could do rather than what she could not.

That distinction is powerful because it shows why migration is not always purely economic. For some people, the decision to move can be about the emotional weight of everyday life as much as rent, jobs or climate.

Kamara Builds A Cross-Border Life

Kamara, an independent travel agent originally from San Diego, described a more recent move shaped heavily by housing costs.

She said she had been looking for somewhere to live in San Diego during the middle of the COVID period, but nearly everything she found was too expensive.

Mexico looked much more manageable.

“I told my partner, I was like, we should just move to Mexico,” Kamara recalled.

Her family now lives a cross-border life.

Kamara said their daughters attend school in the United States because that arrangement is easier for the family, while her partner also crosses the border regularly for work.

The commute is exhausting.

She described waking up around 3 a.m. when they need to cross into San Diego, while her partner deals with the lines because his work requires him to make the trip.

For Kamara, crossing back into the United States also brings anxiety.

“I have to worry about police,” she said. “I have to worry about being a Black person in general in America.”

In Mexico, she said, many of those concerns feel less immediate.

At the same time, Kamara did not present the move as perfect.

The family can afford to live comfortably in Mexico, but the trade-off includes long border crossings and the complicated reality of maintaining ties on both sides.

“We can afford to live here in Mexico,” she said. “We can afford to live here comfortably. So it’s like a give and take.”

Race Does Not Disappear In Mexico

None of the women described Mexico as a place without racial tension.

Jené said feeling “othered” happens regularly.

She recalled greeting people on the street in Spanish and sometimes receiving no response, describing those repeated moments as small but constant.

“It just happens like every single day,” she said. “It’s just like a mosquito bite constantly.”

Kamara described a somewhat different experience.

She said she has been stared at and has had people approach her daughters wanting to take photographs with them. Strangers have also wanted to touch her hair.

Rather than viewing every encounter as openly hostile, Kamara said she often interprets the behavior as curiosity, especially in places where Black residents are less common.

“They don’t know that it’s a no, no, don’t touch me,” she said with a laugh.

She added that she does not necessarily view those moments as malicious because there is also much about Mexican culture that she herself is still learning.

That difference between Jené’s and Kamara’s experiences is one of the documentary’s more interesting elements. Two Black women can live in the same country and interpret similar encounters very differently, depending on their backgrounds, communities and expectations.

Talley, meanwhile, became a Mexican citizen in 2018, allowing her to become more active politically.

She said she became involved with gatherings connected to Afro-Mexican communities and sees similarities between the Afro-Mexican movement and the U.S. civil rights struggle of the 1960s.

For her, those connections show that Black American newcomers are entering a country with its own long history of race, color and inequality.

Gentrification Creates An Uncomfortable Question

The documentary also addressed perhaps the most difficult criticism facing American newcomers: gentrification.

Jené said Black Americans are often conscious of the issue because of their own history with displacement and inequality in the United States.

But being Black American does not erase the economic privilege that can come with earning or holding money tied to the United States.

“Even if you are Black American, you have a privilege,” Jené said.

She gave the example of rent. American friends may describe her apartment as inexpensive, while Mexican friends tell her the same price is extremely high.

The documentary also acknowledges that the growing American presence can raise living costs for local residents.

Kamara pushed back on the idea that most Black Americans moving south are intentionally trying to displace anyone.

“The locals are kind of upset at us, but we aren’t, you know, asking to be paying these prices,” she said.

She connected her own move directly to how unaffordable San Diego had become.

“I’m just trying to live,” Kamara said. “Majority of us, especially Black Americans. We are just trying to live.”

That tension is one of the film’s strongest themes. Someone can move because they feel pushed out by racism or high costs in one country and still arrive with economic advantages that affect people in another.

Bailey also reflects on that contradiction through the idea of the “expat.”

She notes that moving to another country because you have the financial and legal ability to do so is a form of privilege, while also questioning whether the word fully captures the Black American experience.

For some, she suggests, the move feels less like expatriation and more like an escape from being treated as a second-class citizen.

“We Keep Coming To Mexico To Find A Refuge”

Talley said Black Americans continue coming to Mexico because many see it as a refuge.

For her, that meant leaving behind the segregation and racial limits she experienced earlier in life.

But she also warned newcomers not to isolate themselves inside American expat communities.

“The newbies have to immerse into the community, learn the language, and begin to get involved,” Talley said.

She stressed respect, recognition, reciprocity and connection with local people, including Afro-Mexicans who have their own struggles and history.

Jené expressed a similar goal.

She said she wants to spend more time in Mexican spaces, speak more Spanish and continue expanding the community she has built through music.

One of her personal goals had been to speak with her grandmother in Spanish, something she said she was grateful to accomplish before her grandmother died.

Bailey ends the documentary by reflecting on the words of writer Audre Lorde: “It was in Mexico that I stopped feeling invisible.”

She said those words resonate because Black people can feel hypervisible because of their skin color while still feeling unseen in a deeper sense.

More than 11,000 U.S.-born Black people now live in Mexico, Bailey said, leaving her with a larger question about what this growing community will become.

As more Black Americans make the move, the documentary suggests that finding refuge will involve more than simply crossing a border.

It will also mean deciding how to belong, how to respect communities already there, and how to build a home in a country where newcomers may feel freer in some ways while still confronting questions of race, class and identity.