She hid with her four boys under the cover of darkness, the distant shouts of Border Patrol agents and a helicopter droning over the hills on the Tijuana-San Diego border. The agents threatened to end a one-way trip from Mexico to the United States with arrest and deportation.
Some 37 years later, Leonor Dávila, a U.S. citizen, says she’s grateful for the life she has built for her family in Chicago. It’s a far cry from the desolate ranches that raised her in the Mexican state of Zacatecas, where opportunities were as sparse as the weathered adobe structures that dotted the countryside.
So it came as a surprise three years ago when her daughter, Jenny Aguayo-Frausto, who was born in the United States, told her that she and her husband were packing up their lives to pursue a future in Mexico. For Ms. Dávila, the move was as perplexing as it was ironic.
“There are so many people who would want to come over here to the United States, and then there’s them, who don’t want to be here anymore,” Ms. Dávila, 64, said in Spanish.
Ms. Aguayo-Frausto, 30, and her husband, Kevin Frausto, 36, are part of a contingent of Americans of Mexican descent who, because of their ancestry, are becoming citizens of both countries — formalizing their Mexican American identity some 26 years after Mexico began recognizing dual citizens.
The country now beckons as a viable alternative to life in the United States, if not as an expanded playing field uninterrupted by the border.
The appeal of dual citizenship appears to be in line with shifting migration currents in the last 15 years, said Ariel G. Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute who presented at an online seminar on dual nationals hosted by the Mexican government last year.
An improving Mexican economy has helped spur the voluntary return of a significant number of expatriates, so that the population of Mexican immigrants in the United States has shrunk to about 10.7 million from its 12.2 million peak in 2007, according to the Pew Research Center.
“That’s what I think led to the premise of what we see today,” Mr. Ruiz Soto said.
From the Mexican government’s perspective, he added, its national economy, long buoyed by remittances, stands to benefit from the addition of dollar-earning Mexican citizens, some of whom are eager to invest in the country.
In recent years, the advent of remote work, dwindling confidence in the American economy and a charged political climate have made the idea of a life in Mexico more attractive, according to Mr. Ruiz Soto, though safety and a language barrier for non-Spanish speakers remain important considerations.
The Chicago couple boiled down their reasons for moving to Mexico in January 2021 to wanting a better “quality of life,” and to a growing disillusionment with the United States. They had come to a realization: “We’ve reached the highest rung on the ladder that we can when it comes to the American dream,” Ms. Aguayo-Frausto said.
“For us, it’s like we got the financial and educational benefit of growing up and living in the United States,” she added. “Now it’s time for us to take it a step further and look for the next level of quality of life, but in Mexico.”
The couple counted an increasingly hostile political climate charged with anti-immigrant rhetoric and perennial sources of American discontent, like prohibitively expensive health care costs, as key factors in their decision to move.
They spent the first two years in Mexico living nomadically, exploring different cities and states, getting a taste of the cultural and geographic breadth and documenting their experiences on a YouTube channel.
They settled down for a while last year in Mexico City but recently returned to Chicago to await their next adventure: Turning a plot of land in the beach town of Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, into their permanent home.
Holding Mexican citizenship makes buying and inheriting land and doing business in the country substantially easier.
Mexico began recognizing dual citizenship in 1998, but since then the government has undertaken initiatives to remind its diaspora of their constitutionally enshrined right to citizenship.
In 2021, the government indefinitely extended eligibility for citizenship to generations born outside of Mexico. More than 37 million people in the United States claimed Mexican ancestry in 2021, according to Pew.
Expanding Mexican citizenry in the United States, its largest trading partner, is simply in the long-term geopolitical interest of the country, according to Carlos González Gutiérrez, the Mexican consul general in Los Angeles.
He pointed to the dramatic growth of the Hispanic population in the United States. Nearly 60 percent of Latinos in the United States were of Mexican origin in 2022, according to the Pew Research Center. Future generations, he said, will bear greater influence in cross-border relations.
“That will definitely have an impact in terms of how the United States perceives Mexico, in terms of the public policies that are formulated in the United States vis-à-vis Mexico,” Mr. González Gutiérrez said.
Mexico hasn’t released data showing the number of Americans who have become its citizens through inheritance, but the demand has been high enough that consulates across the United States often struggle to keep pace.
“The problem is the Mexican authorities are not keeping up with the demand,” said Aristeo Montaño Sandoval, an immigration lawyer based in the San Diego-Tijuana borderland who five years ago started a business called Doble Nacionalidad Express to assist people with the dual citizenship process.
Mr. Montaño Sandoval said his clients are a mix of middle-aged Mexican nationals looking to make their American children dual citizens and 20- and 30-somethings looking to invest in Mexico, move there or simply obtain the status symbol that is having two passports (not to mention the binational advantages, such as gaining easier access to some countries and not having to pay a tourist tax in Mexico).
“That’s a big percentage,” Mr. Montaño Sandoval said. “Some of them, they don’t even need it. They just want it for bragging rights. They want to upload a picture of two passports.”
Another share of his clients are looking to retire in Mexico.
After becoming a Mexican citizen last year, Roberto Gutiérrez, 67, a former media executive and educator who founded a Spanish-language charter school, sold his apartment, after living in Brooklyn for two decades, and made a big change.
He and his wife, Rosie Gutiérrez, relocated to Mexico City.
Mr. Gutiérrez, a San Antonio native, said that becoming a Mexican citizen was a way to pay homage to his father, who found his way to United States in the 1950s as a laborer with the bracero program, and to reconnect with the country generations before him had called home. Mr. Gutiérrez said his father saw a “giftedness” in the United States, where he raised his family.
After his father’s death in 2015, Mr. Gutiérrez thought of dual citizenship as a way to feel closer.
“I’ve become more related to him,” Mr. Gutiérrez said. “Sure, he’s my dad, but we’re also now compatriots.”
Earning dual citizenship, however, does not guarantee one will have a seamless experience living in Mexico, where people have a discerning eye and ear for outsiders.
Marian Delgado, a bilingual dual citizen born in Nebraska to an African American father and a Mexican mother, lives in the beach town of Mazatlán in the state of Sinaloa. People there often assume she is South American or from the Caribbean, she said.
Kristie Martin, a dual citizen from Los Angeles whose family is from the state of Jalisco, says her light complexion and blue eyes often lead her to be labeled a “gringa” — an Anglo American — in Mexico City, which has become a trendy destination for young Americans and other foreigners.
The city offers remote workers an affordable cosmopolitan lifestyle and has increasingly catered to English speakers and foreign tastes, though not without controversy, as the influx has led to gentrification.
That reality has stirred mixed feelings among transplants in Mexico, including the Fraustos, who say they try to curb their effect on the local economy through conscious spending and shopping habits.
Mr. Gutiérrez said he and his wife were deliberate about choosing their neighborhood near “la gente,” or the people, where they can be “part of the community.”
Strolls through quaint markets and lunch conversations with strangers over the soft voices and strings of a trio band fill their days in Mexico City — experiences that Mr. Gutiérrez said are “about reconnecting with the very people I feel like I’ve missed.”
The Fraustos see their YouTube channel as a platform for those ready for a fuller embrace of their Mexican American identity. Their most-viewed video is a how-to on dual citizenship.
A common refrain of Mexican Americans and other Hispanics of mixed identity expresses the disconnect and ambiguity that comes with having two home countries: “Ni de aquí ni de allá,” which translates as “Neither from here nor from there.”
The rise of dual citizens may signal an embrace of both Mexico and the United States.
On an afternoon stroll in Mexico City in May, Ms. Aguayo-Frausto wore a T-shirt bearing two flags and a short phrase.
“De aquí y de allá,” it read: from here and from there.
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