A Mexico I Had Never Met

Last weekend, I went to a baile de pueblo in Valle de Bravo, a town more famous for its lakeside Airbnbs and chilangos escaping the smog than for its terrenales dances under dusty skies. I didn’t really know what to expect. Maybe some regional music, maybe a lot of beer. What I didn’t expect was to meet an entirely different Mexico. One I had never seen up close. One that, even being Mexican, I realized I had never truly known.

It felt like I had stepped onto a stage someone had forgotten to call cut on, except everything was real. The boots were real. The hats, the dust, the music. Real. The scene felt suspended in time, as if someone had drawn it from a Mexican Cinema Golden Era movie and projected it into 2025. People danced fervently, almost with purpose. Boots slapped against the earth in hypnotic syncopation, kicking up tiny clouds of dust that glowed in the light of an oversized fairground reflector. It wasn’t just dancing. It was an act of devotion, physical, sensual, urgent.

This was Tierra Caliente music, I was told. The tierra caliente is more than just a region, it’s an identity. A cultural and historical triangle of land that ties parts of Michoacán, Guerrero, and the State of Mexico together in a knot of rhythm, climate, and blood. I couldn’t tell you exactly what it means to be from Tierra Caliente. But you can see it. You can hear it in the voice of the man screaming lyrics into the mic. You can feel it in the sway of the crowd. You can trace it in the outline of a couple kissing, drunk, in love, surrounded by sound and smoke.

There were children asleep on the ground, wrapped in cobijas San Marcos, using a backpack or a jacket as a pillow, while their parents danced not far away, fusing into one another in a swirl of desire, dust, and beer breath. One man fell into the gravel and laughed as another helped him up, a bottle of Modelo in hand. It was loud, beautiful, and incoherent. It made me wonder what Mexico really is. Who Mexico really is.

Is it these dancers, who claim the land with every stomp? Are they the true Mexico?

Or is it the well-dressed woman in Polanco, sipping a matcha after barre class at 11 am, posting a selfie captioned “manifesting” from her Tesla Model Y? Is she the true Mexican?

Or maybe it’s the darketo kid sweating in Centro de Salud at 2 am, clutching a warm caguama while his eyeliner runs and he makes out with someone whose name he won’t ask. Is he not Mexican too?

Or the middle-class kid who studies at Anáhuac Norte, plays American football, speaks in slang peppered with English, and knows the taste of caviar but still counts his coins to take the public transportation back home to a safer part of Naucalpan. The accountant who commutes six hours a day from Huehuetoca to Insurgentes Sur. The farmer in Sonora with 200 hectares, a Bronco, and a gym ownership. All of them are so different. All of them are Mexican. But which one is really Mexican?

What happens when we try to answer that question?

Perhaps we start to realize that the very idea of a singular Mexican identity is flawed, an invention, not a discovery. An old myth whispered into the ear of the nation by the long-reigning PRI, reinforced by the telenovela empire of Televisa. A fantasy in which the Mexican is always noble, always hardworking, always chingón. A fantasy that attempts to squeeze 130 million people into one mold, one story, one way of dancing, dressing, eating, living, and dying.

And yet, the contradiction is everywhere. The Mexico of today is not one country. It is a collection of dissonant chords, a cacophony of rhythms that somehow still dance together. It is rich and poor, cosmopolitan and rural, progressive and ultraconservative, sun-drenched and shadow-dwelling, hopeful and bitter. It is a country of contradictions and collisions.

At the baile, I didn’t feel like an outsider exactly, but I did feel like an observer of something sacred. A ritual that had nothing to prove, no desire to be explained. It just was. And in that was, in that unapologetic being, I saw something rare. Something honest. Nobody cared about the Mexico imagined by tourist ads or government slogans. They just wanted to dance, to kiss, to drink, to be seen by each other in the pulsing heat of the night.

There is humility in that. A defiance too.

At some point, I tried to dance. I thought I could fake it, follow the beat, mimic the stomping, but my movements felt clumsy, like I was speaking a language I only half understood. My girlfriend, on the other hand, moved with a kind of effortless rhythm, like her body had stored this knowledge long ago and was simply remembering it now. Her hips knew what mine didn’t. Her laughter made it worse, in the way that only love can make humiliation feel bearable.

Around us, her friends spun in circles with strangers, caught in that strange ritual of fleeting romance, each song a new opportunity to find someone who might make them feel wanted, charming, desired, if only until the last chord faded.

Later that night, as I lay in bed still hearing the echo of tuba and tambora in my ears, I wondered if part of our national anxiety comes from the pressure to define ourselves. To be one thing. To belong to a single story. But maybe that’s the wrong impulse. Maybe Mexico isn’t something you can define at all.

Maybe Mexico is the woman in Polanco and the man in boots. The darketo in the club and the kid in the football jersey. Maybe it’s the man planting tomatoes in Sonora and the child sleeping on the dirt floor at the fair. Maybe we are not one Mexico, but many Mexicos. Maybe we always have been.

And maybe the only thing we share is the dust that sticks to our shoes after the music stops.