Generation X has gone X-patriate. In fact, more and more young Yanqui professionals like Haase prefer to be thought of as Generation Dos XX, after the popular Mexican beer. Underwhelmed with their prospects in a downsizing United States, they are looking to Mexico as a land of opportunity. The eight-month-old North American Free Trade Agreement has already raised U.S.-Mexico trade by 20 percent, and the consulting firm KPMG Peat Marwick recently reported that more than a quarter of the 1,036 U.S. companies it surveyed are pursuing joint ventures with Mexican firms. That has created a frantic demand in Mexico for business and marketing skills that Mexicans are just beginning to learn. Mexican headhunting firms estimate that since 1990 the number of recent U.S. college graduates coming to work there each year has quadrupled to as many as 20,000. “You’re nuts if you think I could be doing this in New York,” says Bryan Palmer, who at 29 is the $60,000-a-year advertising manager for a large Mexico City magazine. “This place is the final frontier for us.”
Not all the locals are happy to see “them” crossing it, however. Mexicans are deeply nationalistic, and with their own economy in a slump, good fortune like Palmer’s is “bound to stir resentment,” says a Mexican businessman. And that’s not to mention the superior attitudes: “Frankly, one reason we do so well is that we don’t have a manana approach,” says a 22-year-old American.
That’s one reason some Mexicans have taken to calling the Americans “drybacks,” a sardonic turn on “wetbacks,” the much-resented American term for the millions of poor Mexicans who cross the Rio Grande illegally in search of jobs in the United States. In fact, the Yanquis arrive legally in the comfort of planes and cars and have easy access to Mexican work papers. “In the future,” warns Miguel Ruiz-Cabanas of the Mexican Embassy in Washington, D.C., “we will have to handle this phenomenon with more care.” But privately, Mexican officials admit that very few drybacks are undocumented.
Last month’s Mexican presidential election left little doubt that demand for drybacks will continue. The victory of Ernesto Zedillo, a Yale-educated technocrat from the long-rul-ing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), ensures adherence to the free-market economic reforms of departing President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. That should open the door even wider for American Xers like 30-year-old George Puyana. Just two years ago he was chafing as a low-level marketing figure at Ralston Purina in St. Louis. So when he was offered a chance to start the company’s “human foods division” south of the border, he jumped for it. Puyana was rewarded with a 30 percent raise. Now he has a large house, a company car and a maid, too. “It’s very hard for people our age to get on the fast track anymore in the United States,” says 28-year-old Rachel Vincent, a public-relations executive in Mexico City via Washington, D.C. “Here, if you hustle, it’s easy.”
Some of this gush is just youthful enthusiasm, of course. Most of the Yuppie conquistadores find Mexican business culture more puzzling than profitable. R. C. Schrader, head of California’s Mexico City trade office, warns that too many of the young and restless forget that in Mexico “you make friends first and do business later.”
Julie Benz makes friends easily. She’s a 22-year-old actress in town to shoot a joint Mexican-U.S. soap opera. And she’d like to stay on once that gig is finished. Benz has already received offers to do Mexican TV commercials and is learning more Spanish at La Tirana, a favorite hangout. “You find out real fast that it’s the American-looking girl that they want down here,” she says. Even Mexican machismo, she finds, has its benefits: “Women get into clubs free.” For now, Mexico may be one of the best clubs Generation X has yet discovered.
