The man-bunned gringo summons the waiter and asks for the check. You’ve been staring at them for a long time. By now your coffee is cold. What the hell is wrong with you? You don’t know anything about these people. Even if everything you imagined about them were true, they would be the kind of people you’d sought out for the past eight years. Had you encountered them in New York rather than Mexico City, you would have been predisposed to like them. Aren’t you their negative image? Did you not go to New York looking for the same things you imagined they sought in Mexico City?

But there is a difference. They didn’t have to worry about not being allowed in, or not being able to stay, or being forced to go back. Your peers in the ruling classes of the first world cross borders without friction, gliding from one country to another like free bloody birds. It doesn’t matter that you have mastered their language and done well at their schools and paid all the applicable taxes, followed the rules and jumped through the hoops and danced when they told you to dance — you remain a colonial subject, un maldito criollo.