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Ivette Sanchez on Mexico's brain drain
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Ivette Sanchez (Photo: Don Morreale)
' Here’s how it is,' says Mexico City business consultant Ivette Sanchez, ' Mexico can no longer guarantee the safety of its citizens. It can't guarantee economic security or a decent future for us either. It’s not just low-income people who are trying to get out. There’s a fugas de cerebros, a brain drain. Anybody with anything going for them is trying to get out. I’m trying to get out.'
Sanchez has lived in the Federal District her entire life. She keeps an apartment on Avenida Insurgentes, not far from the city’s World Trade Center. Her office is close by, but her consulting business takes her all over the city. This means she has to either drive or take the subway to make her appointments.
No matter how she goes, getting from A to B in Mexico City has become a very dicey proposition. If she takes the underground, she dresses down. ' I wear tennis shoes and keep my hair tucked under a ball cap. No jewelry. Nada. I hide my laptop in a gym bag. When I get to where I’m going, I duck into a restroom and change into business attire.'
Car travel is a whole other vampire. The city’s traffic jams are legendary. 'It takes twice as long to go anywhere by car,' she says, 'and once you’re there, there’s no on-street parking. So I park at a mall, which is expensive. I spend more on parking every month than I do on food.'
Driving can be hazardous to your health. ' One morning on my way to work I was sitting at a stoplight and this guy, he was maybe forty, forty-two, came up and stuck a gun through the window and yelled at me to get out of the car. He drove away with my laptop, purse, money, credit cards. Todo. Three months later I ran into him on the street. I think he works as a security guard at a building in my neighborhood.'
People in the city no longer use ATM machines for fear of being kidnapped. Social life has come to a standstill. ' I don’t go out at night. I don’t see my friends. I’d never give an interview like this in Mexico. You have to keep a low profile. You don’t want anybody to know anything about you. This,' she says, ' is not a life.'
If Mexicans are fearful, they have every right to be. Murder, rape and robbery are three to four times more likely to happen to you on the streets of Mexico City than in New York, LA or Washington DC.
The irony for Sanchez is that her parents (dad, a pediatrician; mom, a hospital administrator) emigrated to Southern California in 1997. Had she wanted to, she could have gone with them.
So why didn’t she?
' I was 21. I had a boyfriend and a great job and I believed in the future of my country. Now I’m not so sure.'
Three years ago, Sanchez began coming to Denver to study a healing technique called Muscular Activation Therapy (MAT). Her initial plan was to open her own clinic in Mexico City, but lately her training is looking more and more like an exit strategy.
' I'm not trying to take a job away from a US citizen,' she says. ' For example, I could work here for a clinic with Spanish speaking patients. Not everybody who wants to get out of Mexico is an illegal alien. There are many well prepared and honest citizens who could do good. I want to be part of that group.'
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