Identity Narratives by American and Canadian Retirees in Mexico

Ethnographic materials, including depth interviews and a video, are analyzed to better understand how expatriate retirees living in the Lake Chapala Riviera region of Jalisco, Mexico manage personal identities in retirement. Using concepts from narrative gerontology, this study demonstrates how expatriates' stories and descriptions of Mexicans and Mexican ways of life reflexively construct storytellers' identities and provide a logic for intercultural relationships. While the host population is characterized as happy, friendly, helpful, enterprising and polite, concurrent stories by the same narrators portray them also as untrustworthy, inaccessible, lazy and incompetent. A discourse analysis that extends Cavarero's narrative identity theory argues that these contrasting conceptions of the host culture and population are deployed so as to reflexively position expatriate retirees as interpersonally attractive, culturally tolerant and pragmatically adaptable. Implications for the subjective experience of international migrant retirees are drawn from the descriptive analysis.