A galaxy far, far away...
Mexico battles bureaucracy and space junk, plus a Mexican takes over late-night TV
Welcome to The Mexpatriate.
You’ll notice the format of today’s newsletter is a bit different. I’m experimenting with writing it as…well, a letter of news.
I love letters; pen scratches on paper, thoughts and yearnings neatly folded and released, like a dove into the air. What could be more improbable, more romantic than that? Not this instant, intangible, insufferable thing we call communication today.
I think the literary form of letter writing is one of the great losses of the digital age, but before you join my daughters in rolling your eyes at me as a relic from pre-smartphone prehistory, I too find myself in a swarm of WhatsApp group chats and send plenty of voice messages, emojis and even the occasional GIF (I hold the line at stickers).
Letters on paper may have nearly gone extinct, but of course, there are new iterations. As it strives to become a competitive multimedia “platform,” Substack is getting crowded with talking head refugees from broadcast media, governors (hey Gavin) and TikTok trad wives, but it began as a home for newsletters: missives that land in our (overflowing) mailboxes, rather than pass us by on a stroll—scroll—through the algorithm.
If you like this format (or hate it), please leave me a comment, get in touch at hola@themexpatriate.com or send me a letter. I’d love to hear from you.
“I come from a galaxy far, far away…called Mexico.”
Diego Luna’s wry, heartfelt monologues as the guest host of Jimmy Kimmel Live! this week have gone viral, making him enemies at Fox News and in the Bezos-Sánchez wedding party, and making me think I should finally watch Andor.
As I listened to Luna, I thought about Mexico’s cultural capital in 2025. It’s different from the Coco/Day of the Dead phenomenon in the global entertainment industry, or spotting “Mexico is the shit” jackets worn at Burning Man. Mexico is stockpiling political cred and “soft power” on the global scene. Claudia Sheinbaum—as a woman in a sea of men, a Trump “whisperer” and an enviably popular president—is on a pedestal among world leaders (for now).
Her voice and Luna’s are both deeply Mexican, and they’re finding resonance across borders in a way that’s somehow less polarizing than others. Sure, Luna called Trump’s immigration policies “authoritarian,” criticized him for “hate speech” and joked that he might get deported, but his first monologue as host (that got him a standing ovation—granted, preaching to the choir) was mostly an appeal to shared values and history. He called the U.S. “a country whose nature has always been a welcoming one,” and that “immigrants need to know that their struggle is yours as well.”
Speaking of Star(ship) Wars…On May 27, the ninth test flight of the SpaceX Starship megarocket ended in “rapid unscheduled disassembly” over the Gulf-that-shall-not-be-named. After a failed test in November, SpaceX sent out a team to recover wreckage that washed up on Mexican shores, including a rocket propellant, but local conservationists say they’ve seen no one from the company this time.
“We’re not a backyard for another country to dump space junk,” said one local activist, Elías Ibarra, quoted in Milenio.
Working with federal environmental agencies, volunteers in Tamaulipas have recovered one ton of an estimated 40 tons of space junk along Bagdad Beach, where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf of Mexico (and where the eastern end of the U.S.-Mexico border begins). On June 18, Starship 36 exploded at the SpaceX flight testing center (located 1 kilometer from Mexico) prior to taking off for test flight 10, and sent wreckage flying into the Rio Grande (officials from Matamoros say they have recovered 100 kilograms of residue so far). The fallout from two failed launches within weeks of each other reached Sheinbaum’s mañanera last week, and she promised the Mexican government will investigate any potential contamination or environmental damage.
In other border news, an Austin-based company called Green Corridors has gotten the presidential green light to start working on a US $10 billion 165-mile elevated freight “guideway” between Laredo and Monterrey. There were over 3 million truck crossings into the U.S. in Laredo, Texas last year (28% more than in 2019) and despite Trump’s trade war, cross-border freight seems unfazed. The “intelligent freight system” of hybrid shuttles proposed by Green Corridors is supposed to help reduce congestion at the busy crossing. The company says it is working with Mexican authorities on permits, but there is no date yet for starting construction and testing isn’t expected to begin until 2031.
As moving goods above the border made headlines, so did moving them under it. Federal law enforcement found a 600-meter-long tunnel connecting Tijuana and San Diego last week that they said was used to smuggle drugs. The underground Cross-Border Xpress was 13.5 meters below ground and authorities discovered drugs and supplies inside. Since 2006, El Universal reports that 15 tunnels have been found under the California-Mexico border—the biggest was discovered in 2020 (1.3 kilometers long), and it had lighting, air conditioning and an elevator.
It’s hard to adequately translate the word “trámite” into English—it’s a verb, a noun and a unique state of desperation. But this week, the Mexican Senate passed the National Law to Eliminate Bureaucratic Procedures, which Sheinbaum sent to Congress earlier this year. The goal? To cut trámites by 50% and make administrative processes more efficient. Under the auspices of the new catch-all Department of Digital Transformation and Telecommunications, the law aims to standardize and digitize bureaucratic procedures nationwide, to facilitate everything from setting up a business to renewing your passport. The guiding principles of “simplification” codified in the law include: don’t request documents the government itself generates, eliminate requirements that are not indispensable, treat digital documents with the same validity as paper documents. In other words, the opposite of what is usually demanded as tribute by the gods of Mexican bureaucracy.
In meme fodder for the week, a flood of mysterious foam from the Río Verde led to an impromptu fiesta in the streets of Naucalpan on Sunday, the same day that Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez were also frolicking in foam on the world’s third-richest man’s superyacht. Unfortunately, the Naucalpan foam party ended with people breaking out in welts—authorities report that the bubbles were caused by a “mix of industrial contaminants, detergents and other chemical residues.”
In tomorrow’s newsletter: the U.S. Treasury Department drops a sanctions bomb on three Mexican banking institutions, a posthumous letter appears from Isabel Miranda de Wallace and more.
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