Immersed in Mexico

When Tony Cohan and wife Masako Takahashi decided to buy and restore an abandoned 250-year-old hacienda in a colonial Mexican town, they were determined not to be stereotypical Americans content both literally and metaphorically with “the enchilada combination plate.”

They did not see San Miguel de Allende and its people as some sort of quaint, frozen-in-time tableau obligated “to remain in some romantic Dark Age so we can enjoy them as such,” says the 60-year-old Cohan, author of the recent “On Mexican Time” (Broadway Books), which chronicles the couple’s 15-year relationship with the town. To him, that is “patronizing.”

Nor, he adds, did they view Mexico as “a landscape of hedonistic, inexpensive pleasures” to amuse and entertain norteamericanos. Rather, Cohan and Takahashi slowly immersed themselves in the life of San Miguel, a 16th century town in the central highlands, about a three-hour drive north of Mexico City. On their first trip, in 1985, they stayed in a hotel. On a later visit, they took an apartment. Finally, in 1989, although “not in the market” to buy, they were shown the house by an insistent agent. They made an offer on the spot.

From the rooftop, there was a stunning view over San Miguel. The house was the real thing, in sharp contrast to the phony stucco-and-tiled-roof numbers they’d heard L.A. real estate agents refer to as “emotional Spanish.” It had walls 3 feet thick, 20-foot ceilings and studio spaces for each of them. And there was a working phone line in place, a luxury that in San Miguel at the time was not to be taken for granted.

The couple had yearned for a more sensual and engaged culture. They’d become disillusioned with the pace and disconnectedness of life in Los Angeles, with answering machines and drive-by shootings, with a culture in which the reference point is TV and movies, rather than books and life experiences.

And so it was that they decided to abandon rationality and follow their hearts to San Miguel. Thus began the odyssey of the house they dubbed Casa de Misterios (house of mysteries).

At the time, Americans could not own property outright in Mexico. With the country in economic and political turmoil, the couple knew that their $65,000 investment, which entitled them only to a shaky 30-year lease, could be a fool’s ticket to paradise.

When they first saw Casa de Misterios, it was essentially a blank canvas. Abandoned for eight years, it was blanketed in dust, infested with roaches, scorpions and termites and inundated with mold and swallow droppings, its garden in ruins. There were dangling electrical wires, cracked walls and broken windows. Yet they fell in love with the house. They painted the white exterior a deep rose--the color of a San Miguel sunset. The furnishings are Mexican, much of it made locally. In the dining room hangs the original iron chandelier, forged locally. They set the table, made from a door from an abandoned hacienda, with blue and green Mexican glasses and hand-painted Mexican ceramic dishes and hung Mexican-made copper pans and votive paintings in the kitchen. Takahashi indulged her love of color by picking out a bright blue stove and a fire-engine red refrigerator.

A Pace Far Removed

From L.A.’s Bustle

“Go slowly,” they told themselves when starting the renovation. They needn’t have.

The simplest tasks seemed to take forever. Pesos disappeared like magic. Workers were no-shows. Everything would happen, they found, on Mexican time--much longer than would be typical in the U.S. Just building a new stairway to access the view-filled rooftop living space took months, tangled up in red tape. During the building of an outdoor stairway to the roof, the water tank was relocated to a spot where it is visible from the street, a city code violation causing further delay. Then the rains hit, washing cement dust into the drains and clogging them, and covering the garden in “a gray soup of concrete solution,” Cohan says.

“Remodeling is certainly no easier there than here,” says Takahashi. Adds Cohan, “Don’t go into it with the attitude that these people don’t know what they’re doing because they don’t do it the way we do. Undertake it in the spirit of adventure and remember, you’re working with people who built the great pyramids 3,000 years ago.”

They have altered the house, which occupies a 50-by-150-foot lot, to suit their needs, converting the living room into the master bedroom. There are also two sleeping lofts off Takahashi’s studio and there is a two-bedroom casita on the property. All told, Cohan estimates, they spent about $25,000 on remodeling and furnishings--a sum that would be doubled if done today.

The experience was what he calls “a mixture of exasperation and sudden illumination. In Mexico I assume things won’t happen according to schedule. As a result my anxiety level is rather low and I’m somewhat delighted when workers do show up on time . . . and in some peculiar way, at the end of the day, things do always get done.”

Today, Cohan and Takahashi divide their time evenly between the house in San Miguel and a 1903 Craftsman cottage in Venice, from which they can keep an eye on family and business matters. The cottage, which they bought in 1990, is furnished in an eclectic Japanese-Mission-Mexican montage. Whenever they can, they return to San Miguel, sometimes for months at a time.

“One of the inverse blessings” of the San Miguel experience, says Cohan, is that it has “made me like L.A. more. It’s awakened me to the best of L.A. and California [and] given me a delight in the multicultural landscape we live in here, and a higher level of comfort with it.”

Although most Southern Californians sample world cuisine and listen to world music, he observes, “we usually do it in the safety of our gringo neighborhoods.” Learning Spanish has opened new vistas for them in their own backyard. When they first started visiting San Miguel, Takahashi had only school Spanish, Cohan a smattering from his time as a musician living in Barcelona decades earlier. Through both diligence and necessity, they honed their language skills and found the payoff was in the doors it opened to them in San Miguel.

Had they stayed in Los Angeles, Cohan says, “My life would have been greatly impoverished, but the real sad part is I wouldn’t have known it.”

Even though Angelenos live in a somewhat Mexicanized culture, Cohan says, “it’s astounding that the country next to us is perceived by many Americans as remote as Borneo. It does seem odd to me now that this seemed [at the time] like a remote journey to some distant clime.”

The Modern World

Creeps In a Bit

In 15 years, San Miguel has changed. There are a Tex-Mex restaurant, espresso cafes, a T-shirt shop, an ATM machine, video stores. CNN is ubiquitous. It is now possible to fly from Los Angeles to an airport only an hour’s drive from town, avoiding Mexico City.

Cohan says, “San Miguel suffers along with every nice place on Earth in this respect. But the impact of tourism on the town has not been as fatal as, say, in Santa Fe. Ninety percent of the Mexicans go on with their life and their ceremonies and their business.”

There is an expatriate population of about 5% but, he says, “gringos are not overrunning the Mexican landscape.” The expats have changed too. The retirees remain, but the hardy young backpackers and neo-hippies have moved on to Guatemala and other less costly places. Cohan says, “They’ve been supplanted by boomers who have the money to come and stay or who manage to work out of there,” thanks to the Internet and the U.S.-Mexico free trade agreement.

Cohan laments, “The whole point was to be out of touch. Nowadays that’s almost impossible, no matter where you are.”

Which is why the novelist and essayist, former drummer and sometime lyricist for Chick Corea and others was of two minds about writing the book. As he put it, “I considered Mexico my refuge, not my subject.”

He did not want to encourage a mass tourist invasion of San Miguel, similar to that ignited by Peter Mayle’s “A Year in Provence.” Certainly, he did not want titillated tourists knocking on his door, as happened in Cortona, Italy, to Frances Mayes, bestselling author of “Under the Tuscan Sun.”

It hasn’t happened. For one thing, Takahashi says, “San Miguel is just too rustic for many people’s tastes. Most people get bored after a weekend.”

And, Cohan adds, “I tried very hard not to put a gloss on it.” Insects and illness are as much a part of his narrative as are purple bougainvillea climbing blue patio walls and market days in the plaza with its sights, sounds and smells.

Although it still costs about a third less to live in San Miguel than in Southern California, “personally, I don’t think that’s the adventure to be had there,” Cohan says. And, he adds, the fact that most Mexicans are poor “doesn’t mean they’re not alive. If we suffer from one misapprehension as North Americans, it is that we feel the rest of the world suffers miserably because they’re not us. What I’ve discovered is a rich, festive, resonant culture, in spite of economic duress.”

Takahashi, a photographer and artist, says she has been inspired artistically by “the infusion of emotion and traditions of faith” in Mexican arts and crafts. “They’re totally open to the most voluptuous sentiments,” whereas until very recently there has been in the U.S. art world a disdain for the emotional and spiritual.

“Going to Mexico just broadened my parameters” beyond what she’d been taught, she says. She found herself taking up embroidery, adorning whimsical tablecloths with mottoes such as “Don’t Chew With Your Mouth Open.” Her book of photographs with text, “Mexican Tiles,” will be published in the spring by Chronicle Books.

Today, an old wreck like the house they bought for $65,000 would cost $200,000 to $250,000, partially because property can now be owned outright.

Hoping the Tourists

Stick to Europe

Gentrification of the town is a concern and, Cohan says, “sometimes I wonder if a plague of our own kind will drive us out” someday. Far off, he envisions a San Miguel much like the European towns where there is an “old town” for tourists and the business of living and commerce take place in a modern suburbia; a town like those in Provence and Tuscany that have evolved into “exquisite, expensive gourmet sites.”

Hordes of tourists have not been a problem in recent years, with Americans put off by State Department advisories about crimes against foreigners in some parts of Mexico--highway assaults, robberies, kidnappings. In San Miguel, where they are surrounded by Mexican families who have become friends, Cohan and Takahashi have never felt danger.

For those who might contemplate doing as they do, they offer a few caveats. Don’t go, they say, if you’re “very nervous about your health,” although medical care is generally quite good. The town is a mile high, and it is a hill town with cobbled streets.

Cohan adds, “If you’re going for party time, you should go to Acapulco. If you like to read, take walks, sit in lovely gardens and parks and eat in lovely restaurants, it’s your kind of town.”

One of his “table pounding” issues is the voyeuristic attitude of many Americans. “We want the Third World to remain the Third World so we can go gawk at it--what fun, aren’t these weird people strange? You can move through San Miguel in a bubble if you design it carefully, but why bother?”

Beverly Beyette can be reached at beverly.beyette@latimes.com.