As foreign money reshapes Mexico’s cities and coasts, locals and longtime residents wrestle with a harsher question than “who belongs?”—who can still afford to stay.

A country remade by newcomers

Across Mexico, neighborhoods that once felt like tightly knit towns now function as global hubs, with English on menus, dollarized prices, and an economy increasingly tailored to visitors and foreign residents. Gentrification has become the shorthand for a deeper clash over class, housing, and public policy, as rising rents and short-term rentals push many Mexicans to the margins of the places they built.​

Mexico City: who is a “local”?

In Roma and Condesa, streets shaped over a century by Syrian Jewish shopkeepers, European refugees, U.S. veterans and internal migrants now host digital nomads and boutique Airbnbs. The question has shifted from passports to purchasing power, as protests, rent freezes and new housing reforms struggle to keep pace with speculative investment and tourism-driven policy.​

When a tip becomes a trigger

In cafés and restaurants, a simple “How much should we tip?” has turned into a moral minefield for visitors used to higher wages back home. Chronic overtipping and “gringo taxes” can quietly widen wage gaps and expectations, rewarding businesses that cater to foreigners while leaving workers and prices increasingly detached from local realities.​

Tulum’s spiritual boom, local bust

Tulum, once a quiet Maya port, now caters to a pseudo-spiritual elite of tech-funded “shamans,” thousand-dollar “eco” suites, and chemical-fueled healing raves. Behind the Instagram-ready coastline, locals face eviction threats, soaring prices, and damage to fragile cenotes, as enlightenment rhetoric collides with a tourism model that treats the town as a backdrop, not a home.​

Neighbors, protesters, accomplices

In Mexico City’s Roma, even some protesters admit they helped create the very gentrification they now resent, moving into “up-and-coming” streets before the Airbnbs and anti-gringo marches arrived. Over more than a decade, corner shops and family apartments have given way to branded cafés and short-term rentals, revealing how love for a neighborhood, government tourism pushes, and class prejudice can entangle into quiet complicity.​

San Miguel’s beautiful “golden cage”

In San Miguel de Allende, festivals, libraries, nonprofits and jazz shows built with foreign money coexist with displaced traditions, vanishing downtown altars, and neighbors forced to the outskirts. For many locals, the city has become a “golden cage,” where cultural vibrancy and economic opportunity are inseparable from exclusion, and where every new arrival inherits a share of responsibility for what disappears next.

​Source: MND Plus, “A changing Mexico: Gentrification and protest in 2025”, Mexican News Daily