Annette served in the U.S. Army and worked stations in Iraq, Dubai, Kuwait and Germany before settling into a career as a federal worker processing disability and retirement claims for Social Security. When a return-to-office mandate came through earlier this year, she made a decision many Black Americans are now making for themselves: she resigned, sold her house, and left the country within six weeks, taking her daughter with her.

She had already started the process of getting her residency in Mexico, but Mérida was not her first destination of choice. A fellow veteran in a Black veterans group told her to come see Mérida first before heading to Panama, and after two days of video calls and a quick visit, she changed her flight. Within a couple of weeks, she had her Mexican residency in hand.

Two months in, Annette is honest that she has not fully decided where home will be. She is in the process of finishing a second residency in Panama, and she plans to keep building residency in more than one country at a time, so she is never boxed in by a 90 day or six month limit if she wants to stay somewhere longer. It is a deliberate strategy, not indecision, and it reflects a broader shift happening across the Black expat community that The Black Mérida Experience serves: fewer people treating relocation as a one time, one country decision.

On safety, Annette points to what she found once she started researching: Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico ranks among the safest cities in the country, and is frequently cited as one of the safest cities in North America for Black Americans and the broader Black expat community. The Black Mérida Experience has built its community of approaching 2,000 Black Americans around that same finding. Annette is direct about her own frustration with how Black Americans are treated in the United States, and that frustration is part of why she left when she did. Whether or not that matches your own reasons for exploring a move, her research on safety, cost of living and community in Mérida is worth hearing firsthand.

If you are weighing a move the way Annette is, between Mérida, Panama, or another country entirely, is Mérida actually the right fit for you?