Why I Left the U.S. — The Real Answer

By Zerline Hughes Spruill

I can’t remember when or where I learned the word “tolerate,” but I remember a few moments when its true meaning sank in. It may have been in Hebrew school (yes, a story for another time) during a lesson on the Holocaust. Or it could have been at Howard University, in Dr. Olive Taylor’s lecture on slavery.

Whatever the case, I knew the word fit how I felt as a Black woman in the United States. Not unwelcome, exactly, just tolerated. At some point, being tolerated stopped being enough to build a life around.

I felt my Black presence, Black aura and Black skin were tolerated by teachers in certain junior high and high school classes, during the college application process, at work when I was a teenage employee, in stores when I was a grown-ass working woman and in rooms where I was the only Black person present. Outside the four years I spent at Howard, a historically Black university, that’s what living in the U.S. felt like: the country where I was born and raised, where I worked and raised my own children (none of that by choice).

That’s the real answer to why I left America. Everything else is context.

The context starts around age 15.

From first through 10th grade in public schools, I used borrowed textbooks filled with former students’ names and chicken scratch and sat in classrooms with 30 to 60 students. After elementary school came limited equipment and programming, which ultimately led my parents to apply for private school scholarships.

I spent my last two years of high school at a private school. That’s when I saw clearly, for the first time, the difference between the haves and the have-nots. A single first visit made education disparity visible to me before I even had the word “disparity” in my vocabulary. There was an actual bookstore where students bought their textbooks. They weren’t just doled out to you during the first, second or third week of classes. I couldn’t believe the books had been published in the same decade I was sitting in — within a year or two of my junior and senior years, in fact. My classes had a good six to 18 students. Maybe 20.

We were also told to call our teachers by their first names, which I never got comfortable with. When I greeted one white teacher with “Miss” and her last name, I was immediately in trouble. She pulled me aside in my women’s history class, accused me of making a racist remark and reminded me to call her by her first name. She thought I was casting her as some sort of slave mistress. Here I thought I was giving her more respect than the other students cared to.

Then I went to Howard University. Insert big sigh here. I chose HU because I wanted to finally experience being part of the majority. I deliberately, specifically wanted to spend four years not translating myself, not being spoken to in rap lyrics and not code-switching. I wanted Black professors, Black administrators and Black excellence as the point — not the exception. Howard gave me that. Then I graduated and walked back into a world that wanted me to forget I’d ever had the experience.

I spent years after that working as a newspaper journalist and as communications director at several criminal and juvenile justice reform organizations. Inside jails and prisons, and on Capitol Hill, I advocated for people the system had already decided didn’t deserve a second chance. I saw what was inside those walls and inside people’s breaking hearts, and I rarely saw a win.

You can only push against a wall for so long before you decide: Is this wall going to move, or am I?

The dream started with my kids.

I wanted them bilingual and well-traveled. I wanted them to know, in their bodies, that the world was bigger than what they could see from home.

I got my first passport a few days before my 30th birthday so I could join my mother, who had also just applied for a passport in her late 50s, on a quick trip to Paris — my very first transatlantic trip. My kids had passports before they were 10, and they’d collected stamps from Costa Rica, South Africa and Mexico before they were 16. What I wanted for them, though, was more than visiting other countries only to come back to the States. I wanted them truly immersed in another country’s norms and values. I wanted them educated abroad. I wanted more for them — and for me.

Then they grew up, and the window closed. I’m here in Mexico, but they didn’t come with me. They’re living their own lives now. The dream that started with them became mine. I think about those 17 years whenever I see immigrant families from other countries raising small children here in Mexico. They didn’t wait. I did, and God, do I regret it.

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It took 17 years.

The timing never lined up, and the budget never stretched. The roof blew off the house — literally. Love found me, beautifully and inconveniently, in the form of a man who wanted to “put a ring on it.” The kids got comfortable (not too comfortable) at their schools, and I couldn’t bring myself to disrupt that.

Life kept stacking up reasons to wait, and I kept letting it. Now that I’ve finally made it, I can tell you what 17 years of waiting taught me: The timing will never be perfect, the budget will never be enough, and the emergencies won’t stop, though they will change shape. At some point you have to quit waiting for the obstacles to clear and go — through them, around them, despite them. In other words: JUST GO!

I chose La Paz because of the water.

I grew up in Los Angeles, where the beach was never more than 30 minutes away. It was where I went as a teenager for date nights, emotional days and mom-and-me outings. It was like going to the mall or the park. Washington, D.C., my home for 20 years, has a lot of things. A 30-minute drive to the beach is not one of them. In La Paz, the beach always seems to be five minutes away, on foot or by car.

La Paz sits on the edge of the Sea of Cortez. Its quiet ebb and flow waits for you every day, part of ordinary life rather than a reward or a destination. The pace slows in a way that feels almost radical if you’ve spent years ripping and running, hustling and bustling in a major American city. I wanted sun, sea and peace as my baseline.

For the readers asking: how did you actually make this work?

Remote work is your biggest asset. I was location-independent before the term existed, writing and consulting from coffee shops, my car, my kids’ school cafeteria, Portugal and my bed. If your income follows your laptop, your geography is already a choice. Claim it.

Seventeen years of waiting turned out to be preparation. Every delay taught me something. The financial emergencies taught me to be resourceful. The waiting showed me I actually wanted this, badly enough to still want it after 17 years. That clarity is worth something.

Hotel points are an investment. We used accumulated points for most of our transition travel. Start building them now, years before you think you’ll need them.

Your kids’ or family’s timeline is not your timeline. My dream started with giving my children a bigger world. They grew up and made their own choices. The dream evolved. Let yours evolve too.

Leaving doesn’t mean leaving every dynamic behind. Some of it follows you. What changes is the ratio, and that shift matters more than you’d think.

Up next: Chapter 2 — “The Long Goodbye: How We Drove Across America Before We Left It.”