ELEANORE M. STOKES

E T H N O G R A P H Y O F A S O C I A L BORDER: THE CASE OF AN A M E R I C A N RETIREMENT C O M M U N I T Y IN M E X I C O *

ABSTRACT. This is an ethnography of older Americans who move to a resort area in Mexico to retire. It first traces the emergence of a collective identity among the older movers and then describes the occasions and manner in which the migrants interact with the host community. Events in this setting draw attention to aspects of social identity, community creation and management of social life. In adapting to the host community these retirees 1) manage social relations among themselves by recreating the social forms and world view of their homeland; 2) modify traditional American behavior and cultural symbols in response to the features and demands of the external environment; and 3) manipulate relations with the host community so as to preserve their privileged life .style. When the research focus shifts from the internal dimensions of community life to the arenas of interaction with the host community, age is of less social significance than migrancy as an ordering principal of social life. Key Words: retirement communities, social borders, social integration, Mexico, migration, successful adaptation

1. INTRODUCTION Retirement villages have become a popular residential choice for older Americans in recent years. Their appeal is grounded in middle class American values of freedom and leisure, cameraderie of peers, security, and amenities (Burgess 1961, Zelinsky 1973), values which are emphasized in advertizing for planned housing sites and resort settings. The retirement village, with its concentration of older individuals, has been a testing ground par excellence for questions about age and social interaction, life satisfaction and community building. Intensive research has shown that older movers form friendships, engage in disputes, provide support systems for one another, sustain kinship ties, and show the same tendency as younger people to create functional social systems (Byme 1974, Carp 1966, Fry 1979, Golant 1985, Hochschild 1973, Hoyt 1954, Johnson 1971, Kandel and Heider 1979, Keith 1980, Myerhoff 1978, Prager 1986), Ross 1977, Stephens 1975, Streib, Folts and LaGreca 1985). A few studies have also considered the larger social context of the retirement enclave: host community resistance to subsidized elderly housing (Mangum 1988), administrative ties to developers (Fry 1979, Levine 1981) and political, fiscal and services impact (Haas 1980, Heintz 1976, Stokes 1975). Older movers bring to the new setting a full complement of the social/cultural templates for community life: organizational structure and process, networking, impression management, status markers, standards of appropriate behavior, and Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology 5: 169-182, 1990. © 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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mechanisms to enforce these standards and govem interchange. This cultural wisdom, refined in a lifetime of civic and organizational experience, includes a capacity to modify and adapt cultural rules to suit the new situation and to frame a border of social distinctiveness. As yet undeveloped is an understanding of the means by which migrant-retirees bring these cultural capacities to bear on the external environment. The present study is an ethnography of American retirees in Mexico and their relations with the host society. The discussion first traces the emergence of a collective identity among the migrants and the markers of a distinctive social border; it then examines the values which guide social interaction between the community of retirees and the host community. 2. SOCIAL BORDERS In Max Weber's classic construct, groups are said to coalesce and differentiate on the basis of life style, conventions and attitudes. "'Status' is a quality of social honor or a lack of it, and is in the main conditioned as well as expressed through a specific style of life" (Weber 1958: 405). The concept of social borders extends this construct by defining the markers of symbolic and social separation of status groups contained within a social system. Kinship rules, age, language, ethnicity and territory are familiar examples of border markers (Barth 1969, Ross 1975). The border is part of the structure of the adjacent status groups and carries a negative or positive valence. The border is the point of articulation between them, yet each status group remains partially autonomous. Either group may work to affirm, maintain, erase, or emphasize the markers of differentiation and influence the persistence or valuation of the border (Ross 1975). The inwardfacing dimension of the border symbolizes the collective representations of the group, the "we-feeling" of community creation (Keith 1980), and is a statement of social integration. The outward-facing dimension is constructed of markers which differentiate one group from another (e.g., sex, age, class, race, ethnicity). In this aspect the border is a statement of social separation. 3. RESEARCH SITE AND METHOD Approximately 1200 older Americans are year round residents of an emerging resort zone in the mountains of west central Mexico. The zone consists of a half dozen small pueblos (towns) and a few modem housing subdivisions scattered along the shore of a large lake. It is described in tourism literature as a "vacation paradise". The retirees call the areas they occupy 'Lakeside'. 1 The social center of Lakeside is the pueblo of Huatepec where almost forty percent of the retirees live. The lake area has pre-Columbian and Spanish colonial traditions which are only partly displaced by the modernizing influences of its new status as a resort zone. The indigenous economy is small scale subsistence cultivation and fishing,

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modified by the addition of small merchants and wage labor for American retirees and seasonal vacationers. Income and education are low, typical of rural Mexico where residents have few opportunities or expectations for social or economic mobility. An eight month ethnographic study was conducted in 1979-1980, following a one month pilot study in 1977. Investigation focused primarily on the pueblo of Huatepec but included all other towns with retired Americans. Participant observation and intensive interviews with key informants were the principal sources of information. This involved living in Huatepec and mingling with Americans and Mexicans in a variety of private and public settings: residents' homes, market and plaza, post office, banks, churches, restaurants and night club, club meetings, language classes, performances of the amateur theater group, philanthropic fundraising events, and other events in which retirees are spectators or participants. Intensive interviews with 43 informants, selected to reflect the profile of the community (e.g., length of residence, clique and club memberships, age, marital status, apparent income, location of residence and reputation within the community as "key figure," "involved," and "not involved"), provided personal histories and observations on daily life at Lakeside. Topics included relations with other retirees and with Mexicans, sentiments about being a foreigner, and contacts with family and friends in the U.S. Background information was obtained from: 1) a review of seven years' issues of the weekly English language newspaper serving American settlements in west Mexico, 2) scholarly writings, 3) census records of Mexico, 4) overseas beneficiary reports of U.S. Social Security Administration, 5) a community planning study of Huatepec prepared by a Mexican architect, and 6) two novels depicting the lifeways of Anglos and Mexicans in Huatepec written in the 1940's by an American living at Lakeside. 4. LAKESIDE: A RETIREMENT COMMUNITY The first retirees to settle at Lakeside were military pensioners who arrived in the early 1950's. Later arrivals were business executives, entrepreneurs, performers, educators, lower level white collar workers, and civil servants. With few exceptions, their prior experience in Mexico was as vacationers. More than 90 percent of current residents are U.S. citizens, the remainder are Canadians and one or two European nationals. They range in age from the late 40's to over ninety, in economic assets from near-poverty to affluence. Married couples outnumber single people by about two-to-one. The retirees retain many links to the homeland. They cast absentee votes in national elections, listen to short wave radio, circulate magazines and newspapers, are members of national fraternal and veteran's organizations, and "keep in touch with what's happening back home" through personal affiliations including periodic visits with children and grandchildren. On the other hand, the retirees commit substantial resources to establish themselves in Mexico. They renovate and modernize purchased or leased housing and if they want to

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establish permanent residence, must escrow $20,000. (US) in a Mexican bank. The age, occupation, income and citizenship diversity, typically a basis for social differentiation in the United States, is submerged at Lakeside by the retirees and by their hosts. The retirees treat themselves as a single social category by overlooking age, national and socio-economic differences in favor of the distinctive status as foreigner. They coined the terms 'Lakeside' and 'Lakesider' to denote the territory they occupy and the foreign population. When a stronger statement of social separation from Mexican culture and society is intended they call themselves Americans, gringos and expatriates. The expatriate label conveys their special status as 'citizens at a distance' and reinforces their formal ties to the nation of origin. Mexicans refer to the retirees as la colonia extranjera (the foreign colony) and los americanos, signifying that they give priority to culture as the marker of the social border. The cumulative effect of these labels and linkages is to emphasize the retirees' status as an ethnic group in Mexico. The daily round presents further occasions to mark the retirees as an ethnic group. Each weekday between 10 and 11:30 a steady stream of Lakesiders stop at Huatepec's post office. The customer area, measuring about 4 feet by 8, quickly becomes congested. Conversations begun inside continue onto the narrow sidewalk and incorporate people just coming upon the scene. Automobiles left at the curb add to the congestion in the narrow street. The atmosphere is convivial. Lakesiders call to one another, extend invitations and confirm plans for club activities, then move away, leaving space for the next arrival. On these occasions the observer is struck by a bit of cultural sleight of hand - a public setting which ordinarily is visually and audibly Mexican is transformed for a short time into an American town by the concentration of Anglo countenances and the volume of English speech. The social border of Lakeside is also a product of intemal structure and definition: personal cliques, activities clubs, and a civic association. Cliques are the fluid tier of community life, the result of idiosyncratic interests and situations. Clubs structure diverse recreation, fraternal and philanthropic activities. The capstone organization is the Lakeside Society, founded to handle overseas or local interment of deceased members, operate an English language library, and "promote fellowship among the colonists and friendship with the Mexican community." The Society is the only community-wide organization. It has a membership of almost 1000, including a few prominent Mexicans. 2 Intercultural sociability is a courteous formality at meetings. Mexican members sit at the head table but conversations, which are conducted in English, sound more like the exchange of diplomats than of "friends" or neighbors. The Society has no formal political role but its meetings are sometimes a forum for raising concems about crime, bad roads, trash collection and other deficencies of the host environment in the presence of prominent Mexicans. Community groupings forge and maintain symbolic, instrumental and sentimental ties to the homeland. Protestant and Catholic congregations replicate

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Stateside religious rituals and calendars, the American Legion and Retired Officers Association are chapters of stateside organizations, and shortwave radios and magazines bring news of current events. It is in the persistence of such familiar forms and symbols that North American culture is re-created at Lakeside, the transition to a foreign land is simplified, and formal markers of a social border are established. Adapting to the Host Community Over the years the retirees have modified the rhythm of their lives to accommodate their status as retirees and the periodicity and idiosyncracies of the rural Mexican environment. The stateside convention of the evening family dinner has been replaced by the comida / siesta (midday main meal and rest period) tradition of Latin cultures. Retirees say it is convenient to match their mealtime schedule to the daily timetables of their maids and gardeners and that "a rest in the middle of the day is healthy". Similarly, the scarcity of telephones led to the adoption of new conventions for visiting. Late morning and late afternoon are the designated time for drop-in visiting. Householders may then signal they are "not at home" during these hours by leaving the gate latched or parking the car off the street. Alternatively, a visit may be scheduled by an exchange of notes, often delivered by an employees's or neighbor's child. Lakesiders celebrate the important holidays of their culture but here too they modify form, content and expression to assure compatibility with the new environment. Mexican and American cultural themes merge during the Christmas season. Clubs celebrate the season with special meals, parties and performances. The Christmas liturgy is celebrated in Huatepec's church by a retired American priest and in the non-denominational chapel built by the retirees in a nearby sub-division. In lieu of the traditional tree, they decorate with large colorful paper flowers used by the pueblo. La Quinta, an inn known as the "gringo hangout," advertizes "a real Christmas dinner" but includes mariachi music and fireworks in the New Year's Eve party. The Courier, an English language weekly published by Americans that circulates in western Mexico, is also a medium for blended cultural forms.

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Mexican businesses give season's greetings using those mainstays of the Anglo tradition bells, candles, holly, pine cones, poincettias, flying reindeer, Santa Claus, and piles of brightly wrapped boxes. In one recent issue the weekly editorial cartoon showed a round, bearded Santa in suspenders, furred jacket and boots over his right arm; on his feet and head are sandals and a huge sombrero; standing next to him is a tiny donkey with abbreviated antlers tied to its head.

Informants liked the advertizers' displays but had mixed views about this cartoon. Some objected to the patronizing humor while others said that these blendings of Hispanic and Anglo elements are evidence of inter-cultural communication. Independence Day (and Dominion Day) are celebrated without the public

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displays of flags and parades typical of the homeland. The Courier highlights the occasion with patriotic tributes and anecdotes about historical figures and events. The major event is a party hosted by Mexican commercial interests. About 600 Americans attended the party during the period of study. This event is only briefly patriotic, however. Lakesiders stand respectfully for the Mexican and American national anthems. The host and the President of the Lakeside Society express sentiments of mutual friendship and appreciation. The ceremony ends with a castillo (fireworks set in a stylized frame) spelling out "Happy Independence Day". The remainder of the evening is strictly a social event with "Big Band" tunes of the 1930's and '40's played by a mariachi band and free rum punch. These sacred and secular celebrations, like the activities of the clubs, commemorate the cultural links that bind the retirees as Lakesiders, the sentimental and ideological attachments that bind them to the parent culture, and the ideological symbols that mark their social separation from the host society. Lakeside social life cycles through periods in which Mexican culture and American culture alternate in prominence. From March through November the routine of domestic and club activities structure the days. This is "normal time" at Lakeside and the period when Mexican culture looms large. It is the pattern of life to which newcomers must adapt if they are to "make it" at Lakeside. From December to February, however, American culture takes on greater prominence. "Snowbirds" (winter season residents), family and friends arrive; furs, elaborate gowns and jewelry make an appearance; dinner tables take on a Stateside character because visitors bring items which are either unavailable or particularly costly in Mexico; and conversations are freshened by news of Stateside doings generated by the visitors. In turn, Lakesiders show off the climate, scenery, houses with servants, and stress-free life style. 5. MANAGINGTHE BORDER Lakesiders interact with Mexicans in three principal arenas: governance, banks, and the pueblo. The language of interaction in each arena is a metaphor of relative status. English conveys low status in governance, equal to higher status in banking, and high status in the pueblo. Almost every social gathering is an opportunity to exchange stories about recent and past experiences which show that special techniques are needed to "get along" in Mexico: 1) Don't be an "ugly American" - we are guests in this country and can stay only as long as they let us; 2) Be careful of Mexican law because here you are guilty until proved innocent; 3) Officials should be avoided, bankers are helpful, village people are friendly and honest but not always dependable; 4) Americans have succeeded the Spanish as patrons of peasant Mexicans. The arena of governance. Government officials are the gatekeepers, either directly or indirectly, to this "retirement eden." Americans distrust officials and are apprehensive about their rights in Napoleonic law, especially since a few

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Lakesiders have had visas revoked for automobile accidents, property maintenance and labor law infractions, and earning income in Mexico. Lakesiders are further disadvantaged in these encounters because officials conduct business in Spanish. ~Few Lakesiders have more than a rudimentary knowledge of the language. A case which unfolded during the fieldwork period illustrates the Lakeside strategy of avoidance when dealing even with local officials. One couple organized a petition signed by Mexican and Anglo neighbors to complain to municipal officials about noise from a new discotheque said to be owned by the son of the area's most prominent family. A retiree with "good connections" and fluent in Spanish interpreted for the group of 5 or 6 Americans who joined in the complaint. No action was taken. The couple continued to press their complaint. Shortly after, they received several summonses alleging violations of property maintenance and parking laws. Their immigration documents were also "reviewed for irregularities." Anglo neigbors dropped their support, saying the couple "should have stopped after the heating"..."have only themselves to blame"..."the noise and traffic aren't as bad as they say"..."we aren't disturbed since we moved our bedroom to the other side of the house." The banking arena. In contrast to the difference with which Lakesiders approach officials, bankers are perceived as "helpful." They ease the intricacies of investing in a foreign country, sponsor the Independence Day (and Dominion Day) parties, and attend meetings of the Lakeside Society. Bankers also seem to take a personal interest in their customers, inquiring about their health and families, and helping locate services - whether the need is for an auto mechanic, telephone, or lawyer. Retirees say they "never had such red carpet treatment in Stateside banks." Transactions in the banking arena are conducted in English, giving Lakesiders a distinct conversational advantage and frequent opportunities to "help improve [the banker's] English." Lakesiders emerge from transactions in the banking arena with confidence and prestige enhanced. The arena of the pueblo. The most frequent, intimate, and persistent of retiree host interactions occur in the marketplace, the household and in the conduct of philanthropy. Relations are extremely c and carded out in a mixture of Spanish and English that Lakesiders call "spanglish" [a text comprised largely of nouns and the infinitive form of Spanish verbs embellished by hand signals and elaborate phrases of request and gratitude]. The pueblo provides retirees with most of the basic goods and services. In addition to food, housing and workers, this currently includes two restaurants with bi-lingual menus and American-style food, hand-crafted household goods and clothing, supermarket, gas station, beauty salon, language tutor, and movies with English sub-titles. Lakesiders have suspended the American ideal of a rational marketplace in favor of personal affiliations as the way to conduct business in Mexico. The opinion of seasoned residents is said to the best guide to quality since there are no objective standards for merchandise and workmanship. Information exchanged at gatherings of cliques and clubs helps establish the reputations of merchants. As a result, provision of goods and services tends to be concentrated among a few merchants. -

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Every retiree household has at least two workers, a maid and yardman. Domestic service provides a secure income to supplement or replace farming and fishing for men and new earnings opportunities for women. Even though communication seldom extends beyond warm greetings and instructions for tasks, Lakesiders form opinions about the host culture from this personal contact. If a maid persists in washing dishes in cold water and does not protect food from flies, or a yardman is frequently late, these behaviors are seen as examples of the imperfections of the culture. Conversely, satisfaction with a servant produces statements of global perfection: "Mexicans are polite, loyal, warm." Philanthropy has become institutionalized at Lakeside. Employers sometimes lend money or help in a crisis because they believe that as employers in rural Mexico they wear the mantle of patr6n 3 and have a moral obligation because "this is the way things are done here." This may entail providing transportation to the hospital 30 miles away, paying a medical bill, or granting time off with pay so a maid can care for a relative. Patrons do not expect repayment p e r se, only the respect and loyalty of servant and her (or his) kindred. Thomas Lang, a resident for fifteen years is called Don Tomas by his yardman ever since he paid for surgery for Luis' son. Calling me "Don" is a mark of respect -just like the old days when the Spanish were the aristocrats. Luis and the bey take extra care with my garden and even though I never ask somebody in the family usually stays here when I'm away to be sure everything is secure. Lakesiders' philantropy is concentrated on the school age children of the pueblos. Some donors choose the recipient, usually the child of an employee, and pay tuition, health screening and other school expenses directly. However, most giving is channelled through organized efforts - nutrition program, after school education enrichment, tuition assistance, and clothing. In this arrangement donor and recipient do not have a personal relationship. Standardized criteria of financial need - modeled on stateside welfare programs - "assure that assistance is awarded to those who benefit most." Female-headed households are regarded as particularly worthy, "a well established practice in the States." Tuition assistance has the added requirement of "scholarship and ambition." The clothing program is unique because of the public and ceremonial aspects of the giving and the involvement of several Huatepec women in leadership roles. The program was instituted when a few American women learned that many children attended school only part time because school clothing (including shoes) was often shared among all the children in a family. A child who outgrew the clothes also outgrew school. Approximately 15 women make individually designed dresses and raise money to purchase shirts and pants for "families in need." Recipients are currently selected by a committee of three women of the pueblo, headed by the English speaking hairdresser. This committee replaced the local priest who, it was said by some local people, tended to choose recipients for their piety rather than financial need.

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The annual distribution is a public event. Almost three hundred boys and girls, some accompanied by a mother and younger siblings, line up outside the designated Club member's house with their chits in hand. They are eager but quiet and orderly, moving one at a time into the courtyard to receive their garments. Girls smile shyly as they display their dresses to friends while solemn boys carry their outfits neatly folded. Recipients and neighbors treat the event not as charity but as gift giving, an act that carries no stigma for the recipient in the pueblo. The rationale for contemporary philanthropy is partly moral and partly positivistic. Some individuals, like Mr. Lang, believe it is the obligation of the affluent to aid the underprivileged. Organized aid is driven by the pb31osophy "to help these people to help themselves and to bring the village into the twentieth century." Indeed, most children can now expect to complete sixth grade; several have gone on to junior and senior high; one student is at university. This is in contrast to their parents and older siblings who seldom completed second or third grade. No official tabulation has been made of all formal assistance provided over the years, but available records show an impressive effort. The tuition assistance fund currently has almost 200 active cases. The Sewing Club distributes clothing to 300 boys and girls. The nutrition and enrichment program serves about 80 children. Retiree philanthropy establishes patron-client relations between donor and recipient. This relationship is expressed in several ways. Individual donors, like Mr. Lang, and members of committees that distribute clothing and funds are addressed with titles o f respect - "Don Tomas," "most esteemed lady" - by the children. A few retirees have been acknowledged as patr6n in a public forum. The postmaster invited the past president of the Lakeside Society to be godmother for his daughter's quinceahos4 celebration. "This honor was unexpected because I never socialized with him or his family. I guess he asked me in order to show appreciation for all we [Lakesiders] have done for the children of this poor village." Mr. Lang was invited to his yardman's home to celebrate a daughter's First Communion [a major rite for Catholic children]. "My friend and I were the only Anglos among thirty or forty adults. They couldn't do enough for us. Luis and his family respect me and were honored that I came." The most visible display of respect for a patr6n was shown for the founder of the first organized tuition program. At his death the pueblo arranged a traditional funeral procession and interment in Huatepec. He is the only retiree to be given this ceremony. His widow continues to be held in high esteem in the pueblo. In dealing with the host community the retirees adopted such strategies as philantropy and patronage, avoidance, and condescension so as to strike a balance between two conflicting constructs: an ideology that American culture is superior to Mexican culture 5 and the reality that the Colony has no power or authority in Mexico's political/legal structure.

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The ethnography of Lakeside illustrates the duality of the social world of a retirement enclave. One component is the community of in-movers, la colonia extranjera as they are called by Mexicans, Lakesiders as they call themselves. The second is the set of towns, people and governance of the host society. The social field is an interactive system, mediated by a boundary which structures and connects the partially autonomous parts. The social border has explicit and implict features. The former are citizenship, age, language, and life style; the latter are exclusively association, sentimental and instrumental attachments to the country of origin, and the rituals and symbols of American culture. Relations within the retirement enclave and between enclave and hosts are conditioned and maintained by the social forms and values of American culture and the social forces emanating from the host community. Lakesiders make judgments about the requirements of the host environment then condense these perceptions into a set of operating principles and strategies. First, they reduce the complexity of each component of the social field. Among themselves they overlook national, age, income and occupational differences and collapse that diversity into an ethnic classification (American) or residence classification (Lakesider). They make the external environment manageable by differentiating the components that are central to their wellbeing: officials, bankers and pueblo. The retirees adjust their behavior in each arena of interaction so as to protect their self interest and maintain the desired social distance. Philanthropy, idealized by Lakesiders and recipients alike, is an instance of institutionalized prestige management. A canon of social exchange theory is that prestige is acquired by gift-givers in asymmetrical transactions (Mauss 1967). Gift-giving by Lakesiders is reciprocated by sentiments and expressions of admiration, loyalty and respect, the complement of exchange in patron-client relations. The retirees have no jural authority but the role ofpatr6n is a metaphor of power and authority in Mexico. Second, they codify the structure and process of social interaction among themselves and with the host community. Communicated directly or obliquely in the flow of ordinary conversation, this code affirms the postulates that give Lakeside a distinctive social identity, facilitates intra-group relations, eases a newcomer's adjustment to the new environment, and makes clear when and how the social borders of community may be bridged. In the telling and re-telling, these precepts preserve the social border configured during the early years of settlement. Third, the retirees borrow cultural elements that improve or facilitate adjustment to the host culture - timing of meals, visiting, and modified celebrations of sacred and secular rituals. As a result, instrumental and expressive elements of the retirement community are a mosaic of cultural traditions and social forms. The dominant motif is Anglo-American but details are noticeably Hispanic. Social interchange in both formal and informal situations is a metaphor of the

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social and cultural boundaries at Lakeside. Retirees and hosts occupy the same territory but socialize separately. Lakesiders make judgments about the merits of the host society's people and institutions based on superficial, often mythic understandings of Mexico's history and culture and an unshakable belief in the superiority of American social and cultural forms. Yet, they act on that postulate with caution, avoiding challenges to Mexican authority even as they proselytize American values about education, work, and lifestyle to the people of the pueblo. Lakesiders declare their intention to "promote friendship with the Mexican community" yet limit sociability to symbolic functions - civic events, godparenthood, and religious and funerary rites. A two part social field is an implicit feature of the many studies which document the process and structure of community-building in a wide range of retirement settings - trailer parks, urban apartments, single-room occupancy hotels, suburban subdivisions, and planned retirement villages. In each setting, with varying styles and strategies, the older people reconfigure the values, symbols and rules of the wider society to provide a meaningful and satisfying framework for life in the age-graded setting. Residents of a congregate housing facility in Pads substitute volunteer activities for the occupation and income status markers of the larger society (Ross 1977). In a large Florida trailer park residents place high value on the retirement "way of life" - recreation, sociability and leisure (Hoyt 1954). Society's monolithic category 'the elderly' is re-cast in a west coast urban apartment house by residents who construct a hierarchy of age based on variations within the setting and then reinterpret society's age norms and roles to accord with the new standards (Hochschild 1973). When attention is thus directed to factors and processes of community creation, the world beyond the border fades into the background. Rosow describes the retirement community as a structure created in opposition to the larger society. These communities are considered a protective strategy, a defense against the stigma of negatively charged life cycle markers of age and non-work (Rosow 1967). This is not true of Lakeside which is dynamically engaged with its host society. Community social structures enable residents to control their position in the wider environment. When the boundary of Lakeside is considered as an arena of interaction, attention shifts to transactions between elements in a social field and patterned relationships within a system. Examples of systems of interactional regularities in anthropology are the Kula Ring, a trading system involving vast ocean distances and hostile tribes held in place by the symbolic ties of ritualized giftexchange (Malinowski 1922); and the financial community of London which is denoted by dress and speech (Cohen 1974). In these social settings the analysis of any one element - tribe, elites - while sociologically interesting in its own right, is incomplete without a grasp of its relation to other groupings. The perspective which "sees" each as part of a wider system enriches understanding of the component groups and reveals an interactive system of greater complexity than might otherwise be realized.

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Lakeside is not a unique social phenomenon. It is simply one retirement colony in which the relationship between the community and the larger culture is examined in detail. The popularity of leisure villages suggests there are many "Lakesides," with more to come. Most of these are new communities, composed of migrants who re-settle in search of the "good life" and are additions to the political jurisdictions of their host communities. Retirement colonies are communities, not merely places old people choose to live (Keith 1977). The study of Lakeside illustrates the social finesse with which retirement enclaves manipulate social symbols. In so doing older people exert control over the power groups of the social field. This political dimension has not been developed in gerontology research. Lakeside also illustrates the dynamic quality of an age-graded community organization. Far from reifying American cultural forms as would be expected from Nash's (1970) study of an overseas American business community, Lakesiders adapt those ideals and forms to meet their peculiar needs as migrants and strangers (cf Simmel 1950). This retirement community's status as stranger and migrant competes with age and life stage as explanatory variables o f social interactions within the age graded enclave and between enclave and host community. NOTES * This article is based upon a dissertation. The author is indebted to the people at 'Lakeside' for their hospitality and forebearance, to Dr. William Arens for his advice and counsel throughout all phases of the research and to Dr. Lucille Nahemow and Dr. Eugene Thomas for their useful comments on early drafts of this paper. 1 Pseudonyms are used in place of actual names of persons and places in the field site. 2 These are the leading commercial family, bankers, and the presidente municipio. The latter is roughly equivalent to the chief executive of a small township with constituent villages or hamlets in the United States. 3 The Spanish word patr6n refers to a person of authority, high status, power (e.g., employer, protecting saint, a ceremonial sponsor) and is the reciprocal position to a person of lesser status (the client who is to be helped). 4 The quinceaaos is the 15th birthday, an important life stage marker and social event for girls. A godmother (madrina) is traditionally a person of equal or higher social status than the family. In this instance choices were limited since the position of postmaster (a federal appointment) has a higher status than other village occupations. To have a prominent Anglo fill this role was a coup for the family. It is unlikely that the postmaster intended to invoke the formal spiritual kinship of godparent, child and parent (compadrazqo) which in Latin culture creates lifelong obligations. In this case the establishment of such bonds may have been less important than the cosmetic effect of a social event properly executed. No extended role was explainded to the American, only her obligation to provide an elaborately decorated cake for the party and a gift for the girl and that the girl would honor her with the title madrina. 5 Lakesiders' values parallel those held by a business colony of Americans who are on temporary assigmnent in a major urban area in Spain as reported in D. Nash, 1970 A Community in Limbo. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).

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