Five years ago I packed up my life in Savannah, Georgia, grabbed my fifteen-year-old daughter and our two cats, and moved to Mérida, Mexico.
For me, it was our great escape. I was moving toward something better — a quieter life, a more affordable one, a life with less of the particular exhaustion that comes from navigating racism and forced consumerism in America every single day. I was already self-employed. I already knew how to build something from scratch. I just wanted to do it somewhere that didn't cost me so much of myself in the process.
What I found in Mérida exceeded what I was looking for. And five years in, I'm still finding it.
The City Itself
Mérida is the capital of the Yucatán state in southeastern Mexico. It's a city that has been continuously inhabited for thousands of years — first by the Maya, whose presence and culture are not historical footnotes here but living, breathing, everyday fact. The architecture is colonial and grand and a little crumbling in the most beautiful way. The streets are narrow and the walls are painted colors that have no business being that beautiful.
It is also, for the record, extremely hot. Peruse any expat Facebook group and you can't help but be inundated with talk of the heat. As a southerner, truthfully this is a tendency that used to annoy me to no end. Okay, it's hot. But, I digress, my views on the ongoing discussion on heat in Merida is one for another blog so stay tuned. Just know that from about ten in the morning until seven in the evening, the heat is non-negotiable. You learn to move your life around it — early mornings, late evenings, and the quiet hours in between. That rhythm isn't a lifestyle philosophy. It's just practical. And it happens to leave space for things that busyness tends to crowd out.
The tea of choice here is jamaica. Hibiscus, deep red, tart, served cold over ice at practically every restaurant and market stall. It's the taste of this city to me now. Good for your heart, your blood pressure, your whole situation.
The Mercado and Plant Medicine as Everyday Life
One of the first things that struck me about living here were the mercados. One in particular has become a personal favorite.
At Lucas de Gálvez and the markets throughout the city, you find herbalists — mostly women — selling plants that have been used in Yucatecan healing for generations. This isn't wellness tourism. This isn't a trend. These women are not building a brand around what they know. They simply know it, the way their mothers knew it and their grandmothers before them.
Epazote for digestion. Ruda for energetic clearing. Chaya — a leafy green native to the Yucatán — packed with more nutrition than most supplements you'd pay thirty dollars for. Sábila, aloe, for everything. And yes, jamaica — not just a drink but a medicine.
Being surrounded by a culture that has never separated plant knowledge from daily life has made my own herbal practice more grounded. It's a reminder that this knowledge was never meant to be a luxury item. It was always meant to be passed down, traded, shared. The mercado women don't need a certification to validate what they carry. Neither did my grandmother.
Culture as Its Own Kind of Nourishment
Mérida has a cultural life that is genuinely remarkable for a city of its size.
On Sunday evenings, the main plaza comes alive. There are orchestras playing danzón — a slow, elegant dance form with deep roots in Cuban and Yucatecan tradition — and couples of every age dancing in the open air. Families, elders, children, everyone. It is completely free and completely unhurried and it happens every single week.
La Noche Blanca is something else entirely. It happens only a few times a year — a night when museums, galleries, and cultural spaces across the city open their doors simultaneously, often for free, and the streets fill with people moving through art and music and light until the small hours. I have never experienced anything quite like it. The city transforms.
Then there is the Vaquería — traditional Yucatecan celebration rooted in hacienda culture, with regional music and the women dressed in the terno, the elaborate hand-embroidered huipil that is specific to this region. There are the festivals, the Day of the Dead observances — here called Hanal Pixán, the Mayan tradition of honoring ancestors with food and ceremony and marigold and memory. These are not performances for visitors. They are the culture, ongoing and alive.
I attend these things not as a tourist but as a resident, which is a different relationship entirely. I am a guest in this culture and I hold that with real respect. But I am also someone who has been here five years, who walks these streets every day, who has watched my understanding of ceremony and community and collective ritual deepen in ways that inform everything I do at Black Lion Botanicals.
When I talk about healing through community, through sound, through shared experience — I am not speaking abstractly. I have been living inside the evidence.
A Note for Black Women Considering the Move
I am not going to oversell this. Mérida is not a utopia and nowhere is.
What I will say is that I came here for a better quality of life — for myself and for my daughter — and that is what I found. The cost of living is genuinely more manageable. The culture is genuinely rich. The nature — the cenotes, the Gulf coast nearby, the jungle — is extraordinary. There is beauty here that is available every single day if you are paying attention.
My daughter grew up here from fifteen. She's since returned to the States for college, which is its own kind of story. The cats, who made the whole journey with us, have since passed. Things change. That's also part of living intentionally — you don't get to control how the story unfolds, only how you show up to it.
I am planning to move again soon, to Vietnam, which tells you something about how I move through the world. Mérida was never the destination. It was a chapter — a rich, formative, still-unfolding chapter — in a life I am actively building.
What Mérida Gave My Practice
Black Lion Botanicals grew up in this city.
The way I think about plant medicine was deepened by the mercado women. My understanding of ceremony was expanded by Hanal Pixán and Noche Blanca and every Sunday evening in the plazas. My appreciation for what it means to live surrounded by art — real art, public art, art that belongs to everyone — comes from five years inside a city that treats culture as infrastructure.
When I do a reiki session, when I build an herbal protocol, when I sit with someone in empathetic listening, I bring all of this with me. The knowing that healing is not separate from daily life. That plants are not products. That community and ceremony and beauty are not luxuries — they are requirements.
Mérida taught me that by simply being what it is.
Come If You Can
Come to Mérida. Come curious. Walk the mercados early in the morning before the heat sets in. Drink the jamaica. Stay for a Sunday evening in the plaza and watch or join in the dance. If you can time it for La Noche Blanca, do that.
You don't have to be looking for healing specifically. Just come open. The city has a way of giving you what you didn't know you needed.
That's been my experience, anyway. Five years and counting.
A Black southern woman shares five years of life in Mérida, Mexico — the markets, the culture, the hibiscus tea, and why this Yucatán city nourishes something most of us are starving for.
🦁 — Terry Black Lion Botanicals | Mérida, Yucatán, México
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