After having travelled the world extensively, interacted with all manner of people, and lived abroad for half a decade, I’ve come to the conclusion that Western Europeans often have a cultural death wish. In their desire to self-flagellate and downplay their history out of a misguided sense of guilt they invite foreign and noxious elements, whilst ignoring their own cultural achievements.

The reason for this is I think a mixture of white guilt, and misguided desire to be socially progressive. Having known fairly quiet and peaceful lives, they figure that everyone else is like them. They ignore that the historical norm has always been blunt force and coercion. It used to be the case that behind every interaction, no matter how seemingly banal, there lurked the potential for danger, and hence the average non-Westerner has a healthy dose of scepticism for outsiders.

I dare say that is the case in most of the world - if someone is desperate enough they’re willing to do unspeakable horrors to survive. This doesn’t make them evil, or monsters, but human. Western Europeans have been spoiled because their direct neighbours have reached a certain level of financial and cultural parity with them and hence the only real differences are harmless cultural quirks and some mild philosophical differences. As such, asserting one’s cultural superiority over them seems pointless, retrograde and dangerously jingoistic.

Yet rather unthinkingly this same kindness has been transferred to the rest of the world who may have ill will for the people that invite them in. I say this without quite caring for the colour of their skins or where they come from, but what’s in their minds. Indeed, I’d be a hypocrite if I believed anything else, as I am the racial equivalent of the dog you see on the street where you’re unsure whether you’re looking at a French Poodle or a German Shepard.

I was born in Mexico, one side of the family is a mixture of Polish-German-Mexican, the other is Spanish-Mexican. I’m a citizen of the world in its truest sense as no country wholly considers me their own: I’m much too uptight and white looking for Mexican standards, I’m a bit too brown, free-spirited and unconcerned with authority to be truly German and Spaniards consider Mexicans amusing but unlike them where it counts, and at worst we’re criminals.

So I’m a bit of an outsider to all these cultures yet still feel some kinship to all of them. But when I see Mexican culture I see a very different attitude towards foreigners than Western Europeans have in general. Mexicans proselytise about Mexicanness — you’re allowed to be foreign all you like, but you have to do it in a Mexican way first and foremost.

Perhaps this is best evidenced in food. Not without reason has the UNESCO deemed Mexican food as an intangible world cultural heritage. In prehispanic times, what would one day become Mexico was a rich hodgepodge of warring kingdoms and tribes with thousands of years of history and rich cuisine, so even then the variety was immense.

When the Spaniards came along and introduced us to pork, it’s said that some Aztecs said: “this tastes like human”. Though putting likely apocryphal stories aside, Mexican culture and heritage shows an otherwise unusual willingness to take what is foreign, transform it to their purposes and then serve it up as if they had been the originators.

From those prehispanic blood sacrifices, we have pozole — a stocky meat soup with all manner of vegetables and spices. Most of what you would call Spanish cuisine, you can find readily available in Mexico and often I dare to say better than you’d find in Spain proper — though credit where credit is due, they’re stalwart defenders of it in their own right. When the French conquered us for a while, in a war perhaps fittingly started because of a baker and a pastry shop and now known as “The Pastry War”, we stole from them complicated sauces, crepes and all manner of bread making techniques and then swiftly kicked them out.

Yet culinary explorations needn’t happen because of violent imperialism; they can also happen because of voluntary cultural exchange. In the nineteenth century, through a curious confluence of events, miners from Cornwall ended in Mexico and they brought with them about the one edible British food — the Cornish pasty — yet Mexicans took one look at it and nicked it for their own purposes.

Now, when you go to Mexico you can find “empanadas”, the descendant of the pasty, with all manner of ingredients — most of which the average British person has never even seen, let alone tasted. Once again, I dare any Briton to try our version of their food and have them tell me with a straight face that their originally bland dish has not been much improved upon. If it suits our purposes, and we consider it superior we have no qualms about silly social justice buzzwords like “cultural appropriation”. On the contrary, we’ll take it, and give it a Mexican twist and say it’s ours.

I kid you not, many dishes even carry their own legendary origins of how they were taken from foreigners and we retell them as a comedic mythological origin. For example, there’s a type of tacos called a “gringa”, which is also a Mexican slang term for an American woman.

Either way, the legend says that many years ago an American woman ordered a weird type of taco at a taqueria — she wanted a white flour tortilla, with cheese, sour cream, pork, pineapple and hot sauce. The owner of the establishment was weirded out, just shook his head muttered “pinches gringos” under his breath and did what was asked of him. Yet she sang the dish praises and over time, long after the woman was gone, the regulars began ordering “what the gringa had ordered”, and thus that is the origin of a dish that you can now find in basically all taquerias in Mexico.

Behold — the gringa!

We’re not afraid of foreign cultures if we can see their value to us. But neither are we unwilling to stamp it out with extreme prejudice if we see it as an affront to our values. Take the existence of the American fast-food Tex-Mex abomination that is Taco Bell. Much to their corporate chagrin, and despite having spent millions of dollars to get the ball rolling, Mexico remains Taco Bell free to this day, as any shop that opens there quickly goes bankrupt.

So believe me when I hear the social progressives scream from their rooftops that “diversity is our strength” I know where they’re coming from. Having grown up in Mexico, I can see the benefits of a rich culture that has taken notes from a broad range of traditions. But at its core, despite being accepting of outside influences, Mexico knows what it is and what it isn’t.

If you come from a foreign culture wishing to impose your values on Mexico, you will get your ass whooped because Mexicans are very protective of their heritage. The same is not true for Europeans who are abandoning their cultural values and are at times even ashamed of showing pride in their nation. There are even clips of German chancellor Angela Merkel shaming other politicians for daring to wave their own nation’s flag! That would be utterly unthinkable in Mexico. Hell, we even have a whole day dedicated to waving the flag — the 16 of September — the day in which we declared our independence from Spain.

Ironically, I believe the best way for Europe to safeguard its cultural heritage is to become more Mexican. By all means, be open to immigration and be friendly to others. But know what your values are and protect them. When they invite poor and uneducated third worlders they should do so cautiously, knowing that they come from foreign cultures - you wouldn’t invite someone you met on the street to your home before knowing them well, why should inviting them to your country be any different?

Besides that, they should do their best to integrate them and have them be European before anything else; like Mexicans accept you being all manner of things but Mexican first and foremost — the caveat being that all your foreign customs and beliefs are reinterpreted to be Mexican. Not only that, but Europeans should be aware that the cultures that they are inviting often have no qualms over asserting their dominance by hook or by crook.

Europeans should proselytise their culture harder and more appealing than they do, convince them that following the underlying European philosophy is better. But Europeans can only do this when their culture is so overwhelming that outside forces have no other choice but to conform, and this can only be done when the numbers of foreign elements are manageable and one is willing to exert some will.

I’ll repeat this for good measure: The key to this is the Mexican integration system — Mexican culture is strong, yet welcoming. And it never bites off more than it can chew.

I’ll put it this way, my grandmother, with a thick German accent, who was born in a Polish village before WWII and who can bake a Strudel to die for, now primarily considers herself Mexican. She even prays to the Virgin de Guadalupe, whom again is an amalgamation of Catholic mysticism, indigenous earth mother symbology and wrapped around in a thick veil of Mexican folklore. For all intents and purposes my grandmother has turned Mexican in the decades she’s lived there and that’s precisely what makes Mexico so culturally important. It’s by no means a perfect country, but it’s one that is very capable of making one feel right at home regardless of where one was born.

Viva Mexico!