Atención: Interactions. WhatsApp Is Infrastructure

By Lisa Babincsak

When I moved to Mexico nine years ago, I had barely heard of WhatsApp. Apparently, much of the rest of the world had been communicating without me.

Since then, I’ve noticed that Americans and Canadians who don’t live in Mexico often seem to acquire WhatsApp for one reason—they know someone who lives somewhere else. In Mexico, nobody needs a reason.

WhatsApp isn’t simply how you message people; it’s how you make a dinner reservation, book a haircut, schedule a doctor’s appointment, find a plumber, contact your veterinarian, arrange a delivery, or hire a driver. Calling is almost beside the point—half the time nobody answers anyway. Send a WhatsApp message, and suddenly you’re in business.

After nine years, this seems completely normal to me. Why would I call a restaurant? That feels unnecessarily confrontational.

Then I moved to San Miguel and discovered the next level of WhatsApp: the group chat.

Apparently, any collection of three or more people in San Miguel requires one. Your neighborhood has a group. Your exercise class has a group. An organization you joined has a group. An event you attended once has a group. Someone adds you to a new one, and before you’ve even figured out what it’s for, 47 people have replied “gracias.”

Eventually, you learn that the most important WhatsApp skill isn’t messaging—it’s muting. Otherwise, you wake up to 63 notifications and assume something terrible has happened.

It hasn’t. Someone just said good morning, fourteen people responded, someone sent emojis, and someone else sent a GIF.

Not every WhatsApp surprise comes from a group chat. My favorite one happened recently, when I received a marketing message for a new development in San Miguel. Except WhatsApp claimed it came from a friend of mine.

Since he comes and goes from San Miguel, I assumed he might be involved with the project, so I asked.

“No,” explained the woman on the other end. She wasn’t connected to him at all. She simply had his old phone number.

Of course she did. In San Miguel, even your phone number knows somebody.

Lisa Babincsak is a writer and the founder of Threshold, a diagnostic advisory practice for hospitality, development, and destination strategy.