Hoy no se fía, mañana sí. “No credit today, tomorrow yes.” The Mexico City magazine Chilango, in an article on the signs and cries of street markets, calls this sign “famoso” (famous).
The same article opens by naming a blunter version among the best-known cries and signs of the markets of Mexico City: Hoy no fío, mañana tampoco, “No credit today, and none tomorrow either.”
Sobremesa is the time spent talking at the table after a meal is over. Mexico News Daily calls it “a cultural tradition ingrained in Mexican culture.” A guest who gets up and leaves as soon as the food is finished will seem rude.
At a business meal, the article notes, “the sobremesa can be the weightiest part.”
Yo te aviso, “I’ll let you know.” Ahorita, a la vuelta, “in a little while, on my way back,” said to a street vendor. Ahí para la otra, “next time, then.” Déjame pensarlo, “let me think about it.” En un ratito, “in a little while.” In 2017, Matador Network in Spanish listed these among nine expressions Mexicans use to avoid saying no.
To rent a home in Mexico City, a tenant is traditionally asked for an aval, a guarantor who owns property in the city or its metropolitan area and puts up the deeds. The custom is a rule of the market, not of the law. Landlords prefer a guarantor whose property is free of liens.
A tenant who has no such person can buy a póliza jurídica, a legal policy, for 30 to 50 percent of one month’s rent. In 2025, the magazine Expansión reported that a guarantor with property was increasingly hard to find.
In 2006, the linguist J. César Félix-Brasdefer published a study in the Journal of Pragmatics on how male speakers of Mexican Spanish refuse. He examined the effect of formality on their refusals and the link between politeness and protecting face.
In a study published in 2008, he observed 18 male Mexican students refusing a request, an invitation and a suggestion from a peer. They refused mainly in indirect ways, and they softened what they said.
In January 2010, Mexico City added articles 1796 Bis and 1796 Ter to its Civil Code. They introduced the teoría de la imprevisión, the doctrine of the unforeseeable event. When an extraordinary and unforeseeable event upsets the conditions of a contract, a party “tiene derecho de pedir la modificación del contrato,” has the right to ask for the contract to be changed.
The request does not by itself allow the party to stop performing. The party who asks for the change may go to a judge to settle the dispute. A change does not apply to what was delivered before the event. According to a UNAM law journal, twelve states, among them Jalisco, the State of Mexico and Veracruz, already had the doctrine.
El Barzón began in August 1993 in Jalisco, as a movement of debtors who could no longer pay their bank loans. Jalisco farmers proposed the name from a revolutionary corrido about sharecroppers and peons who were always in debt to the landowner. A barzón is the leather strap that joins the yoke to the plow.
The movement’s first slogan was Debo no niego, pago no tengo, “I owe, I do not deny it, I have nothing to pay with.” It later became Debo no niego, pago lo justo, “I owe, I do not deny it, I pay what is fair.” The debtors offered to pay the capital and the interest first agreed, but not the interest for late payment.
¿No me lo deja más barato? “Won’t you let me have it a little cheaper?” Shoppers ask it at Mexican markets and tianguis, the open-air street markets. In 2026, TV Azteca Jalisco traced the custom of haggling to the markets of pre-Hispanic times. It said that the request also creates a bond between seller and customer.
In 2021, ANPEC, the national association of small retailers, surveyed about 1,200 neighborhood grocery stores. According to the newspaper Por Esto!, 78 percent of the shopkeepers said that customers asked them for fiado, goods on credit. The share of customers asking for credit had roughly doubled, from about two in ten in early 2020 to about four in ten in the first half of 2021.
In an article in the Revista Mexicana de Sociología, the sociologist Héctor Castillo Berthier described the traders of La Merced, the Mexico City market that preceded the Central de Abasto. The traders followed customary norms rather than formal law. They kept “un riguroso código de honor,” a strict code of honor, and their deals were not made in writing, with notes and receipts.
The large wholesalers extended credit to the smaller traders, and the credit bound the smaller traders to them.