Mexico Visa Day

(Written in September 2018) 

Today, Lexie and I got our Mexican Visas. Normally, when you go to Mexico on vacation, you automatically receive a visa that is good for 180 days. Since we will be staying longer than that, we needed to get a Temporary Resident Visa that is good for 1 year and renewable for up to 4 years.

To receive that visa, we needed to make copies of birth certificates and passports, create a letter in Spanish detailing our Mexican address, get passport photos, and have documentation that proves that we can financially support ourselves when we get there.

Once you get the visa in the US from a Mexican consulate, you have 6 months to enter Mexico and then another 30 days to finish up the requirements in Mexico.

Since I had read about other people going to their local consulate and getting their visa, I began the process in August, five months before our scheduled arrival in Mexico, and blocked off a day to spend waiting in an endless line waiting to be processed.

When I researched our local Denver consulate, I discovered that they only processed visas by appointment and that the only appointments available before we left were in September, during the week we were planning on packing and moving. The only other alternative was to wait until we were back east and then spend a day traveling to the consulate in Philadelphia and waiting in an endless line there. We decided to get the appointment in Denver. They had 2 appointments available one day and then another 3 days later. We took them.

The process was very smooth and organized. They took Lexie’s and my documentation, we paid our fee, got photographed and finger printed and got our visas.

It did take a bit longer than it should have because of a mistake I made when signing up for the appointments. I’m pretty loose with my name. I almost never use my middle name or initial and rarely use the suffix. Because I only used my first and last name when signing up for the appointment online, when they took my passport they couldn’t find me in their system because the Robert Greenawalt who signed up was not the same person whose passport they had, which also had a middle name and III at the end. After they informed me that I always had to use my full name when in Mexico, the consulate person re-entered my name and got us our visas. Total time was 3 ½ hours, including driving and a stop to get Lexie’s passport photo. Not bad!

Lexie and I are ready to go. Lisa will get hers in a few days.

(Postscript: Thanks to Bob's experience, Lisa had her middle name on all paperwork and the process took less than an hour. She notes that they do their best to make you look as unattractive as possible in the photo. Remove glasses. Push hair behind ears and off forehead. Don't smile. Consequently, this is the mug shot to end all mug shots.)