In late 1969 I drew a high 303 in the Selective Service pool, which meant I was not going to be drafted to fight in the war in Viet Nam. Relieved, I decided to get away for a while and in early 1970 made my first trip to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico to stay with retired advertising executives from New York. This UNESCO World Heritage Site is 166 miles north of Mexico City. A colorful, historic, baroque, colonial town located up in the hills about 6300 feet above sea level, it offers no sea, no beaches, no resort casinos, no theme parks. Just an old Mexico town surrounded by a scrubby landscape that would be right at home in New Mexico.

It was the perfect place for a happy journalist turned frustrated novelist, which is what I was at the time. I felt the town and all its art and beauty could serve as a muse. Each day for three months, after breakfast somewhere around the Jardin (the topiaried central plaza), I would go into a writer’s shack on my hosts’ property and labor at a typewriter — a green Hermes Rocket, which weighed about the same as a laptop. I still keep it around, just in case of a serious computer crash or a sudden instinct to go to Antiques Roadshow.

Each sunny morning I’d type my way into the halls of the Great American Novel. On page one, my protagonist entered his bathroom to prepare himself to face the day. What followed were effusive descriptions and interior monologues. Nine weeks and 140 pages later, he was still in the bathroom. A completed book never materialized.

What did materialize was an appreciation and a personal knowledge of San Miguel’s intriguing ex-pat inhabitants whom I had the pleasure to meet at just about every meal. I met many professional artists who were blacklisted back in the U.S., victims of the Red Scare, exiled from academia, arts and entertainment circles. This became the start of a research project. I walked all around town with actors and screenwriters who were now reinventing themselves in this glorious mountain oasis of about 15,000 people.

After World War 2 ended, the U.S. was on its way to feeling powerful and prosperous, but also paranoid. We were in a cold war with Soviet Russia and Red China. Democracy feared communism to the point where we actually had a slogan like “Better dead than red.” Congress saw fit to rid America of any thinking that was Un-American. Sadly, this did not include the Ku Klux Klan — they were home-grown.

The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigated anything that smacked of foreign thinking, like communism. Such investigations led to public interrogations and character assassinations. Common sense evaporated. Smear, innuendo and fake news took over. The U.S. Attorney General’s office had a list of “subversives”. Senator Joe McCarthy rooted out anyone who disagreed with him. A supermarket owner published a list of alleged “Reds” in show business. A communist became the new monster under the bed.

Eventually, caught up in the web were people whose sole “crimes” had been among the following (seriously): being “prematurely anti-fascist” in supporting Loyalists in Spain’s civil war, signing a petition to allow black baseball players into the Major Leagues, voting too often for causes supported by Eleanor Roosevelt, or simply functioning as civil libertarians or Unitarians.

The movie industry’s politics came under HUAC’s third-degree spotlight from 1947 until 1962. Lies were spread, lives were derailed or ruined. The phrase “witch hunt” became common currency. The shadow of 17th-century Salem blocked out the sun. Many Hollywood folks left one of America’s dark ages to settle in Mexico to start over or wait for a brighter day.

When I finally got home to Cambridge, I teamed up with a group of local filmmakers and we produced a feature-length documentary, Hollywood On Trial, focusing on how an industry blacklist affected those on it and the country that allowed it. The film garnered a 1977 Oscar nomination for Best Documentary. It started me on my filmmaking career.

I finally returned to San Miguel in 2014 and again this past winter. The population must have grown 10-fold. It is still a cultural oasis, full of ex-pats, but it now harbors a different kind of artist, the one you seek to find within when you retire to a paradise filled with muses.

Looking for a warm escape, my wife and I spent the whole month of February there. San Miguel had wistfully drawn me back. Possibly because of climate change — the change in our political climate, that is. You can feel fears bubbling up again, common sense giving way to paranoia, fake news whipping mindsets into hysteria. “Witch hunt” has come back into our vocabulary, but now it seems like a convenient arrow in the political quiver.

Today, San Miguel is more a watering hole for retirement than for reinvention. But that could change. What if America is about to go through another blacklist period, another time when people could lose their jobs because of their beliefs? Will those ex-pats find solace in San Miguel or will a wall built between the U.S. and Mexico, either literal or figurative, put an end to even this freedom?

Arnie Reisman and his wife, Paula Lyons, regularly appear on the weekly NPR comedy quiz show, Says You! He also writes for the Huffington Post.