First I am really sorry to hear your breaking up story, any breakage of unity is bad news, especially today where we are all pushed to isolation. I've had my share of struggle with Latin temperament, it is part of the beauty I think ;), but after about 4 long term breakups, and 20 (exactly) years later, if I send a note saying hello, happy new year, I get such a vicious reaction and such harsh cursing, that I haven't encountered for 20 years in the street.
About Mex. coast and high lands.
Not so much the East side of Mex. but the West, SW, down to Nicaragua and Panama at one point archaeology said that had 1mil population, which was 1/2 or more of the total earth population, due to the abundance of food and nutrients. I think at about the same time in Mesopotamia and that Pacific coast is where all the wrong decisions and wrong human development started, 10K years ago, where people decided to grow food instead of hunting and picking it from the forest. So they begun this seed selection and evolution, food/nutrient diversity went down, mortality and morbidity increased, height and bone size decreased, and there is even evidence of the skull size decreasing, which is loosely associated with stupidity. :) Corn and bananas appear to have grown 5-10 times in size due to this. Then there are those in the S.Pacific where till "recently" had never developed the bad habit of growing food. The men had bows the women picked seeds, herbs, and fruit, and communities were an integral harmonious part of the forest (ultimate sustainable diversity - plenty of food for all). Then the barbarians came and disrupted all of this and formed the ultimate unsustainable condition of destroying the forest to survive alone.
Since you seem very mechanically able you should make a small experiment (at least 1 cu.m. total capacity) with aquaponics/hydroponics. Not that it is a good thing, but it helps with hands on experience to understand what are all the bad things we do with agriculture. You can make a nice tomato or cabbage but it may be trash (nutrient wise) because it is missing all that it could have obtained from a naturally rich stable forest soil - even if you feed the plants and fish the right nutrients you will be missing all the micro-organisms that convert substances to plant food. I think it all begins to make sense in there and you see industrial agriculture being like a hydroponic tank. An artificial environment where sick plants feed sick people. Beware that some of the mycorrhizal pop-propaganda may be unsubstantiated and only helps some charlatans selling mixes of murky juice and crumbs. You can take your plants to the forest but you can't take the forest to your plants.
https://news.mongabay.com/2019/11/beneficial-and-harmful-fungi-are-at-the-root-of-forest-diversity/ What they sometimes call pathogenic or parasitic is due to looking at the trees and missing the forest. In the grand scheme of things no life is parasitic. But this is western science/bias influencing even the all wise china-men. The higher the divergence the better the equilibrium and sustainability of all species.
The sad thing is that if the Hindus were right, and I did get 3 lifetimes, there may be no humans or cows left on the planet by then. Alone in the dessert will be no way to live, even if there was water, oxygen, and food stored somewhere. And we are speeding up trying to reach that goal for humanity and all species, at least from 1000m below water surface to the highlands where vegetation stops.