Advertisement
Published: March 13th 2007
Spitting heat upon pale skin. Dust swirls, thick and ominous like mountainous fog, yet there is little silence and zero solitude unlike the celestial palaces where the clouds’ nebulous movements waver.
Where a hermit might dwell, there doesn’t exist this exhaustion, this thumping surge of sprawling land and sea convergence. It’s bright and hot, alighting the nonexistent patterns as people and their many motors crush upon the littorals of humanity and culture—
their culture.
It is
their land; the noise and debris, the rising dust-clouds into the eternal heat, the rapturous signals, the stoplights and padding feet across cracked pavement before the next race of holly exhaust pipes flood the streets. The young pubescent girls standing in a 50s truck bed and the workingmen folding leathery hands in deep cooling shadows.
Coronas, Pacificos, Dois XX and
Sol bottles crushed down dirt side-alleys. Passing fishing ports with cracked fleets and peeling paints of white, green and orange. And then the abominable.
Things and their monsters. They let loose to dilute the beauty of this original style of living and culture. As I sat in the back of the taxi from Mazatlan’s international airport, heat and the accompanying dust drew into
the interior through the open windows that sucked like a famished mule. A faded CD flashed in my eyes, as Jesus and Mother Mary spun from the driver’s rearview mirror. Through the country, I watched a beloved Mexico and its culture, passing high-walled penitentiaries and catching the drafts of burning trash and piles of rubber.
I breathed in, deeper than the previous, and as tin and brick turned to unfinished concrete with spikes of rebar, the city-center approached. Burnt paper and smoky chemicals infused into the sea air until the salt purified the wastes. Suddenly, it froze.
A culture, historic in its patternless flow of work, family, tradition, rice, beans, corn tortillas and
cervezas, with mother dodging traffic as she interlinks her arms throughout her five children, and the
federales rolling in their crisp black ’06 GMC pickup trucks and Ford Mustangs, fat signs and stripped lands of acres of sweating asphalt surrounded by cheap simplicities of blue and white, and orange and white swallows its environment. Gorging, the corporations find their way as Mexico expands with the born faces of Wal-Mart and Home Depot.
My heart pinged. It skipped a beat. But I drew another
inhale, observed the life around, and continued to witness an unburdened Mexico thrive. Dust tickled my nose. I sneezed. It reached my throat. I coughed. How unburdened can a culture remain? I was about to find out.
A Culture of Tomorrow Mazatlan, Mexico. It conjures a precision of memories. For many years my family met once a year to live, laugh, eat and drink and recount memories together as we ingrained the new ones into further laughs. We lounged, strolled, swam, shopped the
Zona Dorada, rode horses and parasailed. It was our yearly home at
The Inn at Mazatlan, one of relaxation and adventure as a family conglomerate traveling like the Partridge family stuck together for a week or more by the sticky juices of squeezed limes and empty Margarita mixes.
From my 164 pound blue-striped marlin reeled in by my nine-year young frail limbs in the deep waters of the Pacific to modern-day today as I search a seafood menu for a vegetarian plate—Mazatlan has risen to its highest, finest, and hottest between the periods of Pacific NW whiteness to burning lobster-red, into the pain and peeling, the lathering of aloe vera in gelatinous greenness to a final golden
brown.
Time’s up. Inhale. Breathe in the dust, smoke, fresh rice and beans. Live. Laugh. Love. It is Mazatlan again.
Due to my own direction and the various travels, I missed the last three revivals under the Mexican sun, and so as this spring neared, I looked forward to the reintroduction to a culture buried within the memories of youth. I was in for remembrances and surprises.
The Inn dresses as usual, elegant in contrast with the streets beyond its whitewashed walls. A new tower, more rooms, larger pools and fully-functioning waterfalls. Yoga classes in the morning provide a stretch and increased
prajna after a night of drinks, chips, salsa and guacamole. There’s painting classes, weekly Bingo for the crowds with accompanying time-shares in Branson, Missouri as well as Mexican
piñata fiesta for the kin every Wednesday night at seven. With a restaurant on premise, the Inn is a self-sufficient community of lounge-chair potatoes here for the whatever is available.
Culture? I ask:
¿La cultura? ¿Dónde está la cultura? Indeed, it won’t be found within the walls of the large resorts and hotels fabricated for the broadening American and Canadian, unless…unless, I say, you work
your Spanish with the maids and various workers. But outside, stepping into the mix of heat and noise, running like an old lady on a broomstick, Mexico awaits.
Mazatlan’s Chattahoochee One evening the family piled in two
pulmonias (the equivalent of a crazed golf-cart blaring an ungodly noise of music ranging from YMCA to CCR’s "Bad Moon Rising"). We drove north to
Costa Marinara. Inside the seafood restaurant/factory, I scanned for that vegetarian plate and came up empty. Drink, talk, laughs of the previous evening, and then to eating. After our meal, the American music toned down and the DJ slapped on your classic Mexican rhythms. Suddenly, as if transformed like Mexico’s next “American Idol”, a waiter stepped up onto the platform of the patio with microphone in hand. He held it tight, not out of nervousness, but out of passion. Yes, it was Mexico’s one-and-only Tom Jones.
Deep with reverence, he sung his heart out, swooning the customers (who responded often with grimaces) in his lyrically tied love songs of Latino descent. One local, loaded with two of his buddies at a chess table of empty green beer bottles, joined in with him, grumbling and gurgling to
the melody. We cringed.
“
Thomas Joñas,” my sister exclaimed. This was his Mexican stage name, but we knew it was Tom Jones in disguise after his fallout from the Vegas scene. He was reborn and alive, down in Mazatlan to have any and all fall in love with him under his heavily, sappy, sickening mood. With the years we had been coming to this restaurant by the sea, we never saw the bills paid and tables emptied as quickly as they did that night.
Señor Joñas wasn’t the only performance. Directly afterwards, six blonde children dressed in Halloween costumes of midwestern cowboys and -girls appeared. Between the ages of five and fifteen years, they seemed out of place. Not only the pressed red-squared collared shirts, the jeans and boots, the chaps, bandanas and dresses, but also their faces. They stood out from the average Mexican. These six little children seemed to have just come off the beaches of Santa Cruz with tanned white skin and sandy hair. Let alone, it was nearing ten o’clock on a school night. Depressing and odd.
Suddenly, with the DJ on queue, the music hit its note. Georgia-born Alan Jackson, in as
thick of a country singer’s accent possible, rolled with “Chattahoochee”. The six, in practiced timing, kicked their boots’ heels in square dance as though we were transported on a stagecoach time machine to a backwoods Utah bar. An American woman, apparently from a similar locale, clapped in a dramatized exuberance. “I love this song! I love it!”
I looked over. Her Margarita bowl was at its most bottom slurp.
“They’re so cute! I love them, too!”
At the end of their dance, the youngest three did their habituated action and took off their plastic cowboy hats. They turned them upside down and walked to each table, making as little eye contact as possible, pouting, pleading for money. Smiles were gone, only large eyes and quickened
Gracias for one’s generosity.
Our table supplied three dollars, distributed between
los niños pequinos. Afterwards, with the silenced laughs and smiles, we sat around the table and did the best thing we could think of: ordered dessert.
Old Streets, The Same Bathrooms I walked back that evening with my uncle on the main
Avenue Cameron Sabalo. We passed restaurants of Japanese sushi, American burger joints,
tapas of Spain, and
I thought of the real Mexican dishes in the
pueblos and mountains: the simple rice and beans of Mexico. But this was Mazatlan with its Dairy Queen, the Philly steak sandwiches at The Saloon, as well as Domino’s Pizza, Subway and its new acres of blue and white Wal-Mart and orange and white Home Depot.
The previous day, my mother recalled the brilliance, probably the sole brilliance of the establishment known in more dialogues as simply… McDonalds: “At least we can rely on a clean bathroom no matter where we might find ourselves in the world.”
Yes, Home Sweet Home McDonalds, along with the other chains, now to include Wal-Mart and Home Depot, which even have their own bus stops hand-painted with leftover paints on the
Gigante public buses. Culture. Mazatlan. The input of the West’s dominance and money, yet out on the streets, it is Mexico at its finest.
Today’s Tomorrow Is Yesterday’s Today Blocks are now splashed with the primary colors of the restaurants’ and consumer stores’ facades, but the dust still rises, the trash still burns, the Chevy trucks, the workers down in the shades and the mothers sprinting across the traffic
with young flailing and babies wailing. Cervezas and the guacamole, no matter how diluted with sour cream, still bring in the Mexican culture of memory to the old and young. Culture is life. Life is change. Change is Culture. It is the beauty of the world, no matter how desperate, no matter how congested and overflowing, omnipresent like a McDo
baño.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.108s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 11; qc: 29; dbt: 0.0414s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Falty
non-member comment
Muchacho
Muchacho, pourquoi tu es toujours dans le chose qui resemble les reves? Serieusement, je suis jealouse. Quand j'ai vu la plage, j'ai pense aussi de la plage a paris, pendant l'ete, degalasse...et mes eleves, dans le ghetto, qui m'a dit que, "ouais, pour les vacances, je suis alle au Pantin Plage" C'est pas le meme chose, non? Bise ma plage sur l'ile et embrasse toi meme pour moi. Gross bises la sirene.