Mexicowoods—An Expatriate Life

A Luncheon in Zacatecas

My friend dined recently at a posh restaurant in Zacatecas. He and his party had been seated where they could observe patrons getting out of their cars and handing their keys to the valet parking attendants.

Four identical black SUVs pulled up. A dozen young men got out, sidearms visible under their jackets, and entered the restaurant.

 

One of them addressed the roomful of diners. "Please do not be frightened. We are just coming in for a meal. We ask you to remain in the restaurant until we leave. No one else is allowed to come in until we are finished. Please, nobody use your cell phones. You can relax and enjoy yourselves as our guests."

Then a smaller group of somewhat older men entered, flanked by bodyguards. They spent a couple of hours quietly eating and drinking. As they left, the spokesman handed a thick wad of cash to the restaurant owner. He announced, " Thank you for your cooperation. I hope everyone enjoyed comida. You can go whenever you want." He left, and the motorcade pulled away.

Urban Yelapa

Yelapa Bay boasts an actual town in addtition to its beachy resort area and sizable inland rural community. This was the original fishing village, established long before discovery by vacationers. A dense cluster of brick or cinder block houses, it centers on a spring-fed creek.

 

Yelapa town has roads, but they are generally unsuitable for cars. The primary means of land transportation is by foot or on horseback. This woman rides her mule past the town's only medical service: a tiny pharmacy staffed by a nurse. People have to hope nothing serious happens to them: it's a 45-minute boat ride to the hospital in Puerto Vallarta.

 

It's early. The cybercafe hasn't opened yet. The sun-and-moon image is Mexican all right, but the painting style is Haight-Ashbury. Old hippies are holed up in Yelapa, one of the few remaining refuges for those who still cling to the old counterculture.

 

Say what you will, but where the flower children are, there's good food. Brisa's restaurant has an inviting menu. Lupis bakery offers goodies not usually available in Mexico. At another café, the proprietress informed me she had good brownies—really good brownies.

 

I don't know what you can get at the House of Miracles.

Marginal businesses subsist providing visitor services. Marketing is rudimentary. If you want to go whale watching, ask Roger.

 

When on beach vacations, I prefer oceanfront accommodations. But budget-driven visitors can sleep at Casas Irma & Angel for $35 per night ($40 high season) if they're willing to take a fifteen minute walk when they want to go to the beach. "Enquire at the top of the stairs." More primitive hostelries offer even better deals.

These business signs look more suitable for Venice, California than a Mexican town.

I saw plenty of evidence that residents of Yelapa seem more sensitive to environmental issues than those in most Mexican towns. A signboard depicts "Nuestra Sra. de la Ecología," a play on the famous Guadalupe image. Net bags hang from trees and fence posts to collect refuse.

 

The town has the requisite church. The interior is decorated with fabric hangings to make the otherwise utilitarian cinder block cube look more church-like. The ceiling needs paint, but the interior has been kept spotlessly clean.

 

Boaters note: Yelapa has a yacht club.

 

These phone booths are holdovers from the days when the town had maybe a dozen phone lines.

 

The difficulty of bringing in materials and equipment leads to ad-hoc intallations.

 

Main Street, a mule trail, leads south through town to a point at the bottom of the bay. Behind, the urban center recedes. Pricier homes line the water, many of them available as vacation rentals.

 

The mule track rounds the point and continues on for maybe a kilometer, winding past more large homes. It ends here. The sign says it all: no appointment, no entry. Hmmm. Exclusive.

 

Those who find other Yelapa lodgings too primitive recline in luxury at Verana. It must be good: rates are ten times higher than our hotel on the beach. The cheapest room runs $320 USD per night, five night minimum. It's a 40-minute walk to the beach restaurants, so guests had best opt for the meal plan: another $80 per person per day, drinks extra. So you have to pony up a minimum of almost $2,000 just to be admitted as a guest.

It seems to me that Verana guests might miss what Yelapa is all about—funky, laid-back, real.  I prefer the look of this place on the lagoon at the north end of town.

It's such a tiny place. Maybe 2,000 residents. But town, country, beach—there's plenty to capture my attention, lots to do.

Hiking the Yelapa Back Country

I'm good for about a half a day of lying around on a beach; then I have to get out and do something. One day during our mini-vacation in Yelapa, we hiked into the country behind the beach community, where a pair of trails border either side of the river that snakes back into the mountains. 

Quite a few people live back here. Most seem to be subsistence farmers. They live in palapa huts, raise a few crops, keep horses and mules.

They grow corn in small fields, just enough for family use. Scattered fruit trees provide varied diets: mangoes, bananas, and that exotic Indian import, jackfruit. The fruits hanging on this tree are as big as watermelons.

Until a few years ago, the people of the Yelapa back country lived like their forebears a hundred years ago. Then, no infrastructure existed to provide water, electricity or telecommunications. Today the back country is being wired for electrical power. Some homes became connected for the first time just this year.

Absence of roads means everything has to be done using primitive methods. Here a CFE (Comisión Federal de Electricidad) worker floats a power vault across the river on a rubber raft.

Much of the wiring is being installed underground; hence, the vault. I'd like to think CFE's motivation for burying power lines is due to aesthetic or environmental concerns, but I suspect their decision has more to do with protection from Pacific storms.

For people living back in the jungle, electrification means the arrival of technology. There are no phones yet and no television broadcasts or cable. But this tumbledown palapa sports a satellite TV dish.

I once drove through a tiny Mayan village in the southern Yucatán. The community had no electricity, but I spotted a small solar array perched on a pole outside a traditional Mayan hut. Banda music blared out though the doorway. You don't need light, but you gotta have your tunes.

Along the trail there was plenty for nature lovers to see: a vulture sitting in a blooming tree...

...a curious green tree shedding thin orange bark...

...an iguana basking in the sun. This fellow is more than two feet long.

Here as in other Mexican rural localities, people still wash laundry in rivers.

A farmer draws river water to irrigate his crops. He employs found materials: a plastic chair serves as a mount for the pump.

The riverside trails are too narrow and rough to accommodate automobiles or trucks. Transportation is by horse or burro. Tack hangs in shacks along the trail.

High up on the trail we encountered a string of burros dragging fresh-cut lumber travois style. These boards were cut from logs using a chain saw mill—wasteful and inefficient, but requiring little capital investment. Note how the saw cuts terminate before reaching the end of the log, keeping the boards connected in order to simplify transportation.

Small homesteads trigger romantic notions of country living. Far away from technology, wars, and politics, I imagine life would be peaceful and serene in a place like this.

But I'm wedded to technology. I took the photos for this post with a digital camera; I'm writing it on an internet-connected computer. I dragged this gear into the jungle, unable to live without it.

Besides, I'm too old to work as hard as the people who make their homes in this beautiful river valley.

Yelapa Beach

Our closest beach getaway is Puerto Vallarta, eight hours west of San Miguel de Allende. But PV is not to our taste. Resort hotels insulate visitors from Mexican culture. Beach vendors hit on sunbathers every ten minutes: jewelry, sunglasses, hats, fish-on-a-stick. Forget dozing in the sun.

On the street, ambulatory salesman carrying photo-filled binders offer snorkeling trips that turn out to be come-ons for time-share pitches. Your snorkeling trip won't be free as advertised. You'll have to endure hours of high-pressure selling to pay for it.

And man are those high-rise hotels and condos ugly!

Wouldn't you rather stay here?

The better option lies forty-five minutes south of PV: the tiny fishing village of Yelapa. Here are few phones and no TV. Electricity arrived only a few years ago. Oddly, broadband internet access is available via microwave link from the city.

The way to get here is by water taxi. You can catch one at the pier at the end of the romantic zone in Puerto Vallarta. A rudimentary road exists but nobody takes it; not unless they're delivering a load of bricks. Boats are quicker by a couple of hours and they're much more scenic.

We stayed at the Hotel lagunita, on the north shore of Yelapa's small bay. Low season started on the first of May, bringing with it promotions and deep discounts. Our palapa cost $180 USD for four nights—$45 per night. A local resident told us that May is Yelapa's best-kept secret. Rates are low and the hot weather hasn't yet kicked in.

No road connects the town of Yelapa with the resort area. Instead, the beach serves as a road. People deliver goods in wheelbarrows or on their heads.

Everyday necessities—fresh groceries, beer, coke, gasoline for the boats—all of it arrives via small boat, over the water and across the beach. On delivery day, empty gas cylinders are dragged out onto the sand to await exchange for full ones.

What comes in must go out. Boxes of empty beer bottles and bags of garbage get loaded onto pangas for return to PV.

A desultory fishing industry helps feed Yelapa's 2,000 residents. The fleet contains maybe a couple dozen boats. Most remain moored all day long. Sleepy Yelapa produces more dreams (of whatever kind) than fish.

The tanned guy in dishabille has been free-diving for abalone. He's throwing empty shells back into the water for tourists to step on. His friends are shelling the couple hundred baby mollusks he caught. In California, taking abalone this size can land you in jail.

I asked the guy on the right if I could take a photo of the catch. He replied, "Want some weed?"

 

Around noon every day one or two excursion boats arrive with a load of tourists from PV. Day trippers.

They're ferried to the beach by panga and steered to a couple of restaurants and gift shops that exist solely for the purpose of extracting their dollars. Barkers harangue blinking, disoriented visitors. A guy thrusts a large iguana into unsuspecting arms as he pitches a $10 photo-op. Around three in the afternoon when the boat leaves, all those umbrellas are folded. They get stowed away along with the beach chairs, and the restaurants shut down. Locals don't eat in these places: the food is mediocre and the drinks are overpriced.

Arrival of the tourist boat signals siesta time for us. We retire to our veranda to read, to nap, or just to sit back and take in the peaceful view.

That's what's so nice about a room on the beach. We can retreat while the crowds baste themselves with oil and lie in the sun, ordering yet another Pacifico and shooing away jewelry salesmen.

The other nice thing is that long after they're gone, we go back out on the deserted sand to watch the sunset.

Yelapa used to be an old hippie hangout. People came here for the laid back lifestyle and for the drug scene. A few old hippies remain, hanging on to fading dreams of the counterculture. Their presence ensures good food and good music, yoga sessions and excellent bodywork.

Old-timers complain that the place is becoming popular. They say that expatriates are being priced out of the market for beach houses and forced to move upriver into the jungle. But Yelapa remains a great, inexpensive getaway. Unless (God forbid) a good road gets put in, it's likely to remain that way.

The Stone of the Sun

Most emblematic of Mexican images is the Aztec Calendar. The original twelve-foot circular stone miraculously escaped destruction by Conquistadores bent on obliterating all traces of heathen Mexica culture. It was excavated during renovation of Mexico City's Zocalo in 1790 after being buried for almost three centuries.

A colored image of the stone hangs in the National Museum of Anthropology. The Mexica may have painted the stone, but the colors shown here are speculative. Accurate or not, they make it easier to discern details, like the hands of the sun god Tonatuih arranged on either side of his face, each holding a human heart.

(For a high-resolution diagram of the stone, click here.)

The stone is iconic. I see images everywhere. One appears on the ten-peso coin. I imagine no other country issues currency that implies human sacrifice.

 

Throughout Mexico, no souvenir stand worth its salt fails to offer a shawl or a plate bearing the stone's likeness.

Starbucks recently got itself into trouble by issuing mugs bearing the Sun Stone image without paying licensing fees to the Mexican Government. I had no idea intellectual property rights extended to works created in the Fifteenth Century. I think it noteworthy that government lawyers pursue Starbucks while overlooking all those artisans cranking out ceramic replicas. The legal principle of "deep pockets" appears to be well understood in Mexico.

I saw the stone for the first time on a recent visit to the National Museum of Anthropology. The sight of it engendered the same thrill I experienced when I first saw the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum.

The Rosetta Stone arguably had a more important influence in the development of western thought owing to its role in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics. But its content—tax regulations—is unremarkable. The Stone of the Sun, on the other hand, represents a significant intellectual achievement. It contains a pair of interlocked calendars of 365 and 260 days each which combine to track dates over a 52-year cycle. The Mexica calculation of the length of the day is more accurate than the contemporary European figure.

Mesoamerican science died with the Spanish conquest. But in its time, it was equivalent to western thinking in complexity and sophistication.

Three Views of Mexico City

The romance of cities calls to me: millions of lives, purposeful bustle, vertical landscapes. Mexico City is a real city. It may not have canyons like New York, but it does have skyscrapers. For my money, the best of them is the Torre Latinoamericana. It resembles the classic buildings of the '20s and '30s.

Mexico City is overwhelmingly big. It's hopelessly congested, smoggy, and noisy. I can't get my head around the place.

Photo: Wickipedia

Five hundred years ago the city was called Tenochtitlán. A painting of how it might have looked hangs in the Museo Nacional de Antropología. This image is said to have been carefully reconstructed from reports written by men who accompanied Cortez during his conquest of Mexico.

Occupying an island in Lake Texcoco, its setting must have been far more beautiful than that of the modern city. The population then was around 200,000, less than 1% of the current figure. What would it have been like to live then?

The Spanish came, conquered, and destroyed Tenochtitlán. The population plummeted due to warfare, the rigors of slavery, and smallpox. Four hundred years later, at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, the population had recovered to around 500,000. 

Mexican landscape painter José María Velasco depicts an idyllic place: peaceful countryside with Mexico City a tiny smudge in the center of the painting. I imagine I would have liked to visit Mexico City back then. Were only members of the nobility in positions to enjoy life in the Nineteenth Century? What was life like for ordinary people? I'd like to think those times were a golden age, today buried beneath rampant development and frantic traffic.

El Palacio de Comunicaciones

Mexico's National Museum of Art is housed in one of the intimidating buildings erected during the presidency of Porfirio Díaz. It contains a small but exquisite collection of paintings and sculptures by Mexican artists. I've enjoyed viewing it twice and I'm convinced it merits a third visit.

Originally the building was built to contain the Ministry of Communications: in fact the name is El Palacio de Comunicaciones, carved into the stone above the main entrance.

 

On a recent visit I was distracted by a phone call. While waiting for me to finish, Laura went exploring in the nether regions of the ground floor, where she discovered this—a museum dedicated to the telegraph.

Ye Gods! What a treat for a retired electrical engineer! And totally unexpected. In one moment I was appreciating José María Velasco landscapes; the next I was swimming in techie gear. 

Albeit tech stuff from long ago—like telegraph sending and receiving sets. This one might have been used for practice. You operate it by sitting behind it (in this view), tapping out messages on the red-knobbed key, and receiving the return message by listening to the clicks and clacks of the sounder (the complicated thingy on the far right).

As a boy, I learned Morse code practicing on a set similar to this one, except mine was about a hundred years newer.

Imagine you are working in the telegraph office in Mexico City in 1870. Telegraph lines come to the city from all over the country. Suppose an operator in San Luis Potosi wants to send a message to the station in Veracruz. To connect these two particular lines out of all the dozens of lines coming into your office you need a crossbar switch. That is what this is.

You make connections by pushing tapered brass pins into holes between the lines you want to connect. It's crude, it's primitive, it's effective. This board contains somewhat fewer than a thousand individual switches. The computer you're using to read this post contains more than a billion, and they operate about a billion times faster than push pins. The principles are the same; the technology has just become a million billion times more efficient.

If you don't use wires to transmit signals, you don't need a crossbar switch. Guglielmo Marconi developed the first practical wireless telegraph, using a spark gap transmitter of which this is an example. Marconi is a rare case of an engineer winning a Nobel Prize.

This machine may not do much for you, but to me it's beautiful: all that hand-worked brass, copper, wood and iron. They don't make 'em like this anymore.

Thank God.

Transmitting with one of these machines is like throwing rocks into a pond with someone  on the opposite shore counting waves to decipher the message. In effect there's only one channel: whoever throws the biggest rocks is the one that gets heard. Because of this kind of interference, it's illegal to operate a spark gap transmitter today.

This set is similar in many ways to the spark gap radios aboard the Titanic. The ship's wireless operators were too busy sending passengers' personal messages to pay attention to warnings of icebergs sent from other ships. It's the Dilbert story: engineers provided a solution, management screwed it up.

None of the technology on display in the Telegraph Museum was developed or manufactured in Mexico, but it's relevant nonetheless. Wires connected the country so that the government could react quickly to events. The telegraph set Mexico on the path to becoming a modern nation. I'm gratified that someone in the Ministry of Communications took steps to see that it wasn't forgotten.

At the Catedral Metropolitana

Whenever I walk by Mexico City's cathedral, I see tradesmen sitting by the south fence advertising their skills. Apparently this is a way of life. They put up signs announcing their specialties, they display their tools.

In California I used to hire guys like this. They would wait on the corner beside the Glen Ellen Market. Whenever I needed a few extra hands on my ranch, I'd drive off the mountain and pull up beside the cluster of ten or twenty workers. They'd swarm around and I'd look them over, trying in all the confusion to select men I thought would be good workers. I'd look for worn jeans and boots, calloused hands, guys thirty or more years old. I discovered Lupe Cano, my longtime ranch foreman this way.

This tile setter's face shows that this way of life isn't easy.

On the day I photographed the workers, police were lined up along the east fence. I guess some kind of demonstration was in the works.

What strikes me is the juxtaposition of workmen patiently waiting for a job and policemen leaning on their shields waiting for a riot.

Sitting stolidly in the background, the oldest cathedral in Latin America—a building that has seen it all.

Correos Méjico

A massive, ornate building in Mexico City's Centro Historico houses the central post office, the Palacio Postal. For my money, it is everything a public building should be: imposing, impressive, a statement about the rectitude and permanence of the State.

Marble floors, gilded columns, filigreed railings—it's hard to imagine that all this is necessary to house civil service flunkies hunched over ledgers.

It is a working post office even today: customers apply at barred teller's cages to buy stamps and mail packages. The dozens of windows are no longer necessary to handle the press of customers. The economy of email and the reliability of delivery services like Estafeta and DHL have eaten into Mexpost's business.

My primary interest in visiting the central post office was the rumored existence of a postal museum. I was an avid stamp collector when I was young, and I still like to look at old stamps. I was hoping to see stuff like this showpiece 1856 Hidalgo issue.

Alas, most of the exhibits are mailbags, mailboxes, and old photographs. I saw nothing there of philatelic interest. Instead I found this familiar image of the Chichimec god Huitzilopochtli perched on a cactus eating a snake, volcanoes Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl in the background. What is it doing in a postal museum?

Well, it is a mosaic made up of thousands of canceled Mexican postage stamps. Someone laboriously soaked them off envelopes, sorted them into a palette of colors, and glued them onto a large board. The image is so big I could hardly cram it into the frame of my camera. Not exactly postal history, nevertheless one might charitably say it is postage-related.

So the museum has little to offer, but the central post office itself is so spectacular it hardly matters.

A legacy of the Porfirion Díaz regime, the Palacio Postal was designed by Adam Boari, who also designed Bellas Artes just across the Reforma. That it continues to be used as a working post office is remarkable. Undoubtedly it will be preserved, but in what form remains to be seen. When ordinary citizens can no longer mail letters there, something irreplaceable will be lost.

Mexico City's Policewomen

You see them everywhere in the Centro Historico, waving gloved hands and blowing whistles in frantic monotony: tweetweet, tweetweet, tweetweet, tweetweet, tweetweet. They are Mexico City's transitos and these days most are women.

Their presence gives evidence of liberal reforms undertaken by the Mexico City government. Over stiff opposition from male officers, women have been given police careers. Female officers are less prone to corruption, so incorporating them accomplishes two important goals: a more egalitarian society and less extortion.

Although women have broken into the formerly all-male bastion of the police force, they are used mostly in trivial positions. I've never seen one issue a citation, and drivers ignore their orders more often than not. Moreover women remain shut out of the more notoriously corrupt departments such as the transitos of Estado de Mexico.

Women now serve with the federal police in positions of real importance and, given Mexico's drug wars, of considerable danger. Female police, female prosecutors, female judges—Mexico is finally getting law enforcement working.

In the 9:00 PM darkness I sit writing at my desk in the Hotel Gillow. I hear the women, sounding like crickets, pushing the last of the rush hour traffic through the intersection at Cinco de Mayo and Isabel la Católica: tweetweet, tweetweet, tweetweet, tweetweet, tweetweet. Their sounds make me feel comfortable and reassured.