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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.

Mazatlan: Culture Then, Culture Forever

Camron Karsten
2007-04-27 22:20:45

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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. ...