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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 Karsten2007-04-27 22:20:45
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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.
See photographs from:
Mexico Gallery
