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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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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, ...