by Paul Theroux
“Jesús Malverde,” she said, and lifted the medallion, showing me the image of the bandit seated in a chair surrounded by pistols, rifles, and marijuana leaves on one side, and an occult pentagram on the other.
This was so different from driving myself through the butterflies at Reynosa. But the hallucinatory nature of the bus trip did not take hold until after dark, on the dead-straight desert road, to the moan of the engine and slow gear changes, a sound like grieving. And then the visions descended like a fever, with the bus speeding headlong toward the coast on the empty road—few drivers in Mexico risk the nighttime roads—with the silvery glint of low bushes and natural rubble, full moon on the flat backland. I drowsed and dreamed but was jerked awake by the pounding of the bus for unearthly glimpses of the moonlit hills, and the bounce and swerve of the bus rocked me like a dissolving drug. Ten hours into the trip, on the nighttime road, no other cars risking this desert darkness, it was as if we were on a thoroughfare in space, speeding past blobs of stars. But for interludes of wakefulness, I sensed little but gasoline fumes and dampness and, as in all long-distance buses, stale food and feety odors.
The glare of gas station rest stops, mystical, comet-like as they rushed past, but melancholy and ordinary when we paused for the ten-minute breaks. Ciudad Obregón, for example, one man with a mop, a paper plate of warmed-up tortillas, yawning people dawdling over coffee. And then back to the road and a new synesthetic reality, phantom shapes and bursts of light crowding the windows of the speeding vehicle. And many of these flashes of light had the bleached-bone look of Mexico’s enduring and much-venerated emblem, the grinning skull of Santa Muerte.
I could not stay awake, but when I dropped off to sleep, I was woken by the road bang on the wheels or the brilliant light of overhead lamps—blazing in the middle of nowhere and leaving me seeing stars and filling me with the nausea of helplessness and the frustration of sudden insights that just as suddenly deserted me. And in such a bus, at such a speed, tunneling through the desert darkness, you always assume you’re going to crash.
At Los Mochis, after a hundred more miles of flashes and empty road, no one was awake, no one boarded, and the hallucinatory landscape began again, the bus buffeted by the combined grip of headwind and slipstream, the squirts of light. I slept and woke and slept again, and remembered Señora Cruz saying at one of the stations, “Sometimes they stop the buses. They put up roadblocks and rob all the passengers.”
“Who does this—the cartels?”
“Not cartels,” she said, as though offended. “But the others,” and she named them: ratones (mice, but also robbers), ladrones (thieves), cucarachas (roaches).
But like the vampirism of psychedelia, the hallucinogenic nature of the bus trip began to fade with the waning moon and the watery glow of daylight, and when the sun like a flashing blade penetrated the interior of the bus, I was wide awake, but sluggish with the hangover from a long night of interrupted dreams.
Now we were crossing the river at Culiacán, the enameled flow greeny black in the dawn, the city famous as a hideout, notorious for its cartel violence. Señora Cruz and her daughter heaved themselves past me, Señora Cruz still fingering her medallion of Jesús Malverde.
On the daylit road the banality of the rational world and its street signs and lampposts asserted itself. Though I could not see the ocean, it was obvious that to the west, beyond the flatness of the land, the sea lay under the high sky and limpid air—morning in Mazatlán.
Mornings in Mazatlán
Sunday morning in Mazatlán, no traffic, only a few joggers and dog walkers on the decaying corniche in the centro histórico, the old part of town, still too early for anyone to be headed to work. I was welcomed at La Siesta, my seafront hotel (ocean-view room, $53). On its facade, a plaque memorializing Jack Kerouac’s visit to the town, to this very spot (“En memoria a su estancia en estas playas”), with a long quotation.
“La única gente que me interesa esta que está loca, la gente que está loca por vivir, loca por hablar, loca por salvarse,” it began, and anyone who has read On the Road will easily recognize it as the mission statement of the man who inspired my generation to hit the road: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved.” (The end of the book, seldom quoted, was a soberer reflection: “Nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody, besides the forlorn rags of growing old,” a condition that Kerouac was never to know, dying in Florida at the age of forty-seven.)
Kerouac had come to Mazatlán, like me, from Arizona by bus, the same route, though in 1951 it would have been a slower trip. He did not stay in Mazatlán; he left the same day for Mexico City to see William Burroughs. I lingered for three days of pure idleness, liking the seedy charm of the old city and cheered by the families on the promenade—and the children, the lovers, the drinkers, the strollers. This end of town, on Olas Altas (High Waves) beach, was an enclave in which Mexicans themselves were tourists, or else visited from nearby.
“They come from the colonias—some of them from far away—for the breeze here,” a woman told me, explaining the campesinos seated on the sea wall.
There are two Mazatláns. One is the centro histórico, with its market and churches and the Teatro Ángela Peralta—built in 1874, for opera, boxing, movies, and plays; restored in 1992 as a venue for local musicians and dramatists and dancers—its old plazas and small bistros, hospitable to locals. The other, flashier, golden Mazatlán, the Zona Dorada, six miles up the beach, at the top end of town, with its grand hotels and resorts, is dismissed by locals as the destination of rich gringos, and financed to launder drug money, as a man told me with a dismissive laugh: “Dinero lavar!”
It is rare in Mexico to meet someone who has no family connection to the US. Many Mexicans I met—working in hotels, restaurants, and shops, driving taxis—had held jobs in the States and been thrown out. In the tale told most often, they had been summoned to Mexico for a family emergency and had been unable to return.
Liliana had slipped over the border and made beds in a hotel in Colorado for a year, then worked in a restaurant for a second year. She told me she’d been paid well, and she remembered the generous tips in the restaurant.
“I came home because my mother was dying,” she said. “Now I can’t go back.” She thought a moment—and looked aged in her reflection. “If I had five thousand dollars, I could get a visa, or pay the mafia to help me cross. But I will never have that money.”
Making beds in a good hotel full time in Mazatlán, Liliana earned 700 pesos a week, about $35. Her husband had left her; her children were grown. She was resigned to a life of poorly paid work, just getting by.
Her mention of the mafia prompted my next question.
“There are four here.” And she shrugged. “They don’t bother me.” Ellos no me molestan.
“They fight with each other,” Miguel had told me on the bus, “and with the police.”
Because Mazatlán is a busy and important seaport, the cartels contend for control of its port, essential (and notorious) for moving drugs north. Just a few months before, thirteen tons of cocaine, hidden in barrels of hot sauce and destined to be off-loaded at Mazatlán, were intercepted down the coast at Manzanillo.
A more aggrieved man repeated a frequent Mexican complaint: “If you didn’t want drugs in your country, we wouldn’t have cartels in ours.”
But that is only partly true. The cartels are now more involved than ever in human trafficking, because though it is not quite as profitable, the penalties for smuggling people are far less than for smuggling drugs.
I was often the target of the Mexican taunt, “Yes, we have El Chapo Guzmán, but you had Al Capone!”
This all sounds contentious. Yet the days I spent in Mazatlán were peaceful, strolling on the malecón—thirteen miles of seafront promenade—trying out the restaurants, swimming on the hot afternoons, and at night smiling at the frenzied dancers in the joints in the seaside clubs.
That was the best of Mexico for me—inexpensive meals that were delicious, cheap hotels that were comfortable, and friendly people who, out of politeness, seldom complained to outsiders of their dire circumstances: poor pay, criminal gangs, a country without good health care or pensions, crooked police, cruel soldiers, and a government indifferent to the plight of most citizens. I found that in these circumstances, the people I met overcame the infernalities by either being obstinate and wicked themselves, or in most cases being kind, in a mood of acceptance, understanding that voicing objections can get you hurt, or killed.
The Mazatlán public market, the Mercado Municipal, an art nouveau building, was a ten-minute walk from my hotel, filled with people milling among dead fish, flyblown meat, fruit, clothes, appliances, shoes, religious paraphernalia, and the kitsch and souvenir junk that Mexicans call chácharas. Although crowded, sensationally so at times, the market was a scene of politeness, friendly beckoning, good-humored bargaining, and no confrontation.
It was there, in a stall selling chácharas, as well as icons and crucifixes and ceramic skulls, that I saw that familiar mustached face on a foot-high plaster statue. The skinny, dignified man in the white shirt, string tie, and cowboy boots was unmistakable as Jesús Malverde—an ascetic saint’s face, but this idol was holding a wad of money in his right hand, his left hand resting on a stack of bills. Sitting on a throne-like chair, a big, spiky, seven-fingered marijuana leaf as a backdrop, another leaf at his feet: a secular holy man, shocking in its commanding presence and its oddness. It was the image of the seated man I had seen in Mexico City and on Señora Cruz’s medallion.
“Tell me about him, please.”
The smiling clerk, her name tag reading MINERVA, verified, as Señora Cruz had said to me, “You know this is Jesús Malverde?”
“Yes.”
Minerva said that Malverde was a man who had lived in Sinaloa, and gave me to understand that there was a Malverde shrine in Culiacán (where Señora Cruz had gotten off the bus); that he was venerated, given offerings of gold trinkets and money; and that in most respects Malverde worship amounted to a cult, every bit as powerful as the cult of Santa Muerte.
“Malverde is important, but only in Culiacán and Sinaloa generally,” she said. “He doesn’t matter anywhere else. His statues are here, but not in other markets.”
Most of the statues were six or eight inches high, but some were huge—two-foot-high images of the skinny man in the white shirt, black tie, black trousers, and cowboy boots, the thin ascetic face suggesting saintly self-denial. But what of the marijuana leaves and the stacks of money?
“People worship him—they ask him for protection.”
“What people?”
“Marijuaneros,” Minerva said. “Also poor people—they pray to him.”
This little glimpse into the arcane belief system in Mexico fascinated me, so when I had time, I looked deeper. Jesús Malverde, called the Narco Saint, had been studied and written about by, among others, the journalist Sam Quinones, who wrote in True Tales from Another Mexico how Malverde was known as the Generous Bandit and the Angel of the Poor; how pilgrims left offerings and plaques at his shrine, a large building by the railway tracks in Culiacán; how this Robin Hood figure had lived in the time of the dictator Porfirio Díaz (1877–1911); how he had been hunted down and finally hanged from a mesquite tree by government soldiers on May 3, 1909, now a day of celebration for Malverdistas. Quinones is also persuasive in asserting that Malverde was likely a mythical figure, that he had probably never lived, that he might be a conflation of two prominent bandits or perhaps an invention arisen out of nothing at all except a sense of grievance and a yearning for protection.
Belief gains strength in the absence of facts. Malverde is the more powerful for being pure legend, from the hagiography of an oral tradition. Here is the proof: some worshipers at Malverde’s shrine have witnessed miracles—the return of lost cows, the curing of a gangrenous leg. That Malverde never existed, or is an inflated or hallowed version of a person who might have lived, or is surrounded by a nimbus of hogwash and speculation, producing tears, protestations of faith, and verified miracles, gives him a stark similarity to most other saints.
Malgobierno has something to do with it, too. Quinones writes, “Sinaloa is one of those places in Mexico where justice isn’t blind and the lawless aren’t always the bad guys.” As for the official disapproval of Malverde: “Having the government as an enemy can improve a reputation.” Especially when the government does so little to deal with corruption, ineffective public institutions, widespread poverty, income inequality, underdevelopment, and the police and army getting away with murder.
When the government is not on your side, you look elsewhere for comfort and develop a belief in Holy Death, in the Narco Saint, in (as Poe put it) the grotesque and the arabesque.
On a beach chair on the sand, among the bathers and the families, I felt like Aschenbach—and I mocked myself with that image for a few days, catching up on notes. But one early evening, dusk like a lowering veil, I sat in a corner of the Plaza de la República, getting a $1 shoe shine by Manuel—a youngish man with a small son—who told me, “I live very far from here. I come every day on the bus.” People passed, slowed by the heat and the broken pavement, hand-holding couples, a man dragging a reluctant dog, a woman pushing a stroller, a drunk who staggered near until Manuel waved him off (“Borracho”), children neat in school uniforms toting backpacks, a priest hugging himself and lecturing an old woman, the flower seller, the ice cream man, the man selling balloons and wind-up toys, all of them circulating in the plaza while Manuel told me about his small child and his tribulations, his sick wife, his unfair rent, his long commute, the price of food, the unhelpful government—the end of another hot morning in Mazatlán.
And I was overcome with sadness, the melancholy of the voyeuristic traveler, and thought: This is what happens when you stay too long in a place. You begin to understand how trapped people feel, how hopeless and beneath notice, how nothing will change for them, while you the traveler simply skip away.
Tepic: People Who Hide from Evangelists
To the inland town of Tepic the next morning, a lovely day, sliding down the coast on a bus, someone else driving, a tour of the tomato fields, the ranks and rows of trees in the avocado orchards, cornfields and vegetable gardens, miles of them, all sizable and symmetrical. Even the cemeteries were orderly, the carved mausoleums like small habitable chalets. Only the human huts and shacks in the passing settlements were squalid and ruinous, where the farm workers live, earning a pittance—this, thirty miles from Mazatlán, near the town of El Rosario.
It was restful to travel into the big bosomy landscape, the green hills, shaggy with low trees, too steep to plow or cultivate except in the hidden slopes where (I was assured) marijuana and amapola (opium poppies) were grown, making El Rosario more famous for its drug crops than its vegetables or fruit, and as a consequence, a haunt of the cartels, and somewhat disputed here in Nayarit between the Sinaloa cartel and the Jalisco New Generation.
From the swampy coastal plain haunted by herons, the road climbed into the hills to Tepic. That was my destination. Tepic was founded almost five hundred years ago, but you’d never know it: its antiquity was buried by scrap yards and car repair shops, which are the Mexican response to a bad economy and low wages—making do and mending are the answers to mechanical problems. No one has any money, so cars are kept for decades, and cobblers and tailors are busy, too, and so are blacksmiths, welders, and brickmakers. Mexicans still know how to fix things: the body shops of Tijuana smooth the dented cars from California.
In the glare
of early afternoon, the rest of Tepic, a town cupped in the mountains, consisted of a few busy commercial streets, and the nearer neighborhoods of cracked and sunbaked bungalows and small fenced-in houses scattered over a hillside, some of them on narrow cobblestone lanes. A whitewashed, walled-off university was the pride of the town, and so was another dominant feature, a remnant of the past: the seventeenth-century cathedral with Gothic steeples, whose fenestration and tapering top gave them the look of a pair of upright, skeletal rockets. An uninviting place, on the whole, the sort that inspires the thought, Let’s keep going.
But I had spent the whole morning on the bus, and I was happy to get off at three thousand feet. The air was markedly fresher than in steamy Mazatlán, and I was here for a reason: to visit the nearest settlement of indigenous Huichol people. I was told in Mazatlán that I would have no trouble finding them: “You will see them. You will know them by their amazing clothes” (ropas sorprendentes).
In the sunny early afternoon, I walked down the main avenue, Insurgentes, to a restaurant that had been recommended, El Farallón—excellent seafood, traditionally broiled on a zaranda (literally a sieve, but in Mexico a grill). I was to find, as I had on the border, that no matter how dreary-looking a Mexican city or town, it nearly always has a good place to eat, which is worth stopping to find. In the absence of any other comfort, suffering poor housing, violent streets, bad government, and wicked cops, Mexicans defend their food and take pride in its regional differences—in many cases, define themselves and their towns in the uniqueness of their food.
Paying my bill, I stepped into the street at the same time as another man, who had just finished eating and was voluptuously working a toothpick in his mouth. I said hello, we talked awhile—simple pleasantries—and then I asked how I might find some Huichol people in Tepic.
The man made an expansive gesture. “They’re everywhere.”
