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When we visited La Bocana three years ago, at the start of 2021, it was a tiny beach hamlet consisting of a few Mexican homes, two simple restaurants, and a small, bare surf shop.
We spent several afternoons there, nearly alone save for a smattering of leathery gringos and the isolated surfer. We hiked down the beach and discovered a turtle laying her eggs under the light of the full moon. Where the Copalita river emptied into the Pacific (hence the beach’s name “La Bocana,” or “the mouth”) thousands of shorebirds dove, flocked, and flew in dizzying spirals. The place possessed an intense energy and wildness that dazzled us.
When we returned to the Oaxacan coast earlier this year with my dad, we knew exactly where we wanted to go.
My dad is the quintessential Midwestern Birder of A Certain Age, with his sturdy canvas hats and his water-wicking-UPF-50 tech shirts and his Merlin app ready to let you know that was a rufous-naped wren! He can nerd out about warblers with a hearty enthusiasm you can only mock if you are an evil, dark, cynical person. We wanted to show him a spectacular experience, especially since the coast hadn’t been his first choice.
We discovered that a new series of apartments had been built at La Bocana. They looked unlike 99.9% of AirBnBs one encounters in Oaxaca: that is, they lacked the overlit fluorescent photos of terrible furniture and creepy folk art, the blurry crime scene shot of a kitchen you’d be frightened to make coffee in, the TV with wires dangling over a barren wall.
They looked…nice. Brand new induction ovens, dishwashers (wha??!?!), balconies, all glass and concrete construction, rooftop and ground floor pools…
Renting one of these apartments would allow us to wake up at 5:30 a.m. and go chasing roseate spoonbills (spoiler: we found them and they are exceptionally cool). By American standards, it was affordable: the equivalent of a decent hotel in a Midwestern city. We booked it.
When we arrived, we discovered the apartment was even more luxurious than we’d thought. Like, the kind of luxurious that required punching in a code to open a gate.
Inside, there was a small crystalline pool and several jacuzzis. There was an elevator – an elevator, my friends, an exoticism on par with the roseate spoonbill in Oaxaca –even though there were only three floors.
Our apartment was on the second, with sweeping panoramic views of the Pacific through its glass walls. There was a balcony with a gas grill, there were marble countertops and frozen beer mugs and legit couches with actual cushioning. We were amazed.
Every morning during our stay, we were awoken around 4:30 a.m. by a chorus of eager and competitive roosters. There must have been one rooster for every five inhabitants of the village, and each of these roosters, no matter how prepubescent and screechy or old and feeble, was damn set on out-crowing his rivals. The effect was an audible version of whack-a-mole – one cry popping up here, then another over there, then another there, and on and on until the sun had risen far above the horizon.
The roosters were just one jarring juxtaposition of many where traditional, rural, poor Mexico met the brand-new luxury apartments. The thin smoke rising from the outdoor kitchens of local houses. The laborers, working on what was likely an incipient luxury hotel, drinking forties of Victoria on the sides of the freshly paved streets. Street dogs sleeping in the shade, threadbare laundry hanging on clotheslines.
These were juxtapositions we mostly nudged out of our field of awareness, until the night of the one-year-old’s birthday.
That night, we returned from a birding expedition to find clusters of blue-and-white balloons adorning the house directly in front of the new apartments.
This house was an old-school ramshackle construction of adobe and tin, with dirt floors and an outdoor kitchen. It had its own handful of roosters, of course, which scrabbled around a scrubby hillside behind it.
That night, music was thumping from a pair of speakers and people were showing up by the dozens, descending from the backs of trucks: the cheapest and most available mode of transport along the coast.
There would be food for everyone, beer, mezcal, dancing, fiesta late into the night. A sign announced: Feliz cumpleaños! Beside it floated a giant inflatable number one. It’d be a rager; the whole village was likely invited. But not us.
We went upstairs to shower and make dinner and probably wouldn’t have paid much more attention had Elena not fixated on a group of kids playing in the street outside.
That night, she was bathed and fancy in a long flower-printed dress; a strange coincidence, since 99.9% of the time she’s in running shorts and a grubby tee-shirt. She stood on the balcony and observed the kids below. We were busy chopping vegetables, grilling meat, talking, and were taken aback when all of a sudden she said, “Okay, I’m going down.”
“What?” I was confused. “Do you know those kids?”
“No,” she shrugged, “but they invited me to play.”
“They did?” I asked. I thought she was pulling some kind of stunt.
“C’mon, you’ll see,” she said. I followed her down the stairs to the gate. It had to be unlocked from both the inside and the outside with a code. Through the metal bars on top, we could see the street.
Waiting there in the ivory glow of the streetlight was a ragtag group of kids. They wore flip-flops and secondhand t-shirts, one of which read MY FAVORITE FOOD IS PIZZA.
“Elena!” they called when they saw her. “Viniste!” You came!
She punched in the code, swung open the gate, and was engulfed by them. They had clearly already communicated with one another from the balcony – they knew her name, that she spoke Spanish, that she was Mexican. In under three minutes, they’d established they were playing hide and seek, and then boom, off they scattered.
Elena and another girl ran behind a car; boys skittered into the woods. I didn’t want to get too close and interrupt their vibes, so I sat with my beer by the pool on the inside of the complex and watched them.
They played hide and seek, tag, freeze tag. At one point Elena got bit by fire ants in the scrub behind the house, and asked to come back in, whimpering but playing it tough. She stuck her feet in the pool while the other kids peered through the bars of the gate.
Jorge had come down by then to join me.
“Should we invite them in?” he asked. It was my natural instinct, too, but I said no.
“I think it would be frowned on,” I said. We were silent.
Elena soaked her foot and then let herself out again. The kids played long past her bedtime of 9:30 p.m., sweating and shrieking and giggling in the hot beach night.
Then, as families began to leave in clusters in the backs of camionetas, they said their goodbyes. When the last of them had taken off, Elena appeared again at the gate, now holding a giant striped bag and a saran-wrapped piece of cake.
“Wha…”? I asked.
“They gave this to me,” she said.
Upstairs, we dumped out the bag. It was full of Mexican candy: little tubs of tamarind, tri-colored sticks of coconut, spicy watermelon suckers and spicy beer-mug-shaped suckers and spicy chicken-shaped suckers and spicy corn-on-the-cob-shaped suckers.
There was a separate container of candies that we realized was meant to be a turtle: the bottom of a two-liter bottle cut off and fitted with foam head, tail, and flippers. It had glittery eyes and eyebrows and smiled at us.
Here it all lay, on our thick, expensive, wooden table, in our posh, air-conditioned apartment, with our fridge full of La Croixs and $5 whole wheat bread from the supermarket and fresh strawberries.
It is not the first, nor will it be the last time in Mexico I have been gifted something I do not deserve, by someone who has far less money than I do, who may be making only a few dollars a day. Because deserving is not the point, and money is not the point. The point is that the gift remains sacred.
You give as an act of community; you welcome the stranger in for a plate of beans, a bowl of soup. You give the foreign girl with the $50 sandals who’s playing with you a hearty piece of cake, even if she can’t let you swim in her pool, because connection is connection and that’s where the meaning is.
Watching Elena play I felt at first disgust for myself, but then, whether because of my mindfulness training or two strong IPAs, I moved past that and instead began to consider how so many Americans – and people in the west in general – think of a good life.
To most of us, it would look like me on my side of the gate. Nice Patagonia shorts. Birkenstocks. A private pool and a rooftop jacuzzi and an air-conditioned luxury apartment with a brand-new dishwasher and a Dyson vacuum and Netflix and a balcony with a spectacular view of the Pacific!
But the cost of this life is often a gate. It’s a gate that keeps out other people – those we fear might threaten this life, might snatch it from us – but it also keeps out plenty of other, subtler things. Things we actually desperately need. It keeps out community. It keeps out connection. It keeps out joy. It keeps out God. It keeps out meaning.
Not entirely, of course. But to some degree. The richer one gets, the more drained one can become of vitality: the less one retains this sense of wild mixing, of fierce and devoted generosity, of spontaneous lightness and connection. The harder one has to work to remain rich. Life becomes more precarious and fragile, if only psychologically.
Ironically, the sense of anomie that dogs middle and upper-class American life drives travelers south.
“Why do you people come here?” Jorge will ask sometimes now, exasperated that Oaxaca is overrun with foreigners. “What can’t you find in your own country?”
Connection. Community. Spontaneity. Generosity. Beauty. Joy. Love. Authenticity. A lack of fear, a mixing, spaces without gates. Americans stand beaming in the streets of Tilcajete during the annual Carnival, incredulous and overjoyed that someone in a devil mask has just handed them a free cup of horchata.
We think luxury, privacy, separation will make us happy. Special. Safe.
But what I have found in my experience is that spaces that cultivate exclusivity are also quite brittle, and choked with pressure. Diversity – of color, ethnicity, background, culture – tends to create a more easeful environment for everyone. It’s okay to be who you are. It’s okay to wear your grass-stained jean shorts. It’s okay to say “freak” or “dang girl” or “craptastic” or to speak whatever language you speak. It’s okay for your kid to eat with her fingers. It’s okay to have just conducted an experiment in which you washed your hair with apple cider vinegar.
Whereas sameness – especially when everyone is white and wealthy – demands more sameness. Any difference, a hair out of place, an “inappropriate” behavior or piece of clothing, is, well, weird, and weirdness is wildly uncomfortable. Many of these spaces are very nice, very luxurious, very easy, and very tempting.
But what is invisible are the high stakes of maintaining them: what has to be denied, walled off, ignored, abandoned, repressed. A perpetual looking away, a perpetual maintenance of an exhausting status quo.
A friend who moved from her neighborhood in the city recently to a wealthy suburb came to visit the other day. She sat on my back steps, drinking a cup of tea.
“I miss this,” she said. “This city living.”
She was sitting on my bare concrete steps, looking out on my teensy yard with its trampoline in the driveway. In her new house, she has a gorgeous screened-in porch, a deck, an acre of land.
Isn’t it odd how so many of us miss the times in our lives when we had very little, but everything felt somehow truer, deeper, more real?
This is not to say my friend is miserable or full of regrets, but rather to consider what is lost as well as gained with more money. This friend talked about how most people in her suburb worked full time, so the kids were heavily scheduled, and there wasn’t the same sense of connection and community she’d found in the city. Things had to be planned much more in advance, and everyone lived more in their own bubble. Sounds like the U.S., I thought.
Everyone needs enough to survive, and then enough to be well. To be happy. But the U.S. ethos is not that. It’s more and more and more and more and what if they have more than I do? What if their kid gets into a better college? If I buy this home then we need a second car and then we need an addition and then we need a patio and then…and in its most sinister incarnation, it becomes paranoid.
Everyone wants to steal from me. Everyone wants a piece of what I have. Build the wall.
When really, I’d venture, many of us aren’t even sure we want this, or what we want at all.
Is it making us happier, to have more and want more? To be ever “safer” and richer and more elite? To be ever more separate?
We crave the Mexican dream, Jorge and I joke. Not the dream of chilly isolation and all the latest tech. Not the dream of ascendance, paranoia, and superiority. Not the dream of private everything.
Instead: the delicious freedom that comes from being unafraid of the new, the stranger. The spontaneity of being invited to a party, of being given a cold beer and a plate of barbacoa that’s been stewing for twelve hours; of being the recipient of a kindness you don’t deserve but deserving is beside the point – here, take it, really. Of being the giver of that kindness. Gifting plants in carved-out milk cartons. Gifting time. Gifting your life.
The joy of running barefoot in the street, sharing a piece of cake, connecting without any care for money, nationality, language, or status. The opening of the gate, the mixing, the circle of waiting faces: estás lista para jugar? Are you ready to play?
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