Reader’s Forum

It’s time to save San Miguel
By Elliot Holt March 21, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

Probably few people in San Miguel can remember the different local businesses that have disappeared along with the “progress” the city has experienced in the past few years.

One of the places at the Portal de Allende used to be La Bouganvilea, where Chiquis sold us ice cream and sherbet popsicles while we waited for the arrival of the El Corsario Limousines, which preceded the Corsarios del Bajío buses. The tables were made of aluminum topped with a sort of yellow plastic, the same color as the plastic upholstered chairs. A few steps from there was La Cucaracha, a bar where local and American rummies would spend long hours sipping drinks and telling tales.

Across the Jardín, on the Portal Guadalupe, were the La Gardenia store and another ice cream store, as well as a haberdasher/sundries store, whose name I forget. There was also the El Popo ice cream parlor, where Pablito would sell us ice, ice cream and popsicles.

On the upper side of Mesones was the Hoyos family’s seed and grain store, which served as San Miguel’s only bank before the national ones opened branches here. You could deposit money and buy beans and raw sugar known as piloncillo at the same time.

As to cars, really only a few were in town. The taxi stand was on the Jardín, in front of the Parroquia, and they had a phone booth hanging from a lamppost where the drivers received calls for the “sitio.” The car everyone knew was the old Ford Model A that belonged to Lino Gutiérrez, which he would park on the corner of Hernández Macías and Umarán; in fact, it was the only car parked on Hernández Macías between Pila Seca and Canal.

From what I remember there weren’t any pharmacies as such, but apothecary shops called boticas—1st and 2nd class ones—where you took your own jars or bottles for buying alcohol or different creams or salves, because the only facial cream that was sold in its own container was Pomada de la Campana. It wasn’t until the sixties that they started selling Nivea, whose slogan was, “You can take it anywhere.”

There were a number of bakeries around town. I used to shop for bolillos and teleras at the one run by an old man on the corner of Hernández Macías and Pila Seca. He would bake delicious sweet conchas which we would have as a snack with café con leche in the early evening.

You may well ask yourselves, where is all of this going? Why these reminiscences of an old San Miguel resident who no longer even lives here? Well, I simply want to highlight the fact that San Miguel had its own shops and businesses and stores and restaurants and marketplace, without the need for outside businesses. In fact, San Miguel has been an important agricultural and commercial hub since Spanish colonial times and continues being so today.

It has had its own commercial and business class, whose successors continue contributing to the town to this day. In short, San Miguel survived for hundreds of years without an invasion of businesses, stores and chains that are alien to its culture and traditions. As time passed, the town became a unique tourist destination, first for the North American market and, later, the European.

During the past several years, travel and tourism have become principal job-creating industries around the world, along with the entertainment, gambling and second-home industries.

Currently the travel and tourism industry accommodates different kinds of tourists—those who seek adventure, or sports, or nature or sun and sand. One of the fastest-growing segments belongs to the traveler looking for educational, historic and environmental experiences, and these are the ones who have always come to San Miguel. This tourist is looking for something different from the familiar; they seek the experience of a place that is unlike where they live on a daily basis, a place where they can learn something valuable about another country or culture.

If the idea is to disconnect, why then insist on establishing businesses such as Starbucks? Or McDonald’s? Or Blimpie? Could it be that sanmiguelenses are deluded that having these brands in town somehow makes us better or improves us as a travel destination? I would think we would have had enough with the Mexican mega-stores such as Liverpool, Gigante, Comercial Mexicana and Aurrerá, without having to fall into the “me too” globalized consumerism represented by international brands and logos. It isn’t that businesses shouldn’t be established in San Miguel, just that they should be sensitive to the town’s reality, its surroundings, its traditions, its own culture.


If there is one thing that distinguishes excellent travel destinations such as Florence, or towns similar to San Miguel such as Cuenca in Spain or Bruges in Belgium, it is that the stores, businesses and restaurants are native: they belong to the place. None of these destinations has needed to establish business brands that are alien to their own identities as towns, as communities.

One thing that always has made San Miguel distinct is its uniqueness; it is real.

San Miguel is not a fantasy created by Disney, nor has it been globalized in such a manner that it has fallen prey to the “Californization” of everything: the same chains, the same stores, the same attractions that can be found pretty much anywhere in the US, where you sometime don’t know whether you’re in Denver, San Antonio, Kansas City or Los Angeles. Much of the US has been so homogenized that the majority of its cities have lost whatever made them distinct.


We shouldn’t let the same thing happen in San Miguel. We should actively work toward keeping and improving that which is ours and oppose the establishment of brands and chains that do not contribute to all that makes San Miguel de Allende distinct.

Elliot Holt was born in the US, spent much of his childhood in San Miguel, a part of his adult life in Mexico City and currently resides in Puerto Rico.

A darkness on the edge of town
By Bill Gallacher

Where no one asks any questions, 
and dreams are found and lost
I'll be there on time and I’ll pay the cost
For wanting things that can only be found
In the darkness on the edge of town

—Bruce Springsteen

It started out innocently enough. Three not-so-young-as-they-imagined guys knocking back a few at Harry’s Bar, swapping stories that their wives have never heard and never will hear, and generally reveling in a few hours of unwonted freedom. When the jokes had been been told, and the bottom of the barrel thoroughly scraped, the conversation gravitated down to the topic of adult entertainment, in particular the offerings available in our own little town. One does not generally associate San Miguel with the seamier side of life, but M, perhaps sensing a certain naiveté in P and myself, let it be known that “fleshpots” do exist here; a whole string of them, in fact, on the ring road, nestled between building suppliers, lumber yards and furniture outlets. We did not press M on the source of his seeming encyclopedic knowledge of this field. We assumed that he, like most others in possession of such information, had been conducting a sociological study for serious academic purposes. Our curiosity aroused, we were o
nly too willing to assist him in his research.

Now the days of the rough and tumble bordello are pretty much gone, having been largely replaced, even here in San Miguel, by the table-dancing entertainment bar familiar to aficionados of The Sopranos. The one we hit bore a classical Latin name that for obvious reasons I will not repeat here. Suffice it to say that in an earnest attempt to discover our “other selves,” we breezed into the establishment, propelled by a certain alcohol-inspired bravado, but also with some degree of trepidation. After all, we were, by and large, explorers entering uncharted waters.

It was a pleasant surprise to find that the cover charge of around 200 pesos included a credit of 100 pesos that could be applied later to any drink charges. Once inside, it was hard to ignore the dingy room off to the right that appeared to contain nothing but an unsheeted mattress. To be fair, it might well have been there for the night watchman, although why the door was left open for patrons to see was puzzling. In any case, it seemed an unlikely venue in which to discover one’s other self, alone or accompanied. The actual club was a cavernous affair that at one time must have been a warehouse. Judging by the inky darkness that seemed to stretch to infinity, the walls had been painted entirely in black. From time to time, strobe lights revealed a few tables and chairs arrayed around a long dancing table with two poles at either end.

Despite the murk, it was clear that the place was empty of customers, save for one table occupied by a few Mexican cowboys. No sooner had we been escorted to a table than we were swarmed, literally swarmed, by three of the hostesses, who, like a well-drilled phalanx moving with military precision, planted themselves firmly on our laps and immediately ordered a round of tequilas without so much as a by-your-leave. Completely taken by surprise (I had expected the señoritas would be coyly sitting in the darkness at the edge of the room) I gaped at P and M, now, like me, suddenly pinned to their chairs. The surprise attack had worked to perfection. Clearly well-versed in male psychology, and taking full advantage of the innate reluctance of males to back off in front of each other and particularly in front of the opposite sex, even in the face of common sense, the girls knew they had us by…. Well, you know what I mean.

The drinks arrived, round upon round, fast and furious. From what I could tell in my less-than-discriminating state, ours were severely watered-down aguardiente, theirs the rinse water of spent tequila bottles. Now that the initial shock had worn off, I tried to assess the “quality” of our señoritas. Mine was by far the heaviest and, because of the way she had arrived on my lap, ass backwards in a bounding leap, with her mini riding up her waist, I could only see her face in profile. She seemed pretty enough and surprisingly bold. From over her shoulder, I did have an excellent view of what my friends were up against.

“Mine is kind of skinny,” said P, huffily.


“How come I got the dog,” added M, eyeing La Gordita with extreme interest.

“Do you want to switch,” I pleaded hopefully as the weight on my thigh was becoming hard to take.

“No, that’s okay,” said M, grinning. He had grasped my problem right away and was determined to leave it with me. In any case, the mechanics of switching would have been hard to explain to our charmers and would have been downright unchivalrous to boot.

In a way, it would have been simpler if neither P, M nor I spoke any Spanish at all. Unfortunately we did, which made rudimentary conversation unavoidable even if hugely banal. Seems the girls were all from Celaya, doing their thing (we never did find out how far this thing extended) to get money “to advance their educations” in other more respectable fields. My immediate concern was to get relief from the weight of La Gordita, yet every time I moved to ease the pain, she took this as a sign to press her ample flesh ever more securely where it would fit. How on earth was I going to explain the source of my fractured femur?

Eventually, to the accompaniment of some kind of weird Hispanic hip-hop (weird that is to sixties fossils weaned on the Beatles and the Stones), La Perra got up to do her thing on the pole.

“What now?” I said to M.

“Maybe we should go,” he said.

And P, who seemed to have exhausted all conversation with La Flaca, nodded in agreement. When La Perra returned, we called for the bill. The girls, sensing something problematic in the offing, vanished as suddenly as they had appeared. None of us had brought credit cards. We had sense enough to leave them behind. But we certainly had enough cash, or so we thought. The bill arrived on one of those long thin strips like you get from a supermarket. I was surprised at exactly how long it was, longer than anything from my wife’s wildest excursions to Costco. In the low light, the numbers were illegible. P called for a flashlight.

“How much have you got,” he asked both of us.

We had about 1000 pesos each. He had the same.


“We can’t swing it,” he said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, “We’ve only been here about an hour. Give me the light.”

I checked the items. Each drink had been billed at 180 pesos, for a total of about 3500 pesos.

“We didn’t buy this,” I protested. “It’s a total rip-off.”


“Of course it is,” said M. “What did you expect. They’re going to collect from us, one way or another. It’s the same thing as in the States.” M appeared oddly conversant with the protocol, but I did not press for details. P, too, seemed resigned.

“Seems we have a problem,” he added, with a depressing fatalism.

“Why don’t we make a run for it,” I said.

“Look behind,” said P. Five musclemen, about as wide as they were tall, were securing the exit.

“You think we can get past that lot?” said P.

“No, I do not,” I had to admit.

“Then let’s think of a practical way out of this.”


“You mean we should offer to wash the glasses,” I said.

“Sarcasm will get us nowhere,” said M.

P called for the jefe, who had doubtless been through this scene many times before.

“You can keep my watch until we get cash,” said P.

The jefe apparently thought this a good start but, noticing P’s cell phone on his belt, demanded, and got, this further surety. We were escorted, politely, past the heavies at the door. Once outside and, frankly relieved to be there in one piece, we grinned sheepishly at each other. “Oh well, makes for a good tale,” said one bravely. “How about fools and their money are easily parted,” countered another.

The entire escapade had lasted little more than an hour and a half. The following day P showed up with cash and made good the deficit. By his own account, he was greeted most politely, had his possessions returned intact and was invited to return, anytime.

Somehow, I think it will be a while.

Bill Gallacher is a regular contributor of ironic observations of life to Atención.



Letters

Editor,

The trustees of Feed the Hungry and the almost 4,000 children we feed every school day would like to thank everyone involved with Festival Sabor San Miguel for selecting Feed the Hungry as their charity of choice.

In particular, thanks to Rodolfo Rubio who had the brilliant idea and executed it in grand style. The site was magnificent and the gleaming white tents were a lovely addition to the view of San Miguel. And a special thanks to Jim and Ann Dolan and Nick and Betty Coates for their previous and continued support of Feed the Hungry.

Additional special thanks go to Viking, the vinters and everyone who donated to the auction that took place at the Gala Opening dinner at Casa de Sierra Nevada. Your generosity will make a difference in the lives of many, many children.

Congratulations to all on a successful event and we look forward to next year.

Tony Adlerbret
President Emeritus
Feed the Hungry

Editor,

I was tweaked by your article on noise. I also live on a hill where vehicles do make a lot of noise as they are laboring up the hill. As Kahil Gibran in his epic work The Prophet said something to the effect of...if we live in the city why do we complain of the noise...if you want quiet move out to the boondocks where nothing is going on. In other words, if you think it is too noisy here then go elsewhere. If you want the city life then put up with city life! The city was here before you got here and will be here after you leave. But my wildest guess is that where ever you go you won’t be happy. I had a dad who seems to me to be remarkably like you. He is now in “heaven” but I sense he is still telling god how to run the world. Maybe there is more to life than you/we were ever told about or wanted to believe.

Colin Hanlen

Editor,

Regarding Virginia Neumann’s letter to the Editor on this year’s Best of Burros Festival in Jalpa:

I have volunteered in Jalpa during February and March from 2006 to the present, as a teacher of beginner’s English to children from 7 to 12 years old. During this time of teaching, I have never seen a Bible or religious tract in the classroom, nor have I heard any religious doctrine of any kind. This is over a time span of four hours a week for 10 weeks during each of those years.

FINO (Fundación Internaciónal de Niños Olvidados), A.C. is now the humanitarian, nonreligious organization approved by the Mexican government that runs these educational programs. Monies from the Burro event go toward finishing the biblioteca, furthering the children’s English education and helping with other physical and educational needs.

I’m sorry Ms. Neumann felt the event was too expensive. Last year, no one was refused entry because of a lack of the admission price, nor will they be this year.

Professor Stephen Joseph, emeritus,
Touro College