My family just returned from our third trip to Sayulita, a fishing village on the Pacific Coast of Nayarit, Mexico. Our timing each year straddles the breathtakingly divine and impeccably bad. The good: It is pre-season. The jungle is lush and the banana trees sprout fruit. You’re forced to access your high school Spanish and the waves are perfection.
Sayulita Days, a local carnival and indescribably raucous local party, on the other hand, could bring one to bang her head against a cement wall. The fiesta is a cacophony of questionable kids rides (see my son on one such ride above), all night sirens, battles of the bands, tequila, roving speaker systems blaring some sort of advertising, and the occasional gunshots. For a couple of nights the town reverberates in a way that mere words cannot do justice to. If you wander to the town square in late evening, young men can often be found trashing the place with riot-like vigor.
Something remarkable, though, happens come morning. Everything is restored to its lovely, breezy beach-town order. The surfers pad down to the beach as though they weren’t up all night, dogs doze in the middle of the streets. The town square is eerily spotless.
I initially thought the clean up was a town-sponsored effort to “leave it better than you found it.“ Though after the mayhem turns out not to be something much more amazing. I’ve always been too tired to see it in action, but apparently, a group of local “grandmothers” emerge at the crack of dawn and clean up after the young people. It is the local solution to restoring the order, I suppose, or a locals’ Dispose of Waste Properly’ custom. Weird, but it seems to work. For just a moment, it seemed that I should steal some fairy dust and replicate these magical grandmothers and bring them back to the U.S. — Dispose of Waste Properly: Check.
But upon further thought...
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1 comment:
Thank you for sharing your recent experiences on a trip to Mexico. Being a long time visitor to Mexico, living on the Border, and working with Mexico Park Rangers and Managers, I can confirm that one of the biggest issues is improper disposal of trash. This is also one of the biggest issues in the USA, even after years of "litter bug" campaigns. But we can't give up, there is still lots of work to be done.
I also liked your comment about the grandmothers. What is interesting about the Latin culture, is that Mexicans in particular are very clean people. They sweep their dirt floors every day, wash off their sidewalks daily, and clean around their house. The mother keeps a tight ship, but something happens when they go outside of their home area or into a desert/wild area. This would make a great dissertation paper.
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