Sayulita, a small town in Mexico, with a small wonderful stretch of protected Pacific beach and small waves for small surfers lies just below the Tropic of Cancer at latitude 20.868889. That famous line is the northernmost point where the sun gets directly overhead — during the summer solstice. Nowhere north of the line does the sun ever get directly overhead, e.g. nowhere in the United States except Hawaii. The day after the solstice it starts back on its eternal rounds to arrive at the high-noon point at the Tropic of Capricorn for the winter solstice [of the Northern Hemisphere.] This explains why many of the part-time residents of the town start packing their bags in late April, early May. It’s getting hot! Back to British Columbia, or North Shore, Illinois or dozens of other places they have come from to spend some part of the winter.
Just north of Puerto Vallarta, which flew into the American consciousness in 1963 with the tabloid displayed adulteries of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor during their filming of The Night of the Iguana, Sayulita retained its tranquility and distance over narrow mountainous roads until the 1990s. PV [Puerto Vallarta], as the foreigners like to call it, began to boom in the late sixties after the collapse of near mountain mining was replaced by development, highways and high-rise hotels. It is a major destination for the Love-Boat clan, and hosts a gay-friendly atmosphere as a get-away from big and inland Guadalajara. US hippies and surfers straggled into Sayulita in the late 60s and a decade afterward. It was the proto-typical tropical getaway, not as hot and dry as much of Mexico because the Sierra Madre mountains just kilometers from the beaches catch and hold the off-shore breezes, keeping miles of the coast cool and green for a good part of the year.
We arrived, very late comers indeed, following the advent of the first ATM machines by three years. By now Sauyulita is that odd mix of upscale and downscale that is the lot of many beach towns, from Ocean Beach, San Diego around the Horn and back up to Atlantic City, New Jersey. Some people come because they want to hang. Money means little while time to loaf and noodle with friends and strangers means a lot. Almost like a beach full of sea-lions, with not quite the closeness nor rank odors, folks just want to circulate, eat as they can, swim, sun and surf. Others come later for whom comfort means more. Cool restaurants are better than hot lean-tos. Table cloths are better than quickly swiped Formica. Asphalt roads are better than dust. Cell-phones are better than pay phones. ATMs are better than carrying bundles of cash. So modernity begins to creep in, like a tide slowly rising, not getting to all the streets at the same time, not touching every building.
The newcomers want better homes; good homes bring in brick masons, carpenters, electricians. More asphalt. More restaurants, more beer trucks, more t-shirts for sale, real estate offices, surfing classes… The foreigners bring their own cultures with them. They notice that Mexican kids are only in school 4 hours a day, in poor conditions. They organize. They help change the infrastructure. They volunteer to teach computer skills, after getting computers sent from friends and relatives in the states. The foreigners form a community improvement organization. At its best it is bi-cultural, bi-national mixing the good, tossing the bad. It depends on volunteers who come and go. Things get done, sometimes too slow which is probably better than sometimes too fast. Kids are learning science of the sea and the local wet lands from surfers who are re-remembering university classes they had come here to escape from. (more…)
