A quaint fishing village on the Pacific in the middle of nowhere, Santa Cruz, Mexico is best described by its proximity to Puerto Vallarta, which itself was a fishing village until a few decades ago when some gringo celebrities turned it into a sodomy-laden tourist destination.
Related: Puerto Vallarta, Mexico in Full Color
Santa Cruz is still the real deal. Farmers ride horses where they please and shirtless motorbike riders with their toddlers on their laps don’t wear helmets.
Cockfight
Above: A bona fide cockfight, during which farmers strap razor blades to the legs of their fighters and sic them on each other until one succumbs to their injuries, at which time they are tossed on the growing pile of chicken corpses in the corner of the auditorium. All the while, spectators chaotically exchange cash for bets.
“They just look at chickens different,” as one expat gringo put it.
As I often have in the Third World, I like to imagine, in this context and others, the look of absolute horror and revulsion writ large across my liberal relatives’ faces at the sight of such unsanitary displays of Old World recreation.
The West, as I explore in my book Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is hopelessly sanitized — bloodless and TikTok’ed to hell. I’m not necessarily endorsing cockfighting as sport, but a good old-fashioned shock-and-awe campaign on the liberal Western might not hurt.
Santa pinata
I bought this beauty from my neighbor/landlord’s ex-sister-in-law, who runs a local one-lady piñata operation, for about ten bucks. I imagine in the U.S. it would have cost roughly ten times that.
The Piñata Index, like the Egg Index, is one reason among many I live happily outside of the United States and don’t plan to return to Gomorrah any time soon.
Shrimp boat captain
My neighbor/landlord, a gentleman named Chaleo with a pirate eyepatch, the archetype of what I would expect from the gente of a Mexican fishing village, who compulsively greets gringos with the catchphrase “caballero sin caballo” (“cowboy without a horse”), took me and my wife out for a fishing expedition.
Then he gave us a bunch of fish, plus a wild-caught giant camarron (shrimp). He insisted they tasted different (much better) than commercially produced shrimp and, after sampling his catch, I am forced to agree.
While Chaleo gathered his nets and picked out his bounty, a gaggle of pelicans or whatever gathered to beg for fish and go to war with each other over the inedible dead fish he tossed overboard.
Cartel mausoleum
A cartel bigshot native to the area died at some point in the last couple of years. His acolytes erected in the middle of the village graveyard an ornate shrine to his memory that otherwise could serve as a an impressive upper-middle-class house, by local standards, for the living.
It even comes equipped with multiple air-conditioning units on each of its three floors!
No one in the village complained publicly, although they privately lament the ostentatious display, for obvious reasons.
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