Tag: Mazatlán

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Welcome to Stone Island

No trip to Mazatlan is complete without a trip to Stone Island. A Gilligan’s Island sort of place with predictable characters, happy catchy music playing in the background, and an underlying premise that people with different personalities and backgrounds need to get along with each other in order to survive.

The first time I met Ernesto, he was selling tours to Stone Island for somewhere between $30 and $80. The price seemed ridiculously negotiable, but I wasn’t interested in going somewhere I’d never heard of, at any price. I told him that I didn’t need a tour. I needed a fountain. And the rest is history.

Shortly after I hired Ernesto to be my handyman, he asked me if I wanted to go to Stone Island with him and Publio the following Sunday.

“Oh, no,” I told him. “That will cost too much money.”

“It won’t cost much at all. We’ll take a panga across to the island. It only costs $1.50 for each of us.”

“What’s a panga?”

“A fishing boat that ferries people across the channel. We can walk to Playa Sur, where they sell the tickets. You’ll like it. It will be fun.”

“What about the cruises you were selling on the beach?”

“Oh, those are only for tourists. You aren’t a tourist any more. You live here. We’ll take a panga across.”

Pangas leave the mainland every five minutes, or so. The boats speed across the channel and arrive in less than ten minutes. People pile in and out of the boats with everything they need to spend a day at the beach. Neto and Publio brought their surfboards. Other people brought beach chairs and coolers of food and drinks. One family even brought a large plastic children’s swimming pool, even though we would be right next to the water. I  just brought my fanny pack with sunscreen and pesos.

Sundays at Stone Island are truly a magical experience, with restaurants serving fresh fish and traditional drinks. (Think lemonade, beer and margaritas.) Neto’s friend, Rudy, worked in a restaurant owned by his sister-in-law, so we always went there. Other ex-pats were loyal followers of other nearby restaurants. Rudy had comfortable chairs and hammocks. His English was perfect and his manner was unfailingly charming. His Mexican lunch of fish with rice and beans was delicious.

One of my favorite parts of a day at Stone Island was talking to the beach vendors, who travel up and down the beach, selling jewelry, clothes, rosaries, and wooden sculptures of palm trees and turtles.

Women pay to get their hair braided, and henna tattoos on their arms and legs Children scream and chase each other across the sand. Some tourists haggle with the beach sellers. I never did. I liked talking to them and usually bought something that caught my eye.

One time, I actually paid to take the cruise to Stone Island. We were in a catamaran, a Mazatlán party boat, filled with tourists from the cruise ships. We circled the rocks where a colony of seals barked at us. The crew was jovial and started pouring beer before we even put on our life jackets. When we disembarked, trucks drove us to the far end of island, where we were served fish with rice and beans that wasn’t nearly as good as Rudy’s.

Victor Hugo (his real name!) traveled between tables, trying to entice people to sign up for time-share presentations. By the time we got back in the truck, and then back on the catamaran, a lot of people were suffering from too much beer and tequila, too much sun, and too little good judgement. Once was enough. From then on, I happily took a panga with Neto, and spent the day with Rudy.

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Zelmira Returns With A Broken Heart

In December, 1993, Neto and his brother, Cachi, took a train from Nogales to Mazatlan to see their father. Three days later Jesús was dead from a sudden heart attack. Neto and Cachi were despondent.

“When my father saw how messed-up and raggedy we were from drugs and alcohol, my father decided to take the ride to the other-world in our place.”

Neto has told me the story so many times over the years, I know he’s still haunted by the memory.

Zelmira was living in Los Angeles at the time. No longer working full time as a housekeeper in Echo Park, she was cleaning houses throughout her neighborhood in Inglewood when she got the news.

No one could believe that Jesús was gone. He was seventy-five years old, working full time as a security guard and fixing cars in his spare time. The family waited for Zelmira to return to Mazatlán before they held the funeral and buried Jesús in the Panteon Renacimiento Para Nacer a la Vida Eterna (The cemetery where people are reborn into eternal life.)

“I loved that old man,” Zelmira told people at the funeral. “I always thought he’d still be here when I came back home.” 

Zelmira was a widow at sixty-six years old. She had been married for forty-three years. She put on the black clothes of a Mexican widow and has never taken them off.

After the funeral, Neto stayed behind in Mazatlán for three months to take care of  his mother until she was ready to return to California.

“I wanted to make sure she was all right before I went back to the U.S. I didn’t want to leave her alone. The responsibility I had on my shoulders as a kid, earning money to help her provide for us, came back to me.”

Zelmra appreciated Neto in a different way after the funeral. “Your father always told me you would be the one to take care of me when I was old. I should have listened to him.”

“It’s ok, Mamí. I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life. If I can redeem myself, even a little, by taking care of you now, that makes me happy.”

But an even bigger blow to Zelmira’s heart was still to come. On May 2, 2002, Cachi was killed instantly in a car accident, driving on the road from Hermosillo to Caborca in his Dodge Caravan. Cachi was her second youngest child. Charming and sweet, he often traveled from Tucson to California to visit her. Neto believes that Cachi was his mother’s favorite. “Mamí may have loved him the most and she was crushed.”

 Zelmira immediately came back to Mazatlan for the funeral services. She never went back to California again. “I’m going to let my visa expire,” she told everyone. “I can’t care for other people any more. My heart is too broken.” 

Zelmira’s mother died when she was seven years old. From that moment, she learned to take care of herself. But losing her husband and, nine years later, her son was too much. She wanted to come home to live in her own house, near her friends from long ago. She renewed her friendship with Padre Lalo, and went to daily Mass at the simple Church of the Sacred Heart, down the street.

She took charge once again of her house on Papagayo Street, sweeping the sidewalk and the street in front of her house early every morning so people knew she was awake. 

Now, at age 92, Zelmira is an old woman with hardly any teeth left in her mouth and blind in one eye. She has discarded her armor and become an easier, more compassionate person. She lives with Neto’s sister, in the mountains outside Guadalajara, most of the year. She weeps openly every time Cachi’s name is mentioned. Tears spring from her eyes so readily, people are warned never to talk about him.

There are times that Zelmira is visited by ghosts. She sees her Aunt Petra, who raised her, and her brothers who have died. Some days she talks to Cachi as if he is still in the room with her. Once in a while she thinks Neto is her husband, Jesús. When he walks through the door, she calls out, “Hola, Papí. You are home from work early today.”

But in many ways Zelmira is still a warrior woman  ~ tiny, weighing less than 100 pounds, with fierce black eyes and a head full of wild curly hair. Her voice, low and growly like an angry dog, still commands attention. She will always be the matriarch. The most important hen in the hen-house. The glue that holds the family together.

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A Saga of Shrimp Salad

I moved to Mexico on a whim. I was bored and looking for adventure. The next four years were a whirlwind of new experiences, new people, and enough adventure to last a lifetime.

Neto was the first person I met in Mazatlán. It was April, 2005, the same day I bought my house. He was selling seafood on the beach and I was thinking, OMG ~ what have I done?

Neto was friendly and charming. He asked me why I looked so sad. I told him that I had just made a big mistake. I bought a house that needed a lot of work and I didn’t know what to do next.

Neto smiled. “Don’t worry. I can do whatever you need. I can fix your house just the way you want it.”

I returned to Colorado to sell my house, pack up my belongings, and move to my new home.

Christina was the first person I met after I moved. She knocked on my door and asked me if I needed a housekeeper. I hired her on the spot. By this time it was September.

I arrived before the moving van, to a huge house that was run-down and dirty. I bought a bed, a small outdoor table and two chairs at Sam’s Club. The kitchen had a lot of potential but no stove. Christina came on Tuesdays and Fridays to help me clean and sweep up dead cockroaches. It was that bad.

Neto spoke perfect English. Christina’s English was worse than my Spanish. While I knew a few beginning phrases in Spanish, Christina refused to even say, “Good morning.” But we got along by smiling and pointing. In a pinch, I pulled out my Spanish-English dictionary.

In addition to cleaning, Christina told me she could teach me to cook “real Mexican food.” One day I told her that I wanted to make shrimp salad. Mazatlán is famous for its world-class shrimp fleet. I heard from a neighbor that fresh shrimp was available on a street corner next to the downtown market. What I wonderful new experience for me! I thought.

Back then, everything was wonderful and new. I learned that the changeras are a small group of women who sell shrimp out of large, plastic washtubs on a corner of Aquilles Serdan Avenue. They are named for the chango nets that are used on the shrimp boats to measure the amount of shrimp in the water. They sell shrimp fresh from the boats, the rivers, and the estuaries from September until April. In the warm summer months, the shrimp is frozen but just as tasty.

Christina and I set off to buy shrimp. She told me she would take charge. That was fine with me. She bought 1.5 kilos (about three pounds) of medium size shrimp for 200 pesos (about $20.00.) The changera put them in a plastic bag. 

We didn’t go more than a few steps before Christina turned to me and said, “I forgot. You don’t have a stove.” 

“Is that a problem?”

“Yes. We can’t eat these raw. They have to be cooked first.”

Christina had a solution. She said we could take them to one of the restaurants on top of the market and they would cook the shrimp for us.

That’s what we did. That’s when the real adventure began. 

The restaurant was willing to cook the shrimp. Christina didn’t ask what the price would be. Just like she didn’t ask me if I had enough money to buy the shrimp in the first place. She assumed that because I was an American, I was rich. After buying the shrimp, I had 20 pesos (about $2.00) left in my purse. Christina had no money at all. 

The restaurant owner cooked the shrimp, then turned to me and said the charge would be 50 pesos. She, too, assumed that I was rich. Ordinarily she would have charged much less. 

I looked at Christina and said, “I don’t have the much. I only have twenty pesos left.” 

Christina looked at me and the restaurant owner and promptly walked out of the restaurant. She left me standing there!

I was paralyzed. I didn’t know what to do. I showed the owner how much money I had and she just shook her head as she stood there holding the bag of steaming hot shrimp. Neither of us knew what to do. I had no idea where Christina was. I was on my own. 

Luckily there was an American couple eating in the restaurant who stepped in to help. They told the owner in Spanish that I was honest. They assure her that I would return that afternoon with the rest of the money I owed. 

I walked out of the restaurant with my bag of hot, cooked shrimp and saw Christina waiting for me at the end of the row of restaurants, hiding behind a wooden column at the top of the stairs. She took the steaming bag out of my hands and we walked home.

That was the beginning of many lessons in cultural shock. And the importance of learning a new language. It wasn’t the last.

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The Pino Suárez Downtown Market

The Pino Suárez open market was one of the first blow-my-mind experiences I had when I first moved to Mexico. It is a spacious, 19th-century market, filled with reasonably-priced food, crafts and souvenirs. After a while, it was a place I always brought my guests, knowing they would either love it or hate it.

Love it ~ for its “real Mexico” experience. It is an entire block of open air stalls selling everything you can imagine. Food is sold in one corner. Clothing, crafts, and souvenirs are in the middle-section. Statues and rosaries, tarot cards and even “spells” are sold in one far-off corner of this huge building teeming with people.

Hate it  ~ because it smells of fish and freshly butchered meat. People push and shove their way down the aisles. Vendors accost you at every turn, insisting on bargaining with you rather than letting you move on. The noise can be deafening.

I had mixed feelings about the market. In the beginning, I was lost in the maze of aisles and the crush of people going every direction. After a while, I realized the market’s charm. I discovered my favorite souvenir venders and was eager to introduce them to my guests. Often it was easier to walk to the market for a few items, rather than ride the bus forty-five minutes to shop at Walmart. But I never got used to some of the exotic meat and poultry items, or the smell of blood on the floor.

Fresh fish, chicken feet, lots of intestines, pig’s skins and hog’s heads are all available in the market’s meat section. These were all things I’d never seen before. Some of them are actually scary to look at.

One day a friend asked me if I would walk to the market with her. She wanted to make pozole. According to her cooking teacher, she needed to buy a bag of hominy and a whole pig’s head. We located the items with no problem. The problem was we had no idea how much a whole pig’s head weighed. A lot! Especially if you have to carry it home, along with a five pound bag of hominy. 

The pig’s head weighed at least fifteen pounds. It took two of us to get it home and we stopped many times along the way. Because our Spanish was so elementary, we could only imagine what the Mexican people said to each other as they saw two old white women, walking a mile home from the market, taking turns cradling the head wrapped in plastic as if it were a baby. We were gringas locas (crazy women) for sure.

My friend’s cook showed us how to make pozole in a huge soup kettle. I helped cut up vegetables and we shared this wonderful soup with our friends. It was probably the best pozole I’ve ever eaten, thanks to the pig’s head we carried home in our arms.

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Los Tres Amigos

It was the rainy season and the roof was leaking. Water poured into the bedrooms.

“When can we fix these leaks?” I asked, as we emptied buckets of water into the courtyard.

“When the rainy season is over,” Neto insisted.

“When will that be?’

“October 15th.” 

I’d never experienced rain like this before. Certainly not in Colorado. From June until October, rain flooded the streets. Palm trees bent in the wind until they were nearly horizontal. Dogs and cats hid under abandoned cars. The humidity was stifling. 

October 15th, Neto showed up with heavy-duty metal spatulas to scrape decades of tar and styrofoam off the roof. Publio and Pepé, his best friends, were with him. They assembled a scaffold and built a makeshift ladder from 2×4’s

Laborers in Mexico earn very little money. A skilled tile-layer or carpenter earns 200 pesos for a ten hour day. When I first moved to Mexico, that amounted to $20/day (U.S.). Now, under the current exchange rate, that amounts to $10/day. It is a shockingly stingy amount of money. Food costs roughly the same in Mexico and the U.S.. Clothing actually costs more. Housing is the only commodity that costs less.    

I rewarded my workers by providing lunch for them every day. As a special treat for showing up on Mondays, I ordered tortas from Tortas Kuwait, the sandwich shop down the street. The rest of the week I cooked. I bought a Mexican cookbook and worked my way through the pages: Tortilla soup, flautas, tacos, quesadillas, rice and beans, macaroni and cheese with marlin, whatever sounded good as I flipped through the pages. The only worker who was fussy was Christina. She told me during the first week that people in Mazatlan never eat black beans. “That’s for the poor people from the South.”

The roof project took more than three weeks.

Day 1. No rain. Neto set up the ladder. It consisted of a scaffold with a long board attached diagonally to one side. Small sections of 2×4’s  were hammered onto the board, to create footholds up the slope. Neto, Publio, and Pepé ran up the ladder and started working at 9:00. By 10:00 the sun was beating down on them and sweat was pouring off their faces. They drank gallons of water and kept working.

Day 2. Still no rain. Neto hauled a big bucket of sand up the ladder, along with a beach umbrella that looked like a giant watermelon. He plopped the umbrella in the bucket of sand and now they had shade. 

Day 3. Still no rain. I was beginning to believe the rainy season was over. Neto asked if he could borrow my boom box to take to the roof, along with the watermelon umbrella and the bucket of sand. Now the guys had shade and music. They sang and laughed as they continued to scrape layers of mold and crud from the old roof. 

Day 4. Neto brought a new worker, a young guy from Vera Cruz, to help load the old, stinky roof into buckets to take to the dump. Everyone called him “Vera Cruz.” I never knew his real name. Halfway through the morning, Vera Cruz fell off the ladder and needed to be rushed to the local Red Cross. He fell on his skinny hip and was hurt badly when he bounced hard on the cement. By afternoon, Vera Cruz was back on the job.

“How can he keep working? Isn’t he in a lot of pain?” I asked Neto.

“The doctor gave him a shot of Ibuprofen in his hip. He’s feeling better now. He wants to keep working.”

And that’s the way it went for the next three weeks. After the roof was scraped clean, the men laid a fresh coat of cement before spreading buckets of waterproofing across the roof. 

My house would never have been ready for guests without Los Tres Amigos. They arrived every day with a smile. They tried to understand my English and struggled to teach me Spanish. They thanked me every day for allowing them to work and for giving them lunch. They became my good friends, as well as Neto’s.

Publio is still one of Neto’s best friends. His family became my family, too. Sadly, Pepe died two years ago, from complications of a motorcycle accident and horrible medical care. Seeing Publio again last winter was a joy. But I will always have a hole in my heart, where Pepé used to live.