Mexico #5

We took off for the weekend and went to Veracruz. Here's a simple map of Mexico, from the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, to give you an idea of the geography. We are living in the capital (see the star) for most of the summer; Veracruz is a state and a city as well. We visited the city, on the Gulf Coast directly east of Mexico City.

It was almost miserable getting off the air-conditioned bus; while Mexico City has been in the 60s and 70s, the highs in Veracruz were in the 90s--and so humid! Getting to the beach was doubly relaxing and wonderful.

The mosquitoes got me. I don't think my paranoia about them made any difference. Swimming in the cool salt water of the Gulf was soothing, but the minutes out of the water have ranged from irritated to delirious. Patrick asked our hostel guy for advice and got a recommendation for this lotion which is, in short, a camphor-menthol marvel. I used it all over after I showered this morning, and it's basically very spreadable tiger balm. Wow, what a tingle. I'm sure the moisture makes a lasting difference, too. I am going to have to see if I can get some kind of shot to make me less allergic to mosquitoes.

So while we were on the coast, we had to eat seafood. We had some very nice white fish--and lots of fried plantains. So good! I don't know if you could prepare bananas quite the same way; Patrick claims that plantains have more starch. Anyway, I wanted to see what the other seafood was like, so I ordered some shrimp. I don't think of myself as too squeamish about food; after all, I'm used to seeing whole fish and chicken heads and all that on the table, and I've eaten sea cucumber and eel and corn fungus (I didn't like all of it, but that's not the point). But maybe being vegetarian, or the process of becoming vegetarian, has altered my thinking in ways I didn't realize. Eating those five shrimp was kind of difficult. I mean, I still enjoyed their flavor and texture and all; it wasn't that bad. And I know it wouldn't have been difficult at all if they hadn't been served whole; does that make me some kind of hypocrite? I mean, a shrimp is a shrimp, whether I have to cut the head off and shell it or someone else does. But all night, I kept thinking about the five animals I had just eaten. Does that mean I ate five livers? Do shrimp have livers? Hearts? Shrimp must have hearts, right? Did I eat them?

I've learned a lot of things by having a blog this summer. The writing process itself gets me to think a little more, and often, I do some research as I'm posting. So this time, I have learned about shrimp anatomy. Most of the shrimp's vital organs are located in its head (including the brain, bladder, stomach, and testis, according to this fun picture). Like the wimp that I am, I didn't eat the heads. So I guess I didn't eat all those organs--as if that's better in any substantive way. Yikes, just thinking about all this is freaking me out. Shrimp are so weird-looking. From an environmental standpoint, it's better to eat things that are lower on the food chain, so I guess it's better to eat shrimp than, say, tuna. Although I guess it depends a lot on where the animals are coming from and how they are caught. I've been trying to learn about the eco-friendliness of different kinds of seafood to plan our wedding menu; we want a vegetarian buffet with fish as the entree. (Hey now, "vegetarian" is not synonymous with "rabbit food." I promise, it will be delicious! I love to eat!) All the sources seem to agree that US-farmed seafood is better regulated and cleaner than seafood from other countries. But even some species farmed in the US should be avoided; farmed salmon, for example, is marked AVOID by the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch, while wild-caught Alaskan salmon is BEST, and wild-caught Pacific salmon is GOOD. You can look up a lot of seafood on the Seafood Watch Seafood Guide. Another website that has been useful for me is the Blue Ocean Institute's Guide to Ocean Friendly Seafood.

This post has turned out to be less about Mexico than about seafood. Well, you can read more about what we did in Veracruz on Patrick's blog. He has some nice pictures up. He didn't really write about the beach; we left the city after a day and took a couple of buses to Chachalacas. It's frequented by Mexican tourists, and purely in terms of the quality of water and sand, it's not that nice compared to somewhere like Cancun. But it has a nice family atmosphere (whereas Cancun has a kind of Spring Break, Girls Gone Wild atmosphere), and it's not super crowded. Plus, as far as I'm concerned, any beach with water that you can swim in without worrying about getting sucked in by the undertow, dying of hypothermia, or contracting some kind of infection is pretty exciting. Chachalacas is also neat in that you can walk about 5km up the beach to some sand dunes. I'll have to get my pictures from Patrick's camera to post. ... and here's one now!


Most of the beach has little restaurants, hotels, etc. on relatively flat land, instead of the greenery you see on these dunes. And most of the dunes are sandy without all the vegetation. We saw the same beetle tracks that cover dunes everywhere, and snake tracks, too!

We took a taxi from Chachalacas to Cempoala, a religious site that was built by Totonacs, perhaps six or seven hundred years ago. (Pretty amazing to think about, especially in contrast to where they are today: see a picture of their flying performance for tourists that Patrick took outside the anthropology museum.) The Aztecs attempted to conquer them, but with only mild success; rebellion was frequent. Still, the structures and evidence of rituals at Cempoala show an Aztec influence. Anyway, when Cortes arrived on the Gulf Coast, the Totonacs made an alliance with the Spanish and were instrumental in fighting the Aztecs. Too bad so many of them died from disease epidemics. I wonder what their society would be like if more Totonacs were alive today. Maybe it wouldn't even exist as a recognizably separate entity? Or maybe it would be very similar to what it is now, a curiosity for tourists, just on a larger scale. My impression is that the indigenous communities in Mexico that have preserved traditional lifestyles are basically impoverished. I don't know that much about it.

The underemployment in this country was clearer than ever on this trip. In the City (people here call the capital Mexico), you see a lot of people selling food on the street and random stuff on the Metro (flashlights, CDs, gum, whatever). At the beach, there were also a lot of people selling clothes with "indigenous" designs (I don't know how much they've been altered toward tourist tastes) for super cheap, yet hardly anyone was buying. I wonder how much they have to sell in day to support themselves, and how much they actually sell. We took a taxi back to the beach from Cempoala, and as we got into conversation, the driver started telling us about his disillusionment with the Mexican government and economy. He has a BA in some kind of humanities field from the University of Veracruz, and he's working the only job available, driving a taxi. I guess it's not surprising, in this context, that more Mexicans don't bother going to college--and that there are fewer opportunities to do so than in the United States.

Also he loves basketball and Michael Jordan. But I don't think he's considering immigrating. I thought about asking him if he's thought much about moving in general, since he's living in a semi-rural area (the main crop is sugarcane), but I couldn't find the right way to phrase it.

More pictures to follow.