But the most remarkable thing about him was that I knew him.
“Brian?” I said as he made his way down the aisle.
“Sig? What the hell—?”
“Yeah, exactly. And you?”
We had gone to university together and occasionally bumped into each other at parties or on campus, but we had never been close and had lost touch.
Brian asked me where I was going. I said that I didn’t know.
“Do you want to see the most beautiful town in all Mexico?”
“Sure. Who wouldn’t?”
Discovering the ‘Most Beautiful Town in Mexico’
And that’s how I got to Tepoztlán.
When I got there, it was a dusty place populated mostly by the descendants of the Nahuatl-speaking people who had first settled it nearly 4,000 years ago. At least that’s the theory. Nobody knows exactly who first settled there or when, though artifacts have been found dating to 1500 BCE.
There were few foreigners in town—just a handful of travelers who had arrived by choice or, like me, by happy chance. They stayed because they sought a place that was warm, inexpensive, and unlike home. There were also very few foreign visitors, though now and then some Mexicans came to town for the artisanal market and the small Aztec temple built on top of a mountain at the edge of town.
Brian was visiting his friend Harris, who lived in a two-room adobe house with a large garden, just a few minutes’ walk from the town’s zócalo, or main square. The two were going to Taxco to buy silver jewelry from the city’s Native Mexican artisans, which they would sell in San Francisco at ten times the price they paid for it. I asked Harris who would be taking care of his house while he was away.
“Nobody,” he said.
“Um . . .” I said.
“Sure,” he replied. “That’d be great.”
I asked him how much he wanted me to pay.
“Nothing,” he said. “Just keep the dogs out of the garden, the kids out of the fruit trees and water the garden. There’s no gas, but you can always cook in the fireplace or with a little Hibachi I have. And if you see the guy who sells the gas tanks, you can buy one if you want.” I ended up living in Tepoztlán until mid-November, about seven months.
Oh, and the gas guy finally came to the house to sell me a canister of gas on the morning of the day that I left!
The Changing Face of a ‘Magic Town’
Today, Tepoztlán is a popular tourist destination, partly due to its designation as a “Pueblo Mágico,” or Magic Town, in 2002, and the legend that it was the birthplace of Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec feathered serpent god widely worshipped in ancient Mexico. According to Wikipedia, tourists flock to the town for its “authentic traditional environment, along with the pyramid and several communities with ecological or progressive thinking.”
I highlighted the word authentic because I’m not quite sure what it’s supposed to mean in this context. No, I know what it’s supposed to mean: that this is the real, genuine Tepoztlán; it is not counterfeit or copied. But I don’t understand how an “authentic traditional environment” can coexist with “several communities with ecological or progressive thinking,” which are neither traditional nor authentic, and with the crowds of tourists filling the town’s narrow streets, as I have seen in several photographs.
Surely, the ‘authentic Tepoztlán’ was neither filled with tourists nor home to ‘progressive communities’. When I lived there, I was struck by how primitive it was. There were no TV antennas or satellite dishes. There were almost no tourists and nobody in town had a telephone. Almost all the men worked in the fields of maize and tomatoes just outside the town and, incredibly, there were no police officers at all.
A Mexican friend told me the story of the Tepoztlán police force after a small van delivering Twinkie candy bars was robbed outside of town. The Mexican government had sent two motorcycle policemen to town six months before I got there, after someone had noticed that were no police officers in the town. In the first week they arrested a 13-year-old boy for driving a pickup truck without a license. The boy had been on his way to the campo to pick up his father for lunch.
“In 15 minutes a dozen men from the campo showed up with their machetes and surrounded the cops,” José Antonio said. “They were not stupid. They let the boy go. One hour later they were on the way back to the capital. And that’s why there is no police in Tepoztlán.” Today, with all the tourists, I’m sure there is.
I define authentic in this context as meaning ‘the least distorted by tourism’. By that definition, Tepoztlán was fairly authentic when I lived there, since my presence and the presence of about a dozen other foreigners in town did not change it at all. All signs and menus were in Spanish, most of the inhabitants spoke Nahuatl and/or Spanish and there were no souvenirs or foreign newspapers to be had.
The lives of the inhabitants, to the extent that I saw their lives, took place exactly as if I hadn’t been there. For example, before I moved into the little house, I stayed at a posada a bit up the mountain that had been purchased with the money earned by the family’s patriarch, who had worked for more than 20 years as a bracero, or laborer, in the lettuce fields of California, as Mexican men did then and have done for many decades.
The work must have been brutal for, as I was told, Don Fidel left his home as a vigorous young man and returned a grey-haired alcoholic. He had it so bad that his family locked him in the barn to keep him from drinking. Some days we could hear him throwing himself against the barn door and howling like a whipped dog.
Eventually he managed to escape. It was late October, well after the rainy season, when dust lay everywhere, even on the trees. He got drunk and fell asleep on a dirt path at the edge of the town. He was found there the next morning dead of asphyxiation, his open mouth filled with dust. I am fairly certain that this kind of episode does not occur today in Tepoztlán, or if it does it is kept well out of sight of the tourists.
I wonder, then, if there are degrees of authenticity, depending on how much the place has changed its identity to suit tourism and the money it brings and, given the globalization of cultures driven by travel and, especially, the internet, can a place even still be authentic?
The Search for Authenticity in Travel
About 15 years ago, I was sitting with friends at an outdoor hilltop restaurant on a small Greek island when a family of tourists came to the entrance. They were Germans or Scandinavian and the paterfamilias wanted to know if the food was authentic.
As no one answered him, because no one really knew what he meant, he ended up consulting the menu and, apparently not finding what he was looking for, stormed off into the night looking for an authentic Greek meal, whatever that meant to him.
The food seemed ‘authentic’ to me. I ate Greek food prepared by authentic Greeks with authentic fresh local ingredients (the island has a large fruit and vegetable farm) and drank authentic Greek retsina and authentic Greek ouzo. What else did he want and, more important, why?
Why do we travel somewhere to find something authentic (the place, a meal, a ritual)? I don’t know. I suppose it’s because we don’t want an experience that we feel has been corrupted by the presence of people like us. In other words, we want it all; we demand that the locals stay true to themselves without compromising themselves and we demand that they give us some of the comforts we’re used to from home.
A Night to Remember in Greece
The least authentic place I have ever seen was a town on the Greek island of Rhodes, on the road from the airport to Rhodes City. All of its signs, including the street signs, as well as some billboards were in German.
But isn’t that just an extreme form of how places distort themselves to suit the tourist dollar or euro? As tourists become an ever-increasing source of national and personal revenue, a place changes its identity to make tourists feel “at home.” How ironic is that? Because if you feel “at home,” the place can’t be authentic.
The ferry I was taking when I passed through the “Greek Germantown” brought me to the island of Tilos for the first time. It was May 1990 and there were almost no tourists. I was the only guest at the Hotel Livadia, an unsightly whitewashed cinderblock tower in the center of the tiny port. There were about four or five restaurants open on the island, as well as two hotels and a handful of rooming houses.
The population of the island was about 400, more or less. There were no children because there were no schools on the island. Less than 100 years earlier, the island had had a population of several thousand and every square centimeter of arable land was cultivated. Farming began dying out after World War II, and many inhabitants emigrated to Australia and the US, leaving behind several ghost villages and a ruined economy.
Today there is only one industry on the island, tourism. Thanks to tourism and an innovative island mayor, there is a school and there are children and few people are poor. Not only that, but the island has become totally energy-self-sufficient and ‘green’.
Is that authentic? I think it is because that is who the inhabitants are today and what they do. They would have done so if there hadn’t been tourists – though if there hadn’t been tourists, the island probably would have died out.
They still have their festivals, but they are, as far as I could tell, the same as they were 50 years ago, but more crowded. The music hasn’t changed and neither has the dancing.
Eating Brains and Finding Meaning
My favorite festival there, which is no longer held, took place in September near the chapel to Agios Iohannis, or Saint John. It was my favorite because at the time there were almost no tourists on the island in September (today it is the busiest month!).
The festival was held on a large tract of flat, bare ground belonging to a pig farm behind the chapel. There were five non-Greeks at the festival when I took part. The rest of the dancers were locals who lived on the island during the off-season.
My friend Vangelis, who owned the pig farm, was in charge of setting up the festival. When I said that I wanted to help, he told me to fetch the cases of retsina from a truck, then to haul the chairs, ice for the beer and coal for the fires on which five goats were being roasted.
Then the lights were turned on, the generator groaned, the musicians began tuning up and Vangelis appeared before me with a paper plate holding the blackened head of a goat.
“This is for you,” he said. “Because you help us.” The old men nodded and smiled. I understood – it was a gift, I was being honored: I had to eat it.
“Look,” Vangelis said. “Here is tongue, there eyes and this, brain, you eat last because is best.”
The men nodded and smiled.
“Take this,” Vangelis now said, and handed me a tall glass filled with ouzo. “Now you eat.”
I teased out the tongue with my fingers and ate it quickly, willing myself not to gag, grimace or cry out. The eyes slid down easily and were followed by a swallow of ouzo. Then I scooped out the beast’s brain and devoured it. It tasted sweet and bitter, far better than I had feared, far worse than I had thought possible.
The men nodded and smiled, pleased with my performance.
Thank you, I said. “More ouzo, please.”
The festival lasted until just before dawn. It was such a powerful experience for me that I wrote a poem about it some years later, because it has always stayed fresh in my mind.
What Is Authenticity, Really?
Authentic or not, that was one of the most memorable travel experiences of my life. Today, we are becoming more and more alike, thanks to travel and the internet. We watch many of the same movies, sing many of the same songs, read much of the same news and eat much of the same fast food. We can say that today every place is authentic because the tourists it caters to are ‘authentic’ tourists and a crucial part of its identity.
Put another way, it is what it is.
That night on Tilos stayed with me, and some years later, I put my memories into a poem—an attempt to capture the strange, beautiful, and unsettling mixture of honor, tradition, and personal transformation I experienced while eating goat’s brains and drinking ouzo with strangers on that rocky island.