Le printemps de notre enfance
April 6, 2018
By now, we’re all feeling the humdrum ordinance of our post-spring break lives. The longing for summer: a slightly more permanent solution to the normalcy problem.
Living in Mexico has given me a bit of insight into the psyche of our search for meaning and the eventual frustration at our failure to find it. We spend the majority of our lives on a path we’ve convinced ourselves will lead to the greatest return on happiness. Nine to five, Monday to Friday, we simply exist. Once anyone tells us it’s alright to relax, we try desperately to make up for all that lost time, all that existing where we should have been living. We take ourselves to exotic places through blockbusters and books, buses and biplanes. However, not all escapes are created equal.
You go to Europe for its rich history and culture.
You go to Mexico for its failures. Our failures.
Our failure to legislate anything resembling a humane wage for millions of citizens living in abject poverty.
Our failure to provide the law and order necessary to move forward as a country.
Our failure to recognize our own human worth.
My hometown has always been America’s playground. A city brought up on prohibition-era excess; fortunes built on vice and human decay.
For decades, our tourism industry has been the low-hanging fruit. We’ve been pushing beaches and alcohol since the 60s with Elvis Presley, making a name for ourselves as the everyman’s paradise. The average spring breaker isn’t a wholesome father wanting to immerse himself and his family in a foreign culture. The average spring breaker is someone looking to live it up on a budget.
They’re lured by the 80¢ beers, the complete disregard for a rule of law, and the third-world fetishization that gives Joe Sixpack his false sense of superiority.
The yearly deluge of patrons seeking adventure has created a symbiotic bond with the workers that live in these coastal towns: the waiters, the valets, the dishwashers. One group seeks to escape from their everyday lives, the other simply seeks to survive, selling themselves short on an old adage: a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
That’s not Mexico. That’s mercantilism at the expense of the buyer and the seller. We’re hardly better than the street-corner dealer, appeasing the existential crises of the middle class with weekend doses of euphoria.
We have a problem of perception.
The paradisiac illusion of Mexico’s eternal beach-side party is comforting because it’s so far removed from reality, both abroad and at home. It allows us to ignore the multifaceted issues that haunt the Mexican experience: the racial tension in a country of immigrants, the seemingly solipsistic existence of the masses; the search for opportunity in a land so inhospitable to hope.
Despite these issues, however, life finds a way. We make do with what we have, because we have to.
Some of us are forced to leave in search of a better life, a more dignified existence than the one we were dealt. Yet, those of us who’ve been afforded the opportunity to stay wouldn’t have it any other way. There’s a certain freedom that comes with growing up here. You feel you really can do anything you set your mind to. The world is open for play.
Around this time last year, I was doing some online shopping. After getting lost on the AllSaints homepage, I somehow stumbled upon a link to an unlisted video on their youtube account. This 90 second clip barely scrapes 2,000 views, chump change for a retail giant’s reach on social media, and yet, it’s a gift. An idealized, somewhat surreal depiction of our very real lives. Never before had I seen our culture represented in a manner that captured the dreamlike essence of coming of age in a country so similar, yet so fundamentally different from the American mainstream.
The carelessness of the mañana syndrome that puts our desires at the forefront of our existence. The frustration at our social structures and degenerate institutions that makes living life to the fullest a personal vendetta against mediocrity. The cultural amalgamation that makes taco stands a church for the faithless; a contact point that absolves our day’s transgressions, our night’s vagabonds.
It’s a side of our culture that gets zero representation. The consequence of exposing children to the brutality of life without a safety net, forcing adulthood before its time: youth in revolt.
That’s the Mexico I know. It’s a Mexico few of us acknowledge, but all embody.
The existential absurdity that makes us dance with street players dressed to the nines in plazas older than the city itself.
The stoic goofiness that makes laughter nature’s only recourse. Howling at a joke too stupid to explain, and still laughing with a mouth of blood. Salinger be proud.
The lingering presence of stray dogs too innocent for this world, fur matted into a sad reflection of our compassion, yet still searing a smile into our hearts.
The platonic affection between friends and strangers that means so little, it means the world to you and me.
That’s the kind of honesty that sells, the kind of honesty you can market. When I visit other parts of the world, I’m not looking for resorts, I’m looking for small towns, bustling metropoles. I want to see their people, their museums; the pillars that make up their society. It’s important to show our true face to the world, rather than hiding behind a mask.
We’re a vulnerable species. Tourism should be used to explore and support the plight of our invisible neighbors; their insecurities and satisfactions, the little victories in their lives as well as their misfortunes. The sense of communion from living in an interconnected society is precisely the fulfillment we need when we say we need a break.
Spring is renewal. Fundamentally spiritual, yet tangible all around us. Its the singing of the thrush; the late dewy nights that make us born again.
Make it worthwhile.
