Costco: An American Cathedral In Mexico

Costco:
An American Cathedral
In Mexico

This nonfiction piece originally appeared in El Calendario:

After our first day shopping at the new Costco in Cabo San Lucas, we returned to Todos Santos with mixed emotions: sadness for the death of Mexican culture, elation at finding smoked salmon for ten bucks a pound. Both feelings will fade, I'm sure, with time and repeat visits.

But I will never forget that first step inside: I was overwhelmed. In awe. In her book Miraculous Air, Catherine Mayo tells of a European church that was dismantled brick by brick and shipped to Loreto where it was faithfully reconstructed. Apparently they did the same to the Costco just north of Berkeley, because the one in Cabo is an exact replica. The same 747 hangar space, the same lab mice lighting. The familiar assault of way too many products in far too plentiful supply -- but with an added fright of déjà vu, because every cheap luggage set, every case of Heineken, every 50-lb. drum of Tide is found exactly where it was in the States, in ritually the same row of industrial shelving. That we're still in Mexico is not credible. We are in America, in the church of the American consumer.

Visitors ask what it's like, living here in Todos Santos. We used to regale them with stories of going without, of being excited to find raspberry jam or a triangle of brie at the CCC in La Paz -- stories that will soon sound like our parents' tales of the Great Depression. "What it’s like" here, I believe, is precisely this schizophrenia: having one foot in Mexico, one foot still planted in America.

For some of us, admittedly -- perhaps some part of us all -- Baja is little more than a scenic place to live out one's comfy American life on the cheap. But it was the artist in us, the spiritual seeker, the surfer, the vagabond, the eccentric, who came to Mexico fleeing the madness of American consumerism and looking for a better way. We wanted to get lost. Out of the rat race, the TV and the radio off; we wanted to hear ourselves think. And that really is a marvelous thing, for a time. But then I start missing my raspberry jam . . . Lattes, the Internet, cable TV, good California wine. A camembert the size of a truck tire is worth some serious consideration.

"Wherever you go, there you are," certainly. But we don't just bring America with us; America hunts us down and finds us, wherever we are. Reminds us of the goodies and the bargains to be had, if we only listen to it and not to Mexico or our own thoughts. More disturbing is the notion that we are here, artists and surfers and retirees, precisely so there can be a Costco in Mexico: we are simply the first wave of missionaries. This is globalization -- less violent than in Iraq, but no less mindlessly implacable. Soon enough there will be no escape anywhere, no outside, no refuge for the most determined expatriate.

And we’ll say, "Wherever you go, there are your Pringles."