Bandidos Banned In Todos Santos
About the Author; Recent Works
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Writers and Realtors I’m from Todos Santos, which is to say I’ve lived there for the past 10 years, during which I wrote two books of short stories. The first is called Mexicoland. The second, Bandidos, you may have heard about, as it was banned in Todos Santos. I’ll get to that in a minute. I’m sure you know that Todos Santos is renowned as an “artists’ community,” and that whenever anyone says a place is an artists’ community what they really mean is it’s all about real estate. Taos, Santa Fe, Carmel, Laguna Beach. It’s not about the art. It’s about real estate. It’s about development, and water rights. It’s about money. In the case of Todos Santos, it’s also about conquest, and colonization. It’s about the destruction of a culture and a people, replacing them with another culture, another people. This was not quite what I was looking for, when I arrived here 10 years ago. As a writer I was looking for the space, the freedom to write; the sense of dislocation which makes you see things in new ways, even find a new language to describe who we are and how we live. I found that—much of which is reflected in these two books of stories—and I found other artists looking for and finding something similar—not so much writers, but painters, mostly, and, in their own way, the spiritual seekers, alternative lifers, café philosophers... If art is about new ways of seeing, then I suppose we were all artists. Catherine Mayo captured some of our naïve enthusiasm in The Visitors, which later became part of her Miraculous Air. |
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I’m not going to say we were an artists’ community then and now it’s all real estate, because it was always about both, they go hand in hand, like conquistadors and missionaries. Go back 15, 20 years, for every free-thinking, spiritual, artsy gringo there’s always been another making deals, turning a fast buck, ripping off the locals—in many cases they were the same person.
No, this was apparent the first day I arrived in Todos Santos, and I should make clear that I wasn’t disappointed in the slightest. To me, as a writer, this was everything, right in front of me: the good, the bad, the ugly. Enough irony and bathos to mine for many years.
There were personalities. Dysfunctional in spectacular ways. Egos, eccentricities. People with grand dreams who couldn’t help but fuck themselves up. Drunks, liars, thieves... I’ve read that sociopaths make up about 2% of the population; well, in Todos Santos it’s more like 20%. I can’t relate or even remember most of the true stories from that time, but I do remember saying, over and over, “You could not make this shit up.”
There was a Wild West feel to life in Todos Santos then, and that is something I do believe has changed. There is a story—I’m not even sure it’s true—that a local realtor was actually strung up—hanged—by rancheros for trying to steal their water. Not something you see at the Century 21 office in Costa Mesa, or will see again here, I imagine.
Realism being inadequate for describing this sort of thing, I found another way, a voice, if you will, an exaggerated, nonsensical way of storytelling with bizarre imagery, like the dreams you have when you’re running a fever, and yet touched with idealism and a sense of wonder. I called it Magical Cynicism.
I’d like to read one excerpt of a story by way of example. I first read this at an open reading in the bar of the famous Santa Fe restaurant. I remember this clearly because I was very nervous, I hadn’t read much before, and other people read nice, pretty poems about nice, pretty things, and some woman strummed a guitar and sang about herself, and there was another nice poem, and then it was my turn...
Elegy For All Saints
I was there that year, the year that Todos Santos died. Destroyed, bulldozed, condoized, sold to the company. The year the planes came, and the sky was so thick with bombs you could barely see your way across the huerta. The cows were on fire; the chiles withered because someone had taken all the water, someone else, an outsider, and that someone was me. I took all the water and put it in my pocket and walked to the beach and threw it in the ocean. It was the year of the drought.
All the fish died that year; they went belly up in the ocean and rocked on the water, shimmering like new pesos. And in January of that year the whales went by and they went belly up, too, you could see them from the deck of your dream house, and the sailboats, belly up, and the lanchas—anyway the fishermen stopped going out because the sun had exploded and made the water too hot. Everyone died that year with terrific tans, including my friends and a lot of people I didn’t know. But the condos and the hotels went up anyway. It was the year of the pig. It was the year of the rat. It was a good year if you were in real estate...
So beautiful. The palm trees burned like tiki torches; we would sit and read by them at night, or have dinner nearby on the patio—the fire was good for keeping the bugs away. A lot of great dinner parties that year, everybody talking at once, trading opinions like stock futures. Everyone was worried about the drought; but many felt the bombing was good because it would keep the tourists from deciding to stay. There was gossip, as always: so many rumors we passed around the table, polishing, polishing, spitting them up like pearls into our empty soup bowls and our watery scotches. Every now and then someone would decry the gossip and backbiting; we solemnly agreed and after she left talked about what a bore she was.
This town is built on rumors; rumors mixed into the adobe bricks, baked in the exploding sun. You will hear many rumors during your brief stay here in Todos Santos. Please understand that they are lies, absolute falsehoods, and every one of them is true. You will hear many stories; here are a few I know...
At this point I glanced up and saw everyone looking at me in terror. Eyes bugging out, hair flying back. I don’t think it was just the overheated prose, or the weird notion that a writer could exaggerate and distort in order to paint a clearer picture—that one could essentially expose a truth by telling a whopper. No, I think it was the uncomfortable idea that we can write about ourselves as we are. I’d heard laughter as I read, but not because what I wrote was funny—it was that nervous laughter of recognition. Everyone knew what I was talking about, but no one had dared imagine our lives as we lived them was a subject for a piece of writing, a subject for art.
I’ve brought up real estate and art as the Romulus and Remus of Todos Santos, but it’s worth noting the relationship between them, which is far from balanced. The conquistadors use us, the missionaries, to dignify their project—“This is an artists’ community, you’ll love it here, I’ve got some nice beachfront to show you”—but it’s understood that the priests have nothing to say about how the conquest is being managed.
I’m not talking about a conspiracy, or even tacit agreement, it’s more an unconscious understanding. “You go write your little anecdotes, go paint your pretty pictures, we’ve got serious business to discuss here.”
The art in Todos Santos, with a few notable exceptions, is almost uniformly bad, and by bad I mean uniform, more than merely timid and false. We came for the space, the freedom to create whatever we wanted to, and somehow we all ended up doing the same painting of the peasant woman holding the lilies. Some do it poorly, some do it well, but it’s always the same “it.” I know painters of great skill and imagination who have turned their backs on interesting work because it was homoerotic, or daring, or a departure... In a word, not commercial. They have abandoned their vision to churn out wallpaper that matches sofas in Pedregal.
I don’t judge anyone for this. Artists have to eat. What’s interesting to me is what is deemed commercial in Todos Santos. For example, you will never see a gringo in a painting, or a satellite dish, or an SUV. You will never see a Mexican, for that matter—at least not any Mexicans I know, the ones watering my garden, fixing my car, selling me groceries; the ones who live across the street or down the road from me. You will see only fairy-tale Mexicans, friendly archetypes of grizzled peasant women and laughing girls in flowing skirts; for these are the reassuring icons that tell us we are in the Mexico of our romantic ideal. More often, you will see depopulated landscapes, passing themselves off as prepopulated. These are the images that sell real estate.
A lot of what gets written in and about Todos Santos shares this embarrassing sentimentality. Oddly, in the written arts you do find gringos—good, idealistic gringos finding their better selves—but again, this isn’t anyone I know. Mexicans, meanwhile, don’t exist. The beauty of the desert, the romance of the ocean...and the condescending embrace of the Mexican “mañana” spirit that remains comfortably abstract, without actual Mexicans—inscrutable, truculent, never on time—to muddy the ideal. Again, a sort of gringo real estate fantasy.
Of course, we are not really sentimentalizing Mexico or Mexicans; we are sentimentalizing ourselves, our presence and purpose here. Painting and writing and thinking such nice things, how can our conquest be anything but benevolent?
I stress that the developers, the money people, are just people, in fact people of vision like us. That their vision is one of amassing capital doesn’t make them less heroic or tragic or foolish or sympathetic. For many years we watched them try and fail, shoot themselves in the foot; saw big deals fall through, efforts at grandeur spectacularly wasted. How to make a small fortune in Mexico, as the joke goes: bring down a large fortune. Pursuing art and spirituality meant for us a certain sacrifice of material comforts, but it helped to know that the materialists weren’t doing much better. Their comical failures were part of the Wild West.
That has changed.
Fountain Of Life
Rodrigo came down from his meditation refreshed, spiritually centered, and ready to ream the world a new one.
Rising from the lotus in one fluid movement, he slipped into his huaraches, padded across the Saltillo tile floor to the kitchen, and hit the brew button on his Mr. Coffee. A little meditation, a little French roast; a leisurely tour of the estate, resplendent with warming sunlight: mornings like this were too fucking good to be true. And this is all mine, his mantra. And this is all mine.
Mug of java in hand, his meditation robe hanging wide open (well, because he could), Rodrigo drifted pleasantly from kitchen to banquet hall to patio, into the gardens—the dog slinking away from him in terror—past the sweat lodge and the reflecting pool and the guest houses arranged like a little Mayan village around his wife’s menstruation hut. He crossed himself automatically, thanked whatever animal spirits had seen fit to take her on a shopping trip to Guadalajara with the kids.
Alone, he thought. This is man’s natural state. He was never so happy as when he was alone—unless it was with one of the girls from the local secundaria.
And what wicked little diversion shall we indulge today, hmm? There were questionable business deals yet to be made, land that remained for him to steal, fresh young backsides still to be spanked... So much delicious evil, so little time...
I mentioned that Bandidos was banned in Todos Santos—in fact banned for the story I just read from. The particulars I won’t go into much. This was two years ago. When I say “banned” you might imagine the Mexican authorities stepping in, or the town elders. In fact one gringo has kept Bandidos out of the town’s only bookstore. She told me she was not offended by the book, but feared other gringos in Todos Santos might be offended, in particular certain developers whose patronage she perhaps valued—kickbacks she received for recommending their hotel—or whose influence she may have feared. (Mexicoland, equally offensive, had sold several hundred copies out of the same bookstore, but with that book I’d had the sense to offend only those without money or influence.) As she told me, “Bandidos is a great book, even better than Mexicoland, and I hope you sell a lot in the States. Just don’t sell it here. Not in this town.”
That she was the owner of the bookstore seemed to settle everything, to almost everyone’s satisfaction. Her right to refuse to carry books that don’t meet her community standards in no way infringed on my right to create such a book, any more than a segregated lunch counter infringed on a negro’s right to eat elsewhere. (That gringos can now talk about their “rights” and “ownership” in Mexico without provoking laughter is a sign of how far we’ve come.)
A handful of people were dismayed by the obvious censorship—mostly in whispers, not for attribution—a few others supported and abetted it, rather more thuggishly but also without the courage of presenting themselves—and everyone else in this artists’ community, including other artists, couldn’t be bothered that someone had tried to suppress a work of art in their town, and had mostly succeeded. (I sell about 5 copies a month out of the Hotel California gift shop, among the jewelry and clothes and knicknacks, as well as a boutique called Mangos; for these I am grateful.)
My personal travails as a banned writer or even the fate of my book aren’t really the point. What I find interesting is that an ordinary white American hausfrau, with no particular qualifications or authority, can come to a small town in Mexico and, having lived here a few years, draw a line in the sand and dictate what is allowed and what is forbidden for other people to read.
It’s not the arrogance, the breathtaking ignorance or the hypocrisy—that’s part of all of us gringos and I’ve been writing about that for years in all good humor.
No, what I take from this is that the Wild West is over. The settlers have moved in. People are making rules, and duly enforcing them. There is something at stake now: the buying and selling of land, the making of money; we can no longer afford satire or self-reflection. We have a community to protect, a self-image to project. The brochure says “tranquility” and so we must have tranquility—nothing provocative or even possibly controversial. We can no longer afford the freedom of expression that we formerly called art.
Ten years from now, this won’t even be an issue. Todos Santos will be Costa Mesa. We’ll have no outrageous characters, no dramas, no fuck-ups, no failures. The new capital will buy out the old, and function much more smoothly and sensibly. No project will fail to return on investment. The art in Todos Santos, ahead of its time, awaits the walls of the new luxury homes. There will be no clash of cultures to write about, because all the Mexicans will be long gone. The bookstore is already stuffed with Hallmark cards for their passing.
I could be wrong. Perhaps we’ve yet to see the backlash. Perhaps our Milagro Beanfield War has yet to be written.
In any case I’ll do what I do, as other Baja writers will do their thing. Please understand, I’m not militating for socially relevant or “engaged” art from anyone else, particularly these writers who do their own thing so well. Bruce Berger can describe a hike in the desert in such a way that you totally reexamine not just your relationship to nature, but your sense of who you are. Just as bad art is uniform, real art is wondrous in its multiplicities. We come at the universal from a lot of different angles.
If there is a sort of battle-cry urgency to what I’m saying, perhaps it’s because, living in Todos Santos, I get the sense of time moving very quickly; the march of progress in double-time. Before long a whole culture will be lost, and that culture is our own. There’s no time for false sentimentality. There’s real magic here, and still the space for it. All our beautiful possibilities, and a few barbaric yawps before we die.
Photo by Marilyn Graham