The “cantarito” is a Mexican cocktail served in a clay glass, made with tequila, grapefruit and lemon and is the flagship product of thousands of bars around the country, but especially here in Jalisco, in western Mexico.
At the “Cantarito del Güero,” one of these famous bars on the roads near Guadalajara, the country’s second city and capital of Jalisco, I met several groups of Chicano tourists—that is, Americans with Mexican roots—who were singing rancheras and wearing sombreros and charro boots.
“Everyone has in their soul what they have,” Ariana, born in Pasadena, California, told me, in perfect Spanish with a subtle Anglo accent.
With her overflowing cantarito in her hand, the Mexican-American added: “We (Chicanos) come here because we connect with the environment, the happiness and the joy. Because we connect with our roots.”
There are tourists in every corner of Mexico, but there are Chicano tourists, above all, here: in the region that is known as “the most Mexican in Mexico” because it is the birthplace of mariachi, tequila and charro; that is, the source of an image of Mexicanness known abroad that has a lot of postcard, but also reality.
And if not, let Armando Pérez de León, a rancher with a bushy mustache and a black hat that I interviewed in Cocula, a town in the area, say it: “This is the most beautiful city in Mexico because here you live so peacefully (…) Here we like to milk the cows, the cattle, the horses, it’s what we like, it’s beautiful, because you live so peacefully in the ranch.”
His thick hands, the prolongation of the penultimate vowel of each word, his hat with a steep brim and his kind and determined masculinity made me think of Armando as a character from a movie from the Golden Age of Mexico in the 1930s.
In a way, he is: it is at that time that this charro postcard became popular. Let’s see, then, what is true (and what is not) about Guadalajara being the most Mexican city in Mexico.
A definition of “the most Mexican”
First of all, we should differentiate between Guadalajara, the city of 6 million inhabitants that is called the most Mexican, and the rural environment that surrounds it, which is where the cultural elements that underpin the famous stereotype really are.
Then we should define who we are talking about: the peasant from the northwest of Mexico, a man, a macho, who starts with Pancho Villa, goes through Cantinflas and ends with Vicente Fernández. An amalgam of characters, phenomena and historical times that is reduced to one image: the mustachioed rancher who gave rise to institutions such as the charro and the mariachi.
The peasant of the area, the charro, is hardly seen in the city, which is as diverse, cosmopolitan and unequal as any Latin American metropolis. Or they are seen, but in specific areas or shops that sell wide-brimmed hats, carved leather horse saddles and pointed leather boots with heels.
In the center of Guadalajara there is a Plaza de los Mariachis, which has two sculptures in reference to the musicians. And little else.
In Cocula, on the other hand, 60 kilometers away, ranchers are the norm, decorating the street with a sea of wide-brimmed hats.
There is also a Mariachi Museum, which tells the story of the origin of a genre that emerged at wedding parties, at marriages, that Mexicans of peasant origin officiated for American families in this area that, despite being 1,000 kilometers from the border, seems close.
Jalisco is the second Mexican state with the most Mexicans in the United States —there are at least 3 million people from Jalisco, according to official figures— and it is the third with the most American residents, despite not being right on the border.
Ajijic, for example, is a town in the area at the foot of the beautiful Lake Chapala. And it is, as they would say here, “full of gringos.” The restaurant signs are in English; they receive dollars.
Another of those magical towns in Jalisco is Tequila, a colorful colonial village devoted to distillery tourism, the large mansions that receive dozens of people interested in learning how agave, a succulent with thick leaves and woody thorns, is transformed into a smoky, crystalline drink with between 35 and 45% alcohol.
“This rural culture was adopted by Guadalajara, and Mexico in general, as if there had been a marketing campaign according to which we are that,” says Antonio Ortuño, a well-known writer from Guadalajara (the city’s adjective).
And he adds: “This has never been a city full of mariachis, much less charros, and tequila is drunk like in any other part of Mexico. So, it was a decision about what our identity is, and many traditional families of landowners ended up identifying with that and it was what was portrayed in the ranch comedy and tragedy of Mexican cinema.”
The idea that the Mexican is a rancher with a mustache was consolidated in the 1930s, when Mexican cinema, partly emerging from Guadalajara, supplied the demand of a Hollywood in crisis and Mexico, after a social revolution, was in the process of defining the features of its identity.
Actors like Jorge Negrete and Pedro Infante —and musicians like Vicente Fernández, who has a ranch outside the city with a statue and a canvas for charrería— forged this image of the Mexican that, even if it was part of a campaign, exists: in these towns the ranchera plays on the speaker in the central plaza, there are schools for mariachi children and men with hats and mustaches, like actors from the 30s, wander the streets with mystical parsimony, professing a certain idealism for work and romantic love.
“Look, I’m going to tell you something,” warned J. Reyes González, an 80-year-old rancher who was enjoying the morning with his partner to the sound of a ranchera that was playing on his cell phone. “This is a humble little town, where almost all the people work to half eat and half pay their rent.”
His girlfriend, Adela, added: “He is an original rancher, he is not a pirate.”
And then he said: “If I tell you that she stole me, you won’t believe me, she took me to Guadalajara, you won’t believe me.”
Once again I felt like I was talking to a character from Pedro Infante.
In what is not the most Mexican region
But if the postcard of the mustachioed Mexican exists, there is at least another postcard of the Mexican that is hardly seen here: the indigenous one, that of the colorful crafts, the spiritual rituals and the ancestral medicine.
According to the last census, Jalisco is today the state with the least indigenous presence in a country where one in four people declare themselves to be of indigenous descent.
“The rancher turns his back on indigenous Mexico,” Luis Vicente de Aguinaga, a poet and professor of literature, told me. “And that distinguishes Jalisco, not only culturally but brutally and violently, from rural indigenous Mexico.”
This region was not part of the space governed by the Aztec Empire. The indigenous groups that the Spanish found were small, diverse, some semi-nomadic. And the conqueror, Nuño de Guzmán, was more bloodthirsty and less open to dialogue than his counterpart in the centre of the country, Hernán Cortés.
The rancher, in fact, is whiter and more Creole than the Mexican from the center to the south, who is dark and mestizo.
Almost at the same time that the image of the rancher became popular, a movement of artists specialized in murals emerged that had a profound impact on the idea of Mexicanness.
“The muralists, with all their controversy, included almost all Mexicans in the narrative of the nation. And that narrative continues, and goes through (the film) Coco, it goes through the film by Pedro Páramo, it goes through Frida on a T-shirt: they are the national postcards that change and are exaggerated, but they are also anchors of identity,” says Verónica López, a well-known cultural journalist from Guadalajara.
So: Jalisco is the most Mexican region, but it depends on the Mexico that you want to highlight. Because there are a few.
Things outside the postcard
And one that has recently made a dent in the world is the Mexico of drug trafficking, which beyond violence and illegality, has also been a cultural, urban and musical phenomenon that has fed identity.
“This is also the most Mexican city insofar as it was the first city where drug traffickers went to invest their money,” says Ortuño, who begins one of his books, “Olinka,” with one of the key facts about Guadalajara: half of the illegal money laundering that takes place in the world occurs here, according to data from the United States Department of State.
Guadalajara was the largest city in the area where drug trafficking emerged, northern Mexico, and the political power of the institutions and parties here was less than in the center of the country, which created space for an emerging elite.
Part of the city’s recent development, evident in the impressive skyline of modern buildings in the northwestern area, was financed with drug money: the people of Guadalajara themselves say so, identifying the area as “the Guadalajara buchona,” in reference to the aesthetics and ways of drug trafficking.
And that is an inevitable part of the city’s current identity.
To which other things are added: a succulent gastronomy that gave the country —and the world— institutions such as torta ahogada, pozole and birria; an International Book Fair that attracts a million readers, writers and editors a year; and a counterculture current that, among other things, makes the city a museum of modern architecture and a national nucleus of the LGBTI movement.
Guadalajara is, like any large city, many things. It is all that, and it is also —with its omissions— the most Mexican city in Mexico.
Source: bbc
