The Gringo, locked into the fiction of white superiority…
—GLORIA E. ANZALDÚA
OUR RIDE PICKED US UP AT THE MANZANILLO AIRPORT, WHICH IS A single runway paved right into the dunes along the beach. He was driving an old, beat-up fourteen-passenger van, an ugly golden brown that looked like metallized shit. We clambered in, and the kids, dutiful little Americans that they were, began searching for seatbelts.
“No hay!” our driver called jovially from the front seat. The kids looked back at him as he laughed at their combination of dismay, shock, and creeping pleasure at doing something that had been ingrained as potentially lethal. I reached to shut the sliding door of the van. Just like the seatbelts, it appeared the mechanism that locked the door shut was also nonexistent, so the door was open as he pulled away from the curb.
We were off. The joy, for a thirteen-year-old, of riding seatbelt-less in a speeding van along Mexican highways with the door open is not to be underestimated.
We passed the shrunken and shriveled bodies of a few desiccated cows along the side of the highway. Even in this small detail, it was plain to see just how hermetically sealed most kids’ lives were. They gawked and exclaimed “Ew! Gross!” as we passed them, but in reality, that’s a commonplace scene the world over. That and the trash that littered the roadside.
Manzanillo is a port city on the Pacific side of Mexico. About halfway down the length of the country, the city is situated around a large harbor. While there is some tourism there—the beaches are lined with big hotels and palm-frond cabanas—it’s not like Acapulco or Cancun. There are no ruins nearby or other tourism locales, and it’s not really a backpacker’s hotspot. Manzanillo is probably most well known as the place where Bo Derek and Dudley Moore capered about in the late 1970s film 10 Ironically, Manzanillo is where Mexicans go for holiday, to escape the hordes of gabachos invading their beaches.
I was in Manzanillo with a group of middle schoolers from Los Angeles to take them snorkeling in the great Pacific. While I had some experience with exploring reefs and snorkeling in the open ocean, my experience with international travel was minimal. I had been to Mexico a few times, but all my trips were short and embarrassingly shallow. Road trips from Los Angeles down to Baja, mostly, the highlights of which included getting stumble-drunk at Papas and Beer in Ensenada and eating a generous serving of hallucinogenic mushrooms on Rosarito Beach.
In fact, at one point in these early forays south of the border, I drank Malcolm Lowry–esque amounts of alcohol at a beachside bar and wandered away into the town without paying my tab. I befriended two mangy street dogs and fed them tacos. Returning to my hotel, I was met by the federales They demanded payment for my bar bill and then some lest I go to jail, which took every cent I had. I drove back north across the border the next day, my car running on fumes and my head a noxious balloon. I had single-handedly confirmed every stereotype of the exploitive, obnoxious gringo.
What I never thought about visiting Mexico was the tapestry of drama that was unfolding around me. When America finally views history outside the prism of whiteness, she’ll see that the mass migration of Mexican and Central American families is a great tapestry of heroic struggle and sacrifice comparable to the tales of the pioneers and early settlers we venerate in folklore and popular culture. The Joads with melanin. When we see that migrant Americans are Americans, we can incorporate that story and be emboldened by it. Look at a map. Trace your finger from the Mexican state of Guerrero north through the Sonoran Desert, past cities plagued by violent buchons, toward the border. The journey is epic, the tragedy heart-wrenching, the adventure real. All of this was lost on me when I was a young man in my twenties, however.
I found a grimy dock the day after we arrived, with a dingy boat tied up alongside it. Using a combination of strained smiles, arm waving, and made-up Spanglish: “El snorkel?” “Aqua azul?” “El reef del coral?” I tried to convince the captain to take us out on the water. I had been directed there by the man from whom we’d rented our little house—a poured concrete affair with small, echoey rooms. I dropped the man’s name and received not even a flicker of recognition. Meanwhile, two silent crew members had appeared and watched the proceedings with inscrutable faces. Eventually, after a few minutes of jaw-breaking, desperate grins and constant reassurances to the kids, who were growing anxious at the stalemate, I received a curt nod from the captain. Registering this as a success, I then settled in to discuss price. How much would it cost to take a dozen-plus kids and a few adults snorkeling? We bantered a bit—and by we, I mean me.
I had picked up, somewhere, that it was considered rude not to barter. Having no idea what the going rate is for snorkeling in the Pacific was a challenge, so I threw out amounts that were either ridiculously low or high. I received no reaction whatsoever. I stuttered and waved pesos about and set back Mexican American diplomatic relations by about thirty years. The captain stared at me with a mixture of stern forbearance mixed with fatigue. Finally, no doubt embarrassed for me, he offered a curt nod, at which his crew began to move about the boat, and we loaded ourselves onto the deck as the diesel engines coughed into life. In retrospect I realize I looked like a colonial-era, red-faced Englishman trying to bribe the local chief out of a few thousand square miles of waterfront property. It is not one of my prouder moments.
Once on board, flush with success from my cultural immersion experiment, I looked around. The boat didn’t look like a tourist vessel—it looked like a work boat, with a layer of grime that I associated with authenticity. I didn’t note any snorkeling gear, or ice chest full of bottled water, or anything, really, to suggest that this was a craft used for visiting tourists. I interpreted this as evidence that we’d found the real deal, and escaped the catered and “soft” tourist-trap outfits plying the waters of the bay. These were the local guys, the down and dirty no-frills outfit that would take us out to the really sweet spots only locals knew about—past all the namby-pamby tourists paddling around in fluorescent neoprene to where the real Mexicans snorkeled and spearfished for octopus and red snapper. Heck, I figured they’d probably bring us to some local beach party afterward, where we’d roast some freshly caught sea bass over mesquite fires, eat delicious fish tacos smoking hot from the flames with some salt and lime while the captain’s kind, gentle wife cracked open a fresh aloe leaf and spread the cooling gel on my sun-sore shoulders. A guitar would be plunked and beers opened, the sun would set, cross-cultural laughter and conviviality would ensue.
The boat motored along for a bit—maybe fifteen minutes—and then the captain cut the engine. The whole time, the kids I had brought grew more and more apprehensive. The shoreline receded, and we headed out into the bay. The water had yet to take on that aqua-blue color that graces advertisements for Sandals resorts. Instead, it was murky. Not just murky, but downright oily. Manzanillo—I’d later discover—is the busiest port in Mexico, delivering all the goods by sea destined for Mexico City. It is, in essence, an industrial port, and as such the waters are covered by a thick, rainbow layer of oil and fuel. To the north is Santiago Bay, a renowned snorkeling spot that I would find out about after the trip, where there is even a famous shipwreck to explore. We, however, were not in Santiago Bay. We were in the main sea lanes for container-ship and tanker traffic. Huge, rust-scabbed container ships floated in the distance. Grim-looking fishing boats crossed the horizon with massive purse-seine nets.
The boat rocked silently on the waves. The captain came out from the wheelhouse. He stared at me cryptically.
“Is this the reef?” I asked. The water surrounding the boat was black and heaved with a sloshing, turgid weight.
“Si,” he said.
Now, I was not a seasoned snorkeler—I’d only done it a few times—but I was pretty sure we weren’t at a reef. The two deckhands came up, silently flanking the captain.
“Okay. Well then.”
I looked at the kids. Snorkeling among brightly colored fish had been one of the things they’d been most excited about. They didn’t look excited about this—whatever “this” was. I realize that scamming a güero is a karmic form of comeuppance in recompense for El Norte’s imperialist treatment of our southern neighbor, but it still stung. There was, however, nothing for it.
“I’ll give it a shot. Who wants to jump in with me?”
There were no takers. One of the impassive crew brought out a plastic bucket. In it were two old, mildewed masks with snorkels. I decided there was no way in hell I was putting that hose in my mouth.
I shucked my shirt, grabbed a mask, and hoisted myself onto the gunwales, legs swinging over the side. Underneath my burnt, crab-red legs the water bobbed black and ominously. I shoved off the side and plunged into the drink. While I treaded water and tried to get the mask on, the smell and taste of diesel invaded my mouth and nose. I got the mask fitted and began swimming away from the boat in slow strokes. I tentatively put my face in the water, and stared down into the black abyss.
Actually, I have no idea if it was an abyss. I couldn’t see more than a few feet. The water was thick and murky. I began to lose some of my fear, and began replacing it with anger. I paddled around, looking for a reef. None. Never even saw the bottom. The water was dark and shadowed, broken only by little blobs of light and the occasional shaft of sunlight. I circled more and more widely away from the boat.
“Anything?” yelled one of the kids.
“Not yet,” I said with false cheer.
I began to realize, with slow and embarrassing clarity, how badly we’d been duped. I then wondered: If they weren’t a legitimate snorkeling outfit, who did I just leave my students with, floating a few miles offshore in the Pacific Ocean? I tore my mask off and tried to see the boat—figure out what was going on.
That’s when I felt the first sting.
Jellyfish—small, golf ball–sized, translucent ones—were floating around me. One, two, three, I spotted. My leg burned where I’d been stung—an electric, pinpoint ache. I pressed the mask to my face and looked underwater around me. Four, five, six, seven; I stopped counting. The little jellies were everywhere. Another sting on my lower back. They were uncomfortable, somewhere lower on the scale than a wasp but higher than a mosquito, but there were many of them between me and the boat.
“Do you see the reef?” one of the kids called.
“No, just jellyfish. I’m coming back.”
I began to swim back toward the boat. Another sting, this one on the inside of my arm right by the elbow. I began to swim in that wide-eyed, frenzied fashion anyone who’s seen the Jaws franchise movies appreciates. Big, splashing arm movements, neck arched and head held high. Rapid, shallow breaths sounding like a cross between a wheeze and a whine. In my head I wondered how many toxic stings it would take before I was paralyzed and would sink beneath the waves, drift down into the deep in my saggy swim trunks. The boat engine rumbled to life, and a cloud of noxious black diesel smoke drifted over the water. There was a moment of panic as I thought they intended to leave me there, floating in a minefield of jellyfish. I believe I uttered a high-pitched approximation of “Wait!” which sounded like a donkey that just got stung by a wasp on its testicles. I finally clambered aboard, hurling my body out of the water. The captain still looked deadpan.
“No reef,” I said, breathing hard. Then used one of my few words of Spanish, said with as much venom as I could muster. “No pescado”
The captain changed expression, for the first time. He looked a bit thoughtful. “No,” he said. “Pero muchas medusas”
I looked up the words in the Spanish-English dictionary I had brought when we got back that afternoon. “No,” the captain had offered philosophically. “But plenty of jellyfish.”