Overheard in a Cerrillos Saloon

Overheard in a Saloon in Cerrillos

On tourism, colonialism, and the Simple Life

Recently, I rode my bike through deep canyons in the broiling New Mexico desert but gave up when I realized that being over 30 means you can’t just play around in the heat and sun and not expect Mother Nature to give you a spanking. 

I was out there trying to approximate a better life - one where I did things on the weekends instead of hiding in my home, sucked dry by the commute, the 9-5, the middle management of it all. In the past couple years, old age began to introduce herself by creaking my knees, tiredness, back pain. I thought riding through New Mexico’s beautiful deserts would help me feel alive and like I was living my life and not just watching it pass by.  

Toasted, parched, and slightly faint, I rolled back into Los Cerrillos, the old mining town from which I started my ride. It was quiet, and the sun continued to beat down on the weathered wooden buildings. The train horn hooted as it passed. In the four-block downtown, the old  saloon was the only available respite from the sun and dust coming off the unpaved streets. 

It didn’t offer much besides somewhere to sit out of the sun and wind - thick adobe, no AC, lukewarm water, and loud young men cosplaying cowboys drunk on the porch. The Old West echoes but never dies.  

Everything in the saloon is expensive since it has to be trucked in over mountain roads from the larger cities, making the whisky the cheapest thing on the menu. I heard that damn echo again bouncing off my $7 plate of fries. 

I’m shamelessly eavesdropping, sipping my tepid water, drenched in sweat and coated dust, red flushed face fiendish in the mirror behind the bar.

The lady keeping bar, probably in her 30s, long black hair hanging down her back, light blue eyes, a slightly hooked nose, is twice divorced and was talking about her second ex-husband to the cowboy hatted bar regular stacking change. 

The second ex-husband was Costa Rican and when they got stateside, were told they had to be married in three days or he would be sent back. She described him as currently being “overseas” which conjures images of deployment rather than deportation.

Well I guess the wedding did happen since he now sports the title of “second ex-husband”, but he was still booted - The Land of Mañana and the dictates of the federal government have never been comfortable bedfellows. 

Or maybe, I think to myself as I refilled my cup from the water crock on the bar, he got to dusty little Cerrillos and realized his mistake. 

New Mexico and Costa Rica are kissing cousins on the colonized family tree of Latin America - with New Mexico experiencing colonization twice - once by the Spaniards and a second time by the Americans - not that it’s a competition. 

New Mexico and Costa Rica’s economies, languages, environments, lifeways, were shaped like stiff clay on the pottery wheel of Spanish colonization, guided by the wetted invisible hand of the market. 

Also, did I mention that New Mexico is dusty?

Cerrillos has the kind of blowing dust that gets in your teeth and coats exposed skin. In the summer that wind is hot like an open oven door while the sun broils exposed skin, and in the winter it’s cold and biting, stealing the heat off your body and nipping at your extremities.

However that day in late June, the saloon was incredibly hot, the air stagnant despite the best efforts of the antique fan in the corner - adobe walls are excellent insulators. The barmaid seemed unaffected by the heat - not a bead of sweat dotted her brow. She worked steadily, pouring drinks, polishing glasses (wiping the dust off), never rushed in her movements like there was never a reason to rush, which there isn’t, in this town at least. 

The saloon as a building has lasted for the last 200 years out of torpidity rather than some noble drive to survive, and the fact that the 115 residents of Cerrillos still need a place to drink, socialize, complain, and make deals even if the mines closed and the ranchers moved away. The furniture in the saloon now is the same style that it was in the 1880s, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to think the same austere wooden chairs and tables have remained in this same building for the last 140 years. Same for the rickety wood flooring, the old bar with brass footrail, and the spittoons discreetly positioned in the corners ready for the sputum of some Stetson-ed spelterman. 

The cowboy-hatted regular, who had been listening intently to the woman’s story, finished counting out his $10 tab in nickels, downed the rest of his whiskey (neat), and scuffed his gritty boots along the floor on his way to the door. He paused before stepping into the white hot sunlight outside. I know he must have spoken to her but I hadn’t heard one word leave his lips.

The costume cowboys on the porch are still hooting and hollering about something - alternating drunkenly between Spanish and English, both unintelligible.

At least the Costa Rican second ex-husband could get by on his lengua nativa here since, as the northern terminus of Latin America, northern New Mexicans speak a lot of Spanish, even if it is the spanish of Cervantes and el Siglo de Oro. 

People in Costa Rica, many of whom have never heard of Nuevo Mexico, are incredulous and a little suspicious of Nuevo Mexico being part of Los Estados Unidos. They don’t know that New Mexico was Old Mexico longer than it was New by about 250 years. 

I guess to them the name is unfamiliar as the name of a gringo place (it’s certainly not New York or New Hampshire) - but it’s as alien as any Costa Rican city sounds to American ears - Carara, Sixaola, Talamanca, Nicoya, Jaco - though these names share the rhythm of indigenous place names butchered to fit colonial Spanish orthography - the same as Chimayó, Cochiti, Jemez, Pojoaque, Cíbola. 

Maybe the Costa Rican second ex-husband realized that the big ‘ole US of A wasn’t really all that different from the place he came from. There’s still poverty and jobs in tourism, there’s government annexation of land and extractive industry.  Many people here, like there, exist off beans and the cattle they raised, food that is aggressively local and sometimes produced purely for local consumption. 

Thankfully, New Mexico is too poor to host a fictitious “Blue Zone”, but we do have a lot of nonagenarians in the mountains who swear by chile, osha root, and working the land of their ancestors, as keys to their old age. Thankfully NatGeo is not likely to exploit the humble lives of New Mexico’s elders to sell books based on pension fraud in the name of “longevity”. 

“The Land of Mañana” and “Pura Vida” are mottos that hang together - reflecting a pace of life and ethos that many Westerners yearn for but will never achieve. 

In our lands they encounter folksy stereotypes of  humble, relaxed people who are attuned to the earth, the seasons, the old ways - an idea that becomes packaged for the tourists who come to buy flat brim rancher hats or pura vida license plate covers, chopped green chile or coffee beans. 

The thing they come here to get back - the thing they think they can buy back - is some semblance of simple living. Simple living isn’t easy to define and numerous definitions abound. It’s like pornography, you know it when you see it. 

Tourism is the main method by which Westerners, here largely Americans, come to taste a bit of simple living. They want to see the people whose lives are so similar that they can imagine themselves living that way, yet so different from their own accumulation and rushing and stress. 

They aren’t going to return home with any sort of lasting changes from their tourist adventure because most tourists want to have highly curated, frictionless experiences - adventure expeditions that are tightly produced, local guides who speak perfect English and attend to the every whim of the “cocoon tourists” who want to be insulated from the poverty, the rattletrap trucks, the dogs roaming the streets (you can’t tell which place I’m describing, can you?). 

Shit then what was I doing in that saloon, eating overpriced fries? 

Tourists sometimes get a taste of the simple life - living out of a suitcase, traveling wherever you want, enjoying simple food (doesn’t everyone return from vacation in Italy or France talking about how fresh the food is there?), not worrying too much about schedules unless it’s for the bus or a tour. The tourist seeks to consume these experiences like they are a thing to be eaten and sublimated into their being like nutrients. 

The tourist wishes they could live pura vida or in the Land of Mañana, without the need for their money and things - the simple life - but this wish only lasts as long as it takes to get to the airport where their arrogance and rushing around return because it was never gone, just coaxed into silence by the carne adovada or coconut flan. 

Just nine months ago - an entire gestational period - I left windwhipped New Mexico for Costa Rica as well - basked on the beaches of Manuel Antonio, got cloud-drenched in Monteverde. I felt proud that I was Not Like Other Tourists - I spoke Spanish with some fluency, and accepted my fate when the fish came with the head still on it. Still, didn't I swear I wanted to bring more Pura Vida into my life back home? That I would stop rushing around and take the world as it came? That I would use that ridiculous little sock to brew my morning coffee? 

Simplicity I guess can be defined by a lack of complication - complex interlocking pieces, numerous moving parts, the need for electricity and all its required wires and harnesses and safety coverings. The coffee machine with lights, and a heating element, switches, timers, buttons, knobs to select brew strength - all of which is housed in a fragile plastic casing that will break rather than let you repair it. By having more things that can break or wear out, life is inherently less simple. 

To reduce the number of parts in an object or process is to make it more simple. Simplifying is pouring boiling water into a cotton sock of coffee grounds and letting it durian out - no moving parts, no electricity required.

I’ll bet that the Costa Rican second ex-husband and the barkeep got married at the county courthouse - the cute adobe one with carved vigas, not the new brick one with square columns - but one day later than Uncle Sam required so that when la migra caught up to him, he was married but too late and he was sent off. 

It was probably a small affair, and not one of those big dress weddings with catering and a live band and rehearsed dances and videographers. Those weddings always seem to portend a divorce through the sheer gall of putting your wedding guests through multiple performances before serving dessert. 

I peeled myself off the worn wood of the saloon chair and paid the barkeep, who seemed totally unaffected by her recounting of how the love of her life was ripped from her arms and deported, and left. The heat enveloped me outside the saloon doors. The counterfeit cowboys were stupefied by the heat and the almost empty bottle of whisky sitting on their table. They sat around looking drunkenly at each other as if the spell of the Old West had suddenly broke.