Thorn Tree travel forum

Legends of the Fall Tourist Season...

A generally reliable poster related a new version of an "urban legend" (the misdirected corpse -- in which a family receives not their loved one, but a black man with a cigar) as "gospel truth" below. Those kinds of stories have always existed (the poster found it on Yahoo.com -- I heard the same story, complete with the "black man with a cigar" -- years ago in the U.S. midwest). But that post, and the one from the person who believes there is only one telephone in Real de Catorce, intrigue me. What other folk beliefs and legends still circulate among tourists in Mexico?

The "myth of blonde beauties" is probably the oldest, and still circulates. The Spanish justified their supramacy partly by creating a blond Quetzcoatl in their retelling of pre-conquest tales. The credulous, and not very bright, Maxmillian von Hapsburg's belief in that tale only proves that there are, indeed, "dumb blondes". Portfirio Diaz humorously defended his police-state by claiming a blonde could walk unmolested from Matamoros to Tapachula in her underware.

Tales of danger, and near-death experiences are still popular. Some of these may have some factual basis (any country with a high rate of youth unemployment is going to have a high crime rate), but I suspect most are folklore. How many tourists wear diamond necklaces and carry a fortune in cash anyway? The people kidnapped and robbed while riding in taxis are usually small merchants known to carry cash, or wealthy (or perceived to be wealthy) Mexicans that can raise immediate cash from their family.

I've yet to actually meet the tourist who had this experience. Violence against foreigners is generally front-page, top of the hour news. This includes more or less "accidental" violence. When a tourist was wounded in Chiapas last year, it was major news here. The tourist happened to be Canadian -- the Canada Post and this forum were a goldmine of rumors and legends regarding police misconduct, Zapatista-inspired anti-foreign violence, and primative medical facilities. Never mind that the Federal Prosecutor and local police found the shooter within a few hours (he was a disguntled hotel employee with a gun and bad eyesight) or that the hospital was fully qualified and neither the victim, his partner (housed by the local hospital administrator until the consulate could arrange emergency housing), nor the Canadian Embassay had anything but praise for the local administration, nor that the near-sighted shooter had no political connections -- a good story is a good story.

Fiction, whether in the Canada Post, yahoo.com, or elsewhere, has a shadowy afterlife among Mexican visitors. Don Juan crossed the border and is working in construction in Lake Wobegone, Minnesota, now, but Carlos Castenada's novels are believed to reflect modern reality by some. The Peruvian novelist published his books as non-fiction (I'm old enough to remember reading them in a University anthopology class), but even the altered realities of Richard Brautigan, William S. Burroughs, Jack Keroac and Malcolm Lowery take on some credence as, uh -- dry -- reportage by some visitors. Hollywood, as far back as Raoul Walsh's faked footage of Pancho Villa's campaigns, has been creating a Mexican mythology of its own. Witness the sudden popularity of Real de Catorce after "The Mexican" was released. That one telephone has been awfully busy ever since!

There's nothing wrong with travel myths, for the most part. The Greek tourism industry has prospered for the last few millenia, thanks to the Iliad and Odessey. But, from gay villages in Oaxaca to rat-meat tacos; thrill-kill cults along the border to Indigenous wise-women; toilet paper (or the supposed dearth thereof) to donkeys in Tijuana, this country's 21st century travel myths -- good, bad, ugly and just plain bone-headed -- beat the Greeks hands down. So you regular posters, and especially you Mexican residents. . . what good travel tales have you heard lately?


Another refugee from the Bushista coup!