Tequila: (tequila is made in Tequila!)

Amante, musico y tequila. Ole!  Y si, un gallo Tambien!

It’s curious how one’s perception on arriving as a visitor at a place that is home for others . . . and probably has been for centuries . . . can be that the people and place were given birth when one (this one, at least) landed. (That may be the worst sentence I’ve ever written.) I think it’s a case of inflated self-importance: this store opened just for me; this restaurant wouldn’t exist except in anticipation of me; this town has only ever been awaiting my arrival; I’ve never been in this museum before so it must be new.

My home has never been a tourist destination but I’m thinking if visitors speaking little English streamed through Rosthern year-round, they’d begin to look alike and my courtesies would probably be in the interest of their spending more than in them personally. And if they stayed for a week—exploring all the sights and amenities, trying every restaurant—forgetting them would be an exercise of minutes. (Mind you, testing every restaurant in Rosthern takes five days only.)

I could imagine that a weary waiter in a hot and crowded restaurant is not nearly as happy to see me come in as I might hopefully expect. “Here comes another pain-in-the-ass tourist with stupid questions and impossible demands spoken in broken Spanglish. Whoopeeo dinga!” Actually, courtesy and friendliness characterizes best the people of Mexico who’ve waited on us.

An increasing number of national and local economies rely on tourism these days. Tourists bring in money, often into communities left impoverished by global “progress” including technologies that displace jobs. But it surely must be a Faustian bargain; to be a tourist-friendly town where you were once a traditional community has meant monumental cultural change; how could it not? Churches remain sparsely-attended places of worship, but become tourist attractions as well; menus in restaurants are in a language amenable to visitors; children mix into the melee of strangers and pick up who-knows-what habits (not excluding the art of begging and fawning for handouts, we’ve observed in some places); locals compete for craft and food stall sales. And possibly the most telling: tourism and expat settlement drive up the prices of things, and visitors--not locals--become the demographic for which business caters, for which municipal planning often bends both money and attention. 

In the plaza in Tequila, men with “información turistica” on their shirts walk about to help visitors find the sites they’ve come to see. Up and down the hills of Tequila, meanwhile, the blue-green fields of Agave signal that others must toil under the hot sun to support the export industry that now pays for their living. Agave here produces nothing nutritional, just juice for tequila, fiber for construction and fertilizer for the next crop of the same.

We’re told the town of Tequila was founded in ca. 1525; that’s only two decades and a bit after Columbus “discovered” the “New World.” Rosthern was founded—kind of—in 1893 at which time Tequila as a town already had about 270 years of community behind it. In both cases, the area had likely been inhabited for ten or more thousand years: by the Cree in Rosthern’s case, by Aztecs in Tequila’s.

I had a bowl of Sopa Azteca in the Plaza in Tequila with no illusions that the name was more than cultural appropriation for the tourist trade. It was very good soup.

Downtown Tequila is a visual feast.

We tasted a sample of a smooth, flavoured tequila not unlike Bailey’s Irish Cream. Wonderful. I bought a small bottle of it: 180 pesos; $10 Cdn.

The Guadalajara Freeway loop circles 3/4 of the city of some 10 million. It’s a state-of-the-art highway with only light traffic; we paid $30 in tolls driving from Ajijic to Tequila and back. Locals, we conjectured, would travel on free roads. Speed limit on the freeway: 110. Same as the Louis Riel Trail.

In the Tequila Museum we wandered into the archive room where an older man (Manuel) and a college-age companion were eager to show us the assemblage of old documents chronicling the history of Tequila and tequila. Our daughter’s Spanish is better than ours, and so the conversation limped along with general understanding. What we gathered is that a mass of letters, documents, declarations have been collected with great effort from all over the world and are being meticulously catalogued and preserved here in this small room. My archive/history juices flowed with an envy equal to the glow in these archivists’ eyes as they revealed their monumental achievement.

Friday, we take a tour introducing us to historic Guadalajara.