Caracas in Vallarta

Looking Mexican people in the eyes this week, in Mexico

We landed in Puerto Vallarta today for some winter sun. Yes, lucky us. I could not stop thinking about Caracas.

While waiting in a long, chaotic line for Customs, I said to my husband that “it feels embarrassing to be from the USA this week.” Because it does, and it did, particularly while standing in a Mexican airport, five days after president Trump ordered eighty Latin Americans to be killed in Caracas. He threatened Mexico this past week, too. And, Colombia, Denmark, Greenland, and Iran, and ... who did I miss?

Oh, right, Minneapolis and Portland, Oregon.

It is all humiliating. Grotesquely so, and fully contrary to my WW2 Era parents’ “Eisenhower Republican” values. My Reagan-loving Irish Catholic mother would have despised Donald Trump, and not just for the Epstein files.

She would despise his moral weakness.

A sixty’ish white guy, walking directly in front of us, half-turned to me, as if he had heard my embarrassment and wanted to comment on my words. He looked like a gun-owning American, not easily embarrassed. He was wearing sweaty, grey tech-fabric vacation wear, fresh off the airplane, looking like a guy I might see in the Gun Room at Capitol Sports, back in Montana. He scoped me with a side eye, then turned back into the line.

I felt a bit tense. Would he have agreed? Not? Did he mean something by his side eye? I would gladly have talked with him, had he had the nerve to converse with me, one to one. Whatever he thought stayed inside his head, though. He was afraid to speak whatever he might have spoken. Or, to hear what he might have heard from me.

We all kept walking towards the scanners.

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During Covid, I made a friend, online, whom I have now, this week, met face to face, and voice to voice, for the very first time.

Jonathan Mack calls himself the “expat gringo boyfriend slash pastor’s wife” of the second-in-charge leader of a local indigenous Mexican spiritual community. They sweat their prayers.

I know Jonathan as a writer.

His work is inspired by modernist authors (Clarice Lispector, Gertrude Stein, and more), Chinese Classical poetry, and homosexual life as an unprofessed literary monk in recovery from Indian ashrams, New Hampshire apple farms, and an elitist Tokyo finishing school for girls. Read him to know more. Jonathan has theorized the standard paragraph into a specific literary form. You can find him on Patreon. Do. Do not be timid. He is not. You will learn things.

He calls his home “Vallarta,” as I have learned other locals do, too. The industrial “Puerto” prefix seems long gone from the discussion.

Jonathan tells me that, as recently as ten years ago, Vallarta remained affordable for aging norteños with little more than a social security check to spend. No longer. Now, the shoreline is coated in freshly white-plastered condo towers and real estate offices.

The water floats little fishing boats, which supply the beach chairs and seafood restaurants with shrimp-skewers and local catch. The water also carries waterborne castles, each named for a european city or fantasy princess. When docked, it is hard to tell cruise ships from the buildings crowding the central city skyline up the coast.

Having lived through two gentrification waves in Portland, plus a statewide wave underway in Montana, the signs are clear. Virtually all real estate markets have gone speculative. The gambling (“investor”) class may as well drive up prices on stacks of formerly funky ocean-view, too.

I wonder how condo stacks will look in Greenland.

There is still flavor, though, in the local urban crust. Jonathan spoke of the oldest known male hustler in Vallarta, who is sixty or so, and an apparently quite physically gifted exemplar of the eldest profession.

My friend likened him to a ghost ship.

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I am a hypocrite, of course.

I am writing this while gazing from a sixth floor balcony condo view. There is an infinity pool thirty foot over my head, next to a rooftop bar. It is a particularly American pastime to fret over recycling while tearing open the plastic on our next box of individually wrapped snack cookies. I arrived by jet, and by jet-fuel will I return, because America.

Were I at home, I would show up for the latest protests at the capitol building. Not because I think the American political class cares about protests, particularly in politically-colonized Montana. But, because I meet people at protests who share my desire to swim as best I can in a more generous and positive way.

As best I can.

I cannot personally stop the national humiliation emerging from Washington, DC. But, I can weave relationships with others who, like me, hold the tiny little piece of enormous power called “the right to vote to elect officers of the most powerful government in human history.” A power held by just 4% of the people on our planet. A power not held by (most of) those targeted by ICE.

A power abdicated by any American citizen’s failure to vote.

I can swear to use this power at every opportunity. This I can do. There will be more elections. Bolsonaro is in jail.