Obviously, Mexico is different from the United States in countless ways, starting with the basics of language and diet–and you can go on from there and make a list a mile long. However, until you’ve lived here a while, or visited a few times, you don’t always notice some of the culturally significant but not so dramatically evident differences.
For instance, one thing you learn about Sayulita—and I know this to be true in much of Mexico–is that here, as opposed to the United States, there are many more, shall we say, informal ways people go about selling products, whether they be grown, handmade, cooked, machine-made, or imported from across the sea. Those of us who live here understand this: one of the things that draws people to Mexico is the free-for all, unpoliced, unregulated nature of everyday life. On one hand, the bureaucracy here can be stifling, maddening, and stultifying. On the other hand, who needs a license to sell stuff? Nobody.
Here, every front yard is a possible restaurant, every unclaimed corner a potential shop for some enterprising soul selling car parts, watches, plastic superheroes, tacos, churros, or maybe gorgeously crafted woolen animals or tablecloths, handmade in the far hills of Nayarit or Oaxaca. A dusty 20 by 20 foot patch of roadside dirt one day, a chicken take-out joint the next day, doing a thriving business, with a little pirated DVD stand on the side.
One way people sell stuff here that you don’t really see much in the US is off the backs of pick-up trucks that cruise around town all day long, some with really, really loud sound systems (Mexico can be a noisy country, unless you are on a lost or secret beach), selling whatever. Selling, well, just about anything that will fit into or onto a truck. One guy has a truck piled high with brooms, mops, buckets, scrub brushes, and other household cleaning tools and products. Another guy sells frozen shrimp, medium or large, with or without the heads. He’ll wave a big one at you as he drives past, loudly announcing with his pre-recorded sales pitch the countless ways you can prepare incredibly delicious shrimp. The bread truck drives past, with its sweet 1940s movie soundtrack. One guy sells nothing but watermelons from the back end of his pick up, while another guy has a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables spilling out of his. Onions here. Melons there. Jicama by the kilo, over here, dirt-crusted skin attesting to the freshness. A truck full of wooden chairs sets up shop by the bridge. Another truck is piled high with the outdoor furniture these guys make from re-bar and plastic; I hear Anthropologie or one of those pricey shops up in the States is selling the same stuff, for ten times the price.
Of course there are the propane trucks–each company with its own theme song, which they like to play at full volume. You ask yourself, why do they sell tanks of propane at 7 am on Sunday morning? Because they can, and after all, after while you don’t really mind the sing song sound of Zeta, Zeta, Zeta Gas at the crack of dawn on a Sunday morning. Who knows, you just might be…out of gas? It rouses up the roosters and the chachalacas, who then contribute their own roisterous indignant melodies to the general morning cackle. The sound of morning in Mexico.
