In high season, Sayulita’s Sunday Market, or Tianguis, offers visitors a chance to browse and shop for interesting and beautiful ethnic and traditional crafts from all over Mexico—pottery, woven blankets, hats, wool animals, shirts, shoes, sculpted maskss, and all manner of cool Mexican stuff. This is what visiting shoppers look for, and the market does a fine job of making it available.
In the low season, in August and September, the market serves a different purpose. Actually, this other market is here year round, it’s just that this time of year, you notice it more because most of the crafts people aren’t around.
Instead, along with the one stand selling fresh salad vegetables, chopped and prepared for dining, along with bottles of local honey, what you have is a kind of moveable department store. As you walk along Calle Gaviotas, in the temporary shade of the canvas and plastic roofing the vendors put up between Revolucion and Palmar, you see for sale all kinds of cheap, basic, practical stuff—shoes, batteries, shorts and pants for school, ceramic piggy banks, baseball caps and cheap flip flops, toy soldiers, cars, tanks, and dolls, pots and pans and dishware, plastic containers, brooms and mops and plastic trash cans—the usual stuff you see in discount markets all over the world. The stuff that keeps kids clothed and happy with their toys, the stuff that keeps kitchens running and machines working. It isn’t “ethnic” or particularly pretty, but it is all useful.
You also see a lot of really sexy women’s underwear, and here in Sayulita, local women and girls, both Mexican nationals and gringo ex-pats, all know that the stuff you can get in the Sunday market is just as sexy and well-made as say, what you get at Victoria’s Secret for ten times the price. Take at look at these bras and undies, and the rest of it. This is some seriously sexy lingerie.
