In the Shadow of the Giant: The Americanization of Modern Mexico

8. The Gringo Riviera

“What’s the difference between Cancún and Miami?” a Mexican tourism official asked me during my first visit to the world famous resort. I shook my head and said I had no idea.“In Cancún, everybody speaks English.”The pithy truth of that joke stuck with me throughout the four days I spent in Cancún in March 2005. On the last night of my stay, I hailed a taxi in the city’s hotel zone and told the driver in Spanish, “Please take me to the Hacienda El Mortero restaurant.”“Sure,”the cabbie replied in English without missing a beat. As we headed toward the restaurant he apologetically switched to Spanish and told me a little about his life story. Leonel García Sánchez once owned a clothing import business in his native Guadalajara that required him to make regular trips to Los Angeles, where nearly all of his clients spoke Spanish. When the clothing business went belly up, García moved to Cancún in 2002, and these days he spends more time speaking English as he plies the streets of the resort city than he ever did in southern California. “Here in Cancún I don’t feel like I’m in Mexico,” he explained. “I feel like I’m back in the United States because nobody speaks Spanish.”1 Cancún was a place I had studiously avoided during my four-year assignment as Newsweek’s Mexico City bureau chief in the mid-1980s. One of the main reasons I chose journalism as a profession in the first place was to live outside the United States, and the last thing I wanted to do on my vacations inside Mexico was to sprawl on a beach packed with fellow 151 c h a p t e r 8
The Gringo Riviera CH008.qxd 11/27/08 1:58 PM Page 151 Americans swilling piña coladas by the pitcherful. In those days, the closest I ever came to Cancun was a foray to the majestic Mayan pyramid of Chichén Itzá, where I saw Americans with lobster-red sunburns coming in by the busloads for a quick tour of the famous archaeological ruins before heading back to their seaside hotel rooms. “You Will Always Feel at Home” My worst fears about the place were amply confirmed when I finally made it to Cancún twenty years later. Envisioned originally as an exclusive resort for wealthy, sophisticated American tourists, the hotel zone of Cancún occupies a narrow, twelve-mile-long sand spit just off the Yucatán Peninsula’s northeastern tip, and it stands as a monument to made-in-theU .S.A. consumerism and marketing. The prevalence of English became apparent as soon as I reached the baggage claim area of Cancún’s congested international airport; even the advertising posters of local companies were worded in the global language (“No matter how far you travel,” said one ad for the Mexican cellphone company Telcel,“you will always feel at home”). From the back seat of the tour bus whisking me to my hotel, I glimpsed a steady parade of the same restaurants, fast-food chains, and hotels found in American shopping malls from sea to shining sea. Hooters, T.G.I. Fridays, Hard Rock Café,Planet Hollywood,Bubba Gump Shrimp Co.,McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway, Hilton, Ritz-Carlton, Hyatt, Marriott—you name it, they were present in this market. Manicured lawns, green ferns and golf courses flashed by my window seat as the tour bus made its rounds depositing other American passengers at their respective hotels. The vehicle’s radio was tuned to a pop music station that blared old hit songs from the likes of Gloria Gaynor, the Beach Boys, and the Fifth Dimension. As the Telcel poster foreshadowed, the raison d’être of Cancún is all about making the American vacationer feel as though he has never left the U.S. of A. Tourism is big business in Mexico. It represents the country’s third largest source of foreign exchange after oil exports and the remittances sent back by Mexicans living in the United States, and the industry keeps 152 in the shadow of the giant CH008.qxd 11/27/08 1:58 PM Page 152 setting new records in annual revenues. In 2006 foreign tourists spent a record $12.18 billion in Mexico,2 a...