I recently found out something about this small Mexican city, where we’ve spent a chunk of winter the past five years, that changed my whole way of looking at the place.
San Miguel de Allende is famous for the colors of its buildings—a rich palette of blood red, oranges, earthy ochres. The way the town is painted is a major factor in the look and feel of the place, one of the reasons we, along with artists, find the city charming. But until just a couple of decades ago, San Miguel was and had been for hundreds of years totally white. The buildings were whitewashed for practical reasons, among them reflecting the sun. From what we’ve been told, the coloring of the town was accomplished by governmental decree or committee.
It was like learning that some key feature of your lover’s charming anatomy had been achieved some time before your acquaintance by cosmetic surgery.
I had assumed the colors were the natural look of San Miguel, if not all Mexico, a part of the exotic, down-to-earth, life-and-death Mexican character. One of the reasons we come here (besides just getting away from winter) is for the exotic Mexicanness embodied in those colors.
So it has been something of a shock to find out that those colors were deliberately chosen to please us tourists, as a lady of the night paints her face and gussies up to attract customers.
Learning that the city had painted itself to please us got us thinking about other components of the city’s charm such as the antique cobblestone paving of many of the streets (charming but the source of many a turned ankle), the exotic Mexican restaurants behind the stone walls with outside seating, perhaps around an old fountain. The wonderful mariachi bands playing traditional, romantic music (while the teens practice breakdancing a few feet away). Is all this less Mexico than a version of Mexico concocted for the benefit of tourists?
Will the real San Miguel please stand up? Old photos of the pre-1960 city show the whitewashed buildings and burros not yet employed as a tourist attraction. The city buried under the colors and other tourist trappings. Tourist town this may be, with gringo secondhome owners, but 90% or more of the people are Mexican locals. Excavating to discover the real Mexico beneath the tourist veneer, we ask questions about the real life of the people, the politics, religion, and everyday economics where the minimum wage is $4 a day.
But in another sense, there is no “real” San Miguel to be discovered underneath tourism. A tourist destination’s self consciousness, is a fundamental part of its nature. What is San Miguel really like? To a large extent it’s really a city that put itself at the disposal of tourists for the dinero to be had that way.
It seems a fundamental contradiction of travel: you go to a far-off place, the whole idea being to get to know an exotic destination, something profoundly different from where you live. But when you look closely what you get is a reflection of yourself, what you want, what you find appealing. When we visit a tourist destination what we tour is tourism itself.
There might be a lesson in here somewhere for a tourist destination like Cape Cod –for tourists and their hosts alike.
No Comments