I found Jack Kerouac's Mexico on a strip of beach that separated the old hotels from the heaving Pacific, at a bar near where he sat on the sea wall and watched the sunset 61 years ago.
My best friends in Mazatlán, whom I had met only a day earlier, were behind me arguing and laughing. But with a beer in hand and my own perfect view of daylight's final yawn, I was too blissed out to talk. The crashing waves sounded like drums, and everyone in the water seemed to be dancing: a tangle of teenagers splashed around and flirted, their wiry limbs shimmering like lures, then came a dazzling woman wearing a bathing suit of rainbow stripes, her bare feet catching the surf, her long hair waving in the breeze.
That moment was the closest I got to channeling Kerouac on my journey inspired by his 1952 bus trip from the Arizona border to Mexico City. The scene before me called to mind the Mazatlán he described to Allen Ginsberg: "hot and flat right on the surf, no tourists whatever, the wonder spot of the Mexicos really but nobody hardly knows, a dusty crazy wild city on beautiful Acapulco surfs."
Still, I wondered, how much did Kerouac's romantic vision match up with reality?
Mazatlán is one of the many places that the Beats used to bolster the idea of Mexico as the destination for debauched recreation and self-discovery. Hollywood headed south first (Errol Flynn and John Wayne vacationed along Mexico's Pacific coast), but Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, who moved to Mexico City in 1949 to avoid a drug charge in New Orleans, laid down in literature a charmingly simple notion of the country that has endured.
Kerouac was a mythmaker in many respects. His writing turned struggling friends into epic heroes, and persuaded many youthful vagabonds (my former self included) to go now, to find saints among the sinners. Along the way, he created an impression that he and his ilk were not tourists, but rather ideal American travelers, engaged and sensitive, "desirous of everything at the same time," as he wrote in "On the Road."
But really, his "everything" was limited. Kerouac came to Mexico a half-dozen times in the '50s and '60s to experience greater freedom with drugs, drinking, writing and sex, in roughly that order. He stopped in Mazatlán for only a few hours, and though he told Ginsberg that sitting along the coast with his new Mexican friend and guide, Enrique, "was one of the great mystic rippling moments of my life," he also insisted on hopping back on the bus to hurry on to Burroughs in Mexico City.
"Kerouac never took Mexico very seriously," said Jorge García-Robles, a Mexican editor who has written several books about the Beats in Mexico. "It was a symbol more than something real."
That attitude has been shaping Mexico ever since. Even now, as a correspondent here since 2010, I often see links between the idyllic American fantasy and Mexico's most obvious failures (security) and triumphs (contemporary art). But Kerouac was a pioneer. And as a follower, I wanted to see where he went right or wrong, and what had changed since he helped define Mexico for millions of readers. Following the route from Mazatlán to Mexico City, I hoped to figure out if his dreamy vision could still be found, even as I confronted some of the cold, hard tragedies that many Americans miss.
As I sat soaking my feet in the rooftop pool at the renovated Hotel Freeman, Mazatlán's first hotel tower, I could understand why the gringos came. The view ran up and down the Pacific coast, from the green islands offshore to the winding road heading south toward Puerto Vallarta. A light breeze kept me cool. The only sound came from the old elevator lurching to various floors.
It was the 1944 original, and initially quite a marvel. In old photos from its early years, the hotel towers over its neighbors, like a beacon of modernity — or a greedy grab for business. The builder was the son of Americans and even before the high-rise appeared, American ambition had put its stamp on the city. The first regular visitors to Mazatlán were 49ers, mining executives who used the port to reach rich mineral deposits farther inland. Their early rustic hotels for workers naturally led to greater ambitions. In addition to the Hotel Freeman and a few other properties on the main drag of Olas Altas, Americans also built the first beachfront resort in the tourist-centric Zona Dorada, or Golden Zone, a few miles north.
Damien Cave is a correspondent for The New York Times based in Mexico City.
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