there were no doctors or cemeteries. There was no living to be made there either: there
was no arable land, no livestock, no signs of human civilization. There was nothing.
The Jalisco coast had remained pristine until 1944, halfway through the twen-
tieth century, when the state governor, General Marcelino García Barragán, introduced
an initiative called
Marcha hacia el mar
(“March to the Sea”). García Barragán had a
road built from Guadalajara to Melaque, to allow ranchers to settle that part of Jalisco.
He himself claimed ownership of a beach called El Tecuán. The story of the coastal
colonization he initiated would later become the subject of Agustín Yáñez’s novel
La
tierra pródiga
(“The Prodigal Land”), written in the late 1950s, during the years that
Yáñez himself served as governor of Jalisco.
In his novel, Yáñez reflected on the natural resources of the state’s coastal
regions, which had been monopolized by lumber companies, land usurpers, cattle
thieves and horse thieves. He was very skeptical about colonization, after seeing the
destruction that the March to the Sea had caused in Melaque: “Heavy equipment kept
arriving […] advancing heavily, slowly, inexorably. They tore down trees, broke down
mountains, filled abysses. […] Monstrous tractors, gigantic bulldozers, colossal scrap-
ers and enormous dump trucks. They came from the East, the North, the South,
marching toward the sea.” Yáñez’s world was peopled with fascinating, crooked
caciques
such as El Amarillo, the novel’s main character, based on Rodolfo Paz
Vizcaíno, owner of Tenacatita ranch. Guillermo Gargollo knew him well. “The legend
(of his own fabrication) has it that he was a brutal man, who had killed many people.
Later, I realized it wasn’t true, but still, we were scared of him.”
On one of Gargollo’s trips to the coast, he discovered that Paz Vizcaíno had stolen
their equipment in Cuixmala in order to build access roads to the beaches in Tenacatita.
He built a hotel there and named it
Los Ángeles Locos
. Paz Vizcaíno had always been a
fortunate man, but he never had the chance to stay at that hotel, and ended up losing
it along with the rest of his properties, which were repossessed after he was charged
with fraud involving the Banco Regional de Crédito de Occidente. The story did not
end well: he was sent to prison, and then to a mental hospital, or so they say.
One of Paz Vizcaíno’s victims was Don Andrés Peña, owner of El Limbo, a
property on the Careyes coast. Peña still thinks angrily of the man who robbed him of
his livelihood. In the 1960s, there were only three families living in this coastal area:
the Peñas (in Careyes), the Rincóns (in Chamela) and the Méndez (in Quémaro). “The
Peñas had been there since the days of Carlos Landero,” recalls Guillermo Gargollo.
“They lived on four hectares of cleared land in the middle of the jungle, a bit like
Robinson Crusoe.” Andrés Peña, the head of the family, was born in Cuixmala, where
at the age of sixteen, his mother taught him to write on banana leaves from trees planted
by the Landeros.
Don Andrés Peña was over forty when his employers decided to recognize his
years of service by selling him a plot of land at a pittance: 150 hectares which he
cleared for pasture. On this terrain, called El Limbo, he lived between the jungle and
the sea, in a brick house with an asbestos roof that he built for himself in Teopa. His
only contact with civilization was when he went to have his butane gas tank filled for
cooking and heating water. “I would only leave the house when I needed a molar
pulled,” he recalls. “Sometimes I took them out myself, but other times they needed
to be removed by a dentist.” One time, he had such a bad toothache that he tried to
pulled the offending molar out with some pliers—normally used for bending barbed
wire—only to discover that he had pulled out the wrong tooth. He hunted deer and
wild pigs, and during the dry season, he worked with his uncle Librado in the Careyes
salt flats, spreading the salt out with a rake to let it dry. “We worked those salt fields
until they were ruined by falling rock from the blasting to make the road,” he says. By
the late 1970s, the highway from Chamela to Manzanillo was well under way. This
would finally connect the Careyes coast with the rest of Mexico, and the world.
42
Ojo de venado
(“deer’s eye”) is the name
given to a certain seed by the people inhabiting
the jungles of Jalisco. Brignone adopted it as
a talisman, and says that anyone lucky enough
to find one on their arrival in Careyes has thus
been welcomed by the place.
Opposite page: Brignone was born under
the sign of the Tiger according to the Chinese
zodiac. Here, we see the tiger walking out
of the jungle.
“I arrived, and the virgin forest welcomed
the tiger.”
GF