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Viva El Ruido!
Living in a Culture that Turns It up to 11
by Greg Coyle
I dream of sleeping in Mexico. Sleep, real sleep like the kind you used to get in survey classes in college, is about as hard to find down here as a proper glazed doughnut.
To put it plainly, Mexico is loud. Tin Man down an elevator shaft loud. Cats in a dryer loud. This is a land full of amplifiers, loudspeakers, car alarms, whistles, stereos, rattling panel trucks, church bells, and fireworks. It's a country that loves to bring in da noise bring in da funk, and a culture that believes if it can be done, it can always be done louder.
This is a kind of thinking it's difficult for we norteamericanos to understand. We guard our quiet. We make ordinances and post signs to ensure we get it. But we don't really know noise. We prefer our sparklers to their Whistling Petes, our stool-softening adult contemporary jazz to their caterwauling ranchero dance music. Give us candles on our birthday cakes; they prefer a piñata and a bat.
The distinction makes me eager to ask an emigrated Mexican now living in the States if our quiet, plodding rectitude is the real reason for the rise of the National Farm Workers Union (NFWU) and Caesar Chavez. Who knows, the fear of our humdrum proximity may have even been behind Santa Anna's raid on the Alamo.
But before I get too far, I wanted to quantify what I mean by loud. To that end, I've constructed an easy-to-follow three-step formula. It goes like this:
Step 1:
Collect the following:
- 2 fully stocked taco carts
- 200 fired-clay serving platters with Frida Kahlo's unibrowed mug on them
- 20 of the black briefcases favored by beach vendors and the array of silver jewelry they contain
- 50 happy-hour beer buckets complete with their empty Pacifico bottles
- 1 rusting VW Bug
- 100 sets of vaquero spurs
- 2 burros, embarrassingly outfitted and spangled in cartoonish Zapatista get-ups for tourist photos
- 150 long-stemmed margarita glasses
- 5 aging mariachi bands, including jumbo guitars, accordions and trumpets
Step 2:
Take these items to the very top of the stairwell at the Marriott Regency Hotel.
Step 3:
Throw the whole entire lot down the 30-plus flights of stairs to the terra-cotta entryway below.
This should give you some idea what I mean by "loud."
What Did You Say?
All this brings me back to the issue of sleep, which, as you might imagine, can be hard to come by in such an environment. For this reason, I've taken to wearing earplugs at night. It helps, but let's face it, if you're not used to the things, and if you're encumbered as I am with a hopelessly buoyant curiosity, you just end up listening more intently than ever. "What was that? That sounded like a gunshot, was that a gunshot?"
More to the point, they don't help much in the end. Nothing short of submerging my head in a pot of frijoles could keep all the noise out. I've constructed the following list to provide a sampling of some of the things that have penetrated my earplugs in the last few months:
- A guy puking up his chili relleno just outside my bedroom window.
- The mind-numbing medley of an especially loathsome brand of electronica enjoyed every Saturday night by the youth of Sayulita.
- My neighbor teaching, in one week, four different mamacitas to scream "por Dios!"
- A late-night drunken dust-up between a hysterical Mexican woman and her slap-happy paramour.
- Car alarms.
- The urgent morning announcement of "Agua!" from the waterman.
- The shrill boot-camp whistle and accompanying shout of "Es gas!" of the gasman.
- The rattle clatter of trucks and buses on the highway, made all the louder by their regular hammering into the many potholes dotting area streets.
- Blasting norteña music (think Mexican polka) so loud you can feel it in your fillings.
- Kids repeatedly kicking a soccer ball against the door of a derelict truck.
- The no fewer than 12 Chihuahuas released by a neighbor each morning to empty their bladders and bowels just beyond our patio.
It's a Cultural Thing
Exhibit A
No one that's been in Mexico for Independence Day should have any doubts that Mexico's is a culture that lives loudly. The culminating piece of Mexico's annual celebration of freedom from the Spanish is called el Grito, or "the shout," in which town and nation alike are exhorted to join voices and mimic the call to revolution made by Father Miguel Hidalgo in 1810.
Believe me, when belted out by thousands, en masse (and continued for an hour in some places), it makes for quite a racket. One wonders if the Spanish merely put down their weapons so as to cover their ears.
Exhibit B
This collective outburst is then followed by fireworks. But then most everything in Mexico is followed by fireworks. The Mexicans are perhaps second only to the Chinese in their unabashed love of pyrotechnics. It's your birthday, cue the explosives. Your dog gets neutered, light it up! You eat a cheese sandwich, cue the boom boom.
Every evening off the coast of Puerto Vallarta a dinner boat, built and dressed to look like a pirate ship, fires off its own display. We set our clocks to it. And if you happened to be standing downtown on New Year's Eve, you would've seen eight different shows competing for space in the sky and stretching from one end of the Bay of Banderas to the other.
Exhibit C
The mariachi. I defy you to think of another place in the world where bands, full bands of three, four, five instruments, sometimes even including the standing bass, actually wander the streets, stopping to play for anyone with a few coins in their pocket.
Just this morning, coming to a remote corner of Los Muertos beach, I found a group of five mariachis. They were singing, and with great enthusiasm, to no one but themselves and the waves. Come to think of it, they could've been yelling for help, but you get my point.
Exhibit D
Even the newspapers are loud in Mexico. Every morning while driving my stepdaughter to school I'm invited at major stoplights to buy that day's offering. With headlines in 120 point and decorated with some lurid shot of an especially gruesome car wreck or especially slow matador, they're like a smack in the face, or in the ears, to stretch the synesthetic comparison beyond its reasonable limits.
Thankfully, the men and women peddling the morning edition announce only "Newspaper!" and not "Motorcyclist Without Helmet Mashed Under Wheel of Bus!" or "Shark Attacks Snorkelers in Frenzied Blood Bath!"
Exhibit E
Finally, as some last assertive reminder that a life lived amidst too much quiet is to court the ire of the Sun God Quitzilopochtli, the TV channels offering Mexican-made programs are twice as loud as those trafficking in shows from elsewhere.
I learned this the hard way. One evening, after we'd watched one of the 12 daily airings of Friends, and my wife and stepdaughter had gone to bed, I decided to sample Channel 50, where I was told there is some, ahem, ticklish adult fare (airing weekly from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m., Thursday through Saturday). But once landed on, being a Mexican channel, the TV immediately erupted into more squealing than proctology exam at the old folks home.
Que Pasa?
So what is it about Mexico? Why is din in? I've thought about that quite a lot during those empty early morning hours as I lie awake listening to my neighbor getting some Aztec. So far, my research has failed to turn up even one Mayan maxim declaring that the gods can only be petitioned at the top of one's lungs.
As T.R. Fehrenbach put it in his book, Fire & Blood: A History of Mexico, "The race likes intimacy and noise." In The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz, famed Mexican poet, essayist and 1990 winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, credits it to the expression of the Mexican soul:
Fiestas are our only luxury. . In all these ceremonies - national or local, trade or family - the Mexican opens out. They all give him a chance to reveal himself and to converse with God, country, friends or relations. During these days, the Mexican whistles, shouts, sings, shoots off fireworks, discharges his pistol into the air. He discharges his soul.
I interpret this to mean that Mexico is a country that lives. Inheritors of a history brimming over with sacrifice, warfare, and conquest, what's shooting off some firecrackers? I try to remember that when I hear the guy with the loudspeaker driving his truck up my street. His amplified message is so loud it puts me in mind of what I imagine the plates of the earth rubbing together must sound like.
On a more practical level, a great many Mexicans simply live much of their lives outside. The weather encourages it. Windows and doors are left open. The front steps and curbside are favored over living rooms. Activities that those of us living anywhere north of, say, Santa Monica are used to doing inside are moved to the open air. Birthday parties, wedding receptions, meals.
Even Christmas. This past December 24th, the traditional day of celebration in Mexico, my earplugs and I were jarred awake at 2:30 a.m. by fireworks, drunken revelers, and the untraditional holiday strains of 50 Cent. But I loved it. I got to share the holidays with those neighbors. They weren't likely to invite me to join the festivities, being a gringo and a stranger, but they clearly didn't mind that I participated from a distance.
This is precisely what's so great about the noise, it's the very soundtrack of living: the shouted announcement of the waterman, the blaring reminder of an upcoming local election, the commingling jumble of noises that accompany the 12-day festival of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
By living outside and out loud they maintain that long, circuitous but ultimately unbroken line to their past, affording those of us standing just to side, and sometimes unexpectedly right in the middle, a look at the crazy panorama of a country with a long and colorful history. What traveler in their right doesn't dream of such an opportunity?
The Approaching Adios
As the end of our year here nears, I wonder how I'm going to re-adapt to moving everything inside, closing the windows and stoppering up the sounds of day-to-day life. I think it's going to be hard. I just hope my interior monologues have become more interesting in my absence. |
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