VeraCruz is somewhere!
Ric Polansky ©
When the archeologists write about the Olmec culture they find themselves limited to listing that great cultures past whereabouts near Vera Cruz, Mexico. That’s what brought me here. Book after scholarly publication insisted this was their Pre-historic area forever designated to student and seer. They couldn’t have been more wrong.
Vera Cruz is just the largest city on the map for a starting point to discuss the culture. The truth being that if you want to find out anything about the Olmec culture you have to travel far, wide and be prepared to shell out big bucks or steal a car. They are worth studying as they were the “mother culture of the rest of Mexico”.
The town of Vera Cruz has little to offer other than excellent sea food sold in restaurants at eye popping cheap prices. A cocktail of fresh water shrimp (gambas) 3-5 Euros a large and delicious plateful. VC is a port town filled with sailors, their wives, their would be girl friends and so few actual tourists that you can count them on one hand and still have enough fingers left over for rude gestures. The daytime tourist parade is limited to a visit at the Parroquia (a famous coffee house) that sports 1920’s décor. Here café is brought to your table and a special waiter armed with an enormous kettle pours your “milk” from a great height. Outside exist long lines of shops all selling the same mermaids ingeniously put together with seas shells. If boring was a word in Mexican-Spanish I would elucidate you. But since life has been passing to this same beat for 4,500 years of verifiable history there is little new under this drowsy sun.
It is the moon that controls the towns sentiments and verve. For at the bewitching hour of sunset and an hour more added on to clean up and change clothes the dusty town becomes a whirling dervish of “dancing fools.” It is called the “danzon” and at 7 from Thursday through Sunday night the mischief starts. The bars, saloons, tabernas, pubs and restaurants are crowded with locals that dance with each other to this unique music.
VC prides itself about it’s music. What is most unusual it isn’t for the teens or younger it is for the over 45’s. Danzon encompasses the rumbas, marangas, and other hot steps but in reality is pure salsa. The old fashion kind that came over from Cuba in a the 1890´s.
Danzon is a pleasure to listen to watch and participate. More fun can’t be had in the moonlight-- publicly. Officially these types of establishments are referred to as portales, dancing in the doorway. Music groups play certain bars and have their followings. While other troubadours sing to the pigeons in small plazas dotted near the seaside. Observe carefully, the drunken uproarious gathering two tables down is the next singing act crooning heart twisting love songs that even silence the stray cats. In a place called Vera Cruz, Mexico, music is king when there is nothing else. For it is VC that is the most oft mentioned home for song writer, poet and eleven time married romanticist, Agustin Lara. All Spanish love movies play his songs in the background. But he was a true Mexican even though he wrote for those ditties hummed daily in the market stalls of Valencia (with a tune by that same name) and the sturdy fortress bastions of the Alhambra with his famous “Granada”.
If you’re an American strolling the streets of VC you’ll hear another familiar little ditty and realize… La Bamba, he who died with Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper near my home town of Mason City, Iowa was from here too. None other than Richie Venezuela the first of many Latinos to start the flow north.
VeraCruz remains a music town. A place where they music never dies.
