Baby Bobos the world over

As you walk past the buildings: white plaster walls, red tile roofs, iron bars bulging out from the occasional window, a tree-filled town square lined by one story arched buildings, you are clearly in Latin America. But up close the shops and cafes inside the buildings feel like they wouldn´t be out of place someplace like Burlington or Boulder. The furniture and decorating varies: brushed stainless steel in one cafe, distressed wood in a clothing store, a subtly carved wooden sign with a compass image. There is a certain aesthetic of taste here: reminiscent of Pottery Barn catalogs or Soho. I have to admit it is an aesthetic which appeals to me, as it does to so many other tourists. But sometimes I worry that these cities have turned into a backpacker’s version of disneyland’s Main Street where the facades of colonial buildings have been preserved, but what is inside is anywheresville. Adaptive reuse is appealing: A Gap in an old warehouse on Haight Street is still better than a Gap in a greenfields development in a suburban mall. And these types of places, like their counterparts in the US, incorporate taste for the local and funky. In San Cristobal de Las Casas, the fancy wine bar in a old colonial building with a covered courtyard had a banana tree in the center.
Of course it is easy for me to fixate on all the white faces. Antigua, Guatemala is often seen as being the most tourist-dominated of Central American cities. One morning however, I realized that there actually were still a lot of Guatemalans: walking in their school uniforms, ducking into rear storefronts, going about their business in side alleys. There are even a few women in traditional dress selling lunches at the entrance to the ruined Cathedral. Their presence was simply less ostentatious than the tall caucasians with large backpacks and the stores geared to them were in the less obvious real estate. It reminded me of Harvard Square during the early nineties when stores and shops catering to yuppies and people who, like me were absurdly dressed students from away. But in the side alleys and less appealing streets where real estate was cheaper, there were shoe repair places and diners frequented by the Boston-born folks I put on a uniform and waited tables with.

And I suspect the aesthetic may appeal to more than just westerners. It may be faddish for a subset of educated Westerners to react against the commodity fetish of mass production by fetishizing the local and funky, but it strikes me as a better thing to globalize than the fad of franchises and mass production. Certainly many Mexican university towns have the same aesthetic, though the bakeries and artesanal ice cream stores in Xalapa or Zacatecas could not be supported solely by tourists. The lakefront town of Suchitoto in El Salvador the internet café had sepia photographs of local streetscapes and locally grown coffee. A Guatemalan I hung out with who now lives in San Diego stopped off at the health food store in Antigua to buy yoghurt and freshed baked bread.

In San Juan del Sur in Nicaragua I took a surfing lesson from a Nicaraguan who boasted he’d been surfing for nine years, but never had to pay for a board, receiving a succession as gifts from gringos. We piled into the car, strapped the boards to the roof, and as we drove to the beach, he put on a tape of Bob Marley. I heard Bob Marley a lot in Central American waterfront communities geared to tourists. Does Latin Americans listening to black Jamaicans sing about their oppresion represent a gringo invasion or something more complicated? We pass a group of boys in front of the Cathedral skateboarding on park benches, then pick up two blonde girls who have come to the beach for a few weeks to learn to surf.

While the older parts of these towns are use their cobblestone streets and colonial architecture to attract tourists, parts of town where tourists seldom go are copying the sprawl of the United States. Four lane roads full of traffic, White Metro Centro malls with food courts, freeways lined with hastily constructed warehouses, Walmart style big box stores, acres of identical two story townhouses in the hills at the edge of town, gated communities with cul de sacs. In Boston I had two roommates from Chihuahua, Mexico. They commented that Boston was amazing to them because people got around without cars—something they never could have done back in Mexico. They had jobs selling t-shirts and lived in crowded apartments, but they were children of engineers in the US to study English to improve their business opportunities. I never rubbed shoulders with their central American equivalents—but I suspect there were affluent kids in the big cities for whom a car is just as essential to life as the kids I went to High School with in Virginia suburbs. And of course even my Nicaraguan host family, in their tin shack with walls of plastic went occasionally to the malls.

And so two types of global homogenization are visible in Latin America. One is that of malls, walmarts, and freeways outside of town, another is the spread of cafes and juice bars in funky small towns where you can count on a little money from tourists and even local yuppies. And it is encouraging to think that while both are driven by foreign capital, one is driven by large corporations, the other by individual entrepeneurs and tourists. And given the disproportional impetus behind big box stores, it is impressive that the latter is spreading at all.

Alongside the built environment other parts of American culture are proliferating, like surfing and pizza, Reggae music, or DVDs of Hollywood blockbusters being sold on the streetcorner. But surfing originally comes from Hawaii, pizza from Italy and some of the DVDs star Jackie Chan. US culture borrows from so many different sources, it has in some ways become a medium for the cultures to diffuse and interact with each other. Like Bob Marley music, it might be seen as a concession to gringo tastes, but those tastes have already incorporated ideas developed by non-whites.