Mexico, 1946

MIGUEL ALEMÁN, this year’s official party candidate for the Mexican presidency, proclaimed during the campaign of President Manuel Ávila Camacho, in 1940, that his country might be then saved by fish. He has now declared that Mexico can be saved by the tourists. What with the present high cost of travel in Mexico, the candidate’s program implies that he is still thinking of fish. But he seems to hope now that more fish will swarm over the border in cars than ever were caught in the deep waters off Acapulco. Except in the provinces, Mexican travel requires a substantial investment which is well worth hooking or netting.

The American people will no doubt continue to pay visits south of the border because there is no other foreign and picturesque place where one can go quite so easily. But unless there is a sharp fall in hotel and restaurant prices, there will be many who will go back where they came from before they are gaffed. Like the tourists last winter, they will complain of the cost — and with sound justification, for the cost has no real basis in logic.

Let me give an example. In my favorite restaurant in New York, on East Forty-eighth Street, I lunched quite delightfully, the day I last left for Mexico, for less than two dollars, including what is now known as a beverage. I had pate de fois gras, an asparagus soup, a plate of smoked turkey, and some real Stilton cheese. I was served by the head waiter, a working waiter, and a bus boy. My table was spread with good linen, the china was intact and spotless, the tableware heavy and handsome. The overhead charges there must have been high; yet I was made to feel well fed and served for my money.

A few days later in Mexico City, where I sampled some of the restaurants in the interest of a guidebook I had undertaken to write, I paid twenty dollars, with tips, for lunch for four people in a place not half so attractive as the restaurant in New York. We had good steaks, to be sure, but they were served on thick platters which had come from the kitchen; and although the cafe was supposed to be smart, there was so much confusion of service that no two of us had the same course at the same time. Even counting the cost of the bottled water which foreigners think they must drink to escape the perils which lurk in the reservoirs, I could not see in my bill half the value of the money it called for.

I do not mean to say that all the restaurants iu Mexico City are clip joints, for I can name about four in which I found correspondence, at about the same price, with my lunch in New York. In a sunny restaurant-bar called Sans Souci, the table appointments were entirely adequate. Solicitous minions served us a hot table d’hote from a near-by serving table, and my “steak minute O’Brien" was tender and sweet. The cocktails were twice as expensive as those in New York, so that the bill came to something more than two dollars apiece. Still, I had no complaint. Everything was in order.

At the Papillon on Avenida Madero, a block from the Ritz, at Club 123 on the Calle de Liverpool, and at famous old Prendes, a similar effort is made to give value received. But in almost every other big-name establishment that I took pains to visit, I felt cheated. And I dare say that most tourists, having paid from three to live dollars for indifferent eating, would feel as I felt. If by eating indifferently you can save money for some other purpose, you may perhaps be consoled. If by paying well you live amply, you might stand, for a while, the strain on your wallet. But you get mad when you pay a high price for poor quality—especially when, as in Mexico now, you can see no good reason for that combination of evils.

Inflation is by no means the chief cause of the high cost of living in Mexican hotels and restaurants. If it were, there would not be so much difference between the high City prices and the lower hotel costs in the provinces, where tourists st ill get a break when they find their way out there. Inflation is largely an official excuse.

The present degree of inflation is undeniably serious, for it is destroying the country in more ways than one. In eight winters in Mexico, I have seen the all-over cost of living go up at least 300 per cent. Live chickens that used to be brought to our door at around fifty cents now cost more than two dollars. Tortillas, the bread of the country, have more than doubled in price, and homely beans, providing the national protein, are now quoted at luxury figures. Eggs, which we used to get for two cents apiece, are now seven or eight, and the good fillets of Mexican beef have gone up more than the average 300 per cent.

A standard two-dollar shirt costs five dollars. Taxis, which used to range for two or three miles for about fifteen cents, now cost fifty or more within walkable distance — for an old car will fetch as much as $2000 and a tire still costs nearly $50. And although certain controls are applied to the renting of buildings and houses, rents are sky-high in the new structures, which the old price controls do not govern.

Inflation has hit Mexico hard, destroying the plain man’s economy. But when you write down all the high costs, they cannot he honestly said to add up to American charges; for labor stays cheap. In a Mexican house a considerable staff receives less than one servant in the United States; and I have spoken to waiters who are paid slightly more than a dollar a day by the management, and to chefs who get less than a hundred dollars a month for cooking food to be sold at exorbitant prices. When you further consider that savings are made for the house in substandard appointments, such as cheap tableware and rough cotton napery, not to speak of thimble-sized highballs at a dollar a thimble, you can see that the costs are illogical, and can understand why many a winter tourist complained and went home in advance of his time. He was fed up with the greed of the innkeepers in resort and metropolis.

People can still eat without paying holiday prices, and I have looked around for such places to put in my guidebook. A few hotels, like the Ritz, the Majestic, and the Maria Cristina, still serve a table d’hote lunch — the wise tourist takes his principal meal at around two o’clock in the City — but for the most part that wayfarers’ board at which you feed cheaply, if not too fastidiously, has gone out of fashion. And even where it exists in the capital, it has survived at a price at which a tourist family of four still pays more than six dollars for a meal they would hardly care to detail in their diary.

I regret that some tourists I meet on the road are willing to pay twenty pesos for a tepid plate lunch at a catering shop run by a notorious foreigner, and to lie at great cost on one of the beaches at Mexico’s most famous and shabby resort. But unless you travel to visit the polyglot night clubs up in the capital, without thought for the cost, or to swim and fish in hot Acapulco, where crowded hotels charge as much as the traffic will stand, you can, I am happy to say, still see what Mexico looks like without spending your whole stock of war bonds. You can have plenty of fun in the provinces, where, perhaps at the cost of some of the civilized comforts, you can go four in a car and still cat and sleep for around $16 a day for the carload.

Take the town of Cordoba, not far from the Gulf. It is reached, in the first place, over the most spectacular piece of paved highway existing in Mexico. I stayed there last winter at an inn on the plaza. My washbasin, a new job in white porcelain, drained into a bucket which I had to empty into the toilet. My shower stood behind transparent windows giving onto the bedroom. But lords and ladies slept in that room for the space of two centuries. They danced across the white balcony overlooking the plaza, where now the whole town takes its supper of sweet bread and coffee in the outdoor cafes.

I felt I was closer to Mexico than some friends who stayed at a resort five miles away at three times the cost. Resort hotels everywhere copy the capital prices, but innkeepers in the towns, where real life still goes on, give as much as they can for whatever they take. They may not provide you with lamps for your bedside, and they may keep you short on hot water; but they set a good country table and provide cheerful service.

Cordoba is by no means the only provincial town that is sunny and warm from autumn to spring, and green, cool, and moist in the summer. You could make a Walt Whitman poem of the names of Cordoba’s colonial sisters scattered out on the highways — rich in tradition, brimming with beauty, and teeming with good-natured and colorful life: Queretaro, San Miguel de Allende, Guanajualo; Morelia, Patzcuaro, Uruapan, Guadalajara; Puebla, Vera Cruz, and Oaxaca. These are the places where the gringo tourist is treated as more man than fish.