Looking North from Barra de Cazones

In Barra De Cazones, Veracruz, we ordered Modelos at an empty beach­front restaurant, La Palapa de Kime, on a muggy July afternoon. A handful of vacationers were scattered on the expansive, pebbled, brown sand beach. This was not the tropical paradise of Cabo San Lucas brochures—with expensive hotels and fine white sands—but the scarcity of tourists in this beautiful and serene Gulf Coast village was puzzling at first glance. The roads into town are good—pleasant, twisting runs through a remote and picturesque rainforest, in fact—and a couple of medium-sized cities and an airport are within an hours’ drive. We later learned that the electricity in town was sporadic and that the hotel accommodations were expensive but shoddy. And along the downtown strip, half-constructed buildings seemed frozen in their incompleteness, as if they were as ambivalent about the future as the inhabitants were. Roofless, these cinderblock buildings stood mute and abandoned alongside the central beachfront road, rusting rebar jutting out of the tops of their gray walls. In front of them, stacks of bricks lay idly on the sidewalk. This quiet fishing and farming village of a few thousand would like to reinvent itself as a tourist destination. Government efforts to create fishing cooperatives and plants for processing and freezing fish expanded Mexico’s annual catch in the 1970s and 1980s, but today Mexico’s coasts are dominated by U.S., Canadian, and Japanese boats, which catch ten times what Mexican boats do. Small-scale fishermen in places like Barra de Cazones fetch low prices for their fish, and high fuel prices take a sizable chunk of their meager earnings. With fishermen struggling, little investment in infrastructure, high interest rates, and few jobs, this lonely town’s main business, like that of the nearby villages of Volador and Agua Dulce, is out-migration. Archimedes, a proud and boisterous local entrepreneur, was frying several freshly caught fish in a wide skillet and extolling their virtues in a theatrical baritone.

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