Organized by Selena’s father, her most relentless post-mortem marketing coach,
“Anthology” unfolds into a three-CD spread, with each flap bearing the image of
a different part of Selena’s hilly, reclining body. In a sense, by removing each CD, we take aural communion — every listener becoming the next candle-clutching convert to put their faith in Santa Selena. “Anthology” makes the conversion easy. Accessible and geared for a cross-market audience, it gives us Selena at the beginning and end of her life: the bright-eyed 15-year-old winner of the Tejano industry’s coveted Female Vocalist of the Year award and the mature, married pop icon who so completely captured the hearts and minds of a new generation of Mexican-American fans that People magazine bumped “Friends” off the cover of its Southwest editions to memorialize her.

At a time when Lilith Fair has made pop divahood virtually synonymous with self-indulgent whiteness, hearing Selena clubify “La Bamba” or growl her way through “No Debes Jugar” couldn’t sound more refreshing — or more culturally necessary. After all, Selena was the anti-Lilith: brown, bilingual and blessed with a big Texas bottom that she flaunted in the
face of both Latino and Anglo bleached-blond beauty standards.

But if “Anthology” is about the pleasures of memory, it’s also about the
pitfalls of marketing it. Instead of an actual retrospective, “Anthology” is
a selectively compiled tour of three different phases of Selena’s career –
“Pop/English,” “Mariachi” and “Cumbia”– only nearly every original song
has been remastered, remixed and rerecorded by Selena’s brother and
songwriting partner, A.B. So the rural ranchera of “Yo Fui Aquella” is now a
sugary, pop ballad, and the salsa tendencies of “La Puerta Se Cerr” have been
channeled into a mariachi-laced cumbia. Which makes “Anthology,” depending
on where you stand in the remix-after-death debate, either a polished pop
treasure chest that keeps Selena’s commitment to constant change alive or a
dubious and somewhat cruel exercise in exploitation that treats her catalog
as an endless fountain of profit.

On Disc 1 (Selena’s head), we meet crossover Selena, the last Selena to go
public. Ever since her teen debut with Selena y los Dinos, Selena had her sights set on a bilingual commercial breakthrough, a goal partially realized on the triple platinum “Amor Prohibido” (with its “Techno-Cumbia” and its Pretenders make-over “Fotos y Recuerdos”) and more
fully achieved with the more English-heavy hits of “Dreaming of You” (which
included “God’s Child,” her duet with David Byrne). On “Anthology,” her
genre-juggling skills shine as she flies through makeshift Latin house
(“Amame”), eases into generic dance-floor schlock (“I’m Getting Used to
You”) and rattles off ’80s synth-happy freestyle as if she were Debbie Deb
or Lisa Lisa (“Always Mine”).

By putting this disc first, her father reminds us that Selena’s fame and
success weren’t based on her reputation as an interpreter of traditional song styles. As with the flashy clothes she designed and sold at her boutique, Selena Etc. (remember the purple pantsuit Jennifer Lopez wore at the beginning of the biopic “Selena”),
Selena had a knack, not for preserving regional styles, but for transforming
them into colorful pop hybrids.

The mariachis and cumbias on Discs 2 and 3 (her waist
and legs) bear witness to this. The new mix of “Dame Tu Amor” has
enough brass and strings to make it sound like a Bacharach-penned ranchero,
and “Qu* Creas” proves that when she needed to, Lake Jackson, Texas’
favorite good girl could be all finger-pointing fierceness. And though
“Anthology” curiously omits the adored “Amor Prohibido,” it at least has the
good sense to wind down with the playful and commanding “Baila Esta
Cumbia,” a quintessential slice of cumbia-pop that rightfully remains one
of Selena’s most beloved singles.

When Selena played the Houston Astrodome in 1994 and mixed a number of
these songs with her own refried medley of disco classics (“Last Dance,”
“The Hustle,” “On the Radio”), she was living directly within the Tejano
pop moment. The same medley shows up on “Anthology,” but in place of 61,000
screaming fans (the same number who visited her casket when it was on
public display at a convention center), we get drum machines. Her
performance is still stunning; only now, all we’re left with is a manufactured memory.

I spotted it on the map, a black dot perched alone on the peninsula’s featureless north coast. That could only mean semi-tropical Caribbean paradise, right? We’d heard nothing about the place, so it must be truly undiscovered. The guidebook was quiet on the subject, naming only the road to get there.

Actually, calling it a road was generous. Parts were washed out and other parts had never been completed. We piloted cautiously. By midday the thick scrub jungle gave way to a strange, stark landscape. The closer we got to Dzilam, the bleaker it became. Hurricanes in recent years must have hit hard — rusted cars sank in the coarse sand, and what buildings we saw were abandoned. Tall, dead palm trees stood in eerie rows, their crowns of fronds snapped off by high winds. Beyond them, the ocean sulked, gray and uninviting. We passed very few functional vehicles, only the occasional pickup truck with forlorn characters riding silently in back.

“There’s something creepy about this landscape,” I finally admitted. We’d both been avoiding this truth all afternoon.

“Yeah, the hurricanes must have wiped out the economy,” Erik agreed. “It seems really depressed.”

“There’ll be something good going on,” I wished.

We passed a roadside cemetery full of rotting floral arrangements. I began to think we weren’t going to find a beach full of cheesecake on holiday, as we had in Tulum.

We rolled into town. The main drag had a few shops and a restaurant, but none was open. Sand blew across the streets and drifted around the steps of the crumbling buildings. Not a soul was present. We parked and walked to the end of the street, which merged abruptly with the misshapen and littered beach. A few battered fishing boats lay haphazardly on the sand. The late afternoon breeze carried a chill. There was absolutely nothing appealing about the place. We were hungry, but there were no prospects here.

We poked down another dry mud street. A desiccated structure with lettering that once said “Casa de Huispedes” showed signs of life. The door was locked, but humans made sounds inside. Our knocks produced a slow-moving, older man in a cowboy hat. He considered our request for food and lodging carefully, as if he wasn’t sure he was up to the task.

“Un cuarto para dos … con una o dos camas?” One room for two, with one or two beds, was a question meant to assess our masculinity.

“Dos camas,” we reassured him.

“No tengo dos camas. Solamente una cama y una hamaca.” So he didn’t even have two beds. But I’d been fine in a hammock in Tulum — this would be fine, too. And dinner?

He pondered the request, scratching his chin. Finally, he supposed he could go into town and find something to cook for us, but it would take two hours. Not sure that we had any options, we agreed.

He gave us a key and pointed toward the room. As we shuffled through the junk littering his yard, I was sure we were his first guests in a long time. Erik opened the door to our room and felt for the light. When the bare overhead bulb glared, he yelped.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Look!” he said, pointing to my sandaled feet.

Walking across the doorstep like a pet that had just been let in strode a prawn-sized scorpion. It waved its upturned tail and stinger assembly, which looked very much like an extended middle finger. “We haven’t even moved in and we have a visitor. A hostile one, at that,” I said. Erik kicked at it until it turned and scurried out.

The room was as bleak as the rest of the town — carelessly painted, dirty, cold, without furnishings of any kind except a grim mattress. “I’ll take the hammock,” I volunteered. As much as we loved lounging in hotel rooms, reading and napping, I couldn’t picture relaxing here. “Let’s walk around the town some more before dinner.” Erik readily agreed.

We found only one open establishment — a tiny, sad tienda with little more than
Chiclets and candy for sale, certainly nothing that would qualify as an
appetizer. Erik asked the toothless shopmistress where we could get something to
eat.

“En mi casa,” she replied. “Tienes dinero?” We had been in other private homes
on this trip, always enjoying amazing people and surprising food. And we still
had some money, yes. Erik and I exchanged glances — getting to know local people
could be the saving grace of this place.

The old woman promptly closed up her store and motioned for us to follow her
down a sand path. We stopped at a structure that was no more than a hut, crudely
made of cinder blocks, cardboard, sheet metal and salt-crusted blankets. I
couldn’t believe she lived here. She called out, and a wizened man, apparently
her husband, appeared from within. He regarded us suspiciously. They talked
briefly in muted tones; he then changed his demeanor, introduced himself as
Diego and welcomed us grandly inside.

On every trip there are times when you feel utterly far from home. Inside, we
saw that Diego and the woman lived in absolute and total poverty. They had
nothing. The shack barely qualified as a roof overhead — Diego had made crude
attempts to repair storm damage that his house had not been built to withstand.
Rough sticks held dirty blankets where walls should have been. A crumbling
table commiserated with the mud floor. Diego directed us to sit
down. Then, as if this was an excellent seaside eatery, he inquired as to our
preference for dinner.

I had severe second thoughts — was eating here a good idea? Aside from the
question of hygiene, we were certainly imposing on these people. And we’d
already sent our innkeeper off to fetch dinner. But Erik was both fearless and
starving; he quickly rattled off our favorite choice of Yucatecan cuisine: rice,
fish, garlic and limes. He even asked for a beer, which, amazingly, they had.
While the woman prepared the meal, Diego broke the awkward silence with a
sweeping gesture of his arm. “La vida aquí es muy, muy buena.” Life here is
very, very good.

Well, OK, but what he did he do for work? “Soy un pescador. Es un vida muy
rica.” He was a fisherman, and led a very rich life. We were puzzled; he may as
well have said he was an astronaut. There was simply no connection between his
statements and the dire setting in which he made them. We tried to ask him in
our broken Spanish what had happened to the town, but Diego merely steered the
conversation back, insisting that we understand: “La vida aquí es muy buena.” He
asked no questions of us.

With a flutter of apologetic hand-waving and mumbled explanations, the chef
brought three bowls of food. Mine and Erik’s appeared to have the requested
ingredients, while Diego’s contained only rice. For a few moments we confronted
our food in silence, then tasted it.

It was terrible. Tough, salty, dry fish chunks overpowered the glutinous,
undercooked rice. Whole cloves of unpeeled garlic lurked within, and the lime
was moldy. I couldn’t imagine a more appropriate time to humbly accept
generosity, but we simply couldn’t eat it. Diego had no such problem; he
polished his bowl with proud gusto and reminded us again of his excellent
quality of life. Then he stood up, a gesture we were glad to assume meant that
our visit was over.

Except, of course, for settling up. He named an amount, not looking at us as he
spoke. We paid. I was never good at math, and converting dollars to pesos still
confused me. So it wasn’t until we were halfway back to the Scorpion Inn that I
realized we’d spent roughly the price of a fine meal in an expensive restaurant
back home.

Erik was peeved. “Mr. Wonderful Life! After forcing us to listen to his nonsense,
he robs us! And I’m still hungry!”

“Oh, well, they certainly need the money. Maybe they can buy a new house.”
I
wondered if our innkeeper had come up with anything better for us to eat. He
couldn’t do worse, unless he’d gone shopping at Mrs. Wonderful Life’s store.
As it turned out, I needn’t have worried — he hadn’t gone anywhere. The casa was dark and shuttered
when we arrived, although there were a few battered cars parked in front that
hadn’t been there before. We knocked several times before the door cracked open
and a quizzical face — not the innkeeper’s — peered out, then quickly shut the door.
We stood outside for several minutes, confused. The door opened again, and the
same man gruffly motioned us inside.

The room was pitch black except for the harsh glare of a television. In the
flickering light I saw our innkeeper’s face, hypnotized by the screen. He
ignored us completely. Many other men crouched in the room, all equally rapt,
although our presence seemed to make some of them uncomfortable.
On the screen, over a soundtrack of bad instrumental rock music, a skinny white
man with a shag haircut methodically having sex with a panting, flop-breasted redhead.
They diligently plied their craft, then rearranged their various extremities and
orifices and continued work, doggedly. Like an archeologist digging in a special
kind of dirt, I identified the music, the hairstyles, and the species of human
as late 1970s Los Angelenos.

Our host looked up, indifferently. “Es porno,” he explained. Ah.

We stood there in the darkness like alien emissaries — two pale riders offering
heartfelt cheer and goodwill from a distant culture quite unlike the one in
which these men lived. And yet this sordid bit of video flotsam had found its
way from our shore to theirs, arriving before us, and mesmerizing our host so
completely that he forgot all about hospitality, not to mention our dinner.

We skulked out. No one paid us any mind. There was nothing left to do but go
back to our dismal quarters, not an uplifting prospect. In the room, Erik
pondered, “What about this hellhole — did Señor Porno say how much he was going to
charge us?”

“No, I don’t think he did. The rates are probably similar to the restaurant
prices, and I’ll bet he charges extra for the adult TV, just like in a Holiday
Inn. Wasn’t he supposed to bring us blankets and sheets?” The room was barren,
just the way we’d left it.

By now Erik and I had developed a kind of traveler’s ESP — we didn’t need much
discussion to know what the other was thinking. So when I dug around in my pack
for the map, I could tell Erik was right on my wavelength.

“You know what I’m thinking, right?” I confirmed. “We only have a few more days
in Mexico. If we leave now, we could make it to Valladolid in a couple of hours,
get a room there and be back on the beach at Tulum by noon tomorrow. Whaddya
think?”

Erik was already packing. Checking our route again before folding the
map, I transposed some letters in Dzilam de Bravo to the name I’d remember it
by: Dizmal Depravo.

We crept out and stealthily loaded our car, parked right in front of the
Scorpion Inn’s Den of Sin. Erik started the motor and backed out before we
slammed the doors. I checked the fuel gauge. “We’re pretty low on gas. If we
don’t find a Pemex station somewhere on this road, we’ll be sleeping in the car.
You up for that?”

By way of response, Erik pressed his foot to the floor and headed straight into
the deep jungle night.

My traveling partner Erik and I had not set out on this journey in search of voluptuous nudists. Though I give the subject plenty of involuntary thought, we hadn’t discussed it at all when planning the trip. We sought something more than beaches with beer and babes. We could have easily dallied with divorcees in Cozumel or snorkeled with topless office girls at Playa del Carmen. But we wanted to dig deeper into the culture, to meet people who thrive on next to nothing, to feel rhythms thousands of years old. Of course, we’d welcome surprises. All we needed was a comfortable base camp from which to penetrate the mysteries of the Yucatan.

“Restaurante y cabaqas de Don Armando” fit the bill. The amenities were few, but the clientele was young, hip, good looking and extremely casual. Most of them were Europeans in their 20s, on extended holiday, and everyone acted like they had no place else to go. Guys in cutoffs and women in sarongs lounged around, immersed in thick novels in German and Italian. As we surveyed the room, tanned dudes nodded to us coolly; women smiled. Like the heaps of limes and bowls of salsa that lined the counter, the scene was tart and appetizing.

During our second evening there, a couple in the cafe caught my interest — or rather, one of them did. Her tangled mass of black hair cascaded around a heart-shaped face. She wore tattered jeans and a thin peasant shirt not quite up to the job of containing its restless cargo. Silver jewelry, the rustic handmade kind, punctuated her bronzed skin. Her eyes gleamed with mischief. She had a companion; he had two eyes and a nose, I think, I really didn’t notice. When Don Armando announced to the crowded dining room, “Claudia!” she jumped up to claim her plate of steaming seafood. She then consumed the meal with a voracious, single-minded fervor. She plundered the lobster’s inner recesses with her tongue. Butter dripped off her fingers and ran down her chin. She guzzled her beer. I envied the lobster, the willing victim of her lust.

“You’re staring,” Erik pointed out.

“Sorry. What were you saying?”

“I’m trying to get your thoughts on what to do tomorrow.” I focused long enough to agree to explore the nearby Mayan ruins of Tulum early in the morning, before the tour bus onslaught, and then head into the jungle to locate Coba, another ruined Mayan city. With that settled, and with Claudia feeding spoonfuls of sticky flan to her companion, we retired to our cabana for the night.

In the early morning light, Tulum’s silent stone buildings and spectacular setting fired our imaginations. What did the Mayans do in these tiny chambers? Wouldn’t this one be a perfect spot for wild sex with a beautiful stranger? I found myself hoping for another Claudia sighting. As we headed back, two hitchhikers wagged their thumbs; one of them was Claudia. Erik didn’t need to be told what to do. He screeched to a stop, and they clambered in the Volkswagen’s cramped back seat.

Her companion, named Marco, spoke very good English; she, not a word. They were Italians, winding up a typically extended European holiday of six weeks. They had seen much of Mexico and Belize, and were now debating how to spend a few final days before flying back to Rome.

To my delight, we all hit it off. Claudia looked even better by day. Her flashing eyes and smile seemed up for anything. She followed the conversation by prying quick translations out of Marco. He was a sweet and sincere guy. When he suggested the four of us spend the afternoon swimming and soaking up sun, Erik and I did to our plans what the Mayans had done to their cities — abandoned them.

On the beach, as soon as we were out of sight of the cabanas, Claudia pulled at the bit of cotton batik wrapped around her. It fluttered to the sand, useless. She scampered toward the tourmaline sea decorated with only bits of silver on her wrists, ankle and neck.

Marco explained, “She thinks a bathing suit is for, how do you say …?” He made a box shape with his fingers.

“Squares!” I answered. “We left that crowd back in Cancun. I’m especially glad not to be around them today.”

“Not ever!” he grinned.

We men, two of us paler, weaker, with thicker waists and thinner blood than Claudia, nonetheless followed her lead and shed our clothes.

“She’s a beautiful woman, Marco,” I said, stating the obvious. Perhaps he
hadn’t noticed.

“Yes, she is. It’s been interesting traveling with her. She is very
intense and demanding. I would not want to be her lover.”

“You’re not her boyfriend?” I asked, incredulous, and failing to disguise
my delight.

“No, not really. We’re good friends, and we sleep together sometimes, but
she’s not really my type. She insists on total freedom to do what she
wants. Sometimes that’s very hard.” He glanced at me as he spoke, but
otherwise fixed his gaze on Claudia as she romped toward us, sea water
streaming.

I didn’t quite believe him. I thought Marco was perhaps in love with an
unpossessable woman. Not his type? She could charm the pants off the pope.
Although Marco didn’t show it, she must be torturing him by frolicking
through Latin America with whichever strangers she fancied. And how easy it
is in this setting to follow the whims of desire. Mere hours ago, Claudia
was an alluring stranger in a cafe; now we were intimate acquaintances, our
inhibitions crumpled in a heap on the sand.

What was she thinking? Without words, I was left with the language of
looks, posture, attitude. I couldn’t tell; I looked for a sign. Perhaps
Erik and Marco would decide to do something together, like take a hike. But
then what? Perhaps I could impersonate a lobster. With more sun on my
unprotected hide, that would soon be plausible.

The sound of boats crashing through the surf caught our attention. The
sailors expertly negotiated the waves and slid their crafts onto the sand,
jumping out to pull lines and drag them out of the water. The men were
almost black with sun. They wore nothing but swim trunks. We pulled on our
shorts, Claudia applied her sarong, and the four of us ambled over to watch
them. Their gear was basic: long, open boats with high prows to bash the
waves, large outboard motors, swim fins and masks and a few knives. The
bottom of the boats were thick with tuna, halibut, lobsters and crabs.
In our halting Spanish, we asked them simple questions. Yes, they fish
for a living. Yes, they go out every day, just beyond the reef. No, they
don’t work for a large company, they sell directly to the local
establishments. Such as Don Armando, yes.

“I’ll have the tuna,” Erik advised the fisherman.

“I want lobster,” I said, “but I bet Claudia wants the biggest one.” Marco
translated for her and she agreed, laughing.

The scene pulsed with the eternal rhythms of men and the sea, reaping the
timeless harvest with bare hands under a hard blue sky. Then, one brawny
fisherman produced a cell phone and made a quick call. Almost at once a
late model Jeep Cherokee appeared on the beach. The men loaded everything
into it except the boats, which were simply left on the sand, and drove
off, stereo blasting … timelessly up-to-date.

We headed back to the restaurant. Dinner was a swirling blur of butter
sauce, beer and hormones. I meant to indulge cautiously, mindful of the
perils of turista, but I forgot. We dined, we clowned, we carried on. I
charmed, I conjured, I mimed. I teased Claudia into teaching us colorful
Italian expressions for bodily functions, and she applied herself with
glee. But as the evening wound down, I knew she would spend the night in
Marco’s hammock, or perhaps her own, but not in mine. I fought the
disappointment, but it fought back, tormenting me all night.

In the morning Marco dashed any further hope. “We’ve decided to head up the
coast,” he said. “We have to get to Miami for our flight home.”

We sent them off, embracing as if we were old friends, and for a fleeting
moment I captured her in my arms. Claudia was every bit as huggable as I
hoped, but it was only as good as good-bye. Marco shook hands a final time,
pressing a folded paper into my hand. My heart rate doubled. Instead of a
love note from Claudia, it was Marco’s address in Rome. “Look me up
sometime,” he said.

I watched them hike toward the highway. They’d have no trouble getting a
ride. Erik and I were back on our own, aware that we’d willingly discarded
our quest for deep meaning in favor of 110 pounds of unbridled woman,
prancing before us, then vanishing untouched. Did this mean we were just a
pair of dopes with sperm for brains, like the tourist types we sought to
avoid?

“You were the one that tried to will her into your hammock,” Erik pointed out.

“True, but you didn’t seem to mind when she Coppertoned your back.”

“That was exceedingly pleasant,” he admitted.

With very little discussion, we agreed: Claudia was more than a babe. She
was closer to a wild animal, and any self-respecting explorer would gladly
lurk in the bushes to study her mating habits. The only real question was
how to continue without her blood-stirring animal nature. We chose the next
best thing: lunch. I ordered another plate of Don Armando’s lobster — hot,
succulent, wet with butter and helpless in the path of my desire.

Now a third twist has entered the picture. In the last couple of years the flying wedge of the post-Cold War cult of the dollar has reached Baja. With trade barriers down, luxury builders have moved in with their hotel and real estate money. Cabo wants to compete with the Mauis and St. Maartens of the world, to become the place upscale travelers go to get away.

When you visit, you sense these three Cabos rubbing up against each other continuously. I take them in reverse chronological order.

Cabo No. 3: My girlfriend and I live it up

Mexico is a land of nostalgia. That may be why the brand-new $30 million luxury resort Las Ventanas was built to look old. It has the look of a village on a beach. The copper urns that give the walkways visual texture could have been pulled off the set of “All the Pretty Horses.” The furniture is stone and handmade and beautiful. The vast rooms have jacuzzis whose faucets are green with patina. There are a lot of wrought-iron gates. Everything hums here, hiding a lot of hard work and careful planning.

Las Ventanas has four staff members for every guest. “The situation here is almost Indonesian,” Edward Steiner, the general manager, explained to me. He had managed Washington’s Watergate Hotel for years, and now he was teaching 250 people from an intimate culture how not to be. He had put the employees in sage and khaki uniforms, which the hotel took back to wash every night. A network of staff tunnels had been built underneath the public areas. Each week he posted a lesson on the walls. Shortly before we got there the lesson had been: “Own your perimeter.” Anything that happened within 10 feet of a staff member was his or hers to deal with. The lesson was already taking. Our towels were refolded each time we left the room.

Las Ventanas was enormously seductive. The sky was deep blue with puffy El Greco clouds. The water was light green, the cerulean swells marked by the splash of putty-colored pelicans. The cuisine was Mexican-Mediterranean, full of cilantro and tuna paillard. My girlfriend and I agreed this was the most relaxing place we’d ever been to, on a par with the womb. Better, in fact, because of that waveless pool. When you swam, the displaced water overflowed into a kind of outer moat, which recycled it silently into the main tank. Doing laps was as tranquil as reading. There was the sea, then the waveless pool, then the Texan women reading Vogue.

I took up a post on a stone barstool in the pool and started reading a book about travel writer Bruce Chatwin. Chatwin chucked his job and went to Patagonia in the middle of winter. He wanted to get away from dour England, but what kind of person went to Baja out of season? It was hot, if pleasant by the water. I asked, but most guests were not eager to talk.

You could talk to the staff though. They were young and educated. They came from everywhere but Baja: Mexico City, Guadalajara, Acapulco. Under Steiner they had developed the esprit of actors with day jobs. They seemed in the deepest sense un-Mexican, because they had a less brutal idea of what work had to be. My girlfriend had noted something else. One of the hotel’s drivers introduced her to a new word: Seqa. It was an alternative to Seqorita and Seqora: “Ms.” We were delighted. We started to try it out. The results weren’t promising. The women laughed. The male staff started hanging out by our bungalow.

I know luxury is something people go a good distance out of their way for, but although the resort was doing what it did wonderfully, for us it began to feel a bit weird. Being waited on is uncomfortable, especially being waited on by people you relate to so well. We began to subvert the group-think in small ways. We made our bed, putting the previous night’s gift of a ceramic starfish back on the covers. My girlfriend started keeping food in the room, so no one would have to walk down those long tunnels just to bring us breakfast rolls. The maids found it and threw it out, owning their perimeter. It was time to break out.

It was nearly nightfall, Saturday night, and tiny
Xapoteca children in Cabo’s tourist center shoved little
dolls and candy hearts at us. Men stood in plywood booths
shouting, “Information? Información? Auskunft?” They had
brochures for hotels, snorkel trips, charter boats, craft
stores. The college students were pouring in. What was here
for them? Why had they come? Perhaps because of the 10
restaurants in town with “shrimp” in their names: The
Drunken Shrimp, The Crazy Shrimp, The Happy Shrimp, Shrimp
Bowl and Shrimp Platter and Shrimp Factory, Shrimp
Connection and Shrimp Store and Shrimps ‘R’ Us and Shrimp-O-Rama. There is also a Planet Hollywood and a Hard Rock
Cafe. For this, and other things, the new Cabo makes no
apologies.
The students move through a well-insulated little
circuit of bars beginning with Cabo Wabo, then Cocomo, then
moving on to the Giggling Marlin and ending at Squid Roe,
which doesn’t close until 3 a.m. “What you see in Mexico
stays in Mexico,” one Squid Roe sign read. Port towns –
Provincetown, Key West — tend to make that promise. People
will do things they won’t do at home. House tequila slingers
climbed on tables, placed a greasy hat on a patron’s head
and forced them to down huge shots sprayed from a bota. The
girls on the dance floor looked ready to take their shirts
off. Money moved quickly. Pesos, dollars, credit cards. On
our way home, we passed groups of teenage American girls
trying to talk their way into Planet Hollywood. They were
turned away.

That shocked me. I had never seen the
law enforced in Mexico before. There are a million
regulations on the books in Mexico — zoning, anti-pollution
laws, electoral safeguards — a mirror of our own legalistic
system. But they are routinely ignored. In a country with a
multibillion-dollar drug industry and an infant mortality rate so
much above ours, who’s going to worry about water
conservation? Was a new attitude creeping in with American
money? Perhaps not. I watched two traffic cops in Cub Scout-blue uniforms pulling over cars. Some got tickets. Some
didn’t. A skinny man in a button shirt approached me (I’ll
call him Armando). He had family in Brooklyn. I spoke
Spanish so well. My girlfriend was so beautiful. Were we
Italian?

Armando was a hustler. He worked out of a sidewalk
booth, and his job was to offer tourists a rental car
discount in return for their having breakfast at his
employer’s hotel. I still don’t quite see how it worked.
Much of Cabo is under construction, and you learn to accept
works in progress. He gestured at the cops and rubbed a
finger in his palm. I asked him how this all had come to be.
He rubbed his hands together again. “Drug money? NAFTA
money?” I asked. He laughed. He pointed to the illuminated
globe of the Planet Hollywood sign, one of Cabo’s tallest
buildings. Planet Hollywood money. Hard Rock Money.

What interested me about fishing wasn’t the killing.
Fishing for marlin is like prospecting for gold anyway: You
generally come up empty. There are days when the entire Cabo
fleet of 100 boats doesn’t catch anything. Remember
Hemingway’s Santiago, his endlessly patient Old Man,
waiting, waiting, waiting for a marlin?

A year to the week before our visit to Cabo, a man
named Ed Kilwien of Kirkland, Wash., had landed a 910-pound
blue marlin. It took him three hours. In his picture in the
Los Cabos News, he looked slightly stoned, the fish hanging
from a contraption far above his head like it was about to
be dropped on him. I didn’t want to remove a magnificent
fish like Ed’s from the sea, but that wasn’t a problem. As I
understood it, except in tournaments, the boats in Cabo San
Lucas practice what’s called catch-and-release. Once you
hook a fish, you haul it in, snap a picture and either pull
the hook or cut the line. That I could deal with.

The concierge at Las Ventanas, a man named Marco, had a
gift for conjuring things — discount phone certificates,
rental cars, perfectly packed picnic lunches. We had been
unable to get space on a boat ourselves, but he had already
gotten us a boat from one of the best fleets in the harbor:
Picante. They had carried Ed Kilwien to glory. Our captain,
Capitá Hugo, was clearly a comer. He had a gold marlin
charm around his neck and wrap-around shades and was only 30
or so. He had caught 230 marlin last year and 240 already
this year. I told him when I’d gone fishing in 1974, I’d
hooked a sailfish off Mazatlán on the western coast of the
mainland. Jumping and tail-walking on the line, it might
have been the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen. The
captain and mate had fought over it. “Fuck,” Capitá Hugo
said, “in Mazatlán they’ll eat anything. Here we let them
go.”

We sailed past El Arco, the rocks at the end of Baja.
The Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Cortes join here. From the
water you see a different Baja. Because, of course, Cabo San
Lucas is not much like the rest of Baja. North of it and its
sister town of San Jose del Cabo, known collectively as Los
Cabos, things thin out quickly. There are the starkly
beautiful coasts where surfers hang out in their beat-up VW
Beetles. There are long sierras of burned grass and lush
mountains where rain clouds pile overhead. Everywhere runty
horses graze and steer meander down the road, trailing visitors as if they might be edible grass. Everywhere, the beaches and
sierras are empty.

We were a half mile offshore when suddenly the
continental shelf plunged away. The water was 1,000
feet deep. The mate put bright red plastic squid lures in
the water to catch the roving marlin’s eye. He pulled out
our picnic hamper from the hotel. Mostly he and Capitá Hugo
ignored us, steering their powerful boat in long arcs,
listening to CDs. We had a lot of technology on that boat.
We had a Robertson AP300X autopilot to help us steer, a Furono FCU 582 sounder to
spot the fish and a Furono 2681
display radar to make sure we didn’t hit anything else. We
were 35 feet long, weighed 18 tons and had dual inboard 750
horsepower engines capable of 31 knots. The boat had cost
$350,000.

That afternoon, we didn’t catch anything. Three hours
of trawling, the diesel smoke floating back into our faces,
and the marlins pitched a shutout. In fact we gave something
back. My girlfriend got sick and threw up the tuna steak
from Las Ventanas over the side. She used a deck rag
to clean up, and she admitted that just that little act of
retaking her perimeter had given her pleasure. When we got
back to port, I tried to tip Capitá Hugo. “For what?” he
asked, and walked away.

Our last day in Los Cabos we went back for another try.
It was 7 in the morning. The waiters at Cocomo were
cleaning up, but they were still dancing. A man was working
out on a treadmill in a harborside athletic club. Capitá
Hector took us out this time. “Hector,” he said, “King of
the Trojans.” He was heavier and older than Capitá Hugo. He
worked for Leo’s, one of the smaller fleets. We steamed out
of the harbor on his 25-foot trawler. On his marine radio
Capitá Hector gossipped with other captains. We bought a
bait fish the Mexicans call lisa from a little boat that
pulled up at our side. We caught some skipjack in case we
sighted a marlin. The lisa was the appetizer, the skipjack
would be the meal.

We trawled and we circled. Capitá Hector
opened a beer and scanned the horizon. He and his mate,
Gregory, sang old fishing songs with us. We had not had time
to get food, so they nicely shared their sandwiches. Capitá
Hector did a little marlin dance. After an hour, a line
popped. At last, a fish — hooked, I was sure, not by
technology but by our good karma.

I got into the fighting chair and dug in. The rod bent
almost to the stern gunwale. My muscles tightened. I
bent over the rod to keep it close to my chest, where my
strength is. The captain and mate watched as I began reeling
in. The fish rolled and tugged, but immediately I knew it
could not be a marlin. There was too little fight. Still, it
was a significant fish. I slowly began taking in line. I
would pull the rod back, then reel in as I lowered it. There
were times when I thought it had gone to sleep on me, other
times when I nearly lost my arms tugging. It was confusing
work.

Finally I dragged up a huge mahi-mahi. It was splendid
looking, a cascade of gold and green. I felt some sort of
charge, taking this iridescent thing out of the deep. It
was almost a psychological moment, like an old nightmare. I
looked forward, for the same reason, to throwing it back,
returning it. My girlfriend drew near to take a photograph.
I would call it “Picture of My Id.” Just then, Capitá Hugo
brought out a wooden club and whacked the fish on the head.
“Makes buen seviche,” he said. He threw it in the bin. He
was, it turned out, from Mazatlán.

My girlfriend was green. I was greener. As we sailed
on, we could see rigor mortis settling in, in the huge curved
tail sticking out of the stowing bin. A kind of guilt
settled between us, like we’d slain the albatross. I knew
this was ridiculous. Mahi-mahi are food fish, and I knew that
it was wrong to waste food. They had caught a fish and then
they had killed it. What could be more natural? These men
had no use for bourgeois squeamishness. We sailed on, and
caught nothing else. No barracuda, no sailfish, no marlin.
Capitá Hector drank his last beer, Gregory reeled in the
lines, the tiny trawler pointed its bow to port. We were
heading back, back to the post-industrial proving ground, to
that mix of dust and dollars that is Baja at century’s end.