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Spring-breakers ignore Mexico's rich culture
By Matthew Brown/The Record (Bergen County, N.J.)
CANCUN, Mexico � By day he's Luis Carlos Gonzalez, 27, father of a 6-month-old boy, college graduate, son of a Guadalajara engineer.
By night he becomes "Pipo," purveyor of pint-sized daiquiris and other cocktails, facilitator of widespread drunken chicanery at a bar known as Senor Frog's.
As Pipo, Gonzalez sees young adults on spring break in their prime and at their worst, as they descend on Cancun from around the United States for week-long no-holds-barred indulgence.
Since moving here five years ago, he's made far more money off them and other visitors to this Yucatan resort than he might have made elsewhere, he said. And it's fine by him if the "crazy students" don't care to stop partying long enough to join more sedate tourists in exploring the area's ancient cultural heritage.
"They're on vacation. They can do anything they want," he said of the students who flock in to take advantage of the 18-year-old drinking age. And if they have a good time, "They may be our future customers."
Tour booker Jorge Diaz, who has worked here for 25 years for Caribe Maya Tour Co., has a more jaundiced take:
"The only thing spring-breakers book are bar packages � wherever there's drinking. They don't care about culture like the Europeans do. They only think about their next conquest, their next affair with a girl.
"They're rude. They drink all the time; drugs, sex. Do they do this at home? They're supposed to be getting an education. They don't seem very educated. They act like we have no rules, no laws. We have rules."
Mexicans tend to be cautious when asked to size up American tourists. But their vantage point definitely seems to be a one-way mirror: The spring break scene in Cancun is one infatuated with itself, with Mexico merely the exotic stage upon which the fantasy plays.
When Eric Schmeltz of William Paterson University was asked if he or his eight companions had any plans to leave the "Zona Hotelera" � Hotel Zone � and taste the unique Yucatan culture, he looked genuinely surprised by the question.
"No, not really," he replied. "I hadn't thought about it. No, probably not."
Then he returned to craning his neck to catch a glimpse of the next participant in a well-attended wet T-shirt contest, staged on the beach behind one of Cancun's estimated 65 large hotels.
An overwhelming majority of students who come here never even make the short journey over the bridge separating the Zona Hotelera from its lively and colorful city proper, where thousands of the bar, restaurant and hotel workers live.
Fewer still visit nearby Mayan ruins such as Chichen Itza or Tulum, considered two of the most spectacular examples of that ancient culture's great architecture.
"Chichen Itza is amazing," said Manuel Alarcon Mujica, a former restaurant manager in the hotel zone who now drives a taxi downtown. "The equinox is something that everyone must see. The Mayans were an amazing people, they knew everything about astronomy."
Mujica said he spends much of his day trying to lure Americans on out-of-town excursions, but that he rarely succeeds.
A steady trickle of students do visit the flea market just beyond the hotel zone, but Mujica said in his six years as a taxi driver, only a handful have wanted to go farther.
"When you don't see a place, you don't know it," he said.
The spring equinox also made for a national holiday Thursday, and downtown, children celebrated the day off from school by playing in the streets.
In the section of town leading to the hotel zone, those streets are wide and paved. The pavement gives way to pockmarked and rocky dirt lanes as you get farther away, toward where hotel service workers � paid as little as $5 a day � live in the row upon row of five- and six-story apartment blocks that make up the Corales, Lombardo and Doncelles 28 neighborhoods.
Indeed, like other parts of developing Mexico, Cancun proper is a mosaic of rich and poor. Some of the neighborhoods are downright destitute, with ramshackle cement houses and barefoot kids struggling to fly kites assembled from scraps of trash. Others are prosperous, with much-acclaimed seafood restaurants and newly painted houses with SUVs parked behind gated entrances.
Those diverse neighborhoods are where vendors sell traditional tamales, peanuts sprinkled with salt and lime, and chicharons � fried pork skins.
Meanwhile, scrawny dogs roam everywhere.
Besides tourism, the only other work seems to be in the service sector and on the fishing boats up the coast. This time of year is for the flood of spring-breakers to Cancun, but other tourism streams continue to flow in the area. About 15 members of the Rutgers Scuba Diving Club, for example, are in nearby Cozumel to explore coral reefs. They're spending a week in one of the world's premiere diving spots.
Indeed, spring break is just a fragmentary part of the vacation world created symbiotically by the Mexican and American tourist industries. Many of the American-based chain hotels and shops lining the 22-kilometer-long Kulculcan Boulevard � the main avenue of the Zona Hotelera � pre-date the student visitors.
From Chili's and TGI Fridays, to the Gap and the Hilton, the resort section is Americanized to an extent that far exceeds the total economic clout of 75,000 spring-breakers expected this season.
Also, the American students are in a way leashed by their tour-booking companies. Most are hooked into "all-inclusive" packages with meal plans and pre-paid, all-you-can-drink entrance to particular bars.
Meanwhile, back at Senor Frog's, Gonzalez was about to assume the role of Pipo for another night. He would work from 4 p.m. until well into the morning.
"To us it's very important" to have such customers, he said. "The life here is quiet, and you make a lot of money.
"Well, it's not quiet here," he added as the bar began to sway with music and students poured in for another night of Cancun, American-style.
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