Consider this while bargaining on the beach in Mexico
What I learned about barter while giving English lessons to village vendors
Bartering makes many people uncomfortable. I’ve seen grown men break out in a sweat at the mere thought of having to haggle in a Mexican market, and others scowl with disappointment, even anger, after feeling bested in a bout of bargaining for a beaded necklace or an ironwood dolphin. I fall into the first category. Bartering has always made me feel uneasy. How do I know the right price? Is it fair to grind these people down? Who wants to be cheated?
If Mexican vendors have any English at all, they have enough to barter. On the malecon, the pedestrian walk lining a harbour’s sweep, in major tourist towns like Puerto Vallarta, Acapulco and Cabo San Lucas, vendors speak English well enough to sell their wares, “Hey lady, wanna buy a blanket?” The vendors in small fishing villages like Chacala don’t, even though they need to.
Chacala, where I’ve spent a few winters, is not easy to get to. It is a 1-1/2 hour drive from the nearest airport, on a road that many consider harrowing. Until two years ago, the access road off the main highway was 9 kilometres of pot-holes. But Chacala’s a beautiful place, worth getting to, and it’s always been a favourite of tourists.
Mexican tourists arrive on Mexico’s frequent puentes (bridges literally, referring to long week-ends). The more affluent arrive in cars from Guadalajara and stay in well appointed beach homes. The poor arrive by the busload, spilling out onto the beach and staying in cheap hotels or camping in a dusty palm grove at the water’s edge.
Every Mexican family loves a beach holiday, dragging each other into the waves, getting slightly, or not-so-slightly, drunk on tequila and ballenas (the litre bottles of beer called whales), dancing in the sand to the Mariachis, bargaining on the beach. Bartering is in their culture: they know when to press and when to pay. Many extranjeros (foreigners) don’t.
English speaking tourists, Canadians and Americans who have arrived in Chacala more recently, come only in the winter, but they stay longer and spend lots so they’ve become an important part of Chacala’s economy. The village’s restauranteurs and vendors work all day, plying their goods — jewelry, shrimp, hammocks, baking, T-shirts, hats, coconuts, wood sculptures, ceramic bowls, pineapples, watermelons — up and down the beach, or manning their shops and restaurants well into the night. Although they have a great need for English, they have little time to learn it.
My friend Betty and I offered English lessons in Chacala’s small library across from the school where we volunteered. We wanted to learn Spanish, and we figured we’d get as much as we gave. I learned more than I expected.
A feisty young woman named Daniela was the first to show up. She runs Chacala’s biggest shop, which carries an impressive inventory ranging from sun hats, flip-flops and touristy knick-knacks to some very nice beaded jewelry and some even nicer pictures made of coloured yarn, both made locally by Huichol artisans.
Alexis, a great kid in Grade 5, was our second student, and Gaby, the young mother of a student in the school, was our third. Gaby was a beach vendor, selling earrings her husband made.
I needed a present for a friend and went to the beach to look for Gaby. She wasn’t there so I went to the house where she lived and met her husband, a hippie type surfer dude who was threading a bead on an earring at a table outdoors. I asked if he had more jewellery. He showed me 2 other sets. This was the livelihood for a family of 4 — an inventory of 2 1/2 pairs of earrings?
Gaby and I chatted in Spanglish as she rocked her round-faced and smiling baby in a hammock strung from a strangler fig. She told me how much she enjoyed meeting people on the beach, which came as a surprise to me as I had always thought of it as the worst of jobs. I bought one of the two sets of earrings and I certainly did not bargain for them.
Alexis’ buddies Rodrigo and Ubaldo also came to the English lessons, but they only lasted a time or two before giving up. After that, they hung about the open window of the library, taunting Alexis and trying to tempt him outside. Alexis who was chido, cool enough that he could study English after school and get away with it, ignored them.
Daniela, Gaby and Alexis sat side by side as I taught a flipped-to-English version of Michel Thomas, whose method for teaching Spanish is as good as it gets. We ran through cognates, the give-away words that are alike in both languages — música, telefono, curioso, importante — and focused on the verbs most common for retail: Do you have . . .? Where are . . .?
Alexis role-played as a customer, and Daniela and Gaby tried to answer. “Do you have a bigger size?”, he asked, which came out as “Do you hab a beegair . . . he forgot the word for size . . . tamaño?” They laughed at their mistakes, their tongues twisting around a foreign language.
Over the course of a few sessions, I got to know a little bit about Daniela. She was 30. Had 3 children. Divorced. Remarried. Was a grandmother. Had 3 goals: to learn to swim, to learn to drive, to speak English.
As Christmas approached and more tourists arrived, Daniela could no longer afford to leave her shop so I began going to her. She’d set her notebook on a display of ¡Puerta Vallarta! mugs, and I’d teach her phrases she’d be likely to hear: I like this. I don’t want that. I need 3 of these. Every time I came to the shop, she’d improved. A little. She showed me how she practiced in front of a mirror nailed to a wooden post that supports her roof, trying to get her mouth right. Then we conjugated verbs over and over.
Visiting her store, I learned that despite her open-air shop, her vast inventory, and the fact that her store security consisted of plastic tarps roped over her merchandise at night, she had no insurance. Most vendors don’t, she explained. She also told me that two years before, the winds of an April tormenta (storm) ripped the palapa roof off her tienda (store), destroying everything she had. I wished I’d learned enough Spanish to ask her how she survived that.
One day, after a lunch on the beach of Camarones a la Cucaracha, ‘cockroach shrimp’ deliciously grilled in their shells with a hot chile rub, I went to visit Daniela in her shop. Daniela is always excitable, but this day she was terribly upset.
I asked her what had happened.
She laid an x-ray over a lighted case displaying Huichol yarn art and traced her finger along the fracture line in her son’s heel.
“We had to go to the doctor,” she said. “He has to have a cast.” Then her voice dropped to a whisper, highly unusual for her, and she led me out to the back of her shop to show me a battered white car with a totally shattered windshield.
“Who did this?” I asked.
“My husband has a tienda in the next village. His neighbour becomes very angry. He is shouting. There is no reason. He forced us off the road.” She began to cry. “He started beating the car with a bat. My husband is a very calm man,” she added, as if that explained anything. “That man is crazy.”
“How did you get to the hospital?” I asked, stupidly.
“My mother,” she sobbed.
And how will you pay for the medical bills? I wondered. How will you fix the car?
The next time I dropped in, Daniela was back on keel. Her son still wore his cast. The windshield had been replaced. I have no idea how she managed either, no doubt the typical Mexican solution of indebting herself to family and friends.
That day, Daniela was with her sister Ofelia, who speaks slightly better English and who also runs a shop.
“Can you teach us how to say Es un precio justo?”, Ofelia asked, standing beside a rack of Huichol earrings. “It is art made with love. We sell to Mexicans and foreigners at the same price. Es un precio justo.”
“It is a fair price,” I translated, and wrote it out for them.
Daniela held up the paper and practised in front of her mirror, “Eets a fair price. Eets a fair price.”
I never wanted to bargain again.
This is the 6th story in the weekly publication A Remarkable Education: Lessons Learned in a Mexican Rural School.
One of the fascinating things about Mexico is the way its history lives so vividly in its present. The next story looks at Mexican weekly markets and the surprising origins of Mexico’s artist cooperatives. After that, we’ll return to the two-room school in the fishing village of Chacala.
The previous story describes how my cultural assumptions sometimes got in the way of my good intentions.
Starting in the winter of 2009, Diane Douglas volunteered three years in the two-room school in the fishing village of Chacala, north of Puerto Vallarta. Since 2012, she’s been working to improve online learning at el Colegio Patria, a remarkable rural school in the poor, agricultural town of Las Varas.
