EDITION 89

JULY 2008

The Beats in Mazatlan

By Ernesto Hernandez Norzagaray
President of the Historic Society of Mazatlan

Jack Kerouac, perhaps accompanied by his faithful friend Neal Cassidy, traveled around North West Mexico in the 1950s and wrote about it in a story called "Mexico Fellaheen" (in the book of stories called Lonesome Traveler). Mexican sociologist Jorge Garcia Robles wrote about this in his book "Mexico Inocente" and rescued the story from the void. In his piece, Kerouac tells the story in a language written in Beat code. It is the story of his ramblings in these parts of the country. He shows us a dark world with a certain mystical air, taking us by the hand along extra sensory routes that the straight reader may find a bit difficult to grasp since his experiences are not those of a mere tourist who is looking for just sun, beach, beer and sex.

However there is little of the known in this text. It has revealing facts that show us our domestic violence on one side such that which there is in a pueblo of a few thousand inhabitants called "the capital of opium". It tells of the everyday life of those pueblos back in the 50s where small, great tragedies were almost always the result of a drunken binge or friendly crises. The unknown Mexican writer Manuel Lazcano also writes about this in his autobiography called "Una Vida en la Vida Sinaloense"

We know that the Beats were some characters who had traveled around the USA, especially on the mythical Route 66 that runs from New York City to southern California. They wrote extensive poems and stories of the things that went down along the way, such as the famous On the Road, which continues selling around 100,000 copies each year in various languages.

The other trip that these writers showed us through their testimonies was a journey to the human essence. It was a search that started with stripping away material things and living with the most elemental, and from there, search the inner self, the “I” inside. Contrary to the opinion that they were “rebels without a cause”, many of them subscribed to the Buddhist world or to the leanings of Zen.

Mexican Adventures
Many young American folks of that era lived between the memory of the nuclear bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the paradox of a crazy world turned upside down by consumerism. Seeking atonement from guilt, many of them decided to distance themselves from the well being of the American way of life and they fled from their country.

Some of them took shelter in Mexico. Among them were William S. Burroughs and his wife, Joan, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassidy, Allen Ginsberg and Lucien Carr who traveled to Mexico City. Burroughs not only lived in Mexico City, but actually killed his beautiful wife there in a drunken moment of playing with a gun and trying to shoot a glass off her head. Unlike William Tell, he failed. Once again, the old maxim that weapons and alcohol don't mix was proven true. Just like in a cowboy movie, the bullet split her right between the eyes staining her blond hair. Burroughs spent a while in the dungeon at Palacio de Lecumberri and then, after a judicial process with a corrupt lawyer, skipped off to Tangiers to hook up with Paul Bowles.

Mazatlan
Just days or maybe weeks before this unpleasant event that shook the Beat world, Joan, along with Lucien Carr, had been in Mazatlan. There are testimonies of her passing through here thanks to the excellent book by Ton Wolfe, The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, wherein Wolfe presents some of the more unsavory adventures of these characters. These two friends are recalled violating traffic laws in Mazatlan. They hang around the port a few days taking lots of liberties and they fully enjoy the Mazatlan of the 50s when it was still had a country air about it mixed with elitism.

Ken Kesey, who had written a book inspired by his early psychedelic experiences called “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest”, appeared in Mazatlan in the 1960s. He arrived with his band of intrepid travelers called the Merry Pranksters aboard a wildly painted florescent bus named "Further", spouting the rhetoric and sporting lots of the visual trademarks that later popularized (and, according to Kesey, trivialized) the hippie movement. He came to Mazatlan fleeing the police in the United States who most likely didn't share his interest in tripping on "Further". What is for sure is that one of those afternoons while he was in the old Mazatlan bar, O'Brian's, it occurred to him that he could escape persecution by faking his own accidental death. The idea was to hurl a car off of a cliff (not "Further"-that would have been world wide news) with all of his documents aboard. Perhaps he was going to do it off of El Cerro del Vigia, but at any rate he was going to leave a posthumous letter saying "Ocean, Ocean, I'll beat you in the end". He later tried the stunt in Northern California and his plans were frustrated and he fled once again to Mexico, but when he surreptitiously returned to the USA he was apprehended and he spent a season in hell, as Rimbaud would have said.

Tourists and Travelers
By then the beat “movement” was already a reference. "Howl", the ground breaking poem by Allen Ginsberg, was published in 1956 and in 1957 the legendary "On the Road" by Kerouac, a book that was a cult item and an instrument of rebellion for a generation that resisted accepting the detritus of the "American way of life", was published. "Howl" begins like this:

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,"

Those were the years of anti-establishment attitude that would later explode upon the world in the 1960s, in San Francisco, in Paris, in Berlin and in Mexico City. Its pacifist traits and struggle against the extermination of life and nature found in the Beats a point of contact that in many ways is still present. The incessant search for the unknown is another characteristic of the Beats that many share.

Later on in the 1960s, a Beat poet named Robert Creeley came to town and fell in love with the port and wrote a poem called "Mazatlan". Here is one of the poem's fragments:

"the sea, flat / the light, far away / red sky, the swelling of dark clouds / they seem closer, they cross the far away lateral of the dilated sea"

In the end, more then 50 years have passed since these Beats visited Mazatlan, yet their literature is as alive today as any other classic genre.

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Mexico City, 1950s: left to right standing: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky / kneeling left to right: Gregory Corso and possibly Julius Orlovsky

On the left facing the camera: Jack Kerouac / on the right with glasses and cigarette: Allen Ginsberg

 

Peter Orlovsky, William Burroughs, Alan Ansen, Paul Bowles & Gregory Corso in the Villa Mouniera garden, owned by Burroughs in July, 1961.