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Just north of Puerto Vallarta, the shore of Banderas Bay was once wilderness edged by a no-shoulder, two-lane asphalt strip that snaked up the jungle-draped coast to Tepic where the Nogales to Guadalajara Highway ran. Now, that coastline is called the Riviera Nayarit, and it smothers the old road eighty-plus kilometers north to the holiday colonies of Canadians and Americans at Rincon de Guayabitos and La Peñita. The road itself is four-lane freeway, California traffic-mad most of the way. The tourist industry on Mexico's west Pacific coast continues its juggernaut growth, and the old self-sustaining ways of life in the rural and coastal fishing villages of western Mexico continue to vanish.
Puerto Vallarta has grown from a tiny village into a shrine of luxurious tropical decadence with half a million attending disciples. Sayulita, thirty miles north, is smaller, but more of a monster, a tumorous growth that consumed a village of fishermen's families in a fever of money and opulent banality. The sensation that a traditional way of life is fading away, and the continued contemporary distortion of a region's cultural character, compel me to fix in place, to set in scene and mood, part of what has been lost: the places, people and way of life I came to know four decades ago in Sayulita, now lost.
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The author of a dozen books, including poetry, fiction, and regional history, Robert Richter has a fifty-year relationship with Latin America, and that cultural geography inspires his work. In 2000 Richter won the Nebraska Arts Council's Literary Achievement Award for nonfiction, and in 2007, he was a Fulbright Research Fellow in Buenos Aires. Richter has also been a wheat farmer, substitute teacher, and tour guide in Latin America. Besides the 'Something' series, Richter's other books on Mexico include Search for the Camino Real: a history of San Blas and the Road to get there; Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and the Roots of Mexico's New Democracy; and Sayulita: Mexico's Lost Coastal Village Culture, which received the Silver Award in the multicultural division of the Kopps-Fetherling International Book Awards in 2020.
