Prof writes of a Mexico unseen by most

by Abel Horwitz

Daily Lobo

In the '70s, when UNM Professor of Anthropology David Stuart was a grad student, he wandered into a Mexican fishing village named Guaymas.

There, without enough money for a hotel room or much of a desire to be part of the masses of tourists, he did something that the other American visitors didn't do. He made friends with the locals.

For years he's been delighting his friends with stories of his travels around Mexico, but it wasn't until 2001, after a tragedy in his family, that he decided to write them down. He titled the first book The Guaymas Chronicles, which went on to win a few small awards as well as a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize.

Recently, he released Zone of Tolerance, tales of his experiences in Guaymas' red-light district.

"What happened to me was that I was getting to know folks from stratas of society that the tourists didn't pay attention to," he said. "I made friends with small-business owners, taxi drivers, waiters, girls."

Stuart, who had recently broken up with his fiancee, began exploring the town.

"Like any 25-year-old guy who's marriage goes south, I went looking for the night clubs," he said.

Asking his new friends for directions to the clubs, he was introduced to Guaymas' Zona de Tolerancia, or, red-light district, and, more specifically, Club Rio Rita.

"Rio Rita was the best run old-fashioned night club in Central Mexico. There were no pimps, no mafia, and the drug runners weren't a problem," he said. "This was as classy as a place as you could get."

He said he got to know some of the people there well.

"To the girls it was so strange to have a gringo who spoke Spanish, and they were constantly telling me that I shouldn't become a regular, that I needed to find a nice girl," he said.

Zone of Tolerance takes place a year after The Guaymas Chronicles. At that point, Stuart had come back to UNM, gotten his doctorate and proposed to his future wife, Cynthia.

"A friend that I had made in Guaymas, a waitress named Mercedes, called me up and asked me to be the godfather of her child," he said. "So, I went back down to the town for the baptism. This is where the second book begins."

Zone of Tolerance isn't a sexual exposÇ, but rather a story about the lives of the people who were there, who they really were, and how they wound up there.

"The people in this book are the kind of people - street kids, waiters, taxi drivers - that are real people," he said. "They have dignity and struggle in their lives. There's this idea in America that a little bit of poverty turns you into a gangster, but this isn't real."

Stuart speaks fondly of the people of Guaymas.

"I wrote these books so I could tell the stories of people who rarely get to see their stories told," he said. "These solid, gracious, reliable people. My relationships with some of these people have lasted 36 years. I had a heart attack in March and it was the Guaymas taxi drivers who called me to make sure that I was OK."

Stuart sees his books as tales of morality.

"If a person's worth is measured not by importance, notability or celebrity but in basis of character, then these people who are mostly ignored in American culture meet the test of character," he said.

All the royalties that Stuart has collected from these two books have gone to his friends in Guaymas.

"Be careful who you ignore," he said. "They might be the most reliable characters you ever meet."