Sayulita: Mexico’s Lost Coastal Village Culture

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 Penita. 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.