The Uber pulled away from the airport, and the coastline began to split in two. On one side stood luxury hotels facing clear blue water; figures moved on balconies, and tourists waded in the surf or lay sunbathing on the sand. On the other side, low houses sat scattered in small clusters, their walls blurred by patchy paint and dust. The roadside plants were coated in gray, the concrete road buckled and potholed, and dust rose behind the car. It looked like the road I remembered from home—so rough I could almost hear people and dogs sneezing at once.
Inside the resort, most guests were American, and many were severely overweight. The staff, by contrast, were almost all local Mexicans—dark-skinned, slim, some downright wiry. The central pool stayed full of heavy guests letting the water take the weight off their bodies. The hotel kept them busy with water aerobics, wine-tasting classes, evening acrobatics, or live singers—everything arranged to keep the paying guests happy.
Prices there were startlingly low. A meal for two often came to sixty or seventy dollars, generous and delicious, which would be hard to imagine in Seattle. An Uber ride of twenty minutes cost about ten dollars. The drivers usually spoke little English and drove in silence, their faces solemn. I kept trying to catch their eyes in the rearview mirror—what was in them? The strain of making a living, or simple exhaustion from long days on the road? At each stop I added a little extra tip, quietly feeling that their days were not easy.
At the second hotel, the pattern held: the staff were Mexican, the guests about eighty percent American, with a few Asian faces scattered among them. After breakfast one morning, I walked around the pool looking for the restroom and came across a cleaning woman mopping the floor. I asked in English; she did not understand. I opened a translation app, but the network stalled. Waiting there, I felt awkward, as if I had become an interruption to her work. Once she understood what I wanted, she set the mop aside and walked me to the restroom door. People there were often like that—several times when I asked for directions, they took me all the way to where I was going.
Coming out of the restroom, I noticed three Americans on the loungers by the pool: one scrolling through a phone, one reading a Kindle. The cleaning woman was mopping behind them. In that moment it struck me that while slavery had been abolished, economic servitude had not. Los Cabos seemed to be serving another country—feeding it well, looking after it, cleaning up after it.
I went over and thanked the cleaning woman in clumsy Spanish. She looked a little surprised, then smiled happily, as if no guest had ever come back just to say thanks. Back in my room, I searched around and eventually lent fifty dollars through Kiva to a Mexican borrower. I hope life on this land can become a little easier for more people.
The place is beautiful, the people are kind—and life there is hard.