Sinaloa Amable

We´ve crossed some landmarks recently, crossing from Sonora into Sinaloa, crossing the tropic of cancer and spending over a month biking in Mexico. We arrived in Los Mochis last week, a city spawned by a north american cooperative´s venture to create a utopic city on the shores of the Gulf of California - an effort which required them to dig a huge trench to divert fresh water into town, a project that took two years, but got taken over by a lone capitalist and a different city was created in the model of New York.

In a hotel lobby I found a newspaper that had a few articles about tourism in Sinaloa. Apparently, the US diplomat to Sonora and Sinaloa put out a travel advisory for Americans to avoid travel in the state of Sinaloa. I thought this was dumb from the start, but am now convinced that this man is an idiot: I´ve never met more genuinely friendly, outgoing, generous, happy people anywhere. We´ve been hugged by a crowd of people at a gas station. We´ve been invited to people´s homes to camp. Girls from the bolt shop bought us Lunch at a Chineese resturant (where pxl´s sleeveless t was scandalous). They gave us gifts for the dia de la Virgen de Guadalupe. Roaming agricultural irrigation workers offer us shelter and cokes for breakfast. Everyone wants to help us, give us a ride to get food, give us advice, build us a fire, or just stand around supportively.

Sometimes, people ask why is it that they cannot go to the U.S. This is a hard one to answer, but I can only convey that I don´t agree with these policies and would be as friendly to them in California as they are to me here. After all, it was part of Mexico. But to explain why those policies exist, the institutional and cultural racism, hipocritic trade policies, xenofobia, ignorance... it saddens me. People here brag about how free it is here compared to the north, and many times I see examples of this, for better or worse. Why is this? My spanish is good enough to explain the prision-industrial complex, the privitization of prisons, subsequent legislation that creates more prisoners, the racism and injustice there too...

We´re now in the tropics and have left the desert, on to the Jungle!