Digital Overtone

San Luis Potosí

Templo de San Antonio

In the several days I’ve been thinking about this post, I have often been tempted to write at this juncture: "if by ‘what you like,’ you are referring to days and nights interrupted by frequent trips to the bathroom and a feeling of general discomfort in the presence of food, then you’re right!" I have since come to realize the unfairness of that, but I wrote it anyway because I am vindictive and shallow. But now I take it back. My time in, and this review of San Luis Potosí was condemned before I even thought of writing it by forces that really have little to do with the city itself. Despite what I am about to write, if I were to come to Mexico again and someone were to suggest a trip to San Luis, I would not object. I really think it deserves another shot.

I think the nicest thing I can say about San Luis is that it is a lovely city. In many ways it is like an urbanization of that Querétaro I quit for it. Cobbled streets, thin and crowded with feet and wheels, criss-cross in odd, ultimately grid-like patterns. Where plazas do not adorn their intersections, churches, monestaries, and temples do. Here and there dashes of color fill your peripheral vision, but here the likeness begins to fade. Color is just that: an ancillary detail in a grayscale scene. Food chains and major shopping centers crowd their way between smaller establishments, blaring music that competes when it could just as easily coexist. There is less motion and less activity, but less relaxation as well. People wear preoccupation like cologne behind façades of playfulness that dissolve with the sun, and the mist of it covers the plaza, insinuates itself through the side streets, settles over the Historical District like morning fog. After dark clowns appear here too, but they are brash, modern. The setting of the sun offers little beyond empty streets, the occasional souls roaming in twos, but he who arrives alone remains alone: the openness of Querétaro is nowhere to be found.

San Luis Potosí

Calle de San Agustín de Iturbide

Like Querétaro, San Luis is proud of its history, but the people seem mostly disinterested, perhaps a little too modern for my tastes. Or perhaps because the history is just not as interesting. A poet’s home and his period furniture, a preserved monestary, a closed cathedral. Many, many gorgeous churches, all with people inside at all hours. <tangent>Mexican Catholocism is extreme to begin with, but some people literally live inside these churches. I am timid before such devotion and tend not to take pictures; I fear being labeled the godless gringo who photographs the material without respecting the immaterial. A warring sentiment emerges when it strikes me that people who pray all day long are misunderstanding the Christian message entirely by contenting themselves with asking for change, and not setting out to make it, but I keep that to myself as well. Arguing with viejos never ends well, in large part because I can rarely understand more than 25% of what they say.&lt/tangent> Aside from several very old—and potentially very interesting—houses, all of which are now shopping centers and strip malls, this is the cultural, historical center of San Luis Potosí. No revolutionary stirrings here, no echoes of discontent, of subversion. Charm hides in corners, demands to be sought in sidestreets and bookstores, always just out of sight. Action is quotidian, repetitive, with all the spontaneity of habit. I had high hopes for the Festival of Literature, and a few authors exceeded expectations; others did not. Nevertheless, a have a few new names on my list of authors to check out in the *cough*HIGHLY UNLIKELY*cough* event I have time to do extracurricular reading in the next restofmylife. But still, a boy can dream.

San Luis Potosí

Midday in the Plaza de armas

My favorite shots of San Luis are like still frames stolen from a black and white movie. They establish a scene, but there is no motion and there are no voices: everything is still and beautiful and perfect. I shot the drive from Querétaro with the certainty that it would lead to great things, and shot the city itself like, somehow, in one or another of these images I would find what I had been looking for. But I didn’t. San Luis remains truly lovely for a city, but pales next to what came before, and what comes after. On a breezy Saturday in June, the city was inexplicably empty and quiet. And it was just as well. The next morning I was gone.

Posted by Kyle / Mexico and personal and travel