Untamed Shore

Untamed Shore, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Last week me, my partner and our kid went on a short trip to Baja California Sur. My partner's father was from Sinaloa, and a handful of his stepfather's folks live near Guadalajara, but of the three of us I'm the only one who had ever been to Mexico before, and I'm only familiar with BCS, so we decided to start there--especially since the kid only had five days off of school, and we'd need travel time. With just three full days in the country, it made sense to know where we were going.

We landed in La Paz just after noon, and walked exhaustedly around the city, spotting graffiti, protected bike lanes, murals, other tourists. I got the first of several layers of sunburn on the back of my neck, and we discovered that the waterfront boardwalk was packed with locals for the second day of Carnaval. We ate birria tacos, wandered around the whale museum, ate ceviche, and saw so many kinds of cars you never see in the US and the dirt-road suburbs on the edge of the desert. We ate Chinese food just to see what it was like in La Paz.

Our third day, we drove out to Todos Santos, on the Pacific coast of the peninsula. It's a tourist town, full of white money and housing developments without water permits. My partner and I walked through the warm palm-tree night, got catcalled by locals who mistook us for lesbians because of my partner's long hair, met some very good dogs with dusty paws, ate fish tacos.

I have always loved the desert and the ocean, and seeing my partner and kid discover Mexico was so much fun, and also... there is a dry hollowness, a difficulty in the landscape, that lends itself to noir.

Imagine a noir that takes place not in the foggy night, wet streets illuminated by one yellowing streetlight, but rather in desert sun that bleaches and burns everything it touches. Dust blows in from the sorched brown desert hills and forms a thin film of age on every surface. The sky, the ocean, the bougainvillea and the floral dresses are all over-saturated, bright as poison.

I read UNTAMED SHORE in the hotel room, late at night, when we were tired and sunburnt and having conversations with the kid about what it means to be from Mexico if you're seeing it for the first time, and how to be a good tourist in a city full of anti-tourism graffiti. I can't imagine a more perfect combination of story and timing.

Moreno-Garcia captures the time and place perfectly; she captures what I love about the desert, and Baja specifically, in a rendition that is also truly grim and frightening. Viridiana is a subtle character, authentically petty and naive and tough, and the tourists, the small-town townies, the nepo baby cop, the lies--it all fits together like delicate clockwork.