Contradictions of “Tourist Ddestination”

Brent Harold discovers that the buildings in San Miguel used to be white-washed, By governmental decree or committee the coloring of the town was changed from white to the palette of blood red, oranges, earthy ochres we see today. This was done to attract tourism. So he wonders are we seeing the true city or a town made up to look like something we want to see?

He concludes by wondering if there is a fundamental contradiction of travel: you go to a far-off place, the whole idea being to get to know an exotic destination, something profoundly different from where you live. But when you look closely what you get is a reflection of yourself, what you want, what you find appealing. When we visit a tourist destination what we tour is tourism itself.

For me, what I get in San Miguel is an exotic location filled with color. I've spent over 70 years in Portland, Oregon. The predominant color from late fall to early spring is gray. The trees have lost their leaves. They stand like black skeletons against the sky. The rare winter snow changes the view from gray to a wonderful, pure monocolor, but comes less frequent with less abundance each year. The houses tend to be painted in some grayed tone. The buildings tend to blend for the most part into the sky with the exception of the 33-story US bank tower called "big pink" after its pink marble cladding.

We painted our house Marigold. It was shocking at first, very un-traditional, but when you stood in our red kitchen and looked outside at the marigold siding, you could imagine being someplace exotic. When living in San Miguel, you have the option of color at every turn. The Hacaranda, the Bouganvilla, the colors of the houses and churches, the perfectly blue sky, and the black clouds againjst a setting sun makes me wonder why it took so long to get to this city at 6,500 feet in the middle of Mexico.