Mexican Days: Journeys Into the Heart of Mexico by Tony Cohan

So Mexico stands in the foreign imagination: as permanently exotic, lawless, and named antidote to the gray sterility of its northern neighbor.
— Tony Cohan

The travel writing genre is plagued by self-indulgence, rambling prose, and aimless details. But if the writer of a travel memoir can write him or herself as a likeable character, the pitfalls of the craft may be spun into charm. In his new book Mexican Days, Tony Cohan indulges in nearly every tired habit of travel writers. But Mexican Days is saved from banality by its thoughtful protagonist, so prone to self-examination that the highlight of the book is Cohan’s struggle with himself.

Mexican Days is the chronological sequel to Cohan’s 1999 memoir On Mexican Time. The first book trailed Cohan as he and his wife, Masako, fled Los Angeles for San Miguel De Allende, a small mountain town in Mexico. By Mexican Days, Cohan still spends most of his time in San Miguel, but when the editor of a travel magazine suggests an article about contemporary Mexico, Cohan takes off for a series of trips around the southern portion of his adopted home.

Like many books of the genre, Mexican Days struggles for gravity under a tenuous premise. A book about writing an article spells disaster, although Cohan has numerous strategies to shore up the substance of his book, referencing at various points: the problems with his marriage; world events (the book takes place in the wake of 11 September); and generalized meditations on “disassociate fugues,” a psychological state involving sudden periods of travel. But Cohan’s claims of being compelled to take this journey are degraded by the author’s simultaneous insistence that the journey is at the behest and expense of an editor at a travel magazine. Mexican Days, like Cohan’s days in Mexico, lacks direction.

But rambling themes do not make Mexican Days a failure. Cohan is eminently likeable, and his life has been sufficiently interesting: when he weaves memory into description, he produces beautiful and engaging prose. Cohan displays avid intellectual curiosity and the book is filled with tangents on politics, history and people. Though these sections sometimes seem to force content into the book, Cohan is at his best writing about the various characters that have inhabited Mexican landscapes. It is these people that Cohan is drawn to, those who saw something in Mexico, that attached symbolic meaning to his adopted nation in the same way that Cohan himself has done. It is the connection between these people and Cohan that keep Mexican Days smart: Cohan links himself with eccentrics and outcasts, all engaged together in an endeavor that is arguably futile, all devoting their lives to the pursuit of Mexico.

Cohan’s sense of self-irony, blessedly intact, also rescues the book from becoming mundane. Despite occasionally falling into excessive travel-writerness (the use of words like “nibble,” pedantically expounding on the advantages of a Mexican market over a 7-Eleven, drawing attention to the “standard tourist spiel” of “some PR firm” on a hotel brochure), Cohan is an unusually thoughtful writer: both self-aware and conscientious. Acutely aware that he has what many see as a rare and romantic life, Cohan is often self-effacing in the context of his travels. “Six degrees, all that” he writes, after the remote hotel he has checked into turns out to be run by an old friend. Cohan refuses to attach undue meaning to an encounter that could have been exploited as a tale about the divinity of travel, an admirable display of restraint.

Cohan also thinks critically about his own role in Mexico’s history and often expounds on what tourism and dream-seeking Americans have done to their southern neighbor. Cohan arrived in Mexico before it was a popular tourist destination, and has stayed. Although he has the jaded voice of an old timer, he is willing to continuously reexamine an issue. On a visit to the famous Mayan temple Chichén Itzá, Cohan reflects on the enormous change the mountain site has been through since his previous visit. Cohan admits that his instinct is to flee what has become a “full-blown Yucatan Disneyland,” but after leaving he pauses: “Was it so bad, the marketing of the early Mayas’ brilliance for the economic benefit of their descendents? A tourist-filled Chichén Itzá probably more resembled the original city than the empty province of archeologist, adventurers and artists I’d have wished for.”

The end of Mexican Days is a semi-contrived full circle, leaving the reader with the suspicion that the book was primarily a paycheck for a man who makes his living by producing words. Cohan wraps too many themes into the final pages, and delivers a satisfying resolution on only one: the idea of departure and return to an adopted, but equally beloved home.