Adventures in Hitchhiking: Part 1 - Goats, Roosters, and Shrimp. Oh my!

To hitchhike in Mexico, you stand on the side of the road and wait for a truck to come by. Then you stick out your thumb and yell, “Raite (pronounced ‘rite-tay’)!” If the driver is willing to give you a ride he will slow down enough that you can grab the side of the truck with both hands as it passes and use the forward momentum to swing your legs up over the walls of the truck bed, letting go with one hand as you settle into a sitting position in the bed of the truck. It is surprisingly easy, and once you are seated on the side of the bed, it is surprisingly easy to keep your balance, even at high speeds and around corners.  

In the rural parts of Mexico hitchhiking is so socially acceptable that the official mission policy was that all missionaries serving in rural areas were expected to hitchhike in order to save money. Since I served three quarters of my mission in the farming and ranching communities of inland Sinaloa, I did a lot of hitchhiking. Most of the time it was uneventful. Except for when it wasn’t.

Part 1: Goats, roosters, shrimp. Oh my!

One Sunday morning my companion and I left the apartment early to stop by some investigators’ houses so we could escort them to church. They were all within walking distance, but to save time we decided to hitchhike, since there were more than one family we needed to see. We stuck our thumbs out for the first truck that passed, a shiny new Honda Ridgeline. As the truck slowed, we grabbed the side and hoisted ourselves over the side. I was already in midair when I realized that two live, large male goats were hog-tied lying the bed of the truck. Even though we both back-pedaled furiously in midair, the momentum of the truck launched us right on top of them. The goats thrashed about furiously, bleating loudly and swinging their horns. My first thought was to jump back out and catch the next ride that came along, but with a loud laugh and a rev of his engine, the driver sped down the road so fast that we had to fight to keep from tumbling over the goats and out of the truck bed.

This is what the truck looked like, except in a muted gold color. Because of the ugly, high walls on the truck bed, we had to exert extra effort to clear them. They also prevented us from seeing the trussed-up goats in the bed.

Once the goats calmed down, I thought to myself, “This isn’t so bad, they’ve had their laugh at our expense, but they’ll get us where we need to go with time to spare at the rate we’re driving.” So I settled in for the rest of the ride. As we approached our stop I tapped on the glass of the back window and yelled, “Baja!” (pronounced bah-hah, it means 'down' and is the signal that we'd like to get out) but the truck kept barrelling down the road and out of town.

At this point we knew we could be in big trouble. We began pounding on the sides of the truck and the glass on the back of the window, yelling for them to let us down. At first their loud laughter increased, as if the work “baja” were the punchline to some hilarious joke. After that they impatiently snapped “Ahorita!” (pronounced "aah-or-ee-tah' and roughly translates to “in a minute”) and ignored us. I looked at our chauffers-turned-captors through the back window. There were four grown men, wearing expensive “texano” cowboy hats, brightly patterned silk button up collared shirts, and expensive ostrich skin cowboy boots. Each of them was drinking a cauguama of Tecate (including the driver); the floor was already littered with a few empty bottles and a bucket of ice chilled their next round of drinks. The  driver turned up the volume on his speakers, blasting  Los Tigres del Norte so loud I wondered if my mom Washington could hear it.  One of the men yelled, “Vamos a comer tres kilos de camaron! (we’re going to eat three kilos of shrimp!)” I guess he really liked shrimp. 

SIDE NOTE:  Los Tigres del Norte were a popular grupo norteno group, famous for their Narco Corridos. Narco Corridos are songs that tell action-packed stories about the adventures of trafficking drugs to the U.S. Some are pretty explicit, and others are more subtle. Take, for example, the lyrics of the Corrido of the White Horse:

This is the corrido of the white horse\that started out happily on a Sunday\He set out for the north\having departed from Guadalajara.
His noble rider took the rein off\removed the saddle and all of a sudden\he tore off like a lightening bolt through Nayarit\between the green hills and blue skies.
At a slower pace he arrived in Escuinapa\and near Culiacan he was lagging\they say that in Los Mochis he was close to collapsing\and that his snout was gushing blood.
But he was seen going through Sonora\and the valley of the Yaqui river treated him tenderly\they say he was limping with his left leg\but he still continued his adventure.
He arrived at Hermosillo and continued towards Caborca\ and near Mexicali he felt he was dying\ he climbed step by step through la Rumorosa\ arriving at Tijuana with the break of day
Having finished his errand he went to Rosarito\ and didn’t want to lie down before seeing Ensenada.\This has been the corrido of the white horse\that departed one Sunday from Guadalajara.

Not only is the song rich with drug symbolism (i.e. white horse as a metaphor for the white powder itself), it also describes the route drug runners take to deliver their goods to the U.S.

To the unaccustomed american ear, the musical style and tempo of these songs sound laughably like circus music, or music written for little children. They feature a heavy “oom-paa-paa oom-paa-paa” rhythm with lots of tubas, accordions, and horns. I remember being confused at seeing these gatherings of flamboyantly dressed men around the bed of a truck with their swearing and yelling and drinking listening to circus music.

Spotting a Narco Traficante is easy: they aren’t trying to hide. Look for flashy shirts, lots of bling, snakeskin cowboy boots, big buckles, big hats, big guns, and big expensive trucks. It is not uncommon to see a group of them hanging around the bed of a truck, drinking Tecate Caguamas and listening to Banda Corridos at high volume.

To these men, speed limits seemed to be theoretical. While I don’t know for sure how fast we were driving, we seemed to be tearing through town at highway speeds.

After endangering man and beast in three small towns, the truck peeled off the road onto a dirt path carved into a cornfield. The truck trundled down the path, and the bumpy ride caused two trussed-up goats and two scared missionaries to bleat out their discomfort. Finally the truck lurched to a stop in a clearing in the middle of the field, where three or four cages were stacked, each one holding a beautifully  plumed fighting cock. The men got out of the truck, shouting about how much they liked shrimp and how their rooster would kill the other one’s rooster, and what they would do with the goats (kill them, bury them in a pit with live coals and leave them there for two days before digging them up and eating them).

Cockfighting is illegal in Mexico, but it is still very common - and very popular - in northern Sinaloa

My mind was conjuring up images of my companion and I tied up with apples in our mouths while these guys slow roasted us on a spit white shirts, nametags, and all. I knew we’d be in a different kind of trouble if we jumped from the truck and ran and hid in the corn field: they might still find us, or, they might not even look and we would be stuck. I knew they were just drunken idiots who would probably eventually get bored and take us back to town, so we waited. Eventually, they ran out of things to shout about. They stood there amongst the corn and cages and cauguamas, shifting their weight from one foot to the other and muttering under their breath. As if on cue, they all shuffled back to the car and drove (at slightly tamer speeds) back to the exact spot where we stuck our thumbs out to begin with, and dropped us off.

By this time we were an hour late for church, but we didn’t try to catch anymore rides that day.