Oscar Hernández has spent almost his entire life selling food and drink to passersby along the highway that cuts through the lakeside village of San Luis Soyatlán in the Mexican state of Jalisco. As a young child in the late 1960s, he and a riotous band of local kids—some from his own family cohort of 12 siblings—would rush the passengers taking a short break from long-haul bus trips to sell boiled and salted camote de cerro, a wild, mineral-rich tuber excavated from the nearby hillsides. “Our mothers were the pioneers in that, who washed and cooked the camote, and then it was just us kids who would sell them,” he recalls. “We’d flock over there and surround them to see who’d buy from us.”
More than half a century later, the dynamic here has changed. Now, rather than Oscar and his siblings ambushing visitors on their way through town, it’s tourists who flock to Oscar for Vampiros, or Vampires, a salty-sweet concoction of tequila, orange juice, lime, salt and Squirt, stained a startling shade of red by a shot of sangrita, the savory tomato-based chaser often served with Jalisco’s emblematic agave distillate.
Hernández, born in 1963, invented the Vampiro sometime in the early 1980s. A couple from the nearby city of Guadalajara had hired a friend of his to keep an eye on their country house at the edge of Lake Chapala. “They’d said to us, ‘Bring whatever you want to drink and snack on and otherwise the house is yours when we’re not there,” Hernández recalls—an incredible stroke of luck for a group of teenage boys. Hernández started adding dashes of sangrita to the typical combo of tequila and Squirt, but “it didn’t quite have the flavor I was looking for, so that’s when I added the orange juice and lime and salt,” says Hernández, his pensive face framed by a strict, snowy flat-top. The resultant drink “came out exquisite,” he says, acidic and sweet with a lingering whisper of salt, like the gratifying tingle of sweat after licking your lips on a hot day.
Still, it took years for the Vampiro to become the family’s primary business. In the early 1970s, Hernández’s mother set up a wooden stall along the highway to sell camotes, cucumbers, jícama and mangos, chopped and revved up with salt, chile and lime. Much later, while sitting at the stall on a hot afternoon, Hernández would sometimes mix a biting red Vampiro, garnished with a wheel of orange, and sip it from a tall glass. Before long, friends and clients started to ask what he was drinking. “Because of the sangrita”—the diminutive form of “sangre,” Spanish for “blood”—“I told them, ‘It’s a Vampire.’” When they asked to try it, he would pour them a drink.
Many of the clients in those days, Hernández says, were young families from nearby communities who’d moved to Guadalajara to find work and would stop here on their way to or from the city. While most villages around Lake Chapala lie either close to the shoreline or up in the hills, San Luis, by a fluke of topography and the surveyor’s theodolite, found itself cleaved by a stretch of highway laid down in the early 1930s (though not paved until later) that connected Mexico City to Guadalajara. Federal Highway 15, which would eventually run as far as Nogales on the border with Arizona, was just one part of a massive highway-building initiative undertaken by the Mexican government in the 1920s. The country’s brutal, decadelong revolution had ended just a few years earlier and an ongoing civil war in and around Jalisco, a region whose deep-rooted Catholic piety set it at odds with the staunch socialist secularism of the center, officially came to a close in 1929. Highways were not just essential to the government’s modernizing mission, they were also the sutures with which the new state aimed to mend the wounds of a recently, and still tenuously, united polity.
Though most people in San Luis continued to work as farmers and fishermen, the highway nonetheless came to define the community’s economy. Fishermen would go out onto the lake by night, slinging fishing nets between twinned canoes and waiting for the flicker of moonlight on the gilded backs of pescado blanco, the prized endemic species. By day, women would butterfly and fry the fish, serving them at the mercado with a simple salsa of tomato, onion and both fresh and dried chiles. Other merchants specialized in crisp sheets of cecina, made by curing veils of beef with lime and salt and drying them in the sun. Visitors, who would stop here for food on long bus trips between Mexico’s two most important cities, came to identify San Luis with these delicacies; most locals, Hernández says, couldn’t afford them.
About 30 years ago, a new toll road opened north of Lake Chapala, which drew away most long-haul traffic, leaving local buses and, perhaps more importantly for Hernández, a continuous stream of tourists on their way to and from the mountain village of Mazamitla, under an hour away by road. No one here makes cecina anymore, and the famous pescado blanco has all but entirely disappeared from Lake Chapala, driven to near-extinction, Hernández claims, by tilapia and carp introduced by the fisheries department in the 1970s. (One representative from Jalisco’s Secretary of Agriculture and Rural Development notes that a diversity of factors have led to the decline in pescado blanco populations, including pollution and overfishing.) Hernández, for his part, still sells vegetables out of canted plastic crates, but today almost everyone who stops here has come for a Vampiro, whipped up with stunning efficiency by an assembly line of 12 or more people on busy summer afternoons: Hernández’s wife, his children, his children’s spouses and the occasional teenager who helps when school is out. Serving from behind a long, bar-height table lined with plastic jugs of orange juice and translucent pails of salt and limes, Hernández and his family slosh ingredients into plastic bags tied off around wide-gauged straws in lilac and seafoam and rose.
The bag, as much a defining feature of the Vampiro as its color, was a practical innovation: “I noticed the cups weren’t so easy to manage in cars, so I switched over to plastic. You put them between your legs,” Hernández explains with a perfectly straight face, as if daring you to acknowledge the joke, “and it refreshes both things.” Hernández doesn’t know exactly how many clients come by on any given day, but he does know that he goes through as many as 30 cases of Squirt in a weekend, which comes to more than 140 gallons of soft drink. For all that plastic and sugar, though, Hernández still speaks about his signature cocktail in the same terms of seasonality that have defined his family business since his childhood. Now, rather than describing the relative sweetness of cucumbers or jícamas, he talks about the variations in the orange harvest: sour and green in the rain-soaked summers, vivid and ripe in the sun-washed winters.
Vampiros have long since replaced pescado blanco as San Luis’s best-known delicacy. Stalls advertising Vampiros now appear on the highway some 20 miles out from the village, where a half-dozen or so stalls now compete with Don Oscar, courting clients with oysters and carne asada to accompany their Vampires. The inventor of the Vampiro doesn’t seem to mind, though it’s easy to be circumspect when yours is still the only business in town that consistently attracts crowds. For all its transformations—all its reliance on the vagaries of transport and capital and even, if obliquely, the making of a nation—San Luis retains something of the generosity that city people and nostalgic locals alike tend to associate with the rural present and the pastoral past. “Business is for everyone and there’s enough to go around,” Hernández says, cracking a flicker of a smile. “I never imagined we would prosper this way.”
