Joe Bageant: Cantina Tolteca: Pissing away them Kokopelli blues

Jalisco, Mexico

  Cantina Tolteca is one of those manly Mexican watering holes, where you piss up against a tile barroom wall while ordering the next round from a passing barmaid. With a beer and three shots of mescal in your sails, and the jukebox playing La Paloma, a man feels about as free and unselfconscious here as he ever likely to in this world, which is what men's bars are for to begin with.

  Aside from a couple of putas (and one puto) who roll in after 9 pm, few women and almost no gringos come into the Tolteca. They pass by the Tolteca's plate glass window, the gringo men in their new L.L. Bean Indiana Jones canvas hats, the Mexican mamas with trays of pastries for sale, the gringas in their long tourist shop skirts. Sometimes they glance briefly into the glass, which for them is a mirror, and then keep on walking. Watching them from inside the dim bar is rather like watching a brightly lit aquarium with countless odd fish floating by.