Recession in paradise

Montreal photographer Neal Rockwell documents the fickle financing of tourism and capitalism in a new exhibit

IT HAPPENED IN MONTERREY: Crossing the Rio Santa Catarina
Photo by NEAL ROCKWELL

Just before Christmas 2008, photographer Neal Rockwell was broke and eager to get out of the cold. On the Internet, he came across a remote part of Mexico where you could camp for free on the beach. On a whim, he and a friend packed up a tent, scraped together enough cash for bus tickets and set off on a low budget North American road trip. Riding Greyhound from Montreal to the Gulf of Mexico in the months following the economic crisis turned out to be not just a frivolous adventure, but gave him insight into the arbitrariness of borders and the way communities were living the recession. The result is a show called Frontier that features 30 photos and texts written by Rockwell documenting the Greyhound view of North America.

“I took a lot of photos and a lot of notes and then I started to see this narrative unfold. In a very simple way, it seemed to say a lot about migration and borders and class and people’s lives,” says Rockwell, 27. “It’s horrible to ride in Greyhound buses, totally demoralizing. There’s a big Plexiglas barrier between you and the driver and they turn the lights on regularly. You really feel like you’re not worth very much if you’re riding on those buses, but you have no choice because it’s the cheapest option.”

His travelling companions included former convicts, a group of teenage girls who bragged about the felony charges they were facing while doing Little Mermaid colouring books and, when they reached the South, a woman who believed she was a prophet of God and spent the night performing healing rituals on a man with a chronic cough.

When they arrived in the tiny village of El Canal—so small it’s not even on a map—the first people they met fed them taquitos and offered to put them up for the duration of the trip. They politely refused and camped out on the beach for two nights until a tropical storm blew their tent down.

“We felt bad that we weren’t paying for anything,” he says. “It was really different than here, where we have this mentality of paying your fair share. In that region, they had a good amount of pride about looking after people and being good hosts.”

It turned out that the region, about 350 kilometres south of the U.S. border, had been slated for development for the tourist industry. A nearby bird sanctuary, an unpolluted river and an underused coastline seemed to offer what could become a new Cancun.

“The developers had built a big cinderblock wall around the town to keep it contained,” he says.

When the economy collapsed in the U.S., a lot of these projects just stopped, leaving a graveyard of half-built beach huts in their wake. But there was evidence of revitalization. “You got the feeling that something was coming because they were bulldozing an enormous freeway in the middle of nowhere.”

This was the second time the residents had had to accommodate tourism. Twenty years prior, the government had moved the entire village from the beach about two kilometres inland in an earlier aborted attempt to develop a tourist industry there.

“A lot of those people rarely leave the town. Or else they migrate to the U.S. But they certainly don’t go away on vacation, which is another irony of this place becoming a tourist area.” ■

FRONTIER RUNS AT GALERIE RYE (1331A STE-CATHERINE E.) NOV. 5–12. A VERNISSAGE FEATURING LIVE MUSIC AND DJS TAKES PLACE FRIDAY, NOV. 5, 6 P.M. THE EVENT IS A FUNDRAISER FOR THE IMMIGRANT WORK­ERS’ CENTRE. FOR DETAILS, SEE GALERIERYE.COM.

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