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 Business News | December 2005 
The Road from Cuautla
 Heidi Dietrich - seattle.bizjournals.com
| | The list of Cuautla chains reads like a who's who of the local Mexican restaurant industry: Azteca, Mazatlan, Las Margaritas, Torero's, Jalisco, El Tapatio, Tacos Guaymas, Maya's, Acapulco, and many more. |
Cuautla, Jalisco, Mexico - When night falls here in late July, loud, spinning fireworks fling flames toward the town plaza and crowds of fiesta revelers. Those not dancing or running from the sparks nurse bottles of tequila at long tables set up around the square. Gamblers make their way to the cockfighting tent, where entire families sit on wooden stands and munch peanuts while razor-equipped roosters claw to the death.
For 10 days each July during the Santo Santiago fiesta, the tiny Mexican pueblo of Cuautla flaunts its riches to the world. The surprising source of the wealth on display emerges during the party: A good third of the 2,000 guests in attendance come from the Seattle area, and many of the cars parked on the dusty roads bear Washington state license plates.
Though Cuautla (pronounced KWOT-la) sits in the Mexican state of Jalisco, three hours by car from Puerto Vallarta and 2,000 miles from Seattle, the rural community holds a special place in the Puget Sound economy. An estimated 300 Mexican restaurants in Washington have been started by entrepreneurs from Cuautla, a town with a population of roughly 1,000. Cuautlans have started another 200 or so restaurants outside the state.
The list of Cuautla chains reads like a who's who of the local Mexican restaurant industry: Azteca, Mazatlan, Las Margaritas, Torero's, Jalisco, El Tapatio, Tacos Guaymas, Maya's, Acapulco, and many more. So connected are Cuautla and the Puget Sound region that Washington and Jalisco are sister states; Renton and Cuautla are sister cities.
As a result, Cuautla now drips in American dollars. A group of 30 or so Mexican-restaurant owners regularly pays for municipal improvements, including roads, a town plaza, a health clinic, church renovations, and a $1 million bullfighting ring used just 10 days in December and three days in May each year. A one-year-old landing strip for small airplanes, paid for with restaurant dollars, allows businessmen like Tacos Guaymas owner Salvador Sahagun to fly his four-seat Beechcraft Bonanza from Arlington, Wash., to Cuautla whenever he wants.
While most Cuautlans see the restaurateurs - and their wallets - as town saviors, the steady flow of dollars from abroad has had unexpected, and not unequivocally positive, consequences. Cuautlans tend to leave for the United States by the time they are teenagers, so the town is filled mainly with the very young and the very old, virtually all of whom survive off the American restaurants. Exequiel Soltero, owner of Maya's Mexican Restaurant, estimates 90 percent of Cuautla residents have family in Seattle.
Said Sahagun: "There's no business here. There's nothing to do here. No one stays in Cuautla. They keep going."
When the restaurateurs construct mansions in Cuautla, they have to ship in workers from other towns. Census counts showed the population of Cuautla in 1950 was 7,500 people. This year, the town registered just 1,000.
"Cuautla is a ghost town," Soltero said.
It's a story repeated in places such as Monterey, Mexico, which sends its young people to oil fields in Houston, or the Mexican state of Puebla, whose immigrants form a large share of the Mexican population in New York.
Older Cuautlans, who remember bathing in rivers and eating dinner by the glow of a gasoline lamp, marvel at the present riches. Yet as money flows into Cuautla, the town must also watch its best and brightest go away - most returning only for vacation.
"I left at 14 years old. I would never go back," Soltero said. "I'd die. I'd get very bored."
The former isolation of Cuautla makes the restaurant founders' exodus to Seattle all the more striking. Once a farming town, Cuautla is tucked in a valley three hours by car on a still-under-construction highway from the resort city of Puerto Vallarta. Fully visible from the top of a surrounding hillside, and lush from summer's daily afternoon rainstorms, tiny Cuautla contains a scattering of houses, a church, a plaza, and not much else. The surrounding land outside of town, once covered in corn fields, is now filled with blue agave plants for tequila production and grazing fields for livestock.
With little to entice the outside world, Cuautla would have remained just one of the hundreds of isolated Mexican pueblos if not for a young, driven schoolteacher named Lucy Lopez - and her many followers. It was Lopez who left her village behind 40 years ago to start Guadalajara, a Mexican restaurant on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Pike Street in downtown Seattle. Lopez traveled home to Cuautla and told her former students about the insatiable cravings for Mexican food in Seattle. One by one, they followed her north to join her in the kitchen, first as dishwashers, then as cooks and waiters, and finally departing as founders of their own restaurants. (See related story, page 80.)
From the hillside above Cuautla, the village today still looks like any other sleepy Mexican town. It's only inside the town that its strange paradoxes become apparent.
On the winding road into town, a flashy Hummer roars by abandoned and crumbling adobe houses. A single steep street, recently paved with shiny red rock slabs, leads up from the town plaza and is the site of three lavish homes owned by Hector, Victor and Pepe Ramos, three of the brothers who founded Azteca. Houses in Cuautla now cost $300,000 - American prices for American customers.
The entrance to Cuautla is marked by a brand new statue, arch, and row of palm trees, but many of the city streets remain covered with rough, uneven cobblestones. The town plaza has benches and a gazebo where musicians can perform, paid for by the restaurateurs. Last year, the group financed a small health clinic that feeds the poor lunch and dinner every day. A new steeple and roof grace the town church, thanks to $80,000 the restaurateurs shelled out to repair earthquake damage from eight years ago.
For each project, town leaders solicit individual donations from the restaurant owners, who each give what they can, or what they want. For many restaurant owners, the gifts are automatic.
"If God gives to you, you have to give back to your community," said Torero's owner Ted Rodriguez, who wears a cross pin on his lapel.
As for the seldom-used, $1 million bullfighting ring, Rodriguez opted out of the seemingly lavish project. But Las Margaritas founder and Cuautla Mayor Nicolas Morales reasoned that the price tagis worth it.
"It brings us back here and keeps us together," Morales said.
The restaurant owners' dollars get stretched even further when paired with contributions from the Mexican government, which matches each American dollar with three of its own for municipal projects. The program allowed the town to replace its problematic well system, which had left Cuautla completely dry from time to time, with a system that pipes in water from the mountains 30 kilometers away.
Though the restaurant owners had no financial part in the new highway to Cuautla, of which roughly 300 to 350 kilometers have been constructed, their influence can't be discounted, as local politicians are well aware of the money and power in Cuautla. The governor of Jalisco, Francisco Ramirez Acuna, is a regular visitor to Cuautla and attended a large dinner party during the Santo Santiago fiesta.
The economic dynamic that has made Cuautla so rich, however, has fundamentally altered the town's social life. With boys typically leaving for the American restaurant industry by age 16, unmarried young girls are left behind in big numbers. Most girls, expected to help care for their homes and families until they are ready to marry, don't migrate to the U.S. until they are older. Sahagun estimates there are four girls for every boy in Cuautla.
"Even if you're ugly you can get lucky here," Sahagun said with a laugh.
One 18-year-old Cuautla girl, Christian Vaca Perez, sat on a bench outside a dinner party during the fiesta, waiting for her boyfriend to pick her up. He is 22 years old and works in the restaurant industry in Colorado, visiting his hometown only for fiestas and vacations. Perez said she misses him terribly and already plans to join him in Colorado as soon as she finishes her studies in Guadalajara. Until then, she vowed, she'll wait for him.
Only the elderly, it seems, are content to stay in Cuautla. Pablo Perez, 71, runs a cantina in the neighboring town of Ayutla. Though all of Perez's five children live and work in Seattle, Perez has spent his entire life in Cuautla and has no plans to leave. He has a house by the river, fields of corn, and a guitar to strum. He rises at 6 a.m. to work the fields until noon, and then mans the cantina until 10 p.m. It's a life Perez is used to.
"I was born in Cuautla and I'm never going to move to the U.S.," Perez said.
Morales, the town leader, wonders if Cuautla might die off altogether.
But Azteca's Pepe Ramos, who plans to spend his later years between homes in Cuautla and Puerto Vallarta, said he sees Cuautla as a place people come back to. Lounging on his back porch, he motioned to all the new homes dotting the hillside as evidence that the town won't go away. Instead, Cuautla may one day resemble the retiree communities in America's sun belt.
"There is going to be a Cuautla," Ramos said. "I think it'll be a vacation town."
Contact: hrdietrich@bizjournals.com |
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