Pacific Coast Culture & Language

This coast holds several distinct cultures that the rest of Mexico does not always notice.

Huichol art

The Wixarika of the Jalisco and Nayarit sierra produce yarn paintings and beadwork of a kind made nowhere else — wax-backed boards pressed with coloured yarn, or gourds and masks covered in tiny glass beads, depicting deer, peyote and maize in the visionary imagery of their religion. It is genuinely sacred art sold commercially, and the better pieces are extraordinary.

Afro-Mexican Costa Chica

The coastal strip in Guerrero and Oaxaca keeps the chilena song form, brought by Chilean sailors in the nineteenth century, and the Danza de los Diablos performed at Day of the Dead with carved masks and horsehair beards — a tradition of African origin marking the ancestors’ return.

Purepecha Michoacan

Copper working at Santa Clara del Cobre, lacquerware at Uruapan, and the pirekua song tradition, which is UNESCO-listed.

Surf culture

Puerto Escondido and the Nayarit beaches have a serious international surf community, and it has shaped those towns considerably.

The voladores

Though most associated with Veracruz, the danza de los voladores is performed on parts of this coast too: four men climb a pole of twenty metres or more, tie ropes to their waists and launch backwards into space, spiralling to the ground in thirteen revolutions each while a fifth plays a flute and drum on the platform above. It is UNESCO-listed, it is a rain ceremony rather than an acrobatic display, and watching it performed properly is genuinely unnerving.

The galleon’s traces

Coconut palms, tuba and coconut spirit, and certain textile techniques arrived from Asia at Acapulco.

Spanish is the language, spoken along the whole coast with regional variation — the coastal accent is faster and drops final consonants more than the highland one.

English is widely spoken in Puerto Vallarta, Sayulita, Zihuatanejo and among the surf and expatriate communities at Puerto Escondido, and much less so elsewhere. In the Michoacan and Guerrero coast villages, expect very little.

Indigenous languages are spoken inland: Purepecha in Michoacan, Mixtec, Chatino and Zapotec in the Oaxaca sierra, and Huichol in the Nayarit and Jalisco mountains. Several have substantial numbers of monolingual speakers.

Useful Spanish: buenos dias, gracias, por favor, cuanto cuesta, la cuenta, and no muy picante — though on this coast the chilli is generally served alongside rather than cooked in.