[from Matador Network]
It was around this time that I realized that for a certain significant population of Mexican males, the writings of the Beat Generation and the music of the Doors represented the apex of American culture.
Their numbers may have been small, but I saw their signs everywhere. At party after party, slacker / hipster dudes asked me if I liked Kerouac or Ginsberg while “Soul Kitchen” played on the stereo. From a bus leaving the Observatorio depot, I spotted “Krieger-Manzarek” spray-painted in huge letters on a concrete highway barrier. Even at the dirtiest, poorest-looking small-town bar I went to in Mexico, where old men in white cowboy hats sat and smoked by the saloon doors and no women were allowed, after a full set of banda ballads someone put “Riders on the Storm” on the jukebox.
AVI DAVIS 