Vampire, a tequila drink from Jalisco, Mexico, is a local delicacy

Oscar Hernández has spent most of his life selling food and drink to passersby along the road that runs through the lakeside town of San Luis Soyatlán in the Mexican state of Jalisco. As a boy in the late 1960s, he and a group of rowdy local kids (some from his own family cohort of 12 siblings) would rush around selling cooked and salted camote de cerro, a mineral-rich wild tuber harvested from nearby hillsides. “Our mothers were the pioneers of that — they would wash and cook the camote, and then it was just us kids selling it,” he recalls. “We would go en masse to surround them to see who would buy from us.”

More than half a century later, the dynamic here has changed. Now, instead of Oscar and his brothers attacking visitors on their way through town, it’s tourists who flock to Oscar for Vampiros, a sweet and salty mix of tequila, orange juice, lime, salt and Squirt, tinted a startling shade of red by a shot of sangrita, the tasty tomato-based drink often served with Jalisco’s signature agave distillate.

Hernández, born in 1963, invented the Vampiro in the early 1980s. A couple from nearby Guadalajara had hired a friend to watch their country house on the shores of Lake Chapala. “They’d told us, ‘Bring whatever you want to drink and snack on, and otherwise the house is yours when we’re gone,’” Hernández recalls — an incredible stroke of luck for a group of teenagers. Hernández began adding splashes of sangrita to the typical tequila-Squirt combination, but “it didn’t quite have the flavor I was looking for, so that’s when I added the orange juice, lime and salt,” Hernández says, his pensive face framed by a strict, snowy cheeseburger. The resulting drink “was exquisite,” he says, tart and sweet with a lingering whisper of salt, like the satisfying tingle of sweat after licking your lips on a hot day.

Still, it took years for El Vampiro to become the family’s main business. In the early 1970s, Hernandez’s mother set up a wooden roadside stand to sell sweet potatoes, cucumbers, jicama and mangos, chopped and seasoned with salt, chile and lime. Much later, while sitting at the stand on a hot afternoon, Hernandez would sometimes whip up a spicy Vampiro tinto, garnished with an orange slice, and drink it from a tall glass. Before long, friends and customers began asking him what he was drinking. “For the sangrita” — short for “blood” — “I told them, ‘It’s a Vampiro.’” When they asked to try it, he would pour them a shot.

Hernandez says that many of the clients at the time were young families from nearby communities who had moved to Guadalajara in search of work and who would stop here on their way to or from the city. While most of the towns surrounding Lake Chapala are located near the coast or in the hills, San Luis, by a fluke of topography and the surveyor’s theodolite, happened to be crossed by a stretch of road built in the early 1930s (though not paved until much later) that connected Mexico City to Guadalajara. Federal Highway 15, which would eventually reach all the way to Nogales on the Arizona border, was just one part of a massive road-building initiative undertaken by the Mexican government in the 1920s. The country’s brutal decade-long revolution had ended just years earlier, and an ongoing civil war in and around Jalisco, a region whose deep-rooted Catholic piety pitted it against the staunch socialist secularism of the center, officially came to an end in 1929. Roads were not only essential to the government’s modernizing mission, they were also the stitches with which the new state sought to heal the wounds of a recently, and still tenuously, united political system.

Although most San Luis residents continued to work as farmers and fishermen, the road came to define the community’s economy. Fishermen went out on the lake at night, casting nets between twin canoes and waiting for the glint of moonlight on the golden backs of whitefish, the prized endemic species. By day, women butterfly-cut the fish and fried it, to be served at the market with a simple sauce of tomato, onion, and fresh and dried chiles. Other merchants specialized in crispy sheets of cecina, made by curing veils of beef with lemon and salt and drying them in the sun. Visitors, who stopped here for lunch on long bus rides between Mexico’s two largest cities, came to identify San Luis with these delicacies; most locals, Hernandez says, could not afford them.

About 30 years ago, a new toll road opened north of Lake Chapala, taking away most of the long-distance traffic, leaving only local buses and, perhaps more importantly to Hernandez, a steady stream of tourists on their way to and from the mountain town of Mazamitla, less than an hour away by road. No one here makes cecina anymore, and the famous white fish has all but disappeared from Lake Chapala, driven nearly to extinction, Hernandez says, by tilapia and carp introduced by the fisheries department in the 1970s. (A representative for Jalisco’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development notes that a variety of factors have led to the decline in white fish populations, including pollution and overfishing.) Hernandez, for his part, still sells vegetables in tilted plastic boxes, but today nearly everyone who stops here has come for a Vampiro, prepared with astonishing efficiency by an assembly line of 12 or more people on busy summer afternoons: Hernandez’s wife, his children, his children’s wives, and the occasional teenager who helps out when school is out. Serving from behind a long, bar-height table lined with plastic jugs of orange juice and translucent buckets of salt and limes, Hernandez and his family pour ingredients into plastic bags tied around wide-gauge straws in lilac, sea foam and pink.

The bag, which is as much a defining feature of the Vampiro as its color, was a practical innovation: “I realized that cups weren’t as easy to handle in cars, so I switched to plastic ones. You put them between your legs,” Hernandez explains with a perfectly straight face, as if daring you to recognize the joke, “and it refreshes both.” Hernandez doesn’t know exactly how many customers come to his house on any given day, but he does know that he consumes as many as 30 cases of Squirt on a weekend, which equates to more than 140 gallons of soda. Yet despite all that plastic and sugar, Hernandez still talks about his signature cocktail in the same terms of seasonality that have defined his family business since his childhood. Now, instead of describing the relative sweetness of cucumbers or jicamas, he talks about the variations in the orange harvest: tart and green in rain-soaked summers, vivid and ripe in sun-drenched winters.

Vampires have long since replaced whitefish as St. Louis’s most well-known delicacy. Stands advertising Vampires now pop up on the road about 20 miles outside of town, where a half-dozen stands compete with Don Oscar, wooing customers with oysters and roast beef to accompany their Vampires. The inventor of the Vampire doesn’t seem to mind, though it’s easy to be cautious when yours remains the only business in town that consistently draws crowds. For all its transformations—all its dependence on the vagaries of transportation and capital and even, if indirectly, the creation of a nation—St. Louis retains some of the generosity that city folk and nostalgic locals tend to associate with the rural present and pastoral past. “Business is for everyone, and there’s enough to go around,” Hernandez says, cracking a slight smile. “I never imagined we’d prosper this way.”