Everyone drinks vampire cocktails out of plastic bags in this tiny Mexican town
Oscar Hernández claims to be the inventor of the vampiro.
Drive into the agricultural village of San Luis Soyatlán on the southern shore of Lake Chapala, Mexico’s biggest inland body of water, and you will soon spot dozens of people walking around and clutching plastic bags full of crimson liquid, as if an entrepreneurial vampire had set up shop there to supply his brethren with their daily doses of blood at a very reasonable price.
When I arrive one scorching Sunday afternoon, there are already some 50 people queuing anxiously to get their fix from a stall by the side of the road. There is only one thing that compels them to stop in this otherwise unremarkable town: its status as the birthplace of the vampiro, arguably the greatest tequila cocktail in all of Mexico.
Oscar Hernández, a portly local resident with a creased face and graying hair, claims to have invented the drink almost 40 years ago, during his daily shift selling seasoned cucumbers and jicama at his roadside stand. “I used to prepare these drinks for myself to keep cool in the heat, but customers would arrive and ask what they were,” he tells me. “It looks like you’re sucking up blood when you drink one, so I decided to call them vampiros.”
The Tequila Files 