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" Gael Garc\u00EDa Bernal is seated in the back of a Cabo San Lucas cantina, a place that&amp;#039;s all but empty at 12:30 in the afternoon, but is likely crammed with bar hands, live musicians, and tequila drinkers at night. The actor, director, and producer was in town recently for the second annual Baja Film Festival, where he was feted with an honorary tribute for his work as a Mexican artist and where he screened his latest film, Who Is Dayani Cristal?, an immigration documentary that&amp;#039;ll come out in the U.S. early next year. Bernal is arguably the most lauded and successful Mexican actor working today, and he&amp;#039;s parlayed that success into efforts that disseminate film art through his native country, like the production house he kicked off with pal and colleague Diego Luna. He&amp;#039;s also become something of a Mexican ambassador, preaching the virtues of the nation on the fronts of food, facts, and sights, and speaking outright about his endorsement of a more permeable U.S.-Mexican border. Bernal, 34, turns out to be an excellent source on how to take in the haven of Los Cabos without just lounging by the hotel pool, and what else is worth exploring in Baja California and beyond. We asked the part-time surfer and soccer player what one should be doing in Mexico in the dead of winter. As it turns out, Bernal won&amp;#039;t be closing down this Los Cabos bar. He has other venues for that. The best pastime around these parts, he says, is watching the whales knock boots. ESQUIRE.COM: Locals insist that Los Cabos has become more of an Americanized destination. But it strikes me as a kind of balanced link between the two countries. Is that how you see it?  GAEL GARC\u00CDA BERNAL: It is. Los Cabos is definitely among many other places where this encounter has been happening, not only for tourist reasons, but for this interdependence that we live in. For example, I&amp;#039;m from Guadalajara, and I grew up with a lot of people from the United States who came to study medicine there at the University of Guadalajara. Actually, you&amp;#039;ll find many doctors in the U.S. who did their residency in Guadalajara. So Mexico is a place where this encounter has always been present, and always been happening. And Los Cabos is this beautiful oasis of nature and energy. The whole Baja California peninsula is an energetic place, and it&amp;#039;s incredibly alive.  ESQ: How is Los Cabos different from the rest of the country? GGB: Los Cabos has been an amalgam of many cultures that have been coming here. There have been beautiful Jesuit missions for example, in many places around this area. The towns are incredible. But there is a very strong Mexicanized culture here that exists because people from different parts of Mexico have come to live here. I think the most abstract, but at the same, the most practical example of why Los Cabos is so proudly Mexican is that this is where the whales are born. And this is where whales come and have sex. ESQ: Wait, is that true? GGB: Is that true? Ask around, man! The whales come from Alaska to here to mate, and to give birth. ESQ: That&amp;#039;s news to me. Well, let&amp;#039;s talk about some ways that tourists can enjoy Cabo without just hanging around a resort. Is there a restaurant you like that&amp;#039;s authentic? GGB: There are many places that are great. There&amp;#039;s no such thing as a specific authenticity to what Mexico is, because Mexico is incredibly complex, and varied, and the food is completely different if you travel 50 kilometers. It just changes all the time. But there are all these little towns, like San Jose del Cabo, St. Ignacio \u2014 beautiful places with a very strong culture going on there. There are also places with these natural reserves that are incredible. Because, as you see, this is the most lush desert that exists. It&amp;#039;s full of plants and nature \u2014 a desert that&amp;#039;s incredibly florid, like a forest. There&amp;#039;s one restaurant I went to in San Jose del Cabo, called Huerta Los Tamarindos, which is up on a little hill. And it&amp;#039;s amazing. The food is great, and they grow everything that you eat around that hill.  ESQ: And where would you go if you wanted to get a really good drink, or dance? Is that your kind of thing? GGB: It&amp;#039;s my kind of thing, but in other places. I&amp;#039;ve never liked the beach, tourist, full-on nightlife. Never. ESQ: So where would you go for something like that?  GGB: Mexico City. Monterrey, Guadalajara. There are places there that are fantastic. In Los Cabos, I don&amp;#039;t know. I have no idea. Here, I go surfing. Or, at least, I go to a great place near here, Todos Santos. That&amp;#039;s an easy place. But here, too, is a great place to go surfing, and to go hiking. There&amp;#039;s a mountain where you can climb all the way to the top and see the Sea of Cortez on one side, and the Pacific Ocean on the other. You can see the very tip of the peninsula. This is one of the manifestations of the San Andreas Fault, which has built our American continent. And you can see the tip of the fault, and both sides. It&amp;#039;s incredible.  ESQ: What&amp;#039;s a great or crazy Cabo memory you can share? GGB: I&amp;#039;ve worked here a couple of times, and we&amp;#039;ve had some incredible parties in our hotel rooms. Last year, we did a pretty big, improvised party that went absolutely crazy, but was lovely at the same time.  ESQ: What&amp;#039;s some wisdom you can offer about how to best enjoy Mexico that Americans might not know? GGB: One has a pre-conceived idea of what the country is, but obviously, experimenting with that place eliminates that prejudice. And I think that what&amp;#039;s surprising to many people in the United States is that Mexico is a far more complex country than the United States in many ways. Culturally, it keeps on trickling down, and also, it&amp;#039;s a place that has a lot of sophistication in many expressions. The food, the people, the aesthetic, the landscape, the discussions that go on \u2014 they&amp;#039;re all extremely interesting. In the United States, growing up there, you&amp;#039;re not quite so exposed to the outside world. You&amp;#039;re more on the inside. And Mexico is not the outside, it&amp;#039;s just around the corner. But it feels like the outside, even for me. And I love that. I just love being in the open air, and the garden, and not, you know, on the sofa of your aunt, or something. Mexico is a place to experiment. Our two countries are neighbors, and we are very connected by sharing this incredibly huge border. But we also need to eliminate those borders and eliminate our internal borders, as humans. This sort of coming and going is very important to manifest our desire to learn from each other and understand each other more.  ESQ: And your film Who Is Dayani Cristal? explores those themes. GGB: It&amp;#039;s in that same spirit, yeah. It&amp;#039;s a film that traces down a body that was found in the desert, and sort of finds out who this person was in life, giving him an identity in death. Because when he was alive, he had to negate his identity. He was forced to be a criminal, in a way. Because by migrating illegally, or without documents, you become a criminal, even if you&amp;#039;re doing it for the very right reasons. You know, the set narrative is that those people are criminals. Even to create that horrendous, bigoted concept of &amp;quot;illegal alien&amp;quot; is crazy. Fortunately, it&amp;#039;s being eliminated now. But this film explores that contradiction \u2014 that we live in an interdependent world, where free market is something that&amp;#039;s needed, and the coming and going of goods is a necessity. But we haven&amp;#039;t established a narrative so that the coming and going of people is also accepted. Because it&amp;#039;s necessary. It&amp;#039;s necessary for the flow of ideas and it&amp;#039;s necessary for humans to evolve \u2014 that coming and going. We&amp;#039;re all migrants, we all come from migrant families, and we will always be migrants.  ESQ: Through your production company, Canana Productions, and your traveling documentary film festival, Ambulante, you&amp;#039;re bringing film culture to corners of Mexico that may not get it otherwise. I&amp;#039;m assuming that being here at the Baja Film Festival feels in tune with your growing role as a kind of culture ambassador. GGB: Absolutely, yeah. We helped to create this wonderful documentary film festival, Ambulante, which is unlike any other in the whole world. It travels around 16 or 17 cities in Mexico, with each city transforming it into something different. It&amp;#039;s an incredibly ambitious project, and there were 100,000 people who saw these documentaries last year. And that&amp;#039;s a pretty big number for documentaries. A huge number. Obviously, in a country with a population of 100 million, we need to spike up those numbers, but then again, in the world, how many people watch documentaries? Probably very few.  ESQ: Well they&amp;#039;re certainly more popular than they used to be.  GGB: They are! That&amp;#039;s true, fortunately. And it&amp;#039;s because of many good documentaries, and accessibility. Television has helped a lot as well, and European television has always helped to nurture good documentaries. And now, with Ambulante, it feels like we have something that&amp;#039;s very unique, I think.  ESQ: You know, I don&amp;#039;t think I realized until I got here just how much Mexico loves its soccer. On the bus that shuttled me from the airport to my hotel, there was a whole lot of screaming at games on smartphone screens, and I know you made a film about soccer, Rudo y Cursi. Do you play? GGB: Yeah. Although not so much now because it can be a very dangerous sport, especially if you&amp;#039;re not trained for it. But I do play. In Mexico City, we have a little league that I play in with some friends. There must be plenty of places where you could play in Los Cabos as well, but I don&amp;#039;t know where. ESQ: What&amp;#039;s something I should absolutely do before I leave? GGB: The whales are here already, man. Go see the whales.  Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/interviews/a26659/gael-garcia-bernal-mexico/>