TWO CULTURES
Saturday I want to the Uncommon Market in Hendersonville, an hour‘s drive from Asheville. I hadn‘t been to Hendersonville in a while since some time before the pandemic. The Main Street was blocked off and the tents of the Uncommon Market stretched all the way down Main Street to the courthouse. Hendersonville is a county seat, home to many retirees who vote conservative. Our Republican congressman, Edwards, is from Hendersonville. At one point Hendersonville, like Marshall, was where people when on Saturday to shop for basic provisions. Now it is entirely a tourist town with a wide array of restaurants, including a new Indian restaurant with an $18 buffet, almost empty with two Indian families inside. There are a number of resale shops and lots of art galleries and many stores selling tourist items and souvenirs. I don‘t think the Saturday market on Main Street had brought people from very far except for the normal tourists and people who lived in Hendersonville. It was not crowded.
The vendors whom I spoke with were mostly from Asheville, including two very hip looking Hare Krishna devotees who sold a variety of products including at natural toothpaste to replace what they said was the poison that most people brush their teeth with.
Tourists had on informal holiday clothes, often T-shirts with a statement of one kind or another. I only stayed an hour since I couldn‘t figure out the online parking system which only gave me a half hour.
On the way home Susie called and I pulled over in order to answer and saw a big sign for Smiley‘s Flea Market in Fletcher. I answered the call and then decided to look around.
Years ago, in the 90‘s I was a flea market addict and haunted the Dreamland Drive-in near the Mall in Asheville and was devastated when it was bought out by Lowes and turned into a huge parking lot, a store I refused for 20 years to do any business because I was so irritated. It was a real flea market with at least half of the open air booths placed among the speakers of the outdoor drive in movies space with the screen still looming at one end. I slowly cured my addiction after filling up our carport with weird objects I couldn’t resist. So I never shifted over to Smiley’s Flea Market in Fletcher although I knew it existed and guessed that it would closely resemble the Dreamland Drive-in flea market.
It didn’t. It turns out that Smiley’s is the center of Latin American culture and shopping, I’m guessing for a very large area around Asheville. There were rows and rows of small shops selling Latino groceries and objects from home with even a car repair center. Almost all the people shopping or eating were Latin American.
As I drove on home I thought about the two Americas that I had just visited, in Hendersonville, almost all White people, conservative retirees and tourists escaping the big city, while at Smiley’s almost everyone was Latino and the goods were mostly practical things such as tools or brightly colored stuff imported from Mexico. This was the equivalent of San Francisco’s China Town, which I visited last summer. But this wasn’t a tourist center like China Town, in fact this was an almost hidden place labeled Smiley’s Flea Market, where recent immigrants, legal and illegal, from Mexico and Central America felt at home, probably unrecognized and unappreciated by the residents of Hendersonville, the majority of whom voted for Donald Trump and his MAGA rejection of immigrants, particularly the recent immigrants from Mexico.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 