Hedda Lettuce was at the gym at 8:30 Sunday morning when a friend started showing him photos on his phone. Cars on fire. Burnt-out husks on empty streets. The legendary drag comedian, who has made Puerto Vallarta his home for more than a decade, had no idea what had happened outside while he was working out. “I go, what’s going on?” he said in a video he posted to his socials that spread fast through LGBTQ communities across the U.S. “He said, well, the cartel leader was killed last night, and they’re retaliating.”
He left the gym and walked home through his neighborhood near Zona Romántica, filming as he went, narrating what he was seeing in real time. What he encountered was that particular kind of surreal that doesn’t translate until you see it. “There’s burning cars, and life is going on at the same time,” he said. “It was a contrast of two worlds happening at the same time. Normal life, and then this walking upon this wreckage. I’ve never seen anything quite like this before.”
He explained what he’d been told about how it worked. Cartel members on motorcycles were stopping drivers, ordering them out of their vehicles, and setting the cars on fire. Not targeting rivals. Just random people’s cars. One of his friends had been three cars behind when they were doing it and had the sense to pull over and park. His car was spared. A neighbor’s wasn’t. “One of those cars is my neighbor’s,” Lettuce said, filming the burned-out hull on his street. “He just had a baby, and his wife has another small child, and that was their primary source of income, their Uber. She was an Uber driver.”
He passed Frida’s, an LGBTQ restaurant and bar he goes to regularly. It had no power, metal doors down, just sitting there in the smoke. He kept walking to Soko, the café where he has coffee most mornings with friends. The staff waved him inside. Two waiters he knows offered coffee like it was any other Sunday morning. “That’s how they are,” he said. “That’s how people are here.” A woman inside was eating a plate of fruit, telling him she was okay, she was eating, she was fine. He could see in her eyes she was a nervous wreck. But the coffee was there and the welcome was genuine and that was the whole thing about this place in one moment.
Near the famous pedestrian bridge that crosses the river and connects the downtown area and the Zona Romántica, cars were still burning. A tree nearby had nearly caught. A taco stand run by a trans woman he described as a friend was sitting directly in the path of the fire, and a neighbor on a rooftop above had been pouring buckets of water on the burning cars to keep the flames from jumping. “I’m hoping the taco stand is okay,” Lettuce said. “And she’ll be back in business, ’cause the town is filled with love. Bad things happen everywhere.”
The Oxo convenience kiosks, Mexico’s version of 7-Eleven, were targeted deliberately. He watched cartel members torch them one by one throughout the city. “I knew the people who worked there, I shopped there daily,” he said. “It’s burnt to the ground now.” In the video you can see he’s not exaggerating. It’s ash.
He ended the video still processing what he’d just walked through. “I still really can’t process what I’ve exactly witnessed today,” he said. “I’ve never watched arson happen in person. But this, too, shall pass, and things change, and life returns to some sort of normality, and bad things happen everywhere. It’s just how we deal with them.”
As the sun went down, he posted again.
The tone had shifted. The shock of the morning had settled into something more unsettling. Looters had started moving through the burnt-out stores. People were taking photographs of themselves under torched cars. A few figures wandered the streets, and nobody was entirely sure what they were doing or where they were headed. “It’s not particularly safe,” he said. “The air quality is still awful. Awful, awful.”
Friends who had lived in Puerto Vallarta for years were telling him to stay inside as was the U.S. State Department. They issued an alert to all American citizens in the region to shelter in place. He was told by neighbors that it didn’t matter who was out there or what was happening on the street. Just stay in. He listened. “I’m all right,” he said, “but just assessing the situation.”
He panned the camera around what was left of a nearby store. There wasn’t much to look at. “I think nothing is left,” he said. “Nothing is left at all. Store is burnt out.”
His last video of the night was the shortest.
He was filming a store across the river, still burning in the dark. No more cartel motorcycles. No more burning cars in the street. Just a fire slowly dying and the sound of his dog Kira coughing somewhere in the background. “After I’m done filming this video, I’m gonna close the shades, and I’m gonna shut down the house, and I’m gonna hope for the best for Vallarta tonight,” he said. “It’s very quiet out here right now. And hopefully it stays this way.”
He signed off the way anyone would at the end of a day like that. “Whoever’s in Puerto Vallarta tonight, stay safe.”
Then his dog coughed again, and he laughed a little. “That’s my little Kira coughing in the background. All right, then. It’s fine, you know.”
After everything he’d walked through and filmed and processed in a single Sunday in his neighborhood, that was how he ended it. A burning store across the river, a coughing dog, and a drag queen closing his shades and hoping for the best.
Who is Hedda Lettuce 
For anyone not yet acquainted with the greenest queen in the game, or doesn’t know him outside of the PV scene, Hedda Lettuce, born Steven Polito in New York City in 1968, has been one of the most prominent comic drag queens in the country since the early 1990s. He built his career in the East Village drag scene, hosted his own Manhattan cable TV show, won drag queen of the year in HX Magazine multiple times, and appeared in the 1995 film To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar alongside Wesley Snipes, Patrick Swayze, and John Leguizamo. He performed alongside Madonna at the MTV Movie Awards, appeared on HBO, Sex and the City, Project Runway, and Good Morning America, and was described by Village Voice critic Michael Musto as “the undisputed grand dame of drag comedy.” He’s an ordained reverend who has married couples of all identities throughout his career.
Around 2014 he began spending more and more time in Puerto Vallarta, eventually making it his primary base. By his own account the city made him a better performer. He performs weekly at PV cabarets, has art in galleries throughout the city, and knows the waiters at his regular spots by name. He’s not a visitor who happened to be caught in the violence. He’s a neighbor who watched his neighborhood burn.
What happened and where things stand
The violence erupted Sunday after Mexican military forces killed Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, triggering retaliatory attacks across Jalisco state. The U.S. State Department directed Americans in the region to shelter in place, all taxis and ride-shares in Puerto Vallarta were suspended, and airlines including United, American, Delta, Alaska, and Air Canada canceled or diverted at least 30 flights. Mexico’s Federal Civil Aviation Agency reported airports had resumed normal operations Sunday afternoon with Puerto Vallarta’s airport under military protection. By evening the worst of the violence appeared to have subsided.
Puerto Vallarta’s Zona Romántica, the heart of what CNN has called Mexico’s “top LGBT destination,” was at the center of where Lettuce was walking and filming. No tourists or civilians were reported among the casualties. The cartel’s targets were infrastructure, vehicles, and symbols of government, not people. But the images of smoke over a neighborhood where tens of thousands of West Hollywood and LA queer travelers vacation every year traveled fast, and Hedda Lettuce’s videos put a face and a voice on what it looked and felt like from the street.
“The town is filled with love,” he said. “Bad things happen everywhere.”
