by Paul Theroux
At a service area near the town of San Martín Texmelucan de Labastida I stopped for gas. By now, as a road tripper, I had become accustomed to the routine of a Mexican pit stop, a model of efficiency and in many respects superior to its equivalent in the US. Because Mexico has abandoned its passenger trains, and depends on eighteen-wheelers to move its freight north to the border and beyond, and on its fleets of long-distance buses, its main highways are well maintained. The off-ramp always leads to the dusty antique past—to the man plowing a stony field with a burro, to the woman with a bundle on her head, to the boy herding goats, to the ranchitos, the carne asada stands, the five-hundred-year-old churches, and a tienda, selling beer and snacks, with a skinny cat asleep on the tamales.
On the main road, the gas pumps at the service area are manned by attendants in uniforms. You drive in, say “Lleno, por favor” or “Llenarlo,” and the fellow fills the tank, washes your windows, earns a tip, and offers his elaborate thanks: “At your service, sir.”
There will always be an OXXO convenience store at the service area, many of them the size of a small supermarket: beer, wine, T-shirts, hats, chips, automotive accessories, fireworks, balloons, lucky charms, first aid supplies, fruit, canned food, plastic toys, magazines, and newspapers. There will probably be a taco stand next door, or a chicken franchise like El Pollo Loco, staffed by pretty girls in paper hats. The restrooms will be guarded by a woman wrapped in a rebozo and wearing an apron. She will greet you and remind you that you will need to insert a 5-peso coin in the turnstile, and she might discreetly hand you four squares of stiff abrasive paper, expecting a tip. An enterprising man might be seated at a table near the gas pumps, selling watermelons or clay pots. In some of the larger service areas between the big cities there might be a brown motel of fake adobe, and some of the smaller ones feature a decent restaurant selling local food.
After the gasoline ritual, I parked and bought two tacos, a cup of coffee, and a copy of El Universal, and sat in the sunshine, reading the paper and blessing my luck. I’d be in Puebla within an hour, and in three or four days—I was in no hurry—in Oaxaca. But no sunny moment in Mexico is without a cloud. On an inside page of the paper, under a photo that looked like a gruesome car crash, I read a news item about how, just the day before, a car—the vandalized and sticky one in the picture—was found in Veracruz with five human heads tied to the hood, the decapitated corpses stacked inside the car. Graffiti scratched into the car’s paint, a narcomensaje, indicated that it was the work of a cartel, the Jalisco New Generation.
“Sending a message” was the usual explanation, an unambiguous message in this case, stating that this cartel was not to be trifled with. In 2017 there had been 2,200 criminal homicides in Veracruz state, most of them cartel related.
From here to Puebla, every flat area of the fertile landscape was a cultivated field—hardly a tree in sight—smallholdings of green vegetables, onions or cabbages, lettuce or tomatoes. In the north, I had been used to seeing cactus and bleak stretches of desert, roads of washboard gravel, but here in southerly Puebla state the land was fertile, the fields were green, and people were hoeing, their backs bent, clawing at the soil, the iconic postures of peasants.
Passing Cholula, I thought of stopping for the night, but the traffic began to pile up around me, and pretty soon I was shouldered off the motorway by honking cars and, in a maze of narrow streets, going in the wrong direction. I knew I was lost—or at least far from the center of the city—because the streets were slanted and asymmetrical. The oldest parts of a Mexican city, surveyed and laid out by the Spanish, were always arranged in a tight grid of right angles.
I pulled off the road, consulted the map on my phone, and got my bearings. But I was still in a single crawl of traffic on back streets, nowhere near the center of Puebla, passing a residential area of walled-in bungalows, cringing dogs, and tire repair shops.
Such is the revelation of the road trip. Someone says, “We spent a week in Puebla,” and the name seems magical: colonial churches, houses roofed with red tiles, the Zócalo lined with cafés and arcades, mole poblano drizzled on chicken, brassy music, perhaps folkloric dancing—twirling skirts, stamping feet, shoeshine stalls and balloon sellers, the locals strolling, some of the women outfitted in the Frida Kahlo style, with the colorful Puebla dress, the china poblana outfit of an embroidered blouse and full skirt, perhaps a tiara of pompoms and a shawl and an apron thick with floral stitching. All that is accurate, but there is more.
Here is the reality. Puebla is not the compact colonial city it once was. No Mexican city with a romantic name fits that description. Never mind that it is more than five hundred years old. Puebla is a sprawling metropolis of more than four million people, with a Walmart and shopping malls and factories—one of the biggest textile factories in Mexico. It has a Volkswagen plant, another making Hyundais, and eleven industrial parks. Also the industry for which Puebla is most famous, the making of Talavera ceramics—nine such workshops.
There is not a big city in Mexico—no matter how charming its plaza, how atmospheric its cathedral, how wonderful its food, or how illustrious its schools—that is not in some way fundamentally grim, with a big-box store, a Sam’s Club, and an industrial area, a periphery of urban ugliness that makes your heart sink. Because this is in Mundo Mexico, on the plain of snakes, its citizens are overlooked by the government, its workers exploited and underpaid, its teachers belittled, nearly all its city dwellers living in small spaces. But the people are making the best of it, because it was my experience that Mexicans might be mockers and teasers, but they are not idle complainers.
When an oppressed group in Mexico airs a grievance, it doesn’t mumble. It takes to the streets with resolve, holds a demonstration in the main plaza, camps out in front of a ministry in a defiant vigil, burns a bus, blocks a motorway, or, in the case of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, arrives on horseback out of the jungle and declares an insurrection, taking over an entire state and eventually running it so well that the government (out of shame or indifference or confusion) turns its back on the rebels, pretends they don’t exist, and allows them to create a better way of life.
I made my way through the Puebla suburbs, into the numbered streets and the square blocks, following the signs pointing to centro histórico. Passing an older but solid hotel, its brick facade decorated with Talaveras, on a corner next to a church—the Hotel San José—I parked and ran inside. Yes, they had plenty of rooms, $50 a night, walking distance to the Zócalo and the museums. And that became my home for four nights.
After a long drive and a long walk, I strolled around the Zócalo, where a klezmer group was playing. Klezmer? Yes, violins, guitars, a drum, a trumpet, a trombone. Two players were bearded, in black vests and black fedoras. None were Jewish, they told me later; they simply loved the sound. They had seen videos of klezmer music on the internet and decided to learn how to play its strangulated and sobbing tremolos, its flatulent oompahs, its Bulgarian syncopations, and its Polish mazurkas, bewitching the many Mexicans who crowded the arcade to hear it. One child was provoked to a stumbling dance at the feet of the fiddler, who was sawing his heart out with his eyes shut.
Looking for the famous seventeenth-century paintings in the cathedral on the Zócalo the next day, I was distracted by a scene that reached back to the Spanish conquest: a tall, white-robed bishop in a sparkly white miter, carrying a gold shepherd’s crook, a white giant walking among a congregation of much smaller, much darker people. The bishop was attended by a priest in purple vestments, bearing a bucket. Wielding a dripping silver aspergillum—the knobbed, hand-held sprinkling instrument—the bishop spattered holy water on the upturned faces of the faithful, bringing pious smiles of gratitude to those ritually moistened.
The paintings were soot-darkened and severe, the Altar of the Kings (of Spain) was overpainted and garish, containing the sculpted images of the kings, patrons of the church residing in niches. But two items stood out. One was a glass coffin with a life
-size model of the naked Christ inside, lying supine, his tortured eyes turned toward heaven and covered in blood and deeply scored with spectacular lacerations. This was not old, but it was gory enough to be alarming.
And at a side altar, a painting depicting Father Miguel Pro, his arms extended as though crucified, being shot by a firing squad. This image, too, was fairly sooty, but I remembered the name of Father Pro from Graham Greene. He was fondly recalled by Greene in 1938 as the priest who had returned from studying in Europe to serve the faithful in 1926, when the anticlerical laws were being strictly enforced. Celebrating Mass in secret, in defiance of the government, Father Pro was arrested in 1927 on a trumped-up charge of attempting to assassinate a general (Obregón, who was later killed by a militant Catholic for his anticlericalism). Far from quelling the Cristero Rebellion, the execution of Father Pro—as shown in the painting—gave the Cristeros a martyr. And the atmosphere of persecution provided Graham Greene with a plot: godless politicians, brutish soldiers, God-fearing peasants, churches under siege, and priests ministering the sacraments in covert rituals.
What Greene did not mention was that the churches reopened in 1929, except in the two reluctant states where he was traveling, and that the Cristero rebels were militant, crudely armed, but passionate Catholics, willing to commit murder for their faith—a formidable army howling “Viva Cristo Rey!” and gunning for infidels. Though the states of Tabasco and Chiapas were suffering the vandalism of their churches, Mexico was being governed by Lázaro Cárdenas, a man mildly disparaged by Greene, whom most Mexicans believe to have been their most enlightened president. Cárdenas was a pacifier: as he repealed the antichurch laws, he was trying to mollify the Cristeros in some states, and the persecutors of the Catholics in other states, while at the same time fending off foreign petrocrats and nationalizing the oil companies.
Puebla was an interlude in my road trip south, a four-day touristic pit stop. I fueled my walks with Puebla’s wonderful food: mole poblano—goopy, spiced chocolate sauce over chicken; memelas—corn cakes topped with cheese and tomato; molotes—stuffed pastry; chalupas topped with salsa and shredded meat. Hearty meals, stuffed buns, sticky sauces, and street food.
A museumgoer when I have nothing better to do, I avoid writing much about collections, because a visitor should enter a museum innocent of what’s to come, be allowed to make discoveries, and not be nagged into seeing specific works. I had been humbled by the museums in Mexico City, especially by the treasures in the National Museum of Anthropology—the giant Olmec heads, the skull with staring bejeweled eyes and overlaid with a mosaic of turquoise, Moctezuma’s feathered headdress, and glittering mortuary masks, items harvested from ruins and tombs all over Mexico.
There were no treasures in Puebla’s Museo Amparo to equal those. The Amparo’s small collection was housed in two old stone buildings on a side street. But I found something remarkable there, a Mexican artist obsessed with the grotesqueries of modern Mexico. Among the colonial paintings and ancient stone carvings was an artist I’d never heard of and who seemed to me a true original. This was Yoshua Okón, who described himself as a performance artist. Young (born in 1970) and widely traveled, he made videos as well as installations and sculptures. One of the sculptures in the Museo Amparo was a shimmering object of chrome and cast bronze, a thing of singular beauty that looked like a throne. And in a manner of speaking it was one, as its label stated: El Excusado / The Toilet. It was a superior hopper, as arresting as an Edward Hopper, of lovely proportions, made in the shape of the Museo Soumaya, “an emblem of Carlos Slim’s telecommunication empire” and intended to mock both Slim’s museum (the Soumaya, in Mexico City) and Slim’s wealth, succeeding at both with devastating Mexican mockery.
Looping around that room was Okón’s installation titled HCl, a symmetrical series of acrylic pipes, each pipe about six inches in diameter and running up and down the walls of two rooms, attractive as a well-made industrial masterpiece depicting the austere geometry of plumbing. This too, at first glance, was a wonderful thing, for the way the bold pipes surrounded the room. The pipes vividly churned with brownish-gray liquid, and the whole business was operated by a gulping, pumping contraption, as impressively made as Carlos Slim’s scale-model art museum that was also a “functioning, luxury” toilet.
“HCl is the formula for hydrochloric acid,” the label began, and explained that this acid is an aid to human digestion. Then the unexpected detail: the see-through pipes were filled with human vomit, “donated by anonymous patients from a bulimic clinic.” You admire the artistry and form, and then, told what it represented, you gaze with nauseated horror.
“Okón is satirizing the fantasies engendered by the relentless corruption of contemporary culture,” the label went on, “and the sacrifice of health and well-being to corporate-denominated images of bodily appearance.”
I had seen the angels and saints in the big, dark paintings of Villalpando and Cabrera in the church on the Zócalo, the murals of Rivera or Orozco on the walls of public buildings, the self-portraits of Frida Kahlo in plaster corsets, standing on a wooden leg in her Blue House in Coyoacán. And now Okón’s puke-filled pipes. Like Rivera and the others, and the Oaxaca artist Francisco Toledo, Okón’s work is widely praised and exhibited in museums around the world.
It seemed that the strangeness of life in Mexico, the inequality as well as the vitality, stimulated those artists and provoked the appropriate reply. Such Mexican traits certainly stimulated Francisco Toledo in Oaxaca. When it became known that McDonald’s was opening a burger joint in his city, Toledo threatened an episode of performance art, showing up naked in front of the proposed site, offering free tamales to any Oaxacan who supported him in his outrage.
Okón’s videos were as odd and shocking, and as essentially Mexican, as his sculptural installations. Sharing Toledo’s resentment of McDonald’s intrusion, Okón in 2014 made Freedom Fries: Still Life, a video loop of a huge, blobby, obese man lying naked on a McDonald’s dining table. Okón’s video statement on migration is titled Oracle, a Border Town in Arizona. Basing this on the tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors who have crossed the US border, Okón filmed a chorus of nine Guatemalan children in Oracle, singing a song to the tune of “The Marines’ Hymn” that narrates a history of American aggression, beginning with the invasion of Mexico in the nineteenth century (“From the halls of Montezuma . . .”). “In this version,” his gallery description explains, “the kids sing about the invasion of their own land—beginning with a CIA-led coup in 1954—with specific emphasis on the complicity of the CIA and the United Fruit Company.”
Another video at the Museo Amparo was Bocanegra: A Walk in the Park, a sequence shot in Mexico City showing Nazi sympathizers and historical reenactment buffs, all in actual Nazi uniforms, marching, giving speeches, saluting, and drinking beer. The shouts and Sieg Heils in the video were audible in the nearby galleries.
The people experiencing these pieces were all Mexicans—or so they looked to me; Puebla seemed without foreign tourists—and I lingered to note their reactions, smiling at the Carlos Slim toilet, shocked by everything else. I caught the attention of a museum attendant, a middle-aged man, his thumbs hooked into his belt. He nodded at the vomit plumbing and winked at me, as one satirist to another.
Mexican art was also a world, as ancient as the monumental Olmec heads in the first great civilization on the continent, and as modern as the bronze hopper and outrageous videos intended to satirize Mexico today.
Walking out of the Okón exhibit, I fell into step with a sedate older couple.
“What did you think?” I asked.
“That man has a good sense of humor,” the man said, and his wife nodded in approval.
Art as rebellion, as protest, was a Mexican passion, and protest was a theme in Puebla that day. Hundreds of health care workers—doctors and nurses—were milling about the city’s main plaza, airing their grievances. I talked to a woman in a nurse’s uniform who said that th
ousands of such workers had not been paid, or had been laid off, or denied their bonuses. This too was like performance art, because all the protesters were dressed in their hospital uniforms—white dresses, white coats, the doctors carrying stethoscopes as well as signs.
Shouts and agitation, the medical union members howling through bullhorns: I had seen similar protests elsewhere, in Potosí, Puerto Vallarta, and Mexico City. It seemed an eternal urban ritual, the theater of struggle, enacted in the land of bankruptcy and discontent and failed government, making Mexico appear to be a world of broken promises, a land to flee.
Cholula
Another day, I became a time-killing tourist and took the bus to Cholula, famous for its pyramid. At one time Cholula and Puebla were separate towns, with their own distinctive food, music, saints’ days, celebrations, and churches. Now, with the sprawl, Cholula is a Puebla suburb, a four-mile bus ride apart, past car dealerships and restaurants and department stores.
What was originally a pyramid of stepped and cut stone is now little more than a steep grassy hill, but it was once the highest pyramid in Mexico, known as Tlachihualtepetl (Made-by-Hand Mountain). Its ancient remains are located in its interior, the labyrinth of tunnels in its base—low, dark corridors linking chambers and stairways, leading to humid grottoes and empty niches. Although my aversion to caves and tight spaces amounts almost to a suffocating nightmare of—perhaps—uterine fear, I bought a ticket and walked in.
And once in, I had to creep along, ducking through the whole complex of tunnels, subjecting myself to an anxious half hour, eager for it to be over, nothing learned except that the guts of this pyramid were lengthy (five miles of them had been excavated). I was so relieved finally to exit the thing that I happily climbed to the church at the top, gasping so dramatically that a man laughed at my discomfort.
