“The Conquest happened,” Victor says with a firm finality on Calle Repùblica de Cuba. “Five hundred years ago.”
As Victor and I walk away from the house of La Malinche, I am aware that I have been “schooled.” I thought I knew so much about being Mexican, but evidently I do not. I have just finished college, but the realization strikes me that I know so little. Moving on to lighter topics, Victor and I keep walking through the Centro Histórico, the city’s ancient downtown, raindrops patting our backs.
Before this trip, my understanding of Mexican history, culture, and identity was forged in two narrow environments: the far northwest tip of Mexico and the far southwest tip of the United States, in Tijuana and San Diego in the 1980s and 1990s. These are the “borderlands” that the two branches of my family have called home for generations. As I walk with Victor, I reach back into my memory that afternoon and think about the little things you hear growing up in a Mexican American border community, where Spanish-language newscasts are played in living rooms and English-language newspapers gather on kitchen tables: soccer scores, the Mexican president announcing this or defending that, that red-green-and-white sash across his breast, gossip from the Tijuana society pages, the word Aztec echoing up and down the vocabulary. I remember occasional mentions of a massive capital city, far, far away, and its high urban myths.
It is the biggest city in the world, the legends go, whistled through teeth. The pollution is so bad they have phone booths that sell oxygen.
The crime, the smog, the corruption—in San Diego and Tijuana in those days, Mexico City was a place you’d never want to visit on purpose unless you absolutely had to. But for every child these stories scare away, there are those who find them alluring. I sought out and soaked up history wherever I could. Mexican history is not given much attention in the U.S. public school system, even in California. Most of what I picked up, informally, in passing, was presented in black and white. The Aztecs were great and glorious. The Spanish were evil conquerors. The United States stole half of Mexico. La Malinche sold out. There were enemies and there were victims. There was pre-Hispanic Mexico and postcolonial Mexico. All the things that have happened since then, particularly all the bad and tragic things, are to be read as indicators of the evil of the original sin, the arrival of Cortés to the Valley of Mexico, the fall of the Mexica people, and the destruction of the grand imperial city of Tenochtitlan.
Mexico’s history, like any nation’s history, is not a tale of black and white, but a parade of gray. The Conquest, the Colonial period, the Inquisition, Independence, the Reformation, the Porfirian period, the Revolution, the era of modernization and authoritarian rule under the Institutional Revolutionary Party—all markers in a story of multiplying layers, where mestizaje is not only a state of ethnic mixing but of historical mixing as well. From a young age, figuring out where I fit into that story became my objective.
In college, the question took on a new urgency. One day a roommate brought a friend over to our apartment. The friend was a young, redheaded, blue-eyed native of Mexico City, dressed like a gutter punk, who was “hanging around” California. I told the young Mexican girl my parents were Mexican and that I was born in San Diego, that we’re from Tijuana. “But you’re not really Mexican,” the girl responded.
I was not? Until then I had always been under the impression that the world perceived me as Mexican, like it or not. I felt Mexican—stuck between a dominant American culture that shunned the “Mexican” within its society, and contemporary Mexicans back in Mexico who found it so easy to dismiss our mixed heritage as somehow unrelated to theirs. Around that time films such as Amores Perros and Y Tu Mamá También were opening up radically new conceptions of Mexican life for people north of the border. The same should have been true in the opposite direction. But no. As a Mexican American, born in gringo territory, I was still excluded from the national narrative in Mexico. Would we forever be banished to a state of ambivalence, or could we be two things at once? To answer this question, I knew I had to go to Mexico and find out for myself. One summer there, I thought naively, is all I need.
In late spring 2002, after I graduate from Berkeley, I am offered a dream job, as a reporter on the downtown metro desk of the Los Angeles Times. The editors want me to start right away, but I ask for the summer off. I want to see more of Mexico. I book a one-way flight to Mexico City, from Tijuana. I pack a large rectangular suitcase with clothes, a clunky laptop, and a $6 rubber wristwatch from Walmart (cheap—so as not to attract attention to myself, my mother instructs me). The irony is not lost on me: While millions of Mexicans are migrating northward, I go south. It is an act of rebellion. My parents, who left Tijuana and settled in San Diego in 1976, shake their heads in disapproval.
“They’ll steal your socks without taking off your shoes,” Dad warns.
“What is he going to do down there?” perplexed cousins in Tijuana and San Diego ask my parents.
“We don’t know,” they say. “Está loco.”
I am determined to make my own assessment. Before I leave, I poke around the Internet looking for work to sustain me while there, finding the News, Mexico City’s English-language newspaper. An editor has an opening on the paper’s online news desk. Could I start on Monday? My sighing parents try to offer measured guidance. Dad, a middle-school counselor by day and a boxing trainer by night, makes a connection with friends of friends in the Mexican boxing circuit. I would stay with the Uruzquieta family, they determine. Over the telephone, the adults confer. I can stay as long as I wish, so long as I keep my appointed space neat, respect the household, and contribute money for groceries. It is happening, an open-ended summer in Mexico.
Don Alfredo Uruzquieta, a trainer in a Mexican barrio, just like my dad, meets me in the terminal at the Benito Juárez International Airport. I am told he would be holding a sign bearing his name, not mine, for safety’s sake. I am dragging my suitcase along the gray stone floor, already dizzy from my first encounter with the high-altitude air. I find the sign—URUZQUIETA—and approach with a smile. Don Alfredo shakes my hand unenthusiastically and looks at me with an arching glance. Tall, potbellied, he has a curled-up Pancho Villa mustache and reeds of graying hair falling away from the top of his shiny head. He wears brown trousers and a leather belt and boots, a stained white work T, and car keys attached to a chain. I thank him for agreeing to take me in for the summer and deliver saludos—the customary greeting—from my parents. Don Alfredo grunts at me to follow in his direction, out of the terminal. He begins telling me about his house, his family, the neighborhood, but I detect a casual suspicion from him the entire ride out of the airport. I am shaking my head, silent, in delirium. We are riding on swooping speedy overpasses crowded with traffic that seems to have no use for lanes. Cars and trucks flow with the instinct of blood cells. I see the tops of concrete houses, enormous billboards. It is a landscape of scratchy urban flatness, then rolling hillsides of structures that disappear into a white horizon of haze—the smog. I am overwhelmed by the smell of the city, like charred maize doused in crude oil. You cannot escape it. My senses are in shock. I am twenty-one years old and have never been inside Mexico farther than Tijuana and Ensenada.
The hour of my arrival is midafternoon, lunchtime, so Don Alfredo drives me to the Central de Abastos, a vast open-air wholesale market described as the largest in the world. On maps, the market is a wide stain on the urban grid, like a lake. The afternoon is not sunny, more like blazing pale gray, and hot. Don Alfredo wants me to try barbacoa, goat wrapped in banana leaves and slow-roasted in a ditch in the ground. I have never seen such a thing in my life. We sit under a rain tarp overlooking a pit in the dirt, at a rickety table adorned with vats of fresh salsas, and diced tomatoes, onions, cabbage, and lime. No plastic wrappings or warning labels separate me from my food. I eat carefully, watching Don Alfredo eat and chew and grunt and swallow, a hunter gorging on his kill. Around me, the sights and smells of the market overwhelm my ability to process. There
are tarps and stands and stalls, vendors, children, Indian women selling toys and candy, guys pushing loaded dollies, trucks driving large goods in and out, men engaged in deals and negotiations. The air sits on top of me and presses against my back. Beads of sweat collect on the crown of my nose. It is the first time in my life I feel truly dizzy. The feeling, days and weeks later, never fully goes away.
We drive into the Colonia Zapata Vela, in the eastern borough of Iztacalco, not far from the airport and under the pathway of the landing jets, to a narrow concrete street lined with two- and three-story houses. Each is constructed and decorated according to the whims of its owner. Power lines, public and pirated, dive across the air, linking building to building, an electrical spiderweb. Kids and cars fill the pavement. Small makeshift shops operate from garages and anywhere else, kernels of ingenuity popping through the stresses of the urban skin. I smile. It looks and feels like places I know in Tijuana.
At Don Alfredo’s home, I meet his wife, Doña Sabina, and his son, Alfredo, and Alfredo’s wife, Silvia, and two small children, Carolina and Job. They have a comfortable and modest house, wedged between other houses with brightly painted exteriors. Inside I enter a warm space of tiled floors and wooden furniture, where plastic covers the crocheted white cloth over the dining table. Two bedrooms and a bath are upstairs, and a garden on the roof, where another cousin, Sebastián, lives in tiny work quarters. That night there is a birthday party at the next-door neighbor’s house. I join the entire Uruzquieta family as guests. Strings of pink balloons are hoisted over the street outside, a favor between neighbors. Greetings and hugs and the customary hello, a kiss, cheek to cheek. We dine on homemade pozole stew. There is music, games, children by the armful running around playing. Full, exhausted, overwhelmed, I settle into my room, a cool, airless cube at the end of the ground-floor driveway. The window does not catch sunlight and faces the open outdoor toilet. Only a bed and a wooden stool fill the space. As he shows me around, Alfredo Jr. informs me that spirits sometimes haunt the room. This is where I open my laptop, my Scribe notepads, and begin writing.
I spend just ten weeks in Mexico in summer 2002, but the experience recalibrates my life. For the first time I feel as though I am living purely on the commands of my instincts, survivalist and nihilist equally. To get to the News’s offices, where I sit and translate news items from the papers, from Spanish into English, I ride the metro every weekday morning from Iztacalco to Salto del Agua, Salto del Agua to Balderas, Balderas to Juárez, my defense antennae high and alert. I read whatever book I can maintain control of in the crowded cars, dodging vendors, commuters in business suits, blind beggars, and niños de la calle—children of the street—who perform by laying their bare backs upon shards of glass on the floor of each car. Pesos fly their way if only out of disgust.
The Uruzquietas are tremendously considerate during the time I stay in their house. They correct my Spanish when it needs correcting and explain the ticks of big-city life. A relative who drives a taxi offers to take me to the major central landmarks for a decent price. I see the Zócalo, the Palacio Nacional, the Palacio de Bellas Artes, the Árbol de la Noche Triste (the “Tree of the Sad Night” is where Cortés stopped to weep after suffering deep losses in battle against the Aztecs), and the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, a square situated between pre-Colombian ruins, a colonial church, and modern apartment buildings, in Tlatelolco, just north of downtown.
I always thought I had a good sense of direction, but here I am never quite able to tell north from south, east from west, even in the brightest daylight of the Distrito Federal. At every corner, it is impossible not to notice how brown it is, whether because of the pollution, or the ubiquitous tezontle volcanic stone, or some other kind of blanketing pigment that rises organically from the earth. I wonder if some sort of Aztec fairy dust has sprinkled everything in the color of dirt, bark, and leather. The city heaves. The city attacks. The city is sinking. The weight of 20 million people and 4 million cars and skyscrapers and tunnels and elevated highways presses the ground year after year into what was once a vast bed of interlocking lakes, a sinking that is accelerated by depleting groundwater. Buildings in the old center lean this way or that in the soft earth. Steps are added at the bottom of outdoor staircases to level the land for pedestrians. Asphalt streets tumble along in uneven waves. What was once a landscape of water is now a landscape of concrete, blinking lights, and tubing. It is literally starving for water. It is a city in perpetual delirium. Backward when it should be forward, upside down when it wishes to be right side up. It is running in circles, pricking at its own skin, possessed.
I do my best to fit in. But the signals the city gives me in response are not computing. I go to work, commute back and forth between Centro and Iztacalco, then head out and meet people and make friends, locals and foreigners. Some of those I meet understand me as a fellow Mexican subject, like them. Others do not.
“But you’re so Mexican,” a friend remarks to me one night, as we party our way to the Estadio Azteca with a pack of friends to see Lenny Kravitz in concert. By looking at me, and listening to me speak, he seems unable to conceptualize me as an American. The dissonance in his logic is internal: I’m an incidental fan of Lenny Kravitz just as he is—what other confirmation of my Mexicanness would you need?
But for every moment like this, another arrives, reminding me that in Mexico I can be perceived as American almost at first glance. One weekday night, at a dinner party at a friend’s, I go out to get fresh beers with one of the guests, a native guy with an aristocratic air. Handing me a pack of Bud Light dismissively, he huffs, “Here. Because I know this is what you guys drink.” I stammer and laugh, assuming he is joking. Then I realize he is not. He is mocking stereotypes of the United States at my expense.
I am determined to adapt. I fall in with a company of young American and British expats who had done more or less just what I have: moved to Mexico City on escapade. We venture to the relatively safe central neighborhoods where most foreigners or cosmopolitan-leaning Mexicans congregate, the Roma, the Zona Rosa, the Centro, and to the ground zero of cool in Mexico City, the Condesa. Night after night, my varying crew of expats and Mexicans, dedicated to delirium, teach me the ways of the D.F. underground. We hit house parties for those in the know, DJ parties in old cantinas, make excursions to places packed with kitsch and tourists but are made categorically “cool” by our periodic presence. We are foreigners, Mexicans who love hanging out with foreigners, and Mexicans who otherwise don’t prefer foreigners’ company but also don’t mind it.
“We are chilangos! Who cares?!” the Mexicans holler above the noise in the bars and parties.
I take note. A chilango is not strictly a native Mexico City resident—that’s a capitalino, those born and raised—but a sort of native intruder, a Mexican from “the provinces” who has made the D.F. his home and adopts all the most disagreeable characteristics of those caught in the city’s frenzy. It is a slur that is morphing into a badge of honor. I wonder if the term is flexible enough to include me, too.
Results remain inconclusive. I party on. My friends take me to observe the decadent rituals of the most committed fresas, the slang term for middle- and upper-class children of privilege, the “strawberries.” More parties, more drinking. The Uruzquietas regard my adventures with guarded empathy. “If you stay out past ten p.m.,” Doña Sabina warns one evening over dinner, before I’m heading out the door, “don’t come home. Find somewhere to stay where you are at.” The metro shuts down at midnight and cabs off the street are not to be trusted.
We gather at El Jacalito and Bullpen, bars on Medellín Street in the Roma district, the sort of places that are sprinkled with addicts and the people who work as their suppliers. Brawls are a threat as constant and banal as a backed-up toilet in the dingy restrooms. Raggedy salsa bands play till dawn. The walls in the Bullpen are covered with murals depicting rastas, hippies, cholos, transvestites, vaqueros, and a red-skinned devil. The subjects of the mura
ls are drinking, fighting, fucking, and shooting up. Each night brings its risks and rewards. Once, a barkeep at Jacalito known as La Chimuela slips and falls on the beer-sticky floor while serving. La Chimuela—the nickname indicates disfigured teeth—rips open her left forearm in a splash of bottles. It looks as if she is bleeding buckets. She is rushed to a hospital. Two hours later, La Chimuela is back at El Jacalito, happily serving beers, her arm wrapped in bandages.
Along the way, I meet Leti, seven years or so older than me, who decides to take me under her wing. Leti is Mexican, but my knowledge of what shapes her life is almost nonexistent. I know nothing except that she lives far from the Roma, and that she’d like to study gastronomy. Leti has short, spiky black hair and light freckles, clear blue eyes, and wears jangly metal bracelets all the way up to her elbows. I never learn her last name. She is a punk-rock Mexico City mystery, keeping me close by, hardly ever saying a word.
“Here,” she says one night in El Jacalito, handing me a tiny, folded-up piece of white paper, and indicating the men’s room. Cocaine. Everywhere, in everyone’s pockets. On its way north from Colombia to America, it stops in the Aztec metropolis, fueling a million nihilistic bouts of rage, lust, and vanity on any given night. I was raised to view recreational drug use negatively, but four years at Berkeley have clouded my value systems. I find myself rationalizing. I see participating as a way to merge into Mexico City, for good or ill. I see no moral quandary on my plate, no endless narco war on the horizon. I see only the gathering of the senses. For the first time, I sample the devil’s dust. It seems so casually Mexico City to do so, part of the “local experience,” as a professional traveler might put it. Leti feeds me the powder as though it’s breakfast cereal. And then we dance.
Down and Delirious in Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century Page 3
