My time in Mexico City

A couple weeks ago I went to Mexico City for the first time (or el DF, “day f ay” as it’s known in Mexico, or simply “Mexico” in an interesting collapse of capital and nation) with some trepidation. I had been meaning to go for a while (and one grant application even had me spending three months living there learning about reproduction on a more general/ national level) because I felt like I should, because a friend of mine from NY lives there, because people told me that it was amazing, because an obnoxious man in NY told me that I couldn’t say that I’d only ever lived in major metropolitan areas if I’d never been there, because, because, because. But in the face of all those reasons my only experiences of DF had been sitting in hot, smoky, and polluted waiting rooms in the airport in which people never understand my Spanish and I always feel frumpy and uncool—coalescing in an image of the place as the worst of LA and New York. Plus, it’s not like media representations of DF anything but of a city that’s overcrowded, dangerous and polluted (L likes to tell me the percentage of fecal matter in the air). But, all its good personal PR and two friends living there convinced me to schedule a trip there in June and after S asked me to come pick her up at the airport, I decided to take the bus up a couple days early and see “the big city” for myself.

I took the bus up to DF on Saturday afternoon (it takes about six hours) and except for lots of low clouds and drizzle got a sense of the remote and gorgeous Mixteca region of Northern Oaxaca and Puebla (it really reminded me of the central CA valleys in some ways with a lot of cultivated fields bumping up against foothills). A lot of immigrants to New York and more rural Californian communities come from this area, which is very craggy and remote with the land essentially stripped because of mineral extraction and where there is essentially little to no economic prospects (coming back at night, there were no lights except for those of the cars along the pan-American highway and this amazingly bright almost full moon). I called my friend C (a friend I started grad school with) when I arrived and caught a cab to his apt (too many horror stories about people being kidnapped by pirate cabs led me to take an overpriced authorized one) and he took me out to dinner at a cool seafood place… where of course I misheard and almost ordered an undrinkable drink (after that I subscribed to the follow in C’s steps). And then he took me out to meet some of his expat friends at a bar that reminded me of my favorite bar in the lower east side (super chilled out and unpretentious), where we stayed out until the wee hours of the morning. For all that DF is in image and reality a dangerous city, the area C lives in feels very safe and insulated so much so that he and I walked to and from the bar with no incidents along tree shaded pedestrian medians. He walks everywhere (but also recognizes the gendered privilege of doing that) but also doesn’t carry any more money than he needs for while he’s out, his debit/ credit cards unless he’s on a specific errand, or ID, all things that I don’t think about while in Oaxaca.

C gave me his apt while I was there as he had keys to a friend’s apt around the corner and it was so nice to be back sleeping in a queen-sized bed with high-count cotton sheets as opposed to the double-bed/ poly-blend ones I have here—yuppy princess that I can be ☺ He was in the midst of a bunch of writing projects (it was really nice to be hashing out theoretical analyses with him) so he was like a mother bird pushing me out of the nest for me to practice flying for myself by myself.

So, Sunday I set off with my camera without a map with a general orientation in my head and a set of suggestions of parks to check out in C’s neighborhood. It was hard, but a good self-project combating my feelings of shyness and vulnerability, as I scouted out the scene and found a café to sit in as I waited for another friend C(the 2nd) to call me to hang out. It was Sunday in Mexico, a day for families, and most of the streets felt “closed” (the irony of my fears of a crowded overwhelming city) with the only public activities being located in the cafés and parks. I spent the afternoon in a big park in la Condessa neighborhood which was teaming with dogs hopping in and out of the fountains and at least physically heterogeneous crowds of families.





It very much felt like I could have been in any trendy upperclass neighborhood with the French revival archictecture (remnants of the Porferieto) and cosmopolitan crowds where I heard English and French as much as Spanish.


It is also an area that I heard a lot of buildings fell down during the Earthquake and weren’t replaced until recently as the neighborhood became more and more popular, and there are also new tall buildings (using the same design elements as the fancy new houses going up in Venice) interspersed with classic buildings and 1960s apartment complexes.





Something that I’ve often found in exploring a new city by myself is that it feels very overwhelming and things like finding a place to eat become hard tasks, but once accomplished everything else seems more manageable and possible. C(the 2nd, another friend from NY, the partner of someone in my program) took longer having brunch with his mother than expected and so I spent a couple hours hanging out in el Parque Mexico (which C described as like a section of Central Park) just watching everything happening around me. I spent a period of time bouncing between watching Tango lessons and listening to a band of two bagpipes and three drummers—Mexicans have no self-consciousness about dancing in public.



Monday I set off to play tourist and check out “el centro” and C sent me off via subway (big gulp), which was absolutely without problems (cleaner than NY’s). It was much more “Mexican” than the Roma and Condessa neighborhoods with tons of street puestos and hawkers and crowds and people everywhere. I realized I have become very accustomed to men with large guns around as I passed security guards with shotguns at ready standing outside of the McDonalds while an armored car idled at the curb. I took the subway (with transfers) to the Zocalo/ Palacio National and again, it was less intimidating and overwhelming than I had built it up in my mind (as well as less visually impressive).



These people were all standing in the only bit of shade in the Zocalo (the shadow of the flagpole).


This day I had brought my trusty Lonely Planet and had decided to go to this museum of Mexican Medicine (but I had forgotten that museums tend to be closed on Mondays) and so I wandered around aimlessly for a while until I ended up in the Secretaria de Education Publica where I had read that there were Diego Rivera murals. After getting lost and redirected, I came to a back patio where there are three floors of Rivera murals lining the walls and began to make my way around them taking them in aesthetically rather than trying to “get” them.



Midway through the second floor an older man stopped me to talk and introduced himself as a former Art History teacher and asked if I would let him show me around. I hesitated and then we went back down to the first floor (with him scolding me that I shouldn’t walk so fast and take the stairs, didn’t I know the altitude difference between NYC and DF? My explanations about living and hiking in Oaxaca didn’t help). It was a really incredible experience, he took me around slowly and insisted that I really “see” the murals, describing their import both aesthetically and politically and he was impressed with my knowledge of Diego and Mexican revolutionary politics (as he grumbled about Mexicans not taking the time to appreciate their national treasures, “it’s free, why don’t they come?!” and the lack of attention given by tour guides “you see how fast they go?!”). The first floor was all about the revolution and building a new society, the second devoted to the arts and sciences and al the state’s emblems, and the third was about the conflict between communist and capitalist society.







Not only the murals (which are incredibly impressive), but a really fascinating thing to see was the imprint of time on the paintings—as well as to notice the two murals that his assistants were responsible for, which brought into relief his conceptual and technical expertise.

Tuesday I took off again by myself and without a real plan I explored the Alameda and the Palacio de Bellas Artes and decided that I had inadvertently embarked on the Diego Rivera mural tour (with the DR mural museum across the park from Bellas Artes). Another truly impressive building (in a different way than the SEP) with two floors covered by murals Tomayo (he was Oaxacan), Rivera, and Siqueiros (including a recreation of the famous one destroyed by Rockefeller)-- it was fascinating to see the murals change in the perspective from across the atrium and upclose. And then I took the metro to meet C to meet S at the airport. Poor dear, she doesn’t speak Spanish and it took her no time at all get through immigration and customs so she beat us, but it all ended well. And, after taking her around C’s neighborhood for a late lunch, we caught an evening bus to Oaxaca.

It was really nice to be back in a “real city” and really brought home to me how much I’ve been living in the “provinces” more than ever before. I think that’s been one of the big differences in my time in Oaxaca versus other trips, and brought home the differences between living in a place versus being there for a sort of “out of real time” short trip. All and all it’s clarified for me some of the important things to look for in assessing places to live in the future, as well as some of the ways to build a new community around me.

It was wonderful visiting with C and then having S come, lovely to be around people who know me so well and love me. S was only in Mexico for 6 days, 4 in Oaxaca, but we packed so much into the time visiting five villages, taking very imaginable mode of transportation, and taking a cooking class…. and then she got sick ☹ and I got to practice my “mom skills” forcing pediolite on her and spending the day in bed watching movies (I introduced her to Frida and gave her a précis on Mexican post-revolutionary art/ politics and learned that she is a hidden font of knowledge about the Russian revolution).