Down and Delirious in Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century

by Daniel Hernandez

  Planners and regulators would dub it uncontainable, a city whose apparent destiny of failure was rooted in its ability to attract endless streams of new residents. The city grew, by the thousands a day, by some accounts, and its situation worsened. During a memorably bad period of thermal inversion in 1991, when the city’s smog was at what is now considered its historical peak, the New York Times quoted a local expert: “If the meteorological conditions remain the same, then we could have a thermal inversion that could equal the killing smog of London in the winter of 1950–51.”

  There is no such panic today, even on bad days. The city has grown accustomed to itself. In the bowl, no one seems to notice the poison. The sky above you is some shade of blue, right? Why complain? The locals say it is normal. They don’t seem to mind. They look at you with pity. During this extra-smoggy weekend in January, residents in my building make an effort to go outside as little as possible. We open beers and talk. In the darkened interior of an apartment upstairs, my neighbor Ponce, a cartoonist and illustrator born and raised in the capital, calmly explains the air of normalcy while smoking a few singles. “We’re mutants,” Ponce says.

  I down my can of beer, ask for an extra smoke, and retreat back to my apartment. What Ponce says makes my eyes pop in recognition. To be raised in Mexico City, or to willingly assimilate yourself to it, is to relinquish control over your natural state. The environment physically alters you. Because we’ve physically altered it. Ponce has uttered a cosmic truth. The Mexico City mutation is real.

  Smog levels have steadily been dropping in Mexico City in recent years, but it remains above us, operating more than anything else as a totem. It symbolizes our species’ irrevocable dominance over the planet. In places like the Valley of Mexico, where industry, urbanization, density, and the centuries have made the earth our violated dominion, the consequences of this reality haunt us. It is, as Ponce says, unnatural. It leads us into conflict with the elements, with fellow men, and with the gods.

  The planet seeks payback in Mexico City. Earthquakes remain a spectral threat. The massive 8.1-magnitude temblor that swept the city on September 19, 1985, is a wailing ghost that still rings far in the back of people’s minds. An estimated ten thousand people died, but no one knows for sure. The city was brought to its knees. Off in the distance, usually invisible behind the smog, the Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl volcanoes pose a subdued terrestrial menace. They’re dormant, but—could they wake up one morning? There are the freakish rains and thunderstorms, bringing pounding blasts of wind. Neighborhoods flood, drowning kids and old ladies. Hills or asphalt streets give way. Trees snap and crush small cars. The land and sky remind us every day that they remain older and more powerful than anything we can bring to them.

  Among people, the threatening qualities of the environment sometime ignite a primal urge—the urge to kill. Mexico City is by no means the most dangerous metropolis on earth. Cities such as Washington, D.C., for example, have higher homicide rates. But in the Aztec megacity death and murder acquire a disquieting intimacy with everyday life. In page after page, the red-note papers are filled with practically gleeful reports on the cruelest deaths, often accompanied by graphic photographs. A French scientist who is held up on a busy road and shot in the face after being followed from the airport, dying days later. An Italian man who is shot dead after refusing to cooperate with thieves on a bus. The transgendered sex worker in Ecatepec whose head is rammed to mush by a huge cinder block at the hands of a client. Bodies are found beheaded, burned in tanks of gasoline, mutilated, or beaten to death, blow by blow. There are robberies gone bad, executions carried out in shadowy alleys, and crimes of violent passion. In the age of narco warfare and the growing cult of the Santa Muerte—the unofficial saint of “holy death”—the killings numb us. News of a death to start off the day and news of a death before going to bed at night. Killings presented as common and as in-your-face as the traffic and smog.

  Every day the papers tell us how the urban claims its victims. There are drownings, freak car accidents, vehicles turning over, indoor carbon monoxide poisonings, and horrible falls. The claiming of victims is indiscriminate. A wealthy person dies just as terribly as a poor one, and only the opulence or humility of their gravestones will mark their differences during life. Living in Mexico City becomes a long risky slog through an infinitely treacherous landscape. Some people are keenly aware of it, and it can drive them mad.

  William S. Burroughs once described Mexico City as “sinister and gloomy and chaotic, with the special chaos of a dream.” That was in the late 1940s, when D.F. had a small fraction of the population it does now and the mountains and volcanoes that ring the basin were crisply visible on the horizon. “No Mexican really knew any other Mexican,” Burroughs wrote, some fifty years after the experience, “and when a Mexican killed someone (which happened often), it was usually his best friend. . . . Mexico was basically an Oriental culture that reflected two thousand years of disease and poverty and degradation and stupidity and slavery and brutality and psychic and physical terrorism.”

  Reading this, I instinctively respond with disgust of my own, tallying up all the offensive phrases. Then I think about it again. I think about all the writers whose attempts I’ve seen to sum up the soul of Mexico in a single argumentative statement, from the romantic or the nationalistic, to the postmodern or celebratory. Few are as raw, and as honest. Burroughs looked in the city’s heart and it looked alien, violent, and sinister to him, like a pathogen. His experience illustrates the city’s ability to swallow and permanently transform an individual. This was where Burroughs perfected his dark bohemian lifestyle—drug use, alcohol abuse, chasing young American guys for sex, fixing up his heroin on Dolores Street in Centro, just around the corner from where I sit. In Mexico City, Burroughs forged his twisted relationship with death. It is said Burroughs never lived or wrote the same again.

  The problem that Burroughs and so many others have identified, and which is not going away anytime soon, is a sustained struggle over equilibrium, a lost balance with the elements and with history. The Aztecs who witnessed the original encounter with the Europeans must have felt the coming chaos. Their entire system of things, they believed, was at the mercy of their gods, the custodians of the elements. The earth they knew demanded sustenance. To them, the citadel of temples at the center of their city—Tenochtitlan—was the “belly button of the moon.” As it was the center of the universe, according to their spiritual logic, all their gods were present. The god of war, god of fire, the god of earth, the sun god, the moon goddess. They had to be thanked somehow. So the Aztecs built their empire on sacrificial credit, submitted untold amounts of human souls in ritual sacrifice to ensure the rising of the sun, the rains, and their way of life.

  They fed the land with blood. Children and infants were sacrificed to Tlaloc, who required the tears of the young to wash over the earth with rain. Slaves, virgins, and prisoners of war were slaughtered to dedicate new temples and to ring in the new year. Their severed heads were placed on tzompantli racks on the city’s central plaza for all to see.

  When they arrived, the Spanish regarded these practices as barbaric. But in conquering Mexico, they replaced the system of ritual sacrifice with something arguably bloodier and more brutal. The Conquest was a spectacularly violent encounter, a “foundational holocaust.” Once subdued, the surviving Indians watched their cities and temples be dismantled. Their gods were replaced by images of Jesus Christ, his saints, and the new mother, sweet Guadalupe. In the early years of the consolidation of New Spain, indigenous survivors succumbed to disease in overwhelming numbers, killing off entire lineages and turning thriving urban settlements into ghost towns. Their world had been upended. Cities disappeared, their ruins willowing into the brush, forgotten. The force of the Conquest was so fierce, many Indians, one troubled priest wrote in the late sixteenth century, became “apathetic.” Many refused medicine when they became sick, the priest wrote, choosing instead to “die like
brutes.”

  I can’t imagine the agony, unable to render to their gods—Tonantzín or Tlaloc or Huitzilopochtli—as they had done since the dawn of their world. But history marched on. In the ensuing generations, Mexicans of all castes intermixed beyond order and recognition, spawning the new, idealized mestizo civilization. With the boost from the Virgen de Guadalupe, everyone became a Roman Catholic. Mexicans eventually let go of the Aztec gods, but that didn’t mean the deities just disappeared into the cosmos. In Mexico City it is regarded as a sad spiritual irony that the Metropolitan Cathedral—built on pre-Hispanic holy land—is sinking into the earth.

  The spiritual imbalance heightens the sense that Mexico City is a geography of real, physical risk and hostility. But to blame the awesome power of a hostile environment on human religious practices alone would be impertinent. Historians often categorize Mexico into three major periods: its pre-Hispanic, its colonial, and its modern. During all three, the society’s center is Mexico City, and in all of them, the city is driven by a culture of violence. Violence against humans, violence among humans, and violence between the human race and its surroundings. At each defining step in the history of Mexico, blood and death were on the watch. Something deeper is at play here.

  In another one of those awful smoggy winter days spent huddling indoors in the Centro, smoke choking the room, Ponce and I meet again for an afternoon tequila. His hair is wild and his skin is earthen bronze. He is always dressed as if he’s ready to run out his door and never come back, in trainers and sweatpants. Ponce is so inspired and terrified by the air outside that he paces around, tensely holding an invisible ball of energy between his two open hands. I am sprawled on the floor, illogically looking for cool air from the wooden planks.

  “Mexico City,” Ponce whistles, “is a lake of fire.”

  He sits down to keep drawing a psychedelic comic strip taking shape before him. My mind races back to that winter bus ride to the east, at dusk, turning back to the image of a futuristic hell. Mexico City shrouded in poisonous smog, proof of man’s dominance over the elements. In the shrinking light, I imagine brontosaurs lumbering up the hillsides and an orange pterodactyl soaring above me. Is this how it looked since the beginning of time?

  Around the first or second century A.D., on the south end of the valley, the geological record tells us, the Xitle volcano erupted near the Cuicuilco settlement, washing over the land in scorching lava. This primordial violence wiped out the earliest known civilization that existed on the basin’s ring. The settlement was virtually liquidated, leaving hardly an archaeological trace. The lava cooled, slowly transforming into the stone with which later Mexicans built their pyramids and, later, used to build the Spaniards’ churches.

  A dramatic painting depicting the Xitle eruption is sometimes on view at the Museo de la Ciudad de México. On one side, a few of the earliest human inhabitants of Mexico—nearly naked, holding spears—stand bravely above the hot hell below them. Their expressions are grim but determined, as though they are thinking, This is where we were made to live. This is who we are. The valley at their feet is a belching sea of red and orange.

  7 | Kidnapped

  Violence in art, like violence in society. (A still from Rinoplastia, by Yoshua Okon.)

  The news report I am reading online says authorities discovered the remains of a young woman late in the evening of Friday, December 5, 2008. The body was found buried in a shallow dirt ditch beneath a metal staircase in the garden of an abandoned home in a comfortable neighborhood in a southern borough of Mexico City. Hours later, according to the report, Nelson Vargas, a prominent businessman and the former head of Mexico’s national sports commission, entered the headquarters of the top organized-crime investigators in Mexico, stone-faced. He offered no words to reporters. By the following Friday, December 12, on the Virgen de Guadalupe feast day, DNA studies confirmed the widespread speculation: the body of Vargas’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Silvia, has finally been found, fifteen months after the girl was kidnapped one morning on her way to her exclusive private high school, snatched from her car by armed men.

  In Mexico City, this grisly discovery would have been the ending to just another kidnapping case, coordinated, professional, terrifying. Kidnappings are common, occurring by one conservative estimate as often as twice a day across the country. That ratio ensures individual cases rarely make the news. But the Silvia Vargas case is different. Every single development, no matter how tiny or inconsequential, has been broadcast nightly on the TV news and updated by the minute on news sites. When the confirmation finally comes, that Silvia Vargas’s body has been found, I am sitting at my desk watching the feeds online. I go over to my neighbors’ to share the news, but my announcement meets with little interest. It’s a warm Friday night. Ponce and the crew just want to play cards. I go back to my screen, scanning the news, checking for an announcement from the Vargas family. The girl’s story has been haunting me. I am hooked. And I can’t figure out why exactly.

  An hour or so after the first news report, I check the Silvia Vargas vigil Web site. For months it has displayed photos of the girl and the family’s contact information. It is now updated with an open letter to the public informing supporters that a memorial mass will be held the following day for Silvia at the Panteón Francés in Colonia San Joaquín, the French cemetery. The family’s note appears in elegant script and requests that mourners wear white. The Vargas family thanks the media—“Without them, we would have never found Silvia”—and the media get the message. It is past midnight, and right now even at the left-leaning La Jornada the top story is about the transfer of Silvia’s remains from the morgue to a private crematorium. Not a particularly earth-shattering update.

  “She Is with God,” banner headlines in the daily papers announce the next day, quoting the Vargas family. Once again, the familiar image of Silvia appears on newsstands on practically every other street corner in the capital. Her soft, round face, sandy brown hair, deep brown eyes, a bright smile suspended forever in death at eighteen years of age. Standing before a newsstand, in the thick of the downtown traffic and noise, I am motionless looking at Silvia’s face on the newsprint. Sadness yanks at me, but I am not comfortable with this emotional response. I never met Silvia Vargas. She was practically a whole generation younger than I. I doubt that—had she lived—our paths would have crossed. Yet seeing her image so many times in the papers and on television confuses me into believing that I may have known her, and by extension that I can sympathize with the grief felt by her loved ones.

  As soon as the mass for Silvia is announced, I know that I want to be there. Why be present at the grieving ritual for a person I never knew? In my head, I can’t formulate a reply. The only thing I’m sure about is that I am not sharing my Saturday plans with my neighbors.

  Kidnappings in Mexico fall into three basic categories: express, virtual, and ransom. The express variety refers to quick pickups, with the victim hauled off to a few cash machines, taken on a joyride, then dumped on an unfamiliar street. The virtual kidnappings are characterized by trickery. Families are called and told a loved one is in the hands of criminals, so they hastily fork over money, even if no kidnapping has actually taken place. Ransom kidnappings bring more risks for the organized kidnapping rings, but also the potential of much more profit. Professional kidnapping negotiators are called in, and the kidnappers settle into a position of power, terrorizing relatives of the victim with harassing phone calls or, in some cases, by sending over a minor body part to the waiting loved ones—an ear, a finger—proof that the stakes are severe. Victims are held for cash ransoms as large as millions of dollars or as small as a few thousand pesos. Often they are permanently “disappeared,” killed and never returned home, even after families pay up.

  As many as two-thirds of the kidnappings in Mexico go unreported, up and down the ransom scale. The phenomenon took off during a soaring national crime wave that followed the economic crises of the 1980s and ’90s. People in Mexi
co City will tell you that everyone was broke and desperate back then. Kidnapping circuits have since become a frightening and lucrative branch of business for drug-trafficking cartels, which have diversified their revenue sources as the government has tried to crack down on narco smugglers. Recent official tallies suggest that more than sixty kidnappings occur in Mexico monthly, but civil organizations says the true number is closer to five hundred. Law enforcement authorities remain widely distrusted by a public accustomed to hearing of cases in which police are found to collude or even lead kidnapping crews. Privacy, without any contact with the police, is the preferred approach in such circumstances. As a result, the fear grips all of society—most kidnapping victims belong to the lower- and middle-income brackets—but in Mexico only the wealthy and well-known are capable of thrusting their problems into the public eye. Only in rare cases do they do it in so dramatic a fashion as Silvia Vargas’s parents, in the full glare of the media machine, and with a total appreciation of their privilege even in grief.