Osvaldo looks at me flatly. He says he read a book and took a course on how to disconnect himself from it.
The ambulantes on my block, the street vendors, play music from their special little enclosed market on blast all day, from eleven in the morning to about nine at night. Every day. The speakers are on the concrete, on the sidewalk, facing the open air. Early on, I debate whether I should go down to the guys who sell Shania Twain and Beyoncé, cumbias and reggaeton, Vicente Fernández, and an audio English-learning program, and tell them, “Yo, guys, can you turn it down a little?” This is one option. My other option, I think, is to complain to my borough government, a very American gentrifier thing to do. But then, at the delegación they’d probably ask for my name, my address, and who knows what they might do with that information. I picture it somehow getting back to the mafias that run the street vendors—the D.F. government negotiated to get them into their new indoor spaces, off the sidewalks—and then somehow, in a not so nice way, its getting back to me.
My third option, the most winsome of all, would be to write them a clear, direct handwritten note calmly explaining how the noise from their stage-grade speakers is perfectly crisp and sound in my apartment, and probably all the apartments above and to the sides of me, and if they would please not play their music at full blast all the time, maybe just downgrade it a bit, even a quarter down. I would sign the letter and slip it under the grates of their market in the middle of the night and wait for something to happen. It’s like something I would do if I were thirteen years old, but I’m desperate.
The noise comes in every day as I settle in, invasive, unapologetic, mocking me. I ask the landlord, the licenciado, what he thinks about the noise problem from the ambulantes when I go downstairs to pay my first full month of rent. Well, he tells me, he’s tried to go over there, tell the guys there’s a lady in the building who is sick, and they don’t care. They just say they have to play it loud or else they don’t sell anything.
I ask Osvaldo if talking to the vendors would be effective, and he said it wouldn’t, they wouldn’t care.
“It’s just the way it is,” he says.
Uriel concurs. “It would be like talking to a window.”
It’s noisy, he admits, but at least it’s good noise. At least it’s decent music most of the time. I mean, music that when it comes on, you don’t mind 100 percent having to listen to it. Even “Feel Like a Woman.” At least it’s not nineties’ high-energy Mexican techno on loop or something awful like that. “And Dance with the Devil,” or something like that. Uriel is right. I have to learn to live with the noise. I have to embrace it. I have to realize that something about the racket is nourishing.
After smog, noise is the most prevalent pollutant in Mexico City’s air. Both have their obvious drawbacks but both also have their magic. When I lived in Los Angeles, the toxic coastal smog created some of the most spectacular and psychedelic sunsets I have ever seen. Here, in the high landlocked capital, the smog sits on you but it also makes for dazzling skyspaces. Neon orange, electric gray, brilliant purples, and slanting pinks. I begin to listen to the noise as a blanket of security. Noise, like smog, means people, commerce, signs of life. There is safety in noise, as there is safety in numbers. Silence is not to be trusted because in Mexico City silence is insincere. The city never wants to be quiet.
There is peace to be made with the noise. I now try to picture my square, little apartment as a magical urban tree house—without a tree—hidden above a really exciting river of people and energy. There is magic on the streets, I tell myself. The hustle! The raw kernel of big-city life! Listening to Beyoncé or Wisin y Yandel blast through my bathroom window every day reminds me, ultimately and of all things, that I live in Mexico City. That means a place in the world with too many people, too much pollution, and too much noise. It is a place, like so many others in the world, that runs on illegal street commerce, on pirated content, on pirates, like my fantasies of cities in Africa and India and the Middle East, and the borderless barrios that those places share with neighborhoods in London and New York and Chicago. It is a truly cosmopolitan place because here, in the orbit of Tepito, every kind of film, concert video, or album, no matter how obscure, is potentially within grasp, expanding our boundaries and influences.
More than extravagant parties or roaming mariachis, life in Mexico City means an English lesson on fruits and vegetables booming in my ears, supersized and out of my control during my morning shower.
It takes a tall Scandinavian woman with lanky features and a rough tenor of a voice to break down to me, finally, what it means for me to be living here in Mexico City.
It is early 2008. I’m wandering the desolate gloomy streets of Colonia Roma hoping to fight the wave of depression that comes with the dusk of Sunday, every Sunday, without fail, no matter what city I’m in. I meet up with Josh, a twenty-one-year-old student from Louisiana, and we talk about home, about graffiti, and our parents. We sit down for tacos on Álvaro Obregón, then find our way to an apartment of a friend of his, to sit around on leather couches and watch the TV show Dexter with subtitles on, except on the parts where the Cuban police officer throws Spanish into the dialogue.
We sip tequila and have popcorn and packaged chicharrón chips doused in lime and chili. When I’m sufficiently certain that dusk has passed, and that I can walk home without too much Sunday gloom, I thank the hosts and get up to leave.
“And what’s with the English?” the tall Scandinavian woman, Josh’s friend, asks suddenly.
“The English?”
“It’s very good,” she says.
“Oh,” I respond, getting it. “I’m from California.”
“You’re not Mexican?”
She is genuinely confused.
“No, no, I’m Mexican American.”
“Ah! Well, you’ve come home,” she concludes happily.
“Well, no one in my family has been here,” I reply. “I’m the only one who’s made it here.”
Made it here. The words roll together and fly away. The girl smiles big and is truly pleased to meet and greet. Our cheeks meet in the customary good-bye kiss. “Welcome home.”
Back I go to the sidewalks, toward metro Hospital General. The night is chilly, crisp, and still for January. I listen to the streets and walk steadily. I had been trying to communicate to Josh’s friend that I am not “home” because my family is not native to central Mexico, but to her it doesn’t matter. To her I am in my epicenter, the belly button of my ancestral homeland. She is proud, for me. I stroll down busy Cuauhtémoc, past the door at number 226, where I lived for a few weeks in summer 2002, three stories above the roaring boulevard, with two Scots and a Mexican from Torreón.
I peer in. It looks the same, the heavy glass-and-metal door, the tiled art deco passageway, the box elevator and narrow staircase. I’d go up every night and sit on the porch and watch the river of traffic below and wonder what I was doing here. Tonight everything is the same. The Scotiabank branch downstairs, the Sanborns café down the block, the stark hotel across the street, the Benidorm, still somehow in operation. The city has miles and miles of “passing-through” hotels. For lonely businessmen, hapless tourists, lunchtime trysts between married men and their mistresses, married men and their male lovers, drug deals, for dying.
Walking to the station, I feel the flash of familiarity. The torta and taco stands, the homeless people begging for small coins, the reeking steam rising from vents leading to a subterranean nowhere. This is home, the impossible megacity. Some find it in New York, some in Los Angeles, for some it is in Europe or East Asia. For some it is Mexico City. Walking here, I could be anywhere. Streets and people and sounds and bad smells. Sidewalk obstacles and sex shops. A new jetliner cruising down to earth on the established pathway overhead. Megacities do not pretend to be pretty or picturesque, do not pretend to deny that ours is now a planet overrun by humans, and that humans are filthy and destructive creatures but are also prone to romancing one
another. The megacity is the perfect place for romance. Romance between two people, between strangers exchanging quick looks on a platform. Romance for the tenuous proposal that is a global society.
On the platform at metro Hospital General, two teenage couples are ravenously making out. On the train, an African man in hip-hop gear who must have teleported onto Mexico City’s Line 3 from the subway in New York or in Paris nods in my direction. Easy-listening is playing softly from a few strategic speakers in the transfer corridors of metro Centro Médico. Then, in the Tacubaya station’s main transfer passage, three deaf people, one man and two women, are happily chatting in Mexican sign language. They have found each other.
It is Sunday, so more love, more couples making out on the escalators up. Back on the surface, a fully costumed clown, in full makeup, heading home after a long day’s work. Clowns work parties, then drum up extra earnings performing wacky skits on the trains. The clown and I nod to one another when our paths cross. Everyone leaving the metro tonight is going along to the humid little boxes that we call our bedrooms, home, aware that in the modern megacity the walls that separate our homes are membranes that only temporarily keep apart the millions and millions of people who must, at all times, breathe the same city air, eat the same city food, share the same treacherous city sidewalks, and greet the same city clowns heading home on Sundays in red plastic noses and long flappy shoes.
15 | The Seven Muses of Mexico City
El Águila Ciega, 2010. (Painting by Daniel Lezama.)
From the Associated Press:
12:48 PM PDT, April 27, 2009
MEXICO CITY—A strong earthquake struck central Mexico on Monday, swaying tall buildings in the capital and sending office workers into the streets. The quake rattled nerves in a city already tense from a swine flu outbreak suspected of killing as many as 149 people nationwide.
“I’m scared,” said Sarai Luna Pajas, a 22-year-old social services worker standing outside her office building moments after it hit. “We Mexicans are not used to living with so much fear, but all that is happening—the economic crisis, the illnesses, and now this—it feels like the Apocalypse.”
Co-worker Harold Gutiérrez, 21, said the country was taking comfort from its religious faith, but he too was gripped by the sensation that the world might be coming to an end. “If it is, it is God’s plan,” Gutiérrez said, speaking over a green mask he wore to ward off swine flu.
People are standing in rows around the center of the Zócalo, held back by an invisible line made by soldiers from the presidential guard, placed a few meters apart. The soldiers stand at attention, their boots gleaming in their white laces, their white gloves spotless, their green helmets covering faces marked by the severe glare shared by sentries guarding only the most solemn of totems. Around the plaza traffic moves as usual, people and cars and buses and trucks. But in the center something important is about to happen, the lowering of the enormous national flag that is hoisted to the top of a towering pole in Mexico’s preeminent central square. Everyone, the soldiers, the people, stand silently, waiting for the drum detail to emerge from the National Palace.
It is not every day you stumble upon the flag ceremony at the Zócalo. When you do, for Mexicans and foreigners alike, it is important that you wait and watch. The ritual is dazzling, and it has been a particularly significant week in the story of the nation’s sense of self. Barack Obama has made his first visit to Mexico as head of state. It is spring 2009. The U.S. president’s visit was intended as a display of solidarity with the southern neighbor at its most trying historical juncture in almost a century. The political class, the infrastructure, the entire social contract, were being held hostage by the threat of the stateless narco cartels. Could Mexico survive the orgy of drug-related violence? And if it could emerge intact, would Mexico ever be the same state again?
The two presidents met in an almost baroque welcoming ritual at Los Pinos, with bleachers full of rosy-cheeked schoolchildren from a few surrounding academies joyously waving tiny American and Mexican flags. Felipe Calderón spoke, Obama spoke, their words instantly translated between English and Spanish by unseen voices that sounded extravagantly worldly and well educated. The two nations would be friends, compadres against the threats that challenged them both: organized criminal syndicates, climate change, the global economic recession. Obama promised that undocumented immigrants would no longer be subjected to humiliating racial profiling in the United States. To be a Mexican in the United States, Obama assured, would now be A-OK. A year later, Arizona would pass a law that allows police officers to ask to see someone’s immigration papers if “reasonable suspicion” exists they are in the country illegally, and Mexico’s government goes up in arms. But at the moment, the salutations appear genuine.
“All across America, all across the United States, we have benefited from the culture, the language, the food, the insights, the literature, the energy, the ambitions of people who have migrated from our southern neighbor,” the American president declared.
Mexico, wounded but proud as ever, needed the reassurance. Mexico needed the gringo country’s money to fight the cartels.
So how did Mexico articulate its needs to the U.S. executive and his delegation of diplomats and business leaders? By inviting them over for a drink. At the National Museum of Anthropology, the grand repository of Mexico’s archaeological skeletons, Obama and Calderón and legions of dignitaries from both countries clinked glasses together in a toast of goodwill. It was tequila. They toasted twice.
Barack Obama spent less than twenty-four hours in Mexico City during his visit. One commentator in the United States warned—without any sense of satire—that sending Obama to D.F., even for less than a day, would be a matter of serious national risk. We wouldn’t want the emissary of empire to get too infected with the toxicity of the Mexican way of doing things. Or infected literally, with the swine flu virus that had by then already been surfacing in the country, unknown to most of the population. Air Force One delivered Obama to the Benito Juárez International Airport and military helicopters shuttled him to the comforts of Polanco and Chapultepec Park. The Beast, the Cadillac-made fortress-on-wheels that Obama commutes in at home, drove him between meetings and the Presidente InterContinental hotel, although word eventually leaked that the president did not in fact ride in the Beast but in another less ostentatious vehicle hidden within his caravan. The presidential car had been flown from Washington, D.C., to be used simply as a decoy, an imperial extravagance. One local newspaper noted that the visiting president did not set foot upon a Mexican sidewalk during his twenty-hour visit.
Obama nonetheless promised to return. Both parties agreed to work together more closely in the future—just as every other president visiting Mexico has said since John F. Kennedy. Calderón emphasized that Obama was most welcome. Warm salutations poured endlessly in both directions. To me, a sadness hung over the affair. Inviting Obama into the most intimate spaces of Mexican nationhood—Los Pinos, the anthropology museum—implied a kind of defeat, an indistinct lameness.
Yes, we’re good enough to host and pamper the American president, the pageant said. He really likes us.
On the Friday after Barack Obama departed Mexico City, I am among the many faces of Mexican society who intersect daily on and around the Zócalo. We find ourselves facing an especially buoyant and proud Mexican flag. It really billows and flaps majestically, I think. Its enormous panels of white, green, and red are glowing in the neon-poison sunset. I sit against the municipal-government palace and watch as the drumming detail of the presidential guard march solemnly out from the Palacio Nacional. A tension rises from the ground, the beat, ba-beat, ba-beat, of the military drums. People stop and stare, then join others along the edges of the long rectangle made by the line of standing guards, ready to join in the salute.
The soldiers’ white gloves give me a bit of the creeps. At Tlatelolco in 1968, white gloves were the signal of evil. Government agents donned them to identif
y themselves once the order was sent to fire upon the unarmed masses. White gloves, the clean, pure call of state control, now worn by the guardians of the most sacred national totem. As the soldiers lower the flag, the drumming intensifies. Above me I notice that Mexican flags flap at attention on all the surrounding palaces, including the Metropolitan Cathedral. More people who are passing through the plaza stop and gather in silence. Many raise their right arm straight across their chest, the right palm straight, facing downward. It is the salute Mexicans are taught since kindergarten.
The guards roll the enormous flag into a long tube, ensuring with a total religiosity that the fabric never once touches the brown floor of the Zócalo. They march back in lockstep to the Palacio Nacional, and the drumming ends. Silence, then activity once more. The people who had gathered seem to release a collective heave of fervor. They now spread apart, move along, crisscrossing one another on the Zócalo as if nothing had happened. Back to normal.
Across the way, near the open-wound ruins of the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan, a temporary digital-clock installation marks the time that remains until celebrations begin for the bicentennial of independence and the centennial of the Revolution. Its digits tick backward, more terminal than celebratory: 516 days, 05 hours, 54 minutes, 01 seconds.
Dropping into a cab on Victoria Street. We are soaked. Delirious and giddy from the rain. Too much rain. Pouring angrily, sloshing in pools and streams on the street. The driver can barely see through his windshield. He looks a little frightened. The rain seems alive.
“This rain,” someone in the car says, as if speaking to it and not us. We sit in silence, listening to the downpour drum upon the roof of the car as we inch along. “What’s up with the rain?” someone asks.
Down and Delirious in Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century Page 21