Mexico City! (August 21-27): "The Sights"

Mexico City: A First Glance, and then some

Thanks to COMEXUS (The U.S.-Mexican Commission for Educational and Cultural Exchange) hosting the annual Orientación de Bienvenida for its U.S. Fulbrighters in Mexico City, I had the privilege of spending a week in one of the biggest, if not the largest, of our present world’s cities. Anyone who has either traveled to or read about Mexico City knows that one week in the Distrito Federal barely counts as an introduction to the sprawling metropolis. Yet with a busy Fulbright Orientation schedule and a few free days to meander, I’m confident that I saw, heard, tasted, smelled, and encountered a good smorgasbord of what Mexico City offers its guests as well as its citizens…and I’m left with an appetite to return many more times.

The Sights:

I didn’t see the blessed Basílica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, nor the famed Museum of Anthropology, nor the forests of Chapultepec, nor did I float slowly through the canals of Xochimilco, nor did I stroll through the southern neighborhood of Coyoacan or the avant garde barrio Condesa… not this time, anyway.

My first major excursion in the big city was actually underground, as I took advantage of the 2.00 peso (less than $.20 USD) Metro to travel from the airport on the Eastern side of the city, to the Zona Rosa neighborhood, more in the center of D.F. The Metro was clean, for the most part, with far fewer visual distractions (advertisements) compared to subways in Boston and New York. I emerged above ground at the Insurgentes stop, just a block and a half from the hotel where nearly all 77 of us Fulbrighters would gather together for four days. I located the street exit I wanted and proceeded to walk swiftly through a long, crowded, and very noisy tunnel formed by hanging tarpaulins, where everything from purses to watches to pirated DVD’s and CD’s to umbrellas and sunglasses and belts could be purchased. (I later found out that Insurgentes was generally Metro stop to avoid, because of the crowds and the frequency of theft. The threat of being blindsided by my large plum-colored pack must have deterred any thoughts of ripping me off.)

The Zona Rosa is a delightful area, especially along the Calle Génova, which is mostly pedestrian-only and whose walking paths weave around and through well-kept gardens of greens and flowers, where a handful of lovely brass sculptures make their home. Shoe-shine high chairs dot nearly every street corner in this bustling financial and shopping district, and it appears to be pretty good business. A few more blocks from the hotel (Hotel Géneve) is the Paseo de la Reforma boulevard, which in this section of the city is divided by a very nice pattern of triangular flower beds and is punctuated by multiple rotundas, including the largest one which plays host to the Monumento de la Gloria de la Republica (Monument to the Gloria of the Republic). A giant golden angel perches atop a towering column of stone, inside the base of which serves as a mausoleum for the remains of 12 heroes of Mexico’s fight for independence. With traffic seemingly both endless and non-stop, one has to sprint to make it from the sidewalk to the rotunda without being hit by a car!

Along the Paseo de la Reforma, a series of artistic benches participated in the “Diálogo de Bancos,” (Dialoge between Benches), a fantastic—and useful—public art forum.

A few passes up and down the Paseo left no doubt of the amicability of Zona Rosa to homosexual couples. A pair of women on a motor scooter was being interviewed by a journalist and his camerawoman; a male couple holding one another sat contentedly on a bench; pairs stroll hand in hand; others pause for a tender or passionate kiss. There is no hiding of affection here whatsoever, whatever one’s sexual orientation. As I shall quickly learn during my next few weeks in Juárez, most of life is public in much of Mexico, and that’s just the way it is.

Police are everywhere! Some are on foot watching the entrances to buildings; along the Paseo many are sport helmets as the “roll the beat” rather than “walk the beat” on their policía-labeled segways. And there are A LOT of female officers—probably one in three or one in four. One night when we were walking home from a humorous Cantina (decorated with quips such as “if you drink to forget, pay your tab first”) which graciously accommodated a good 20 of us foreigners on a packed Thursday night with live music, there was a gathering of at least 50 police outside the Club de Oro (or something with Oro). While police cars can’t rival the number of taxis in D.F.—green-and-white classic VW bugs and the white compact hatch-backs of sitio taxi—police cars are by no means a limited presence, and they announce their presence at the very least with flashing lights even as they drive casually down the streets, if an officer isn’t blaring a message out the window with a bullhorn.

With an English-speaking woman as our guide, a sizeable number of our group gazed intently at the murals of Diego Rivera and tried to identify the various political, cultural, historical, and editorial elements of his sweeping canvases in the Presidential Palace framing one side of the Zocalo, or Mexico City’s center. The Zocalo is a wide open space surrounded by governmental buildings on three sides and the Metropolitan Cathedral to the [DIRECTION]. As we weave our way in and out of buildings, large cranes are draping the volcanic-rock (tezontle)edifices with monstrous banners in preparation of the Grito and Independence Day on September 15^th and 16^th.

Adjacent to the Presidential Palace are the ruins of the Templo Mayor, the religious center of the city of Tenochtitlan, where an insignificant indigenous group, so-called by one Mexican archeologist, settled on a previously uninhabited island in the middle of Lake Texcoco, becoming the center of the Mexica (often known as Aztec) empire for some centuries. Legend has it that the god Huitzilopochtli ordered the Mexica peoples to leave their ancestral home known as Aztlán in search of a new land: a lake with a small island where an eagle perched, devouring a serpent on top of a rock adorned with a cactus. (This vision is depicted in the image on Mexico’s flag.) The original temple was completely covered by a second temple, which was completely covered by a third… when the Spanish arrived in the 16^th Century, they completely destroyed the outer eighth layer of the Temple; visible today are remnants of layers 2-7, with the first layer completely underground. The corresponding museum, which includes a scale layout of the island as it must have looked centuries ago, as well as a large number of artifacts, is outstanding.

The clash of cultures and religions is galvanized in the view across the Templo Mayor ruins to the towering steeples of the Catedral Metropolitana; great, ornate structures built in the name of and for the honor of God and gods, as well as saints and Mary and other figures. Walking through the cavernous Cathedral, almost gawking at the detail and elaborate fixtures and décor, while Mass was being celebrated by a small group of worshipers in a smaller chapel-area of the church was a surreal experience. Here, God and humanity, art and culture, decadence and desperation, wealth and poverty, have met for centuries and meet still today, even as this church literally sinks into filled-in land, which was once a lake, at the rate of centimeters each year.

Friday night in Mexico City is Lucha Libre night—which may sound familiar to many, if only for the U.S.-produced “Nacho Libre.”—en vivo. While I’m far from a proponent of media violence and I vehemently reject WWF, Lucha Libre has become woven into Mexico City—as well as much of the rest of Mexico—lifestyle, and the D.F. experience wouldn’t have been complete without it. Lucha Libre is fought-performed by teams of three people wearing colorful masks in a large boxing-like ring. On our particular Friday night, groups like the Perros del mal (the Bad Dogs) sporting spiked Mohawks, squared off against teams whose champions were Águila (Red Eagle), blue-spandexed Combra, and El Sueño Americano (American Dream). The most bizarre character was a small person in a teal gorilla suit! The teams “fought” one another in choreographed acrobatics, with impressive gymnastic abilities impressing the crowds composed of students, adults, grandparents, young children, even an 8-month-old with her mother seated in front of us! I object to the stylized violence, the scantily clad women who announce the progression from one round to the next. It was really quite incredible to see such a huge group of people so riled up and engrossed in what has become as much of a national pastime as American Idol in the U.S.