Down and Delirious in Mexico City (4 page)

“Uff,”
I respond, and frown. Among some Mexicans in the United States, La Malinche is reviled as a traitor, the Judas Iscariot of the New World. By grunting I think I am doing my duty.

But Victor, an artist with whom I have struck up a fast friendship, recoils. “You Chicanos need to get over the
conquista,
” he says. “La Malinche was amazing. She was incredibly smart and beautiful and knew many languages. She is one of the only women historical figures we have from the period.”

I am strolling with Victor after lunch. It is a warm and drizzly day, mid-July 2002, just a few weeks into my first visit to Mexico City. From the moment I land, nearly every human interaction and every street corner turned offers an eye-widening lesson. The onslaught of information and sensations leaves me fatigued. Almost anything I say is analyzed, mocked, or critiqued in relation to my being a sort of native foreigner—a Mexican born in the United States, Mexican but not quite. Victor's reproach shocks my brain. As far as I know, to be accused of
malinchismo,
the undue love and devotion for the foreigner, for the American or the European, is slanderous in Mexico. I mean, that's what I
had been taught
back in California. Mexico, Victor says to me carefully on that street, is a fusion of two civilizations, the Spanish and the indigenous.
We are both, half and half,
he says. It is
mestizaje,
the joining, and we are mere by-products of that merging. That's just history.

Victor is bright, friendly, and generous. I am having lunch a couple times a week at El Generalito, the restaurant he operates with his partner, Juan Carlos. After the meal, the coffee, and the conversation, they rarely bring me a check.

“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.