Mexico City on foot
Mural in Mexico City by Diego Rivera.
NEW YORK CITY—The Travel section of this past weekend’s edition of The New York Times listed Mexico City as the number one place to visit this year. Quite a coincidence, as my wife and I had just gotten back the day before from a trip there and to the nearby town of Puebla.
The Times blurb, however, is rather tepid in its endorsement of la ciudad de Mexico, focusing on how the city now has smart new fashionable restaurants, how it’s safer than before, features some hot design studios, etc. Of course it’s good to know about these sorts of things, but they nowhere near convey the excitement that makes the city buzz. I daresay the city has always had good restaurants, though perhaps not as glitzy or upscale as the paper of record would like them to be.
This sprawling metropolis—built on the 14th century Aztec city of Tenochtitlan and the largest in the western hemisphere with more than 21 million people—has an astoundingly rich and complex cultural heritage, manifested in the people’s mestizo faces, the architecture, the varied colonias or neighborhoods, the markets, and the art that stretches over two millennia, with the precolonial, colonial and postcolonial periods often, if not always, overlapping one another.
The most striking example of this overlap is the Templo Mayor, where the ruins of possibly the most important Aztec temple were discovered by workmen laying down electric cables in 1978, underneath the paving stones of the zocalo, or plaza, in its immensity one to rival Tiananmen and Red Square. Dating from 1400 C.E., this temple was enlarged several times before Cortes’ arrival, and was believed by the Aztecs to mark the exact center of the universe. The conquistadors were never subtle in (literally) imposing their mark on the conquered, whether this was to knock down the indigenous edifices or to marginalize folkways—as we know from our own colonial history in the Philippines, one intertwined with that of Mexico, when we were essentially its province administratively, the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade being the principal link.
Of course at Teotihuacan, the precolonial, pre-Aztec sacred city thought to have been erected in 100 BCE and reaching its zenith in the 5th century C.E., with its monumental pyramids of the sun and the moon, its ritual plazas, and broad avenues, there is no overlap. The only postcolonial signs are the vans and automobiles, the parking lots, the souvenir shops, the tourists with their smartphones and cameras, and the occasional plane overhead. (Interestingly, wall texts at the site state that recent archaeological evidence suggests that the temple of the sun may be a misnomer, as it may have been a temple to the deity of water.)
To my mind, to get a true sense of a city, it isn’t enough to hit all the cultural highlights. We did this, of course, but limited ourselves to a few to which we could devote an afternoon or a morning, without mentally rushing on to the next item on a checklist. Other than Teotihuacan, we concentrated on the murals of the great Mexican artists at the Palacio de Bellas Artes: Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco. Recreated here in 1934 by Rivera after the original, commissioned and paid for by the Rockefellers for the Rockefeller Center, was destroyed due to its explicit homage to Marx and the founders of the Soviet state and to its fierce critique of capitalism, his El Hombre en el cruce de caminos, or Man at the Crossroads is both monumental and intimate, and invites the viewer to linger and deconstruct its many layers. A splendid bonus was an exhibition devoted to the explosive energy of the Russian avant-garde artists of the 1920s and 1930s, with works not likely to be seen anytime soon in New York City.
We spent a whole afternoon revisiting Casa Azul in Colonia Coyoacan, Frida Kahlo’s family residence, where she was born and where she passed away. Frida, like her Diego, was a force of nature, and here in this residence turned into a shrine, one understands how this haven of tranquility and with a supportive family allowed her to surmount her physical disability and metamorphose into a piercingly radiant artist.
Half of the time we were flaneurs and walked as much as we stood; walked and contemplated; walked and tried various eateries that only locals (so we surmised) patronized; walked until our feet ached, and we were out of breath, more often than not, as the deceptively flat city lies at an altitude of more than 7,300 feet above sea level.
We explored Colonia Condessa, the neighborhood where our B&B was located, and one that combined the residential with the commercial but not in the big-shop-kind-of-way. At the western end of the Condessa was Gallery Kurimanzutto, where the London-based David Medalla was part of a group show. This was my first time to actually lay eyes on one of his bubble machines. It turned out to be quite sensual and beautiful, more so than I expected it to be.
One reward for our forays on foot was coming across murals in an old, non-touristy market, the Mercado Alberto Rodriguez, about six blocks north of the zocalo. The Mercado reminded me of such old Manila palengkes as the Quinta in Quiapo and Divisoria.
(To be continued)
Copyright L.H. Francia 2016
Like us on Facebook
