Mexicowoods—An Expatriate Life

The Basilica of our Lady of Guadalupe

We see images of Guadalupe all over San Miguel de Allende and indeed, all over Mexico: molded onto medallions, printed on post cards, airbrushed on pickup trucks, silkscreened on tee shirts... Two figures have been painted onto stucco walls less than a block from our home. 

Today we go to see the original image that according to legend miraculously appeared on  the cape of the peasant Juan Diego in 1531. It is housed in the Basilica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe in Mexico City.

The image was originally housed in this building. But the number of people who come to view the image of Guadalupe continues to increase. Today millions come every year. Only Vatican City receives more visitors. The old church can't handle them all.

 

Moreover, the building is sinking into the soft soil and currently is undergoing restoration. Creaky columns get new stones held together by steel braces while mortar sets.

We walk through the church to the sound of hammering. Burly workmen in hard hats grunt as they haul a new altar rail into place. It's all most un-churchlike.

In 1974 the Church commissioned architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez to design a larger basilica to handle the crowds of pilgrims and tourists. I think his design is brilliant.

 

In the photo above, the pilgrim wearing a red shirt walks to the basilica on his knees, a common practice among the devout. I marvel at the number of people who venerate Guadalupe and the depth of their devotion.

An arc of pews facing a high altar provides seating for about 10,000 people. For certain ceremonies, temporary seats increase the basilica's capacity to 40,000.

 

Juan Diego's original robe, the garment on which the famous image of Guadalupe appeared, now hangs above the altar, surrounded by a gilded sculpture.

Visitors get a close-up view of the her image by riding one of three people movers. The airport-style moving walkway seems to be a reasonable solution to handling the crowds, especially in December when more than two million people come to see her.

Visitors bring flowers for Guadalupe. An organized pilgrim group brought this large arrangement.

 

Individuals and families lay bouquets at the altar. They bring so many that an attendant has to haul them away every half hour or so.

The new basilica had been completed by the time Pope John Paul II stopped at the basilica during his tour of Mexico in 1979. No way he was going to miss it. A large brass statue commemorates the event. The metal for the sculpture came from many thousands of brass keys donated by the faithful and collected in parishes all over the country.

 

The popemobile was left behind, displayed for visitors to see. It looks like a modified Mexico City bus. The greenish windows in the sides of the vehicle are made of thick bulletproof glass. We live in violent times.

 

The circular building with an upward sweep of the conical roof draws all eyes to the sacred image. Everywhere lighting is dim except on the famous figure.

The design succeeds in creating space for bringing together the image of Guadalupe and the millions who visit her. Believers and nonbelievers alike cannot fail to be awed by the experience.

Engineering School

Sometimes I wonder about the capacity of Mexico to compete in a technological world. Monterrey Tech is the country's premier engineering school, but is it a match for the Swiss Institute of Technology? The Massachusetts Institute of Technology? The India Institute of Technology—a school that graduates hundreds of software and chip designers every year?

When I stumbled upon the Escuela Nacional de Ingenieros I was intrigued, particularly since the building was said to contain a museum.

 

Housed in an imposing Greek Revival building directly across the street from the National Art Museum, I imagined this would be a showcase for Mexico's technological accomplishments, an opportunity to demonstrate that the country could duke it out technology-wise with the rest of the developed world.

A banner hanging from the façade invites me to view the museum's current exhibit.

 

Sigh.

Had I more time, I would have toured the museum anyway, in the hope that other unadvertised exhibits would illustrate some of Mexico's major engineering accomplishments, like the Copper Canyon Railroad. One day when I have more time to spend in Mexico City I'll tour the museum. But if this is how the Escuela Nacional de Ingenieros is used, it doesn't look promising for this retired engineer—or for the country as a whole.

Produce Sellers at Mercado de Jamaica

Mercado de Jamaica, the big flower market in Mexico City sells fruits and vegetables as well as flowers, although vendors of these are far outnumbered by flower stalls. But to reach the flowers you have to walk down a corridor past all the fruit stands.

 

Sellers here seem to have more space than those in, for example, San Miguel's San Juan de Dios market. The Jamaica displays are larger, the foods offered are more varied.

 

I post so often about mercados that something has to be out of the ordinary to inspire me to write again. And Mercado de Jamaica is different: the attractiveness of the displays and the quality of the produce is superior to any I have seen elsewhere in Mexico, reminiscent of that in Barcelona's Mercado la Boqueria.

Look how big, beautiful, juicy, and perfectly ripe these fruits are. Not a single green, overripe, bruised or spoiled one in the lot. Soriana (a Mexican supermarket chain) could learn much from these sellers.

 

SInce Mercado de Jamaica sells flowers for use as gifts, it's natural that fruit vendors package gift arrangements as well.

 

Exquisitely prepared candied fruits catch my eye. Peaches, pears, figs, tunas (prickly pear fruits)—each sugary specimen looks perfect.

 

This candied fruit looks nothing like the crudely hacked stuff in our local mercados or supermarkets. Check out these calabazates—candied miniature pumpkins—each in its own little dish.

 

As in other Mexican mercados, the selection is larger than in U. S. supermarkets. Unfamiliar fruits and vegetables are abundant. An example, the yellow-orange tecojotes are an apple-like fruit that appears seasonally. I see them used to flavor poncha, a fruity drink served warm during the Christmas holidays. I wonder what other ways they're used.

The tecojotes are priced at 15 pesos per kilo, about 50¢ a pound. The apples in the background are priced the same—50¢ a pound. They are imported Washington State apples identical in quality to those sold for $2 per pound in Los Angeles. That says something about distribution and margins in the U. S. food distribution system ¿No?

 

The sign stuck in the pile of strawberries says "Who gives you more?" I wouldn't be surprised if they were imports from California—Watsonville or Oxnard. They look like the flavorless, case-hardened variety, bred to have a shelf life of four weeks. But at 70¢ a pound maybe they're a good deal anyway. A few fish genes spliced into strawberry DNA never hurt anybody. Who gives you more?

Which of these things is different? A solitary egg vendor squeezes in between two fruit stands. Consistent with Mercado de Jamaica standards, his display is arresting.

 

But the eggs along with the pineapples and melons, high as their quality may be, are nevertheless products of agribusiness. The pineapples—from Hawaii, the melons—from California's Imperial Valley maybe, the eggs—from Bocacho, a huge Mexican producer. The tecojotes may have been locally grown, but they're bucking the trend.

Mercado de Jamaica offers produce as good or better than what you can buy in Draeger's swanky market in Menlo Park, CA. And it does so at less than a quarter of Draeger's prices. The mercado's produce is the best of the best: that is, the best that agribusiness can produce. The appearance is gorgeous: the flavor and healthfulness may be something else.

I'm currently reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. I've always preferred food that is locally grown using organic methods, but I never really appreciated how big corporations have hijacked our food system, how good nutrition and palatability have been sacrificed for appearance, transportability, and shelf life.

I think I'll continue buying my food at tiny Via Organica or Natura. The selection is limited to what's in season locally and it doesn't always look as pretty as the stuff in Mercado de Jamaica. But it's always healthy and flavorful.

Mercado de Jamaica

A friend suggested I visit the Mercado de Jamaica, Mexico City's great flower market. I love mercados and I love flowers, so this off-the-tourist-track attraction is a natural for me.

At the entrance to the market, a surreal mural decorates the long corrugated iron façade.

A mural segment depicts a Xochimilco boatman poling his scow through the starry night, heaped with flowers.

 

Underneath the great steel roof, a hundred or more vendors line a labyrinth of passageways.

The sheer amount of color in the place—dazzling.

An arrangement of red roses and birds-of-paradise stood at least four feet high. I asked the vendor "How much?." His asking price: $600 pesos—about $45 USD.

For the cheapest flowers, shoppers bypass the fancy arrangements and go straight to the growers fresh in from the campo, their trucks heaped with field-grown flowers.

The Mercado de Jamaica is hazardous place for browsers and tourists. People bustle past hauling loads of flowers. I was forever being shooed out of the way.

I never before considered the words "hand truck" and "flowers" might be used in the same sentence. Nor had I thought of flowers as heavy.

 

Hauling all those flowers is hard work. Plenty of food sellers stand by to fuel the workers. This pan vendor gives me an opportunity to use "hand truck" and "bread" in the same sentence—another first.

Barbecued corn browns over portable wood-burning cookstoves. A huge clay cazuela bubbles with a stew of cut corn, herbs and other vegetables.

The seller, one of many offering this dish, told me it was called esquites. She gave Laura a sample served in a fresh corn husk.

I would like to say it was delicious, but this stuff is the doughy feed corn served throughout Mexico as street food. For my Mexican neighbors it's comfort food. But my gringo palate is conditioned to appreciate the tender sweet corn we get north of the border. To me, esquites taste like corn that was picked too late and left on the supermarket shelf too long.

But people visit Mercado de Jamaica not for the food, but the flowers.

For formal arrangements or simple bunches of roses, for decorating a home or a business, for quinceañeras, birthdays, weddings, or funerals, people scour the corridors, looking for just the right blossoms. I saw many customers, but I couldn't imagine that enough of them could pass through these narrow alleys to buy up the huge stock on offer. Mercado de Jamaica has been in business for many years though. Apparently enough flowers get sold to keep it a going concern.

Breakfast at Café Tecuba

When in Mexico City, we usually stay at the Gillow Hotel, located at the intersection of Cinco de Mayo and Isabel la Católica in the Centro Historico. A modest but comfortable hotel, suites go for $670 pesos. For that, you get a small sitting room, a king size bed, a large Jacuzzi tub, and a balcony overlooking the street where a saxophonist sometimes entertains you with a rendition of the theme from the Pink Panther.

At least once during each visit to Mexico City we walk three blocks from the Gillow to the Café Tecuba for breakfast.



The food at Café Tecuba is just okay, but the atmosphere and decór are the real draw. We arrived at opening time—8:00 AM—on Saturday morning. Being the only customers at that hour, the atmosphere seemed a little subdued. But lack of customers permitted clear sight lines for photography.  Above: the view toward the front with the beautiful stained glass windows. Below we see to the rear. Beyond the doorway the walls are covered with murals.



Eighteenth-century portraits of obscure nobility line the walls.



A painting of a little girl in court dress contains a written notation identifying her as Doña Anna Maria etc., etc., legitimate daughter of Manuel Porfirio etc. etc. Why, I wonder, was it necessary to make such a distinction on a formal portrait?

Breakfast dishes generally are uninspired, but the café con leche is a treat.



The waitress pours a half inch or so of intense coffee concentrate in the bottom of a tall glass—more or less depending on how strong you tell her you like your coffee. Then she adds hot milk from a pitcher. She pours from a great height, causing the drink to foam. The flavor is robust; the drama makes it more so.

Breakfast at the Tecuba—we do it every visit.

Parachutists

The floor of the Valley of Mexico has long been paved over: woods cut down, lakes drained and filled. Flat land is gone: room for new housing exists only on steep mountainsides.

No orderly plan exists for developing the hillsides. No official policy permits such construction. Instead the expansion of Mexico City is in the hands of paracaidistas—parachutistshes—savvy individuals who occupy and squat on marginal land. Using bribery they acquire proper titles and the necessary permits to cut in roads and to bring in water, sewers and power. As soon as houses are compete, they sell them and descend onto the next vacant land up the hillsides.

The history of Mexico City is of uncontrolled growth. The government has repeatedly proved it cannot rein in the developers. North of the border, unckecked suburban sprawl like that along I-15 in Nevada is the result of cozy relations between presumably respectable housing corporations and the government agencies who are supposed to control them. In Mexico City, it's done by individuals on a much smaller scale. But with enough paracaidistas busily working away, the effect is the same.

Lunch in Teotihuacan

Adjacent to Teotihuatlan, the village of San Martín de las Pirámides provides a convenient destination for lunch. Ravenous from so much walking and pyramid climbing, we head for the mercado and some quesadillas. My lunch is cooking in the middle of the comal: quesadillas de flor de calabaza and quesadillas de champiñones (squash blossom and mushroom).

 

Heaped on the tortillas in the foreground are sesos—brains. Considered a great delicacy by many Mexicans, I've never found them appealing. However, I did sample a quesadilla de panza. The filling is stomach—not tripe mind you—but the actual stomach of some animal. It was quite tasty.

These quesadillas are not made with traditional round flour tortillas. The cook places a blob of masa—cornmeal dough—into this device. As with a pasta machine, she gives a crank a single turn. Rollers press the masa into a thick patty, and a second roller cuts it into an oval shape. It's cool to watch.

 

She places the masa ovals on her comal and adds cheese along with whatever other ingredients you want: onions, squash blossoms, brains... She ladles copious amounts of oil from the aluminum pot on her left, more in my opinion than is needed to keep the quesadillas from sticking. This is not going to be a low-fat meal.

 

Her hands move in a blur. She must have served twenty people in as many minutes. Hers is a popular place. Every stool was filled and often customers stood behind in ranks, waiting for their lunches.

 

Mercado food is a favorite for me. I wish it was even remotely healthy, but it's not. So I only get to eat it on rare occasions. But it tastes sooo good, and dining shoulder to shoulder with an amiable bunch of strangers only adds to the experience.

Nuisance Control

At the entrance to the Teotihuacan Museum, a sign informs us about limits on our behavior. Set for the common good, we accept them gratefully.



No dogs, no bike riding, no futbol, no boom boxes. No roast turkey.

Got it.

The Museum at Teotihuacan

A rcheological workers at Teotihuacan have unearthed a wealth of objects. A museum on the site displays a selection. We wander through a series of softly lit galleries.

 

Fragments of frescoes carefully lifted from hidden walls tantalize us with glimpses into the minds of ancient artists.

During the millennium since the fall of Teotihuacan, a few pieces of pottery managed to survive, some better than others. A tiny seated figure meditates; a life-sized head seems all the more terrifying for the pieces that are missing.

The head of a singer informs in a single piece that the inhabitants of Teotihuacan practiced performing arts as well as plastic ones. The piece is perfect, miraculously surviving the fall of the city and subsequent depredations of vandals and scavengers.

Ancient Mesoamericans may not have used the wheel for transportation, but they certainly found other uses for it. The perfect form of this exquisite alabaster bowl could only have been produced on a lathe.

Sharp tools were made from obsidian, a volcanic glass that when properly worked, produces edges as keen as scalpels. The curators cleaved this large chunk of obsidian as a demonstration piece by striking it with a round stone hand hammer.

Wicked leaf-shaped knives are on display, some nearly a foot long. Outstanding among the obsidian artifacts, this knapped hook catches my imagination. It looks just like the knife used by the torturer to eviscerate Mel Gibson in Braveheart.

A finely polished bone needle illustrates yet again the sophistication and skill of Teotihuacan's toolmakers.

An entire gallery is dedicated to housing a scale model of the pyramid site. This view encompasses the north half of Teotihuacan, with the Pyramid of the Sun in the foreground and the Pyramid of the Moon in back.

Curiously missing from the museum's exhibits are metal artifacts. Probably only objects made from gold would have survived uncorroded. I imagine security considerations would preclude housing such valuables at a location so remote as this one.

A small but exquisite museum, I was torn between spending time studying the exhibits and going outside to explore the ruins.

Teotihuacan

Yesterday I mentioned Mexicans' propensity for leaving stoneworks behind. An old military outpost, a crumbling chapel, a humble dwelling open to the sky—they're all interesting and often photogenic. But stoneworkers have been stacking rocks for centuries, since well before the Spanish got here. And these Prehispanic works are arguably their greatest achievements.

Laura and I have run down to Mexico City to immerse ourselves in the big tourist attractions. Our first stop is the Teotihuacan Pyramids, one of the Mexico's greatest archeological sites, ranking up there with Chichén Itzá and Uxmal.

We enter the site from the south, making our way toward the Pyramid of the Sun, intent on climbing it. Ever rebellious, we eschew the Avenue of the Dead, finding ourselves alone on a service road arcing around to the east. We feel as if we have thousands of acres all to ourselves.

 

Teenagers have come this way, unable to resist an urge to leave graffiti carved into maguey leaves. "Erika, I love you. Sincerely, Fabian."

The climb looks formidable. We take full advantage of the breaks in the steep steps to catch our breath. The air is thin at 7,200' and the conditioning we get running up and down the Chorro Steps isn't preparation enough for this climb.

 

The pyramids are built of millions of cubic yards of adobe faced with stone. Originally finished with thick plaster painted red, today we see rocks sticking out of the surface. Their purpose was to anchor the decorative facing to keep it from sliding off under the forces of erosion and earthquakes. The surface we see is a restoration, part of an effort begun at the beginning of the 20th Century.

 

Teotihuacan is a world-class destination. A pair of Japanese tourists make their way down the pyramid steps.

 

Years ago, Wal-Mart built a mega-store in the town near the pyramids. The intellectual left reacted in outrage that a symbol of U. S. hegemony would despoil the country's cultural heritage. From atop the pyramid I search in vain for the offending building. I am unable to make it out, but the stacks of the coal burning CFE power plant stand out plainly on the horizon.

 

Lots of people visit the site. I estimate this row of buses carried a thousand visitors here today.

 

Yet there's never a sense of crowding. The place is simply too big. There are hundreds of people in this photograph. You can barely make out a large tour group just to the right of the point where the pavement turns from red to black.

 

Once atop the Pyramid of the Sun, no one is anxious to hurry back down. We invest too much energy to squander it on a quick visit. This visitor reads up on Teotihuacan in her guidebook, raising her eyes from time to time to contemplate the Pyramid of the Moon.

 

Throughout the site vendors harass visitors, offering cheesy bows and arrows, obsidian masks, Mayan calendars and the like. Purported handcrafts, they somehow all manage to look manufactured. A favorite is a toy that makes sound like the cry of a cheetah. We hear big cat screams all day long.

 

We find a more satisfying cat tucked into the side of a minor platform. A painting of a cheetah has somehow escaped the ravages of erosion and vandalism. Teotihuacan must have once been a very colorful place.

 

Today it is more than a tourist attraction, more than an arena where licensed salesmen prey on gullible tourists. Teotihuacan is a major archeological research site. Careful excavation reveals rich detail about the lives of the original inhabitants and builders, thought to have numbered more than 100,000.

Archeological workers screen excavated soil to recover small artifacts.

 

Eventually we descend the Pyramid of the Sun and walk along the Avenue of the Dead past scores of platforms.

 

The avenue ends at the Pyramid of the Moon. We've done all the pyramid climbing we want, so we're satisfied just standing and contemplating it.



A day simply isn't enough to take all this in. I need more time. A vague sense of guilt steals over me for not working harder at trying to comprehend the society that built the Pyramids of Teotihuacan. The works left behind here are not the works of some primitive tribe of indigenos. A sophisticated administrative and social structure was required to create a city on this scale.

That the builders were brilliant is evident from these remains. That they were subject to the same follies as their descendants is also evident. Teothuacan was not conquered and razed by the conquistadores. The city collapsed sometime during the 7th or 8th Century, possibly in a civil war.