The Real Mexico
¨It is in these blocks that the prostitution begins,¨ Felipe told me. I admit, I was so distracted with everything else going on around me that I would not have noticed, not right away, that one or more young women loitered on every street corner. They stood there so casually that if I´d seen them I would have assumed they were waiting for their boyfriends, or their mothers.
Felipe Hidalgo, who teaches at Universidad Internacional, has always gone out of his way during the last three Januarys to show me something about Mexico. I´m always aware that Cuernavaca, the excursions we take from there, provide a very thin slice of Mexico. When Felipe offered to show me the ¨real¨ Mexico, I was ready.
So, we had spent the morning on a tour of Mexico City. For lunch we ate at Casino de Espańa, a beautiful restaurant with a small company of waiters ready for the rush of diners who arrive mid-afternoon for comida. Only after lunch did we plunge into the crowded streets near the Palacio Nacional and the heart of Mexico City.
We moved through streets packed with people buying goods for sale on the sidewalks. This looked a little like the streets near the green market, in Nikšić, except the goods were far more abundant and probably of less quality, and the crowds we passed on those streets probably included more people than the whole city of Nikšić, and the people were all Mexican. So, I guess thee wasn´t much of a resemblance.
After making our way through the marketplace and then into prostitute territory, and crossing a park filled with the sad stories of homeless and drug addicted men, we arrived at La Merced, the largest mercado in Latin America. Like other mercados I´ve seen, it offered everything and offered it in abundance. Every fruit and vegetable known to the Mexican table could be found, piled high and available at prices even people living on the minimum Mexican wage could afford. It resembled the mercado in Cuernavaca, but dwarfed it in size.
I´d visited another part of Mexico the day before. A small grup of students and faculty visited the village of Cuentepec, where the people still speak the Nahua language. Spanish is their second language. One family, who brought us into their home showed us how they made the clay that allowed them to make the clay pots and figurines they sold. Since they have no oven to bake their products in, they set them on the ground and burn them using a mixture of local plants and dried excrement. They made their tortillas by scraping kernels from the corn and grinding them with stone matates, then mixing and baking them, all with the tools that Meso-Americans have used for thousands of years.
We entered other homes, usually compounds of buildings. The materials for building included adobe, brick, concrete, and stone, and we often saw walls of the various materials next to one another. Many of the roofs, especially of the smaller buildings, were corrugated sheets of asbestos. Most people there have animals and it seems that everyone depends on agriculture in some form. But how they manage, how they live was impossible for me to imagine.
Comments
A fascinating slice of life.
Posted by: Dennis G. Jerz | January 14, 2007 4:24 PM