Down and Delirious in Mexico City (29 page)

This was my true cultural formation, the sounds in the car on the way to school, in the driveway, in our rooms, BET on blast every afternoon after school. In Mexico City, in certain worlds, the beats come back to me. They echo through the clubs, parties,
toquines,
through the haze of Oaxacan weed. They belong to the archaeology of the moment, the fluidity that exists between North and South, the unifying thump. I reside in those in-between spaces, the ripples, the intersections.

One day I go to Calle Repùblica de Argentina deep in the back of Centro, Tepito territory. I come upon a stretch of the street that is lined primarily with stores that sell baseball caps. I find a spot with a stand outside lined with straight-billed caps that are in plain colors, from black to pink, with the elaborate skull-and-flower Ed Hardy–esque designs that are in style right now among some of the
tepiteños,
and knockoff caps for certain American teams:
NY, LA, AZ,
and
SD,
the insignia used by the San Diego Padres. It is block letters, the
S
placed slightly above the
D,
both symbols knitted in heavy white.

Does this mean a critical mass of San Diego barrio exiles is in Mexico City? What about Arizonans? Nah, I decide, these must just be popular pairings of letters. I ponder the
SD
cap. This is not a piece of attire I would ever feel comfortable wearing in actual San Diego, but here, the insignia calls to me. I go for the straight-bill
SD
cap, in dark brown. I pay my fifty pesos for it, slap it on, cock it to the right, and walk back into the energy and noise of the street.

Shortly after I move into my apartment in the Centro, I go next door to meet the neighbor, Osvaldo, an architect. I knock on Osvaldo's door and see the inside of his house, a cozy, Catholic apartment. With a simple hello he walks past me and heads to my apartment, just to check it out. It is empty except for my bed and desk. I ask Osvaldo, “How do you deal with the noise, from the
ambulantes
?”

Osvaldo looks at me flatly. He says he read a book and took a course on how to disconnect himself from it.

The
ambulantes
on my block, the street vendors, play music from their special little enclosed market on blast all day, from eleven in the morning to about nine at night. Every day. The speakers are on the concrete, on the sidewalk, facing the open air. Early on, I debate whether I should go down to the guys who sell Shania Twain and Beyoncé,
cumbias
and reggaeton, Vicente Fernández, and an audio English-learning program, and tell them, “Yo, guys, can you turn it down a little?” This is one option. My other option, I think, is to complain to my borough government, a very American gentrifier thing to do. But then, at the
delegación
they'd probably ask for my name, my address, and who knows what they might do with that information. I picture it somehow getting back to the mafias that run the street vendors—the D.F. government negotiated to get them into their new indoor spaces, off the sidewalks—and then somehow, in a not so nice way, its getting back to me.

My third option, the most winsome of all, would be to write them a clear, direct handwritten note calmly explaining how the noise from their stage-grade speakers is perfectly crisp and sound in my apartment, and probably all the apartments above and to the sides of me, and if they would please not play their music at full blast all the time, maybe just downgrade it a bit, even a quarter
down. I would sign the letter and slip it under the grates of their market in the middle of the night and wait for something to happen. It's like something I would do if I were thirteen years old, but I'm desperate.

The noise comes in every day as I settle in, invasive, unapologetic, mocking me. I ask the landlord, the
licenciado,
what he thinks about the noise problem from the
ambulantes
when I go downstairs to pay my first full month of rent. Well, he tells me, he's tried to go over there, tell the guys there's a lady in the building who is sick, and they don't care. They just say they have to play it loud or else they don't sell anything.

I ask Osvaldo if talking to the vendors would be effective, and he said it wouldn't, they wouldn't care.

“It's just the way it is,” he says.

Uriel concurs. “It would be like talking to a window.”

It's noisy, he admits, but at least it's good noise. At least it's decent music most of the time. I mean, music that when it comes on, you don't mind 100 percent having to listen to it. Even “Feel Like a Woman.” At least it's not nineties' high-energy Mexican techno on loop or something awful like that. “And Dance with the Devil,” or something like that. Uriel is right. I have to learn to live with the noise. I have to embrace it. I have to realize that something about the racket is nourishing.

After smog, noise is the most prevalent pollutant in Mexico City's air. Both have their obvious drawbacks but both also have their magic. When I lived in Los Angeles, the toxic coastal smog created some of the most spectacular and psychedelic sunsets I have ever seen. Here, in the high landlocked capital, the smog sits on you but it also makes for dazzling skyspaces. Neon orange, electric gray, brilliant purples, and slanting pinks. I begin to listen to the noise as a blanket of security. Noise, like smog, means people,
commerce, signs of life. There is safety in noise, as there is safety in numbers. Silence is not to be trusted because in Mexico City silence is insincere. The city never wants to be quiet.

There is peace to be made with the noise. I now try to picture my square, little apartment as a magical urban tree house—without a tree—hidden above a really exciting river of people and energy. There is magic on the streets, I tell myself.
The hustle! The raw kernel of big-city life!
Listening to Beyoncé or Wisin y Yandel blast through my bathroom window every day reminds me, ultimately and of all things, that I live in Mexico City. That means a place in the world with too many people, too much pollution, and too much noise. It is a place, like so many others in the world, that runs on illegal street commerce, on pirated content, on pirates, like my fantasies of cities in Africa and India and the Middle East, and the borderless barrios that those places share with neighborhoods in London and New York and Chicago. It is a truly cosmopolitan place because here, in the orbit of Tepito, every kind of film, concert video, or album, no matter how obscure, is potentially within grasp, expanding our boundaries and influences.

More than extravagant parties or roaming mariachis, life in Mexico City means an English lesson on fruits and vegetables booming in my ears, supersized and out of my control during my morning shower.

It takes a tall Scandinavian woman with lanky features and a rough tenor of a voice to break down to me, finally, what it means for me to be living here in Mexico City.

It is early 2008. I'm wandering the desolate gloomy streets of Colonia Roma hoping to fight the wave of depression that comes with the dusk of Sunday, every Sunday, without fail, no matter what
city I'm in. I meet up with Josh, a twenty-one-year-old student from Louisiana, and we talk about home, about graffiti, and our parents. We sit down for tacos on Álvaro Obregón, then find our way to an apartment of a friend of his, to sit around on leather couches and watch the TV show
Dexter
with subtitles on, except on the parts where the Cuban police officer throws Spanish into the dialogue.

We sip tequila and have popcorn and packaged
chicharrón
chips doused in lime and chili. When I'm sufficiently certain that dusk has passed, and that I can walk home without too much Sunday gloom, I thank the hosts and get up to leave.

“And what's with the English?” the tall Scandinavian woman, Josh's friend, asks suddenly.

“The English?”

“It's very good,” she says.

“Oh,” I respond, getting it. “I'm from California.”

“You're not Mexican?”

She is genuinely confused.

“No, no, I'm Mexican American.”

“Ah! Well, you've come home,” she concludes happily.

“Well, no one in my family has been here,” I reply. “I'm the only one who's made it here.”

Made it here.
The words roll together and fly away. The girl smiles big and is truly pleased to meet and greet. Our cheeks meet in the customary good-bye kiss. “Welcome home.”

Back I go to the sidewalks, toward metro Hospital General. The night is chilly, crisp, and still for January. I listen to the streets and walk steadily. I had been trying to communicate to Josh's friend that I am not “home” because my family is not native to central Mexico, but to her it doesn't matter. To her I am in my epicenter, the belly button of my ancestral homeland. She is proud, for me. I stroll down busy Cuauhtémoc, past the door at number 226, where
I lived for a few weeks in summer 2002, three stories above the roaring boulevard, with two Scots and a Mexican from Torreón.

I peer in. It looks the same, the heavy glass-and-metal door, the tiled art deco passageway, the box elevator and narrow staircase. I'd go up every night and sit on the porch and watch the river of traffic below and wonder what I was doing here. Tonight everything is the same. The Scotiabank branch downstairs, the Sanborns café down the block, the stark hotel across the street, the Benidorm, still somehow in operation. The city has miles and miles of “passing-through” hotels. For lonely businessmen, hapless tourists, lunchtime trysts between married men and their mistresses, married men and their male lovers, drug deals, for dying.

Walking to the station, I feel the flash of familiarity. The
torta
and taco stands, the homeless people begging for small coins, the reeking steam rising from vents leading to a subterranean nowhere. This is home, the impossible megacity. Some find it in New York, some in Los Angeles, for some it is in Europe or East Asia. For some it is Mexico City. Walking here, I could be anywhere. Streets and people and sounds and bad smells. Sidewalk obstacles and sex shops. A new jetliner cruising down to earth on the established pathway overhead. Megacities do not pretend to be pretty or picturesque, do not pretend to deny that ours is now a planet overrun by humans, and that humans are filthy and destructive creatures but are also prone to romancing one another. The megacity is the perfect place for romance. Romance between two people, between strangers exchanging quick looks on a platform. Romance for the tenuous proposal that is a global society.

On the platform at metro Hospital General, two teenage couples are ravenously making out. On the train, an African man in hip-hop gear who must have teleported onto Mexico City's Line 3 from the subway in New York or in Paris nods in my direction.
Easy-listening is playing softly from a few strategic speakers in the transfer corridors of metro Centro Médico. Then, in the Tacubaya station's main transfer passage, three deaf people, one man and two women, are happily chatting in Mexican sign language. They have found each other.

It is Sunday, so more love, more couples making out on the escalators up. Back on the surface, a fully costumed clown, in full makeup, heading home after a long day's work. Clowns work parties, then drum up extra earnings performing wacky skits on the trains. The clown and I nod to one another when our paths cross. Everyone leaving the metro tonight is going along to the humid little boxes that we call our bedrooms, home, aware that in the modern megacity the walls that separate our homes are membranes that only temporarily keep apart the millions and millions of people who must, at all times, breathe the same city air, eat the same city food, share the same treacherous city sidewalks, and greet the same city clowns heading home on Sundays in red plastic noses and long flappy shoes.

El Águila Ciega
, 2010. (Painting by Daniel Lezama.)

F
rom the Associated Press: