Down and Delirious in Mexico City (3 page)

“Hold on to my backpack,” Christian tells me over his shoulder. It is becoming difficult to keep up. He stands behind Gozu, close, his chest against his friend's backpack, his hands holding on to Gozu's arms from behind, just above the elbows. “You all right?”
I hear Christian ask Gozu, who just nods, his focus fixed on the mass of people ahead.

I watch as Christian gently squeezes his friend's arms, to let him know that he is right behind him, a reassurance. It is a completely sexless gesture, an expression of unfiltered affection between friends, a common display in Mexico, I learn. Best girl friends hold hands on the street, best guy friends stroll locked arm-to-neck. Maybe it is the weed blooming inside my heart, because seeing this sort of affection so intimately, so close, makes me experience a cascade of nostalgia—and also a misplaced pinch of embarrassment.

I turn away, alarmed at myself, wondering if I should have felt shame for spying on this moment between Christian and Gozu. But the crew from the Cuernavaca tollbooth don't let me slip too far back. They are resolved to have me hang out with them this night. Just like that, after a few words of introduction. It was a summons as heartfelt as one received from a relative or a lifelong friend, only these are complete strangers. Confronted with this band of brotherly potheads from the deep south of D.F. on one of the holiest nights on the Mexican calendar, I feel right in this moment an intense urge to celebrate and reaffirm the bonds I've had in my life such as these, among the brothers you choose. I have not felt this way in so long I am wondering if the sensation is artificial—considering the
mota.

We press on. Minutes pass when there is nowhere to move, nothing to do. So people simply stand, their gaze ahead. No one speaks, but the hum of the masses penetrates the skin. “Once we get closer,” Porku says, “we'll raise the Virgen over our heads, so she can see that we've made it.”

I hope quietly that the Virgen will take notice, because by now
the pilgrimage has taken on an epic quality. Success and even survival is in doubt. We are still a hundred yards or so from the basilica, and I sense an anxiety rising in the crowd. I catch sight of a fainting over my left shoulder, a woman who crumples onto a bench and is laid flat on her back, exhaling heavily. “An ambulance over here,” a kid with spikes in his hair calls listlessly to a uniformed monitor nearby. A few people watch with curiosity but must move on with the flow. More faintings follow. The pathway ramps upward, more police are visible, and my crew of friends grow excited. We suddenly begin moving faster, indicating that we are nearing the complex. We have made it. Almost.

The modernist basilica structure looms above us, a round, towering thing with a swooping bronze rooftop like a droplet of emerald liquid. Once we finally make it inside the compound's gates, under the brilliant glow of white floodlights, the lack of a proper crowd-control mechanism becomes wildly apparent. Police in helmets and shields and the Catholic scouts—earnest young men and women in khaki shorts and bright sashes tied around their necks, high school age—lock arms, forming lines surrounding the basilica. Every few minutes, they open a break in the line to allow a few hundred people to move—or rush frantically—across the concrete plaza to the steps of the shrine. As they hold back the line, more and more people are pressing in from the street. We are caught in a compressor of bodies, staring directly into the eyes of the scouts who are preventing us from moving forward. This creates some tension.

“Please! Let us through!” people scream.

“They're letting people in over there!”

“Don't push! Don't push!”

“Have some consideration!”

People around me begin panicking. I am panicking. Our huddle
resolves to simply run the scouts over, but the attempt is unsuccessful. My crew of new friends presses to the front of the pack, pleading, saying that it is just five of us and would they please let us pass? More near-faintings, more chaos. It would be impossible to complete the final leg of the pilgrimage across the vast plaza on one's knees, per the custom.
Was it past midnight yet? Would we make it in? Can you see her inside?
We are all tightly gripping one another's backpacks and jackets. Porku, near the front of our huddle, senses a moment of distraction in the guards' line. He quickly makes sure we are held together and, mustering his last morsels of energy, rams through the scouts' arms, yanking the rest of us ahead. A break! Commotion! Air! We break free and run toward the basilica, grateful to the Virgen for her intervention. We run under the glow of the lights, across the plaza, up the steps, to face the multitudes pressed together inside the shrine. We are in awe, laughing at our fortune, basking in our faith, just under the covered entrance to the basilica, which is packed with people and human breath and perspiration. Waiting to keep moving inward, the crew begin talking about preparing for the night ahead of warmth and drink and weed, in a tent, among friends. People are already pressing in from behind, eager to enter the basilica. We again form a human chain with our jackets and bags. “Hold on, hold on!” Christian yells over his shoulder.

But we have another barrier to contend with. A severely outmatched Catholic scout, a girl of about twenty in a crisp red shirt, pleads helplessly to the crowd pushing to get inside, “Please no pushing, no running!”

“We're inside the basilica!” another scout scolds.

But it is hopeless. Inside the basilica there doesn't seem to be enough oxygen to go around for everyone, let alone any personal space. Chanting from the altar choir fills the vast tent of the shrine's
interior. The smell of potent incense heightens the delirium. I can't see anything but the upper surfaces of the basilica's interior swooping walls of polished wooden panels and modern chandeliers showering pale yellow light downward. It feels like an overdone late-disco-era penthouse.

My
banda
keeps double-checking on itself. Christian hangs on to Gozu, and Gozu hangs on to Porku, and Porku hangs on to El Cochinito. I hold on at the back as best I can until—to my great horror—my knees begin to give. It has been three hours of walking and standing, in the cold, surrounded by a sea of millions. I feel dizzy. There is chanting and incense and the human hum, but I can't see what is happening beyond the mass of people. We are stuck behind an intimidating stucco pillar. I cannot see the Virgen de Guadalupe. Gridlock. My limbs check in with my brain and inform it that they can no longer go on. Calling to Christian and Porku, I say, “I can't go in there. I'll wait for you right here, against this wall.”

The guys glance at each other, and at me—quick looks of panic and the awareness of imminent loss. Voices and ears are all around us. No time to discuss or reassure one another, not a second. Bodies pressing forward. They have to keep moving. All of us know, in those short seconds as we are swept with the crowd farther into the church, that we will probably never see each other again. I immediately feel that I have made a terrible mistake.

My friends disappear into the masses inside the shrine and I work my way backward, to a corner near a doorway, searching for air. I watch a poor guy attempt to enter the basilica on his knees, clutching a framed portrait of the Virgen and a few wilting red roses. He seems frightened and, with his shaved head and heavy glasses,
looks vaguely like a fellow Mexican American, just as in-over-his-head as I am.

Nearing collapse, I anchor myself against the cold stone wall. It has taken us hours to get here, to reach her, Mexico's patron saint and Holy Mother. And now I am alone, inside her basilica, stuck behind a brown pillar near the entrance, not even able to see the Virgen's image from where I am standing. Defeated, I don't know what to do next. My friends are gone. I have failed them. I have failed in light of the faith I was developing in the bonds with the brothers you choose, in the face of a tradition that binds all Mexicans. I have failed myself. I struggle my way back outside and breathe the crisp night air, crestfallen. More crowds are coming in, but I am in a no-man's-land between the lines of police and basilica attendants and the shrine itself. I wander the plaza in a daze. If I could just have held on a bit longer, stayed brave, I would already have been hanging out with my new band of brothers on the other side of the basilica. By now, outside on a patch of grass or concrete somewhere, we'd be pitching a tent, smoking pot, drinking, and talking about our devotion to Guadalupe. Or whatever.

I reach into my backpack for one of the charity oranges handed to me earlier, open its skin with my fingernails, and started munching on the icy flesh. The orange just reminds me of my lost friends, Porku, Christian, Gozu, and El Cochinito, the guys from the tollbooth to Cuernavaca. I become afraid I am already beginning to forget their faces. I make my way around to the rear of the shrine, hoping to see my friends. Instead I am ushered out of the complex by guards and told I will be unable to reenter the gates.

I wander the crowded streets of La Villa neighborhood, my depression turning into despair.
What time is it? Two a.m.? Three?
Thousands of people stand anywhere they can, eating and playing music to Guadalupe, while thousands more are sleeping on
sidewalks, in bushes, in doorways, near street stalls, piled together under blankets and sheets, framed Guadalupe images clutched close to their hearts. I come across several clusters of kids standing around smoking pot, praying each time that someone will look up and call my name,
“Güero!”
and say, “There you are!” But no. Nothing.

The next day, December 12, my knees are in agony. My feet are blistered. I feel chastened. A
real
Mexican, I scold myself, would have seen the pilgrimage all the way through. I demonstrated to my new friends and the Virgen herself that as a culturally weakened Chicano—a
pocho
—my faith is still incomplete, that on my journey toward becoming Mexican I still have a long way to go. In the afternoon I board the metro and return to the basilica hoping for a miracle. I hadn't even had a proper conversation with them, but the crew from the tollbooth to Cuernavaca represent to me the sort of connection that you never want to lose in Mexico: young people who bring you in, no questions asked, absorb you into their family on the spot. But I had not exchanged phone numbers, e-mail addresses, or social-networking names with a single one of my new friends. The only possibility of reuniting with them is a chance sighting, perhaps of the boys packing up their tent or heading back down the hill to the south end of the Valley of Mexico.

The pathways to the basilica are less crowded. Some pilgrims are still headed in the direction of La Villa on foot. Well-wishers still stand along the path bearing gifts, water, and food. The sun is hot. Trash is piled up high anywhere it has landed, plastic bags filled with greasy napkins and chicken bones, rolled-up used diapers, cores and skins of eaten fruit, artifacts from the night before. I enter La Villa's plaza freely and search the crowds for a sign of
the guys. The wide stone esplanade is alight with provincial dance groups in full regional costumes paying homage to the Virgen with drumming and song. Pilgrims stand around taking pictures and enjoying snacks. Constant song and prayer and incense emanate from the basilica. Faith is lifting the air.

The sun begins to set over Mexico City in the vaguely disorienting slant of late fall, like a concave mirror image of itself, burning orange and pink, clouds soaring monumentally. I wander up the stone steps of the hill of Tepeyac, behind the colonial and modern basilicas and the chapels of La Villa, among trees and fountains, still holding out hope that I will find my friends. But I see only strangers lounging upon the stone steps and terraces. Some hold statues of Guadalupe in their arms, as if the things are living creatures. Some take tourist photos before panoramas depicting the manger scene and Juan Diego's encounter with Guadalupe, thirty pesos a shot. I join the many tired pilgrims who lean against the terrace's volcanic brown ledges to rest. At La Villa, to the Virgen de Guadalupe, the sinner is indistinct from the saint, the native
paisano
cannot be told apart from the foreign
pocho.
With the other pilgrims, I silently watch the city simmer below us in the wide yellow heat.

(Illustration by Sergio Hernandez.)

A
nd this is the house where La Malinche lived,” Victor says, pointing to a plain colonial structure on Calle Repùblica de Cuba, in the Centro. The building doesn't seem like much: pink walls, brown wooden doors that appear indifferent to their age, shuttered windows. On a wall high above the sidewalk, a tile marker with blue cursive script indicates that “according to tradition” the house once belonged to a woman named Doña Marina. Also known by her Indian name Malinalli Ténepatl, Marina served infamously as Hernán Cortés's translator and mistress during his conquest of the Aztec Empire.