Down and Delirious in Mexico City (35 page)

A spontaneous thematic flow chart on Mexico City, by the author.

T
he Mexico City streets are calling, pulling me away from the keyboard. I pinch my cheeks and step outside.

It is a carnival every day. Food, music, sounds, faces, and clothing of every sort, around every corner. It is a cosmopolitan feast. Cultural riches both fresh and old purr at me from inside museums, theaters, galleries, plazas, cafés, and the ruins of glorious past
civilizations. I can enter in a single day a market that's been in the same place since before the Conquest and an IMAX movie theater after checking into the Office Depot. I wait for the next trendy cult, or seek grace in the presence of Xochipilli, the Aztec god of song, dance, queers, male prostitutes, and psychedelic plants.

Life here is good and getting better. The air is clearer. The city is adding new bus lines and a new metro line. Public shared bicycle programs are popular. I look up. Modern new structures reach elegantly into the sky, under construction. I look down. The sidewalks are older than in most U.S. cities. A tag catches the eye that makes me smile. The city is becoming a haven of rights and simple rewards. Same-sex marriage is legal and everywhere I look couples across gender lines express their love for all to see. No one bothers them. Love and freedom conquer hate and demagoguery.

But there is always another side to this place. I have a rule about cities: I don't trust any that all people love unconditionally. You have to hate what you love every once in a while for it to be a healthy affair, especially when it comes with the place where you live. Despite all its gems, there are things I still dislike about D.F. and its culture. I can find a zone of comfort and expression among friends, loves, the families you chose. Yet I've found over the past three years that my social worldview remains constantly at odds with the strict class stratification many Mexicans regard as something like the natural order of things. Class strata makes people fearful of whole regions of their own city, preventing them from opening their experiences to other systems or cultures. The family structure remains strong and insular in society at large. Circles are difficult to penetrate. These realities have brought me many moments of conflict, isolation, and doubt.

I look back at these pages and see a person different from the person I am today. This writer is already becoming a stranger.
Youth ends. At some point I have to take those painful and lonely steps required for the evolution of the psyche. Everyone around me is doing it, too. I am at home here, but I could never say I wouldn't move on. I have visions of Istanbul or Shanghai, a nameless coastal paradise, a dark nightmare in the sort of world we haven't seen yet. Sometimes I see a future back in Los Angeles or on the border. The border is the only place in the world I know that is a metaphor we all live.

—D.H., September 2010