Down and Delirious in Mexico City (5 page)

I do my best to fit in. But the signals the city gives me in response are not computing. I go to work, commute back and forth between Centro and Iztacalco, then head out and meet people and make friends, locals and foreigners. Some of those I meet understand me as a fellow Mexican subject, like them. Others do not.

“But you're so Mexican,” a friend remarks to me one night, as we party our way to the Estadio Azteca with a pack of friends to see Lenny Kravitz in concert. By looking at me, and listening to me speak, he seems unable to conceptualize me as an American. The dissonance in his logic is internal: I'm an incidental fan of Lenny Kravitz just as he is—what other confirmation of my Mexicanness would you need?

But for every moment like this, another arrives, reminding me that in Mexico I can be perceived as American almost at first glance. One weekday night, at a dinner party at a friend's, I go out to get fresh beers with one of the guests, a native guy with an aristocratic air. Handing me a pack of Bud Light dismissively, he huffs, “Here. Because I know this is what you guys drink.” I stammer and laugh, assuming he is joking. Then I realize he is not. He is mocking stereotypes of the United States at my expense.

I am determined to adapt. I fall in with a company of young American and British expats who had done more or less just what I have: moved to Mexico City on escapade. We venture to the relatively safe central neighborhoods where most foreigners or
cosmopolitan-leaning Mexicans congregate, the Roma, the Zona Rosa, the Centro, and to the ground zero of cool in Mexico City, the Condesa. Night after night, my varying crew of expats and Mexicans, dedicated to delirium, teach me the ways of the D.F. underground. We hit house parties for those in the know, DJ parties in old cantinas, make excursions to places packed with kitsch and tourists but are made categorically “cool” by our periodic presence. We are foreigners, Mexicans who love hanging out with foreigners, and Mexicans who otherwise don't prefer foreigners' company but also don't mind it.

“We are
chilangos
! Who cares?!” the Mexicans holler above the noise in the bars and parties.

I take note. A
chilango
is not strictly a native Mexico City resident—that's a
capitalino,
those born and raised—but a sort of native intruder, a Mexican from “the provinces” who has made the D.F. his home and adopts all the most disagreeable characteristics of those caught in the city's frenzy. It is a slur that is morphing into a badge of honor. I wonder if the term is flexible enough to include me, too.

Results remain inconclusive. I party on. My friends take me to observe the decadent rituals of the most committed
fresas,
the slang term for middle- and upper-class children of privilege, the “strawberries.” More parties, more drinking. The Uruzquietas regard my adventures with guarded empathy. “If you stay out past ten p.m.,” Doña Sabina warns one evening over dinner, before I'm heading out the door, “don't come home. Find somewhere to stay where you are at.” The metro shuts down at midnight and cabs off the street are not to be trusted.

We gather at El Jacalito and Bullpen, bars on Medellín Street in the Roma district, the sort of places that are sprinkled with addicts and the people who work as their suppliers. Brawls are a threat as
constant and banal as a backed-up toilet in the dingy restrooms. Raggedy salsa bands play till dawn. The walls in the Bullpen are covered with murals depicting rastas, hippies, cholos, transvestites, vaqueros, and a red-skinned devil. The subjects of the murals are drinking, fighting, fucking, and shooting up. Each night brings its risks and rewards. Once, a barkeep at Jacalito known as La Chimuela slips and falls on the beer-sticky floor while serving. La Chimuela—the nickname indicates disfigured teeth—rips open her left forearm in a splash of bottles. It looks as if she is bleeding buckets. She is rushed to a hospital. Two hours later, La Chimuela is back at El Jacalito, happily serving beers, her arm wrapped in bandages.

Along the way, I meet Leti, seven years or so older than me, who decides to take me under her wing. Leti is Mexican, but my knowledge of what shapes her life is almost nonexistent. I know nothing except that she lives far from the Roma, and that she'd like to study gastronomy. Leti has short, spiky black hair and light freckles, clear blue eyes, and wears jangly metal bracelets all the way up to her elbows. I never learn her last name. She is a punk-rock Mexico City mystery, keeping me close by, hardly ever saying a word.

“Here,” she says one night in El Jacalito, handing me a tiny, folded-up piece of white paper, and indicating the men's room. Cocaine. Everywhere, in everyone's pockets. On its way north from Colombia to America, it stops in the Aztec metropolis, fueling a million nihilistic bouts of rage, lust, and vanity on any given night. I was raised to view recreational drug use negatively, but four years at Berkeley have clouded my value systems. I find myself rationalizing. I see participating as a way to merge into Mexico City, for good or ill. I see no moral quandary on my plate, no endless narco war on the horizon. I see only the gathering of the senses. For the first time, I sample the devil's dust. It seems so casually
Mexico City
to do so, part of the “local experience,” as a professional traveler
might put it. Leti feeds me the powder as though it's breakfast cereal. And then we dance.

After the bars, we cobble together a spontaneous group and find our way to some stylish art deco building in the Condesa, across from the Roma. Both neighborhoods are still in the early stages of their eventual gentrification. We stumble up several landings of stairs and into someone's apartment, where we indulge on a sumptuous spread of canned beer, cigarettes, and coke. I want to please Leti. I want to fit in. She coos to me in raspy Spanish. This is how it goes until the glare of sunrise catches the silhouette of the fifty-five-story Torre Mayor, then under construction, its unfinished top exposed in shredded angles of steel.

Late at night, or sometimes in the morning, my head pounding, I return to the Colonia Zapata Vela, just a few miles to the east of Condesa and Roma but a world away from the scenes of organized hedonism. After a month or so with the family who first welcomed me to Mexico, I make a few connections and move into an triangle-shaped closet in a bachelor pad on loud and crowded Avenida Cuauhtémoc, between the Roma and Doctores neighborhoods, a few corners away from metro Hospital General. The roommates are two Scots and a model and musician from the city of Torreón, in the northeast near Monterrey. I am closer to the
News,
and also closer to achieving my
chilango
-fication.

I never pause to take notes about these first nights out in Mexico City. That would be uncool, and Leti and her friends seem to me in 2002 to be the epitome of cool. Their tastes and values are radically different from what I have just left. At Berkeley, the accepted standards at the time consisted of musical acts such as the Counting Crows, maybe some Mos Def, and anything popular in the imagination of an idealized Berkeley of the late 1960s. In Mexico City the youth sound that I encounter is mostly electronic,
a mashed-up, bass-heavy, dirty disco beat that I have never before heard. It sounds cooler than cool. My friends navigate the city effortlessly. I envy their confidence and sophistication. They hustle, they bargain, they drink, smoke, and do drugs. They wear mullets and fauxhawks back when mullets and fauxhawks are only just cutting-edge. Sexuality is fluid, negotiable, and often utilized as trap or trick on partners or potential mates. I am running with a band of true modern
hipsters
before the term enters the lexicon and the market, before the self-eating self-awareness of global cool fully kicks in. They engage life with a surrender, a sustained vitality. I am entranced and intimidated in equal measure.

I lose track of Leti eventually. I spend my last three weeks in Mexico that summer backpacking across the south, from Cancùn to Oaxaca and Veracruz and Chiapas and back. By September, it becomes time to return to the “real world” and start a career. I return to California a different person from the one who had
left.

Mexico City is a site of essential rediscovery. For the first time I begin to consider the possibility that living with a cultural bipolarity could be okay, on balance. It is the city's underlying lesson. My identity can remain unresolved. And if so, the possibility exists for me to walk in two worlds at once. And if I can walk in two worlds at once, I could walk in three, four, or forty. The journey, the searching, is itself the point of arrival.
Mestizaje
became a material truth operating inside me, inside all of us. So Mexico City, teeming with millions and millions, as surreal as Los Angeles, as majestic as New York, a mighty city all its own, became both my crossroads and my destination.

Before long, it beckons me back. Early on the morning of
November 1, 2007, my parents drive me from San Diego across the border to Tijuana's international airport. I take it as a welcome omen that it is the start of the Days of the Dead. A few hours later I am riding in an airport taxi along choked Viaducto to a house in Tacubaya, one of the oldest
colonias
in Mexico City. Mario, a blogger I know—raised in Mexico City, based in Barcelona—puts me in touch with two guys who have an extra room in a large, old art deco house on a private courtyard. One is a musician, the other a researcher and writer. It sounds perfect.

I know I am part of a wider movement. For a period in the middle of the '00s—around the time when the trendy L.A. clothing company American Apparel decides to launch not only a store in Mexico City but a magazine about it—twentysomethings of certain means from all over the world fall under the spell of the Mexican megacity. We leave jobs, college campuses, and home addresses where unemployment checks would still be sent. For the most part, it is not an exodus of much significance. We move to Mexico simply to breathe and live the culture, to pursue our writing, art, or photography, to capitalize on its cool.

I ready my survival arsenal. In a flurry of bureaucratic maneuvering and with the help of relatives in Tijuana, I leave California armed with a Mexican birth certificate and a Mexican identification card. My parents are Mexican. In accordance with the current binational diplomatic relations, I could be as well. “Mexican born on foreign soil.” It sounds absurd, which is just the sort of tone I'm after.

The new roommates in Tacubaya, Diego and Pablo, greet me at the doorstep and lead me upstairs for a tour and a glass of tequila poured in a new way for me, just a quarter way up. A guitar and an upright piano are in the living room. Plants are perched territorially in corners. They show me my bedroom, tell me I can use its creaky
wooden desk. The sensation—the feeling of temporary weightlessness that comes with moving, making a fresh start—reminds me of my arrival five years earlier at the Uruzquietas' home. This time, my stay doesn't have an end date.

They're D.F. kids, they're
banda
, and they're into the Ramones. (Photo by the author.)

W
hen it is time for the weekly Chopo street market to shut down, the rains come. It is Saturday afternoon, 5:00 p.m., Aldama Street, around from the Buenavista rail station and above the Buenavista metro, northwest of downtown. During rainy season a shower strikes in the afternoon at roughly the same time, in more or the less the same way, every day. First it is a sprinkle, then a steady pattering, then a violent downpour so ruthless it seems almost self-aware. El Chopo, the historic street market that caters
to Mexico City's alternative “urban tribes,” is a village of pirates beneath the rainfall. It is one of those places in the world that creates its own set of unspoken rules and collective behavior, invisible to the casual eye. For thirty years, on Saturdays when there isn't much else to do, kids in Mexico City have been getting together here to buy and sell music and rock T-shirts. Mostly they just hang out. Do whatever you want to do, the mood seems to say, but respect the flow.

When the rain comes, the stalls shut down and the punk rockers scurry into the
cervecerίas,
the neighborhood beer joints that dot the streets near the Chopo market. Most of them are cramped single rooms open wide to the street. They're already packed. All you can find in the beer joints are just a few chairs and a couple of refrigerators brimming with frosty
caguama
liters of Corona, Indio, and Victoria. The bottles are wide enough to fill a whole hand. Old women sit out front offering quesadillas, making the beer joint a “restaurant,” but everyone in the room knows the place is really there for the purpose of being drunk in. It's standing room only.

Inside the
cervecerίa
there are couples making out, fingers strumming a guitar, a voice singing, mohawks twinned in earnest discussion, play and sound, muggy lighting. I am here alone again, trying to be inconspicuous, avoiding the aggressive gazes that regulars reserve for any newcomer. I bum a cigarette from a guy in a green military jacket. He flags me immediately as a nonlocal, by my accent.