Mi Mero Mole--A traveling girl suspects Aztec ghosts in Mexico City
By Camille Ikalina-Robles
Monday--rain, rain stay for another day.
It’s raining as we pull our luggage over puddles across the uneven concrete. It’s a cool spring rain in the late afternoon in Mexico City, like the 3 p.m. rainstorms I looked forward to every day when I was a kid during the summers I spent in Florida visiting my dad. But it’s not humid, and there is no thunder, just the steady rain in a city high above sea level, tucked in a valley surrounded my mountains.
That valley is the Valley of Anáhuac. Built upon soft land above old pre-hispanic cities, I am convinced the ancient ruins below house the spirits of old Aztec ghosts. Where I walk now is a very modern city, haunted by its own ghosts torn between modernity and the subtle hold of the hands of its past. The marks of old pagan cultures mix with the practices of the prevalent Catholic faith, and the influence of the richer land beyond its northern border is visible through the high fashion store windows. Spain exists here as well, just another ghost.
Noemi, my dear friend whom I met while in Morocco, is traveling with me. We are students and we are broke. But traveling is something that exists deep in our bones, hers from a heritage linked to indigenous Mexico, and me from my roots to the Basque gypsies of northern Spain. So we make the best of it even when we have little money. Our hotel is clean and a nice place to lay your head. It’s got a shower and clean sheets, and it’s only $35 American dollars a night for both of us. It really puts being “broke” into perspective.
Tuesday--wishing my shoes were made for dancing.
Noemi takes me to see the Baile folklórico at the Palacio de Bellas Artes for my birthday. The Bellas Artes is part classic and part modern, wrapped from the inside with Diego Rivera’s Man at the Crossroads, a completed mural that for a few hours at least, graced a wall of the Rockefeller Center. The theatre is warm and luminous, lit by a bright stained glass window above. When the lights are dimmed a mariachi band appears, and dancers in bright costumes twirl in magnificent patterns, colors moving by like birds in flight. The men are handsome, the women are beautiful. Two hours feels like two minutes. I’m lost in the tangle of figures and colors, and only the enthusiastic yelps of the dancers keeps me from losing all of myself, until the beauty is too much and I am lost, a space deeper and more fathomless growing inside me and I realize I know nothing.
Wednesday--lovers in the subway.
Mexico City surprises me in many ways. I wondered about the the relationships between Mexican men and women before I came here. I thought of cat-callers on my own city streets, the discomfort I felt as I walked passed a group of Mexican men. I remember someone telling me once, “It’s just a cultural thing. The women don’t think it’s weird down there.” But there is already a change happening in Mexico City and when I arrived I saw the beginning of a new, evolving emancipation. Mexican women were mad and were demanding to be treated better. The didn’t want to be propositioned, or groped on their way to work. They didn’t want to be hassled and disrespected. The government took notice, and now there are women only buses and segregated male/female cars on the subway. Women to the left, men to the right. So when you are squashed tightly against one another, and believe me it can get so tight that you can actually feel the person breathing in front, to the side, and behind you, for the most part you don’t have to deal with unwanted attention to your lovely lady parts. Unless, of course, it’s because your lady parts are just in the way of another lady’s lady parts. But is separating the sexes really an advancement, or just a quick solution for a deeper problem? For now it works, and it puts the idea out there that things are changing.
This is not to say that love and lust do not exist in Mexico City. It’s quite the opposite actually. It seems that everywhere we look, in subway cars or train stops, next to monuments or in the parks, the youth of Mexico City is very much in love. It’s unlike America in a lot of ways, in that it actually feels romantic. The glances exchanged, the passionate make out sessions. It’s more old hollywood than it is American Pie, but whatever fuels it is something entirely Mexican as well, engulfed with the passion that exudes from the rich, intensely poetic culture that is its backdrop. Though no one really complains, the forbiddeness of it all still feels electric. One of cab drivers excused it with a simple, “ah, young love,” but he did express how the fantasy of it all did have its consequences. He said how Mexico City was full of young lovers....and young married couples, young unwed mothers, babies raising babies with a shocking perspective on the realities of life.
Undeniably you go to a place like Mexico City with expectations, a subtle acknowledgment that no matter how open minded you are, sometimes the stereotypes travel with you. But I still think there is a distinct difference. A tourist believes these stereotypes already exist; a traveler goes to see if they are true.
Thursday--the view of the gods.
I am at the top of the Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacan. Slightly out of breath, enjoying a coolness despite the blazing sun. The pyramid is smaller than the Pyramid of the Sun to the left, but from here you can see everything. I am standing on something truly ancient, and, I am thoroughly conflicted. I look down at the swarming tourists below, and I can’t help but feel like we are all little ants making our way up and down the ant hill, but without offerings of food or drink. Instead we wear shorts and those weird velcro strappy sandals and cameras around our neck and we take but don’t leave anything useful behind.
I have to sit and close my eyes. I imagine it like the Aztecs would have seen it, swarming with commerce and trade and sacrifice. I imagine what it looks like inside, something only a few have seen with their own eyes. And then I can feel the calm and things settle, because I realize that sometimes the most treasured things are the things we can’t see. And for now, they’re safe in the dark under something a million trodding feet can’t defeat.
Friday--Mexican food and Frida Kahlo dreams
We should call this the trip a pilgrimage in the honor of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and mexican food. With a stomach full of enchiladas (in the most amazingly flavored green sauce I have ever tasted!), we follow the trail of Diego Rivera’s work throughout the city. His work is in the museums, and at the Palacio Nationale. Frida Kahlo’s childhood house is blue and white and the walls are marked with old drawings, old letters from admirers and lovers, drawings of Diego. Things I viewed from the glossy 10” x 12” pages of my art history text books are in my view. Magically more colorful and gigantic. They haunt my dreams, where I see myself marching with Lenin and drinking cacao hot chocolate from the hands of an Aztec god.