Hurbanistorias

Mi Rancho

Well. Here I am, center of the Universe, Mexico City, Mexico. Land of deaf-dumb subway singers, endless environmental disasters, lost lonely people from anywhere else, hundreds of years of history, swank hipster hangouts, yuppie rent-a-bike, one of the richest men in the world, starving drunks, singsong accents, and uncountable other oddities. It's the land of constant stimulus.

I live in a neighborhood called Jardín Balbuena, actually a very pleasant place to exist in the bourough ("delegación") Venustiano Carranza (see map), a block away from the metro station Mixiuhca, across the four-lane Eje 3 Sur from Jardín Balbuena, a big park where they put a big tianguis every Monday and Thursday, where you can find anything from forks to blankets and curtains, 15 peso pants, used digital cameras (and good ones!) to produce, tlacoyos and raw chicken (whole or in pieces!). I'm also within walking distance from the Olympic Velodrome they put up in '68. It's a funny neighborhood because though rent's relatively cheap, we're just a couple blocks from some really nice houses. Must be the screaming of landing airplanes...

My roommates are graphic designers. I actually only know one (the one with his name on the lease), because the other one's been in Guadalajara for the last few weeks apparently. I don't even know that one's name. Well anyway, the one I do know is called Marcos, a very San Francisco boy with rectangular glasses and a sort of reserved demeanour (till you get half a bottle of wine in him anyway). He keeps the place very clean and hangs out with me when I get back from work all grizzled and tired. Smiles a lot.

La Chamba

Oh yes, work. The thing that permits me to stay here... I found a job doing the most obvious thing possible: teaching Ingrish. I'm teaching at a private company in the neighborhood of Lomas de Chapultepec (=> Cha-pool-teh-PEC), which is kind of like Pacific Heights on a Dubai acid trip, all colonial and modern mansions with jararandas in bloom, shiny cars, and glass-and-steel high rises hovering around. Writhing masses of three-piece suits. But the place I'm working at is by and large okay; my co-workers are funny and interesting, the pay is all right, and I feel like I'm doing something useful.

The Metro is my friend. I clock into work just before 1pm every day except Saturday (when I start at 9am) and Sunday (which is obviously God's day of rest so I don't go to work), so I have to go running out of the house around 12:45. Fall down the stairs, two stories down to the door of my building, sprint across the parking lot/playground (go figure) open the front gate and hundred-yard-dash to the Metro stairs, past the fruit stand with the middle-aged guy who greets me every time ("buenas tardes güera!"), the torta stands, and down into the belly of the Metro, that swallows me up as I slip my ticket into the slim silent mouth of the turnstile, disappear into the gum-on-the-ceiling tunnel that leads me to the other platform, the Tacubaya direction platform, where an orange train will sweep me away to the next stage of my trip. Every morning an adventure, the same vendor selling Danzón CDs (I already bought one, but still I always want to dance when he busts out his Benny Moré and Pérez Prado...). Seven stations later I'm in Tacubaya, scuttling around the twists and turns, following the orange arrows to transfer to Line 7 toward El Rosario. Two stations later there I am in Auditorio, probably the deepest station in the damn Metro system, and I'm bounding up shit-tons of stairs, embarrassingly tired as I reach the top, panting like a dog in the summer, and crawl out into the world and onto my Palmas bus, which ten minutes later has me spilling out onto the sidewalk next to the Iglesia Covadonga and the taquero who greets me every day as he unloads his delicious fare from his truck. "No vas a comer tacos hoy, güera?" "No señor, hoy no puedo, voy con prisa, pero mañana seguro." Crossing Palmas is the last dangerous task of the afternoon (provided I have no kids classes scheduled for the day...) and then I wave through the glass door and Rogelio lets me in with the buzzer-button, usually greeting me with some sassy comment or other.

All images come from the Internets. The station symbols are from the Metro website: http://www.metro.df.gob.mx/ and the map is from Wikipedia (the brains of society...)

More Adventures on the Peninsula and Under the Gulf

The world is clouding over again; 4 days of gorgeous sun and running around, but all things must pass, as a great English coleopteran once said.

Back to business...

Part 3 Cont'd: QUINTANA ROO

Moving along from Pet-cakab, we went to see a parcel of pitahaya, commonly known in Gringolandia as ''dragonfruit''. It's a cactus, but in vine format, and they grow it on giant posts. The parcel was owned by a little old lady, and the soil was red.

Part 4: YUCATÁN

A kid from Mérida once told me that the best hammocks are Yucatecan hammocks, and that was the first thought on my mind rolling into Pisté, Yucatan in the afternoon. After food. Because food is always first... so a few of us went out to find food. There are a couple of typical dishes we tried, one being cochinita pibil which is like pulled pork in a delicious sauce, and sopa de lima, which uses a fruit similar to the meyer lemon for flavor in a tomatoey brothy soup with meat and vegetables. After food came the hammock search. Well, I'll go ahead and tell you that there's not a whole lot in Pisté, just motels and tourist shops, and in one of them I found a beautiful cotton hammock and sat around chatting with the little old shopowner, who lowered the price a bit for me (or that was his claim), but it seemed reasonalble at about 25 bucks so I felt pretty good about the whole thing.

Later, the lot of us went to Chichen-Itza for the Espectáculo de Luz y Sonido, which I very much do not reccomend, because though it's cool to see pyramids at night, they don't let you wander around, they just sit you in one spot and talk at you with colorful lights.

The following day we went to see a henequen (sisal, as it's often called) hacienda called Hacienda Sotuta. We did the whole tour, which included a walk around the giant beautiful Spanish-tile laden, wooden-furnished house, and a ride on the little donkey-pulled carts they used in the old days to move the henequen around. Henequen is funny, it's an agave that they use for fiber, so after cutting off the oldest leaves, they bundle them, move them, unbundle them, smash them, brush out the fibre and dry it, then they make twine and rope and such things out of it. It's incredibly strong material.

This photo of a little old man I took outside the

hacienda, where he was selling his peeled oranges: I'm including it in the blog because he has this cool little springloaded orange lathe which is what he uses to peel them! Fun machines!

Part 5: TABASCO

Ah, Tabasco, land of mosquitos and chocolate. We arrived in Comalcalco in the late afternoon, at the house of a friend of the professors. We were to camp on his porch and in his backyard in his outskirtsy and pleasant town. This friend studied with them at the University in the '70s, but two years ago he got multiple sclerosis and now he's paralyzed from the neck down, in a wheelchair, barely able to speak. But he chatted with us students, and even gave us a little motivational speech on our last night at his house. It was pretty incredible.

We spent three days in the chocolate orchards, looking at problems with diseases, learning about exports, and of course, the process of making chocolate, which is one of the most amazing-smelling things I have smelt in my life.
The cacao tree gets to be about 5m tall maximum (COMMENT: THE CACAO PHOTOS ARE

NOT MINE, I STOLE THEM FROM THE VAST BELLY OF THE INTERNETS), though often it's pruned shorter. There are various varieties, but supposedly the most precious and cocoa-

butter-rich is the creole cacao. It's native to Mexico, and traditionally made into drinks, such as polvillo, a mix of ground cacao, cinnamon and toasted corn. It's delicious... Tabasco is the most important state in cacao production, but Oaxaca appears to be more important inasmuch as the production of chocolate (processed cacao). Let's see, it grows in giant pods, or 'cobs' on the

trunk of the tree, and these pods house about 20-ish seeds per, which are surrounded by a fleshy white pulp that tastes a bit like

a litchi. These seeds are dried in the sun, or fermented,

these processes producing different flavors. Normally the fermented grains are mixed with the dried grains to get a nice mix of smooth and 'robust' flavors. I ought

to mention that it's a shade plant, so they plant a variety of nurse trees, usually banana when the cacao are saplings, later establishing leguminous trees and mangoes, chico sapote (chicle, or gum tree) or other species to not only shade the cacao but also provide other sources of income.

Finally, I'm going to make mention of a tree worth mentioning, the noble ceiba, of which there are several examples in the UCD Botanical Conservatory (though they pale in comparison to the real deal in its rainforest wonderland...). This is a ceiba portrait I took in Palenque.

The Viajezote: a glorious 3-week disappearance from civilization

Today the rainwater is running down the stairs of the lonely basketball courts across from my house. It winds between the cobblestones in the street and out of the poorly-gauged drainpipes of the rooves, up through the soles of my shoes (all of which, I have discovered, have secret capillary entrances designed for discomfort on rainy days), and down through my hair onto my face, neck and glasses. And what do we do on days like this? We drink! No, wait... we blog.

Bueno, so were did we leave things? Oh goodness, we abandoned then so long ago...

Introduction: The Viajezote

5pm, 2 January 2010: Arrive at school with two overstuffed backpacks. Meet up with Alfredo and Jacobo, and we basically have the run of the vacation-swept, abandoned school. But as the weather totally sucks we mostly sit inside a classroom we've taken over and eat and shoot the shit. 11 pm the same day means the arrival of the buses that will take us all away to various parts of the Republic: I am off, in the absence of my closest friends, to the tropics: Chiapas, Campeche, Quintana Roo and Yucatan. We load up.

A full night of fitful rest later, I awaken to a Oaxaca sunrise, a good stretching session in the humid cold of the roadside, and another long haul out to Tapachula, Chiapas.

Part One: CHIAPAS

We arrived at about 6pm, everyone groggily unloading their stuff from the 17-hour torture chamber into the Tapachula Youth Center gym, where we were to spend the following three nights. Then we all hungrily set upon the town, to wolf down not-very-good food (why the food in Tapachula is so bad I will never know, but everyone agreed that Tapachula sucks, foodwise). The next day we set to work: day 1 was a visit to a mango and rambutan farm (the photo of a rambutan, which is like a furry lichi, is not mine, it is from the vast belly of the INTERNET). The kid who showed us around the farm (the farmer's son, actually), was right out of the '70s for his haircut, moustache and cowboy shirt, loaded us all into his pickup truck and took us rollercoastering around the semi-rainforested landscape to get to the orchard (because the bus obviously wouldn't stand such a rough trip). So we went crawling around in his orchard a bit. The soil in that orchard was SO gorgeous... they don't use machinery and they don't sweep the orchard floor, just cut down the weeds with machetes, so the soil was this black, deliciously friable substance with hordes of earthworms writhing within... and since it was the off-season the weeds were growing these beautiful pink flowers (it's some kind of Apocynaceous plant that you see all the time in gardens and nurseries, but in this orchard it's a weed). Furthermore, he fed us the famous and yet little-known jackfruit, a 10-pound mofo that looks disturbingly like a durian. It tastes like a mix between cantaloupe and banana, and has a wet, slimy, resistant texture that makes it kind of an adventure to eat. Furthermore, the inside of the rind produces latex, so you wind up helplessly sticky after you've eaten a piece... it's sort of exhausting.

Anyway, that night we stopped at the Guatemalan border, for the mere thrill of setting foot on foreign soil: frankly, I think northern Guatemala looks a lot like southern Chiapas, but whatever, it was novel to change pesos for quetzales and look out over the river that separates Mexico from Guatemala, see people (illegally??) crossing that river with giant boxes on their backs. I think the border patrol here is a little more relaxed than what I'm used to...

Next day to the papaya factory, and I say it like that because not only is it one of these high-tech operations with its own packing plant and the whole enchilada, but also because of its tendency (welcome to capitalism, Cat...) to convert people into machines. Pay 'em cheap and work 'em to death, then go to Guatemala and get some more. And congratulate yourself for it. The people picking papaya went shoeless in the fields, and the women who washed the papaya in dilute bleach work eight-hour shifts with their hands in the bleach bath. I asked the engineer who gave us the Grand Tour if they switch jobs during the day or at least during the week, and he said, 'Oh, no! These workers are highly specialized. ' Can you imagine working half-drenched in bleach eight hours a day? Imagine your hands, you eyes, your nose, your neurons... The engineer that toured us around was an incorrigible twat with no respect for the earth or human life, as it turns out. But he did give us boatloads of free papaya, so though I don't forgive him, I do have fond olfactory memories of the occasion.

I should mention how unbearably humid Tapachula is. It's one of the low-elevation zones of Chiapas and for that reason totally unpleasant if you're from California.

From there we went to Comitán, where we stayed at a coffee farm. There we learned nothing about management, because the guy in charge was basically an accountant who had bought the farm and had no idea what he was doing, but he was trying to establish an agrotourism kind of thing. There were ziplines and little palm-roof palapas for guests to hang their hammocks. There was also a gorgeous river in which we all did our bathing at night (which is to say we swam around in the dark, floating on our backs and staring at the stars and mars and the moon through the canopy of trees, listening to the chorus of birds and bats and bugs). Here are some observations: 75-kilo sacks (that's how much I weigh) of fresh-picked coffee: both adults and children (all of them Guatemalan imports because they put up with less pay and lots of abuse) carry them out of the hilly fields on their backs, strapped to their forheads. Then they pour them out to dry on the concrete patio... but bueno, the kids have to work with their parents, because what are they going to do, leave their kids alone in the forest while they go pick their coffee all day? They reach their quota faster if they've got a little help anyhow...

Then we moved right along to the heart of the matter: the rainforest. Sweeping due north from Tapachula we passed through Ocosingo (Zapatista territory) and up into Palenque, home of the famous Classical city. The coolest part about Palenque if you've already seen the ruins, is that when you're hiking up the giant hill to get to the archeological site, there are all of these tiny, unmarked paths just quietly sneaking away from the main road and if you're subtle about it, you, too, can sneak off with them, and find yourself entangled with aerial roots, the screaming of the sarahuates (howler monkeys), and the creeks that carry fossilized snailshells in their rocky beds.

The next day we went to Metzabok, and saw another rainforest that's not to hot (though equally as rainy), and a nice lady Doña Cristina, took us around... I think I'm going to have to devote another post to this topic, so remind me to do so.

Part Two: CAMPECHE

Racing across the Tabascan bottleneck to Campeche, we went to Calak-mul, another Classical ghost town, and the adjascent Biosphere Reserve, the latter being the coolest part, because we got to learn about rainforest management. The trees are thick and house more howler monkeys and spider monkeys, toucans, guacamayas (macaws), parrots, and leaf-cutter ants. It's like, epiphyte-central, too. If you perch on top of a pyramid, the other pyramids stick out of the foliage like rectilinear anachronisms. It's not one of the most-visited sites so it's really quite nice to go running around there.

Part Three: QUINTANA ROO

Arriving by night to Bakalar, Quintana Roo, all we knew was that there was a laguna. It wasn't really visible in the total darkness, but we went swimming anyhow, the brave few who support cold water on a cold night. I mean, I couldn't resist, personally, because I was sweaty from rainforest-running the previous day, and that clean natural bodies of water require that I immerse myself in them, period. So I jumped into the starry water and floated on my back again, wandering around the shallows and appreciating the uninterrupted sky.

The following day we saw what a marvel we had been soaking in the night before: the 7-color lagoon of Bakalar, its white sand full of snail shells, its sparkling surface. So we jumped in again, 7 am, even colder than the night before, but who cares-- when you have a lagoon to yourself, you just have to.

So from there we split into two groups, and we went to invade two different ejidos in the region, and I went to Pet-Cakab, where we met Doña Romuela, a little old lady who is the community's traditional herbalist. She devoted the day to showing us around the roadsides, introducing us to the local vegetation and how it can be used in medicine and a little witchcraft. Later, she took us to her house to show us how it works on the treatment floor (that's to say on her bed in her house): she took Rafa, who had injured his leg playing soccer some time before and had a hard time on the hike, and informed us that she was going to heal him.

'Take off your pants, kid.'

So there's Rafa in his underwear, and she's rubbing this weird ointment on his knee and explaining to us how tendons work, massaging his calf and shin and ankle with her tiny hands, as we all sit and stare, barely fitting in her tiny wooden house.

It fits to mention here that the south of Mexico is the only part in which I have seen wooden houses. Wood is an extremely uncommon building material in Mexico, but in the tropical countryside it's the only building material you see. The houses are usually painted candy colours and don't bother with glass windows (some don't have windows at all).

I should also mention that that night began the town's fair, which consisted of a carousel, some arcade machines, a spanish-bingo game and some food stands. But it lit up the tiny square and brought the very small population out. We were staying in the ejidal house, right in front of the square, so it was pretty fun to jump outside and see what was up.

Furthermore, there is extensive exploitation of the forest for the hardwoods they have there, especially caoba. The ejido has a sawmill, and the president of the ejido took us around. It's really incredible how much wood they waste. What's more incredible is the shaved patches of forest where they go cut the trees... But what are they going to do? It's the only source of income they've got.

I'm going to stop here and keep going next week ish with more Quintana Roo, plus Yucatán, another round in Campeche, and the grand finale in Tabasco...

El Viajezote: A Telegraph From The Peninsula

Lost in the Southeast of Mexico STOP Never coming home this place is too awesome STOP I mean you should see the sky here STOP I have been in the most nowhere town in the world and to pyramid central and in fields of mangos and cactus fruit and dug up soil and evaluated it like a real live scientist STOP There will be uploading of a shit ton of photos in a couple of weeks STOP I miss you all and reccomend that we all go live in Yucatán together and sleep in hammocks and do whatever because let's face it it would be awesome STOP

End Message

Ode to Foodstuffs!

I wrote this on: Saturday, 29 August. Why I never posted it I just don't know.

Today I went to the market in Cuauti, because this weekend I am not going to DF, I'm staying in the Estado. This is a photo of a chile relleno I helped Gloria make at home. It is swimming in sauce.

Have I written about the markets yet?

Every neighborhood or town has its own giant indoor market with a million stands inside selling fruit and veggies, or else giant sacks of sugar, flour, nuts, piloncillo, dried beans or what have you. Some stands sell candy (including candied fruit or candied squash or sweet potatoes), others sell spices and sauces, clothes, piñatas, or songbirds, and still others sell meat or seafood or weird witch-doctor remedies (I'll try to bring something good back for Bryan). And all the vendors are barking at you:
“Que vas a llevar, güera?”
“Hay chayote, hay uva, hay mango, hay chile... que le damos, señorita?”
“Pásale amiga! Quieres probar el quesillo? Manchego? Queso panela?”

I want to eat everything.

I find it way harder to decide what I want in this situation than at home. And most of the food's pretty cheap. The only really expensive things are mushrooms and eggplant. Nobody eats eggplant in this country. Anyway, the other thing there is in these spots is lots of places to eat, little tamale-and-atole stands or comida corrida stands.

Let's break this down:

In Mexico we eat a lot of corn. A ton of corn. Tamales, in case you are not familiar, are these delightful breakfast-foods that you should go to the Mission one morning and try. They consist of cornbread, effectively, but steamed, with a filling like rajas (chopped chile in tomato sauce), verde (tomatillo salsa), mole (which is the best sauce ever and has like a million varieties each with a million ingredients) or dulce, which is just where they sweeten the cornbread and dye it pink. They come wrapped in corn leaves, because that's how they hold their shape when they steam them, in these little corn-leaf envelopes. Atole they tend to serve either out of one of those old-school steel milk tanks or out of a giant cylindrical orange Gatorade cooler. Either way it's this delicious drink made from water, milk and corn starch (which dissolves better than you'd think), usually flavored with chocolate, fruit, or rice (with bits of rice in it, it tastes like rice-pudding). If you want to feel full in the morning you have a tamale and an atole and you're good to go. You don't even want to think about eating after that.

Alas, I think about eating pretty much constantly.

Comida corrida is my new way of life. You show up, and it's like a choose your own adventure, or a dichotomous key: Consommé or cream of squash soup? Rice or spaghetti? Chicken in mole or enchiladas in salsa verde? Pineapple or papaya? And your three course meal PLUS fruit PLUS agua fresca PLUS tortillas costs you 25-50 pesos (<5 bucks in any case) depending on where you are. It's genius. And they're usually clean, pleasant little places. I love it. It's a really good way to avoid eating tacos all the time. And as much as I love tacos, they're greasy little buggers. I will hereby give the rundown on a few foods you may not be familiar with Stateside:

HUITLACOCHE
This is actually a pathogen of corn: it's a fungus that infects the kernels but it's quite tasty and black... It's really good in quesadillas.

ESQUITES y ELOTES
There are little corn on the cob / corn off the cob stands everywhere. They put mayo (which normally I don't like but I can make a big exception for esquites and elotes) chile powder, lime and this odd powdery (a la parmesan) cheese on 'em and it's so damn tasty. You can ask for them roasted or boiled, too.

FLOR DE CALABAZA
Squash blossoms. My mom puts them in risotto sometimes. They're great in quesadillas. If you don't kknow what a squash blossom looks like you need to get your booty outside more often.

CHAYOTE

This is a kind of squash which in the US is sold in individual little plastic bags. It's tasty and the texture is way better than normal squash.

GUANÁBANA and CHIRIMOYA

Eating these is like eating custard. Try to find it somewhere. It's also a delicious flavor for popsicles. I bet they have guanábana popsicles in the Mission. There's a lovely Son Jarocho song about a guanábana.

MAMEY

This is the king of fruits as far as I'm concerned: it reminds me of an avocado in the sense that it has a tough skin and a sort of creamy texture. The skin is brown and leathery, and the meat it bright orange and super sweet and delicious. It makes an EXCELLENT ice cream or smoothie flavor. This I am certain does not exist in our country. I learned that this is without exception NOT a plantation crop; all mamey growers are small-scale, backyard type growers. I got to encounter a mamey tree when I was in Chiapas last year. It was pretty awesome: it's a huge tree and the fruit drops to the ground and if it splits when it lands they leave it there and these giant green butterflies, like the size of your hand, come and slurp up the orange innards... it was so pretty. I have never seen this fruit in the States. Everything else on this list I'm sure exists somewhere but I have seen no evidence that there is or has ever been a mamey in the US. I am going to start a mamey plantation in Florida or Socal or somewhere like that and get super rich. Just you wait and see.

LICUADOS

Smoothies. It's just that here they throw fruit, milk, vanilla, and cinnamon, along with oats or granola or nuts if you like in a blender and you get about a liter of it (a quart, if you're one of the older folks reading this...) for less than 2 bucks.

TEJOCOTE
It's like a little yellow apple, but with more flavor than a yellow apple, and an orangier color. It's starchy like an apple and sweet. It's the principal ingredient of the drink they call “ponche,” which is kind of an hot apple-cider kind of drink they make around Christmas.

Acting up and Getting out

1. Luz y Fuerza

2. “Fin de Cuentos, es Gringo, y Piensa Como Gringo...”

3. La Marcha y Tlatelolco

4. Indiana Jonesing It

There's a big stink getting made right now over the government shutdown of the power company Luz y Fuerza. Evidently they're trying to implement a scheme wherein some Spanish company is going to own or run the power supply. I am not totally sure of all the details... remind me to look this up. There's a lot of conflict about it, because apparently it was poorly run, but if there's one thing they hate in Mexico, it's Spain owning their shit. And Mexico produces a ton of electricity, in large part from hydroelectric dams. I get the impression that most people here are very nationalistic and would rather put up with poor electrical service than give it over to Spanish people. Which isn't to say that these are the only two options. Clearly they could just change the way they manage the company but this is what I was mentioning in my brief spiel about Calderón, that rata de dos patas who is the president right now, the neoliberal honky-loving traitor. Or that's how he's generally described here. In any case, cool logo, huh? http://www.sme.org.mx/

Speaking of which, they say Obama won the Nobel Prize. Shit, if all it takes to win the Nobel Prize is to NOT be Bush, I ought to get one too. A man in the combi this morning summed it up very gracefully as he talked loudly on his damn cell phone: “What gives?? They've got their troops in Afghanistan, in Iraq and god knows where else. What it comes down to is no matter what color he is, he's still a gringo and he thinks like a gringo. This is total bullshit.”

Two weeks ago, on 2 October, my buddy Peyote (that's his nickname anyway-- he's one of the kids with the funny hairdos et al) invited me to a protest, and I said, well, I'll have to check in with my prof, but she's an activist type so I think she'll be cool with me missing class for such an event. And I'll be damned if I didn't go to her office to turn in my homework and receive the response, “Oh, the 2 de Octubre March? You can't miss that. It's super important...” and she recounted the whole history of it and the whole, when I was in school, schpiel... It was sweet. So my buddy ran around school looking for the banners and such: “FES CUAUTITLÁN / INGENIERÍA AGRÍCOLA RESISTE!” If I find a place to scan negs, I'll post the photos. For the time being I have this image I snatched off another blog. I think it's an appropriate poster because it includes a photo from '68.

Brief tragic interlude: the stripiness of the photos has become an illegible blur. I'm so sorry I messed up your camera mom. When I come home I'll get it repaired. Though maybe I can get it fixed for cheaper here-- actually this is one of the things I've noticed, is that since people ACTUALLY repair things instead of chucking them and buying a new one, repairing stuff is fairly cheap. Maybe I'll bring your old SLR down here for fixin' since mister Hungarian fella doesn't want to do it. Long story short + back on topic → I'm taking film photos these days.

So about 15 of us went dashing out of school two hours later than expected, about 6 from Agrícola and the rest from Veterinaria. We jumped a crowded bus to Metro Politécnico and waited about half an hour for the right micro to pass by , and went tromping along about a half hour on foot to catch up to the march. We squeezed in between a high school (“prepa”) contingent and another FES campus, Aragón, and commenced to march. The scene was nuts: more people than you can shake a stick at, to say the least. I think you'd need a few hundred thousand sticks if you wanted to efficiently shake sticks at all of them, though I'm not really sure why we want to shake sticks at people, can anyone explain that phrase to me? Neima? You were always good with that. Who am I kidding, Neima's not reading my blog. Anyway, There were so many so many SO MANY cops. Lines, formations, streams, rivers of cops in full riot gear along the streets we marched through. I lot of citizen-onlookers too, but my god are cops menacing. Supposedly the reason is that there's always vandalism, and I definitely saw a bunch of vandalism, but then again, there's always vandalism... I would say the main reason was intimidation. After being tear-gassed for no particular reason, I now have an opinion on the matter. In any case the student-cop relationship was the theme of the day, and I believe it's the theme of the day every October 2. The crowd's chanting was revealing: “Hay que 'studiar, hay que 'studiar, él que no estudia policía va'llegar...” (“Kid study up, study up—if you don't stay in school you might wind up a cop...”). There was also the UNAM school cheer, the famous GOYA: “Goya, goya, cachun cachun rra rra, cachun cachun rra rra-- Goya, Universidad!” which unofficially ends with the cheer, “Pública, gratuita y para todos!!” (Public, free, and for everyone!) … and in the march even this was modified to, “Pública, gratuita y sin porros/puercos!” (Public, and free of cops/pigs!”). So that sets the stage for me to explain the past a bit. The block print is a pretty famous image now. The artist is Adolfo Mexiac.

Disclaimer: I am going to make it clear that I myself am not involved with any politics. My purpose in going to the march was to see what it was like, take some pictures and nosh on some food for thought.

Now on to my historical diatribe: if you want a more accurate version you should read “The Night of Tlatelolco” by Elena Poniatowska. If you want the Cat version, read on...

So in the '60s there was actually stuff going on outside of Berkeley, believe it or not. In fact, at the National University (UNAM) and The Polytechnic Institute (“Poli”) were just full to the brim with activists. Now in '68, the Olympics were a-coming to Mexico city and the government was busy trying to pretty up the face of the country and sweep all its “social problems” (read also: poor people and pissed off students) under the rug. Well, the pissed off students wound up in a conflict with police on campus (though there is a law against police entering the campus) and I believe they ended up slaughtering a number of students in that scuffle, but afterwards when the students organized an enormous protest in a historically important plaza called Tlatelolco, or the Plaza of the Three Cultures (the three cultures being Aztec, Spanish and Mexico) represented by the presence of an unearthed Aztec city, the Catholic cathedral built with the stones from its ruins, and the ugly '50s style apartment buildings all around. Okay, so that's the spot. But get a few tens of thousands of students piled in there in a time of political tension and what results is a massacre. Probably a couple hundred students were assassinated or “disappeared” (which is the term in many Latin American countries for “kidnapped by the government, tortured and killed without a trace”), though the official government numbers are around 40. There were snipers on the apartment roofs, and assaults all around the plaza. Anyway, so every year, that's what the Marcha is all about. October 2, 1968. And still the Olympic Games went on. It's worth mentioning that the Olympics that year saw a political message from the US players-- there were two runners, gold and bronze medalists, who had the guts to rep the black panthers on the stage thingy that they put the winners on. I think that's pretty inspiring. I'll have to look more into their story and what happened to them thereafter because of course I forgot.

So that's your Mexican history lesson for the day. Let's get back to the present for a minute...

Pamela's boyfriend is an Indiana Jones fan, and I think that's how we wound up climbing a random mountain this weekend. I met up with Pame at the church in Cuautitlán and from there we found a micro headed for Tepotzotlán. A bumpy half-hour later we were at the church in Tepo, and we went wandering a spell before winding up in the museum. The story goes that the church was a seminary school, and the place is huuuuuge. It's hard to navigate, with lots of stairs and gardens and hallways and creepy paintings of child angels. The main sanctuary is very impressive though, all sculpted walls drowned in gold-leaf, right up to the 20-meter-high cupula-ed ceilings. Anyway, we were wandering around and we ran into Pame's boyfriend who was looking for us. He's a good-looking guy with a goatee and slicked-back hair and a feather tied to the hair at the base of his head. Anyway we go up to the lookout deck of the ex-convent and we're looking at the view when Humberto points off in the distance. “Hey guys, what do you think of climbing that mountain?” Yeah, sure, why not. How do we get there? “Well, I think we just walk that way.” So we took off, stopping for provisions (a cup of coffee, a snickers bar and two liters of water) and the town dwindled around us and disappeared into the country, and as we climbed the foot of the mountain and the high-tension power-lines loomed above the wildflowers, we took a look around with great gusto and pushed ahead into the spiny frontier: dogs with spiny teeth, cactus with spiny spines, huizache with spiny thorns... the red tunas are ripening on the wild nopales, and I started to miss Davis, thinking of the times I went tuna-robbing in the arbo with Tom, with Jordan, with Chris Salam. Looking back at the shrinking town of Tepotzotlán I felt a little better. Be here now, right? Crazy giant spiders were waiting in their crazy giant webs to freak us out and get caught in our hair, on our legs, on our faces... Humberto and I are both somewhat arachniphobic and so the sounds of our cussing (in Spanish and English respectively) echoed over the mountainside as Pamela quietly laughed at us and took note of my groserías for future utility... as the dusk drew creepily near and we were still a ways from the top, we took a moment to contemplate our options. Do we keep going, and possibly get caught by darkness and rain? Or do we turn back, get ourselves a nice elote (corn on the cob that they sell on street corners, eaten corn-dog style, which is to say on a stick, usually covered in lime juice and chile powder) and a dry place to have a nice sit? Well, you know how it goes. Spiders, darkness, snakes, coyote-poo and rain be damned! We will make it as close to the top as convenience allows!! So we split the snickers bar in three, ate it with determination, slurped some water, and marched ever forth. The view from the top was pretty sick. We weren't all the way at the top, but we made it to the base of a sheer rock face, which we attempted without success to scale (partially because falling meant basically landing on an iron maiden of overgrown wild nopales (→ big spines) and huizache (→ mean thorns). We scrambled down the mountain as night fell, wandering back into town, eating a nice elote and floating back home on janky bumpy buses.

The above photos are of stencils I liked.

The end!

IN TRANSIT: now with statistical analysis!

I walk a couple hundred yards to the main road, the mighty Carreterra Cuautitlán-Teoloyúcan. Here pass all the camiones (buses), micros (short-buses) and combis (volkswagen vans), which go to many useful places, but mostly to Cuautitlán and Teoloyucan... however, there are also quite a few that take the high road to the autopista (freeway) and go to other useful places, like the CITY. So if I'm going to school, I look for the Cuauti-bound micros, which I know are Cuauti-bound because there's a little placard in the window that says CUAUTI, and usually other useful details like XHALA FESC-4 , which is my school: Xhala is the town, and FESC is the school, and 4 refers to it being Campus 4. There are several other campuses of the FESC scattered around the area. I haven't been to any of them; I doubt their as cool as Campo Cuatro. Anyway, so the transit guy is waving on cars, hollering, whistling and taking notes. He sees me, waves, and stops all traffic so I can pass, like he does every single day, and we greet each other, just like every single day, and he asks me where I'm going. I tell him I'm off to Metro Toreo. So I look for the camion with the placard that says M TOREO. I will mention that this is confusing, because the station is actually called Cuatro Caminos. This comes with a funny story. Pamela is from a town about an hour out of the city, but about two hours from school. Anyway, I met up with her, Jacobo and a couple other friends the other day because there was a forestry expo in the city we wanted to go to (it fits to mention that in Mexico, it's the agricolitos that are entrusted with the nation's forests-- I guess it's a bit like how the Forest Service is a part of the USDA). I'd already figured out the Toreo-Cuatro Caminos equivalency because I had taken this bus before, found myself at Cuatro Caminos, and upon scouring the Metro map realized that there was no station called Toreo. Clearly, when the bus says TOREO, it means Cuatro Caminos. So I was cool with that already. But we get there and Pamela and I are waiting on Jacobo. I call him and he says, “Okay, so somehow I wound up at Cuatro Caminos, and I'm trying to figure out how to get to Toreo...” and I say, “Dude, no sweat, you're already here! Come find us at the turnstyle!” I tell the girls, he's already in Cuatro Caminos, he'll be here in a couple minutes. Pamela gives me a funny look and goes, “Where's Cuatro Caminos?”. The buses all say TOREO, but on the maps and in the station it only says Cuatro Caminos: there is no means of translation except personal experience. That's how confusing the damn transit is here. I love it, it's so unnecesarily complex...

Anyway so I get on the bus and I say, “Good morning! I'm going to Toreo.” And if the driver says 15 pesos, I give him a funny look and say, isn't there a student discount? And he thinks for a second and says, “12 pesos,” or “13 pesos”, depending on his mood. They're all men, sorry ladies. So I've saved nearly 20 cents. The guy gives me my change (on the camiones, micros and combis they give you change, and also on the peseros in the city. The only type of transit that won't make change are the new RTP buses in the city, but at 2 pesos per ride, who can complain?).

There are a few important characteristics of these big suburban buses that one ought to recognise:
1.They fuck up your handwriting because the roads suck
2.Jesus decals, 100 percent of the time
3.Playboy bunny details, approximately 56 percent of the time
4.Loud radio 95% of the time
1.Cheesy pop, 10% of total loud radio
2.Disco, 5%
3.Salsa, 15%
4.Norteña, 65%
5.Other, 5%
5.People get on board and try to sell you stuff (about a quarter of the time its to benefit their AA branch or drug-recovery institution)
1.Candy and peanuts 45%
2.Potato chips with Tapatio-type salsa 8%
3.Gelatin/Flan 14%
4.Motivational books 3%
5.Religion 30%

“Te han asaltado?” is a question I'm asked with relative frequency. I am aware of such events having befallen my friends and acquaintances. In Oswaldo's case (don't you love his name?!) he was walking home from the bus stop after dark. They took his wallet and cell phone and he was kind of shaken up. In the case of Itzel, Lili and Gloria, their bus was indeed jacked. This leads to the point, which is that in fact the big janky buses do from time to time get assaulted. They say the key is to keep your backpack out of sight and keep a 20-peso note in your pocket to hand off to whoever is doing the assaulting. At night the combis are perfectly safe (because it's super hard to rob people if you can't even stand up all the way, and furthermore it's not worth your trouble to rob 1-8 people. They say the Metro is super safe at night too, because there's security cameras and stuff. I'm not totally sure that security cameras really make anything safer, but whatever.

One last anecdote before I go to class: I got on a micro bound for Metro Politécnico one aftern oon, and as the sun was setting we stopped at a gas station to pick up a whole bunch of passengers. The sky was all colors and drama, and I was standing up in the back of the bus, when the rear doors open and somebody starts to get on. I turn around to take a look and it is Jesus Christ, stepping onto the bus in his long robes, angelic pained expression and uplifted hand. After a half-second freakout I realize that it's a life-size wooden statue being shoved onto the bus by a skinny kid of maybe 16. I am still totally confused but completely happy to spend the rest of my bus ride standing next to Jesus, suffering the same pothole-ridden roads and abuses of inertia as everyone else. I tried to take some pictures but it was impossible to do so subtly and they turned out awful. But that's my bus story. Cómo ves...