A Letter From Mexico City

Early morning from my Mexico City “air-lock:” Being here in MC is different for me now than any other time that we have visited. Then it’s been all explore and ingest; now, it’s, how many more days until we go on to TO? Truly, my mind simply is not resident in this place. Sensually, I turn back to Vallarta with its colours and ocean breezes; organizationally, I’m entirely in Toronto, mapping out the many and varied things to be accomplished in the ten days after our return; but, physically, my body is here and must attend to the needs of its own realm. So, I walk a lot; I eat – not especially well; and I sleep, again, not terribly well. I’m reading a very interesting travel book by a guy named Richard Grant, called God’s Middle Finger, and sub-titled, Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madres. I started it the day before we left PV but have been unable to continue in my usually voracious manner since we left: I’m simply too distracted by my own inner re-orientation to Toronto, our next port of call. When I do get back into it, I will write a summary of some of the things I’m learning about the Madres from Grant, things that make the current “narco-state” conditions that have come to the fore in the international press since the War on Drugs geared up, considerably more understandable.

But to the present: yesterday Mark and I walked up the Passeo de la Reforma from our Zona Rosa hotel to Juarez Avendida, and along into the heart of the original Spanish colony that has morphed over time into this vast and sprawling city. At its centre is the Zocalo, a massive rectangular open space surrounded by the ancient cathedral and colonial administrative offices and palaces. This space is that to which all visitors are drawn, embodying as it does, not just the colonial past but that of the Aztecs who preceded and were conquered by the Spanish. The history of those eras is portrayed in the enormous murals by Diego Rivera on the interior walls of one of the buildings flanking the Zocalo. To the right of the cathedral is the Temple Major, a museum housing and displaying the excavated ruins of the Aztec’s religious centre: the pyramid where many thousands of prisoners of war literally “lost their hearts” to satisfy the Aztec gods. The Zocalo area was their central civic and religious space and the Spanish, to destroy that past and to complete their conquest, tore down all of the Aztec edifices, using those very stones to build the new state and to solidify the new religion. History rarely allows for such definitive stops and starts, however. The “bones” of the past remain beneath the Zocalo and all of its colonial structures; archaeologists steadily continue to unearth their treasures. The pre-Christian myths were not destroyed by the coming of the new: they were simply folded into the stories told by the missionaries of the conquistadores and continue to find expression in popular devotions.

I first visited Mexico City and the Zocalo in July, 1970 when Maurice brought a party of about ten of us for a sample of the Mexico that he knew and loved. Liz and DJ, Judy M, Mike Q, Betsy (?), and Len McG were among that number. It was hot; the air was very polluted; the food and water were not purified as now; combined with the high altitude, these factors left many of us disoriented and unwell. Nonetheless, it was impressive. Today the central space of the Zocalo is filled with instalments of interest or pleasure for the teeming visitors – currently, an exhibit of military history. But then it was empty: no exhibits, few visitors. To me it was a kind of ruins – antique, grey, powerful in some way, but in another, lifeless. This was in contrast to the spirit and beauty that I felt in our visit to Teotihuacan with its pyramids of the sun and the moon set within an immense and glorious valley. The view from the top was exhilarating. Being there rekindled my desire to read and to study history. When we returned to Toronto, I applied to do a fourth year in history at U of T and resigned my job at Sick Children’s Hospital.

But that was then. Now I’m both here and not here, very like then, I suppose. Ah, the vagaries of the human mind and spirit. And so I’ll leave you for now, somewhere in between Mexico and Toronto, the past and the future. All the best.