MEXICO CITY
Us Americans are known for many peculiarities by the rest of the sane world beyond our borders.
We think it’s normal to eat in the car, to list out all of the symptoms of medications on commercials (some of my favorites include “unusual urges for sex and gambling” or “bone loss”, which to me sounds inconvenient as someone who regularly uses his bones), to take only two weeks off paid vacation every 365 days and to watch cars race around in a single oval 500 times instead of varied tracks from place to place.
Still, I’d argue there’s one quirk to which we Americans almost universally subscribe above all others. More attention goes into this strange, homemade nostalgia of ours then calories go into our pre-frozen burgers.
Genealogy.
Yes, this is the land of Ancestry.com and 23andMe. Americans will go out of their way to tell you that they’re 1/47th Irish, then fly to Ireland to seek out distant family members and let the Irish know that they’ve returned to their homeland in full expectation of a celebration. Though the United States’ multi-ethnic makeup permeates its culture (and, it could be fairly said, is one of the driving forces of its status as the cultural bellwether of the world), this diversity yields a funny byproduct in its citizens:
Longing.
The Portuguese word, saudade, best captivates the dilemma (I also used this word in an article on my hometown of Laguna Beach, here). Non-existent in English, saudade might best be described as a satisfying combination of melancholy and nostalgia.
Think the Blues.
We get this as Americans, deeply feeling a missed connection to wherever “out there” we came from. So what do we do?
We do what we’ve always done best.
The myths generally involve some forlorn oceanic excursion leading to several generations of work as specialist cobblers in tenement housing in Brooklyn (there are now, hopefully ironically but sadly not, men in Brooklyn with waxed mustaches and three piece suits who dress like [but can’t fight like, or do anything like] Theodore Roosevelt or Fievel’s dad in An American Tail and work as, you guessed it, cobblers, thus completing the cycle of life and bringing tremendous disappointment to their ancestors who twisted and toiled to ensure that if their descendants did one day have the resources to choose their vocation, it would certainly not be something related to feet).
This is both flawed and partially true. That many Europeans did immigrate to entry points like Ellis Island by the millions is an indelible part of American culture.
But like the great underground clubs of always-ready-to-be-made-fun-of-and-yet-still-actually-cool Bushwick, it must be remembered,
There’s always a backdoor.
America, unlike Bosnia and its 12 mile across coastline, has more than just a front door. Spanning an entire continent and with many territories beyond, the entry points to this varied country are as disparate as the people who enter them. Coming from Asia to the West, the Caribbean to the Southeast, Africa and Europe the East, even Canadians from the North…
American culture is the definition of crowdsourced.
Still, there’s one land that reigns supreme in its influence on us, its continuous influx, and its own contents when visited. A bastion of identity to our direct south.
The land of the cochinita pibil.
I’m talking about the Holy Land.
I’m talking about Mexico.
And among the 193 or so nations recognized by the UN, it’s the great Estados Unidos Mexicanos from which my dad’s side of the family hails. As a pasty white kid with blue eyes, blonde hair, and a penchant for reading Prince Caspian, opportunities abound for my rewriting of the myth that lies between me and the past-me’s of ancient Time. But like any myth, it starts with a respectable, burrito-sized chunk of truth.
My Mexican-ness, though questionable on the surface (I am a quarter), has long played a stronger than warranted role in my own crafting of an identity. Of my four grandparents, I was born with three, and one died when I was a toddler. This left none on my mom’s side, and my grandma on my dad’s side, bless her heart, wasn’t known for big hugs. She too passed when I was younger, leaving my grandpa Eduardo Filipe as the sole grandparent in my life. I capitalized on this connection from a young age, wanting to feel connected to the past while different from the other kids trying to do the same. Having a secret Mexican heritage is a great place to start when it’s 1995 and you’re busy arguing about other important matters like whether the GameBoy Clear is different from the other GameBoys and which Mortal Kombat character is the best (Sub-Zero is the correct answer).
This graduated into an earnest effort to speak Spanish (I’ve now been a Spanish speaker for most of my adult life) and many trips down to understand the country from whence our family came. And came they did.
My great-grandmother, Laura, immigrated to Los Angeles in her twenties with a young Eduardo after Eduardo’s dad, my great grandpa, blew up in a corner store. Growing up I heard the tale countless times. A drunken customer was chasing a rat around with a shotgun; the rat ran down a hole and the man shot into it, not knowing that below the floorboards in the cellar rested boxes of dynamite. The place exploded, killing my great-grandfather behind the counter but somehow, not the man.
Almost a hundred years later, my oldest uncle (named Filipe Eduardo, or Phil…there’s a back-and-forth naming tradition in the family going back longer than anyone can confirm) flew down to the small town of Rosario and was able to confirm this did indeed happen through church and civic records from the time.
Needless to say, the origin story ticked all of my five year old boxes: explosions, dusty backwater desert towns with cowboys, and the climax where my great-grandmother met thee Pancho Villa in town as a girl and shook his hand. Fun fact, she was born in the 1800’s and died at 106 (!) in the 2000’s, for those wondering how the math works out on the veracity of her heavy Pancho claim. When I asked her about the craziest thing she experienced in her lifetime, she said the invention of airplanes. Fair point.
As I aged, I cared less and less about the intricacies of the alleged tales but never lost the half-real, half-fabricated connection to the country “down there”. Many more trips again and I’ve now learned that the feeling is repeatable and legitimate:
I’m continually coming home to a place I’ve never been before. (< I may have quoted this before on this blog, can’t recall which posts but it’s a good one from the one and only John Denver when referring to the feeling of coming to Colorado from his native New Mexico).
What I can say I’ve touched on before is this idea of places on Earth that seem pervaded by a certain “Suchness”. Portals to understanding, regions that in an analogous formula are like this:
“Chernobyl is to radioactivity as India is to spiritual energy”
As some who reservs a six person bottle service table in his heart for resentment towards New Age pseudo-spirituality, the hint of ideas like “portals” and “energies” is akin to voluntarily self-inflicted testicular torsion.
Yet even I, douchebag California guy who rips on California but is still proud to be from there so instead claims New York without knowing half the streets and generally being full of shit and then blogs about it as if to have some semblance of authority on the subject after a mere few years of residency,
...will admit it.
There are places where the air itself holds some palpable substance that when inhaled links you to everything that came before and all that’s yet to come.
I can’t draft you an exhaustive list of places like this. Some are obvious, others, total dark horses.
India, every corner of India, even the bathroom of the McDonald’s where I ordered a curry burger in Mumbai, is saturated with “the Stuff”.
New York City, of course, is manufactured by literal bricks of this “Energy”. It leaks out of cracks in your walls and up into the skyline above, forming purple clouds of meaning that stretch across the tops of its functional monuments to mankind’s impermanent supremacy…. the skyscrapers (best viewed from Sunset Park or anywhere on the water in Queens).
Montreal, oh strange and amiable Montreal. It seeps thick strands of significance like Quebecois maple syrup. You can taste it, a feeling that can’t be replicated elsewhere but is recognized and felt on any block in Le Plateau. If I felt it in -11 Fahrenheit, they’ve either found a way to transport it from elsewhere and hold suspended in cold storage, or more likely, it’s coming from within.
The Four Corners region of the Southwest. In spite of sparseness and insignificant architecture (if you can even find a building to begin with), just pulling off to pee on the side of a dirt road possesses you with the sense that your two feet stand upon something important, something bigger,
Something that matters.
There are other places like this. They tend to have history, a flexible but recognizable term, better felt than assigned a taxonomy. I’m on a mission to find other places like this. I like to think they’re connected by magical doors that are opened by encrypted codes embedded in our Atmans and lead to each other in some fantastical but reverent neural net that, try as I might to be ethereal in my description, operates like the Floo network.
Everyone will react to any of them, any of these places, but our reactions are not uniform. Any witch or wizard can use a wand for everyday spells, but the wand chooses the wizard. Match the right wand to the right wizard and the bond’s undeniable. (Note: if at this point none of this article makes sense, it means you haven’t read the entirety of the Harry Potter series, which also means you should promptly unsubscribe from this blog and focus on the more important matter of reading all seven books right now).
Mexico as a country is this place for me. I feel it there. And yet of all people, me, the insecure quarter-Mexican-gringo-gangly-fusion-noodle-of-a-man hadn’t as of this year been to the very heart of the nation, the culture, the world that is Mexico. Like a wizard who’d not been to Hogwarts, my understanding of Mexico remained like a map of the Room of Requirement: always shifting and conforming to the preconceived notions of the beholder, without a defined Empyrean.
Ulysses had Ithaca.
Bilbo had Bag End.
Mexico, and me, or the quarter of me that’s Mexican,
has Mexico City.
[Also, I just imagined a literal quarter of me, then spiraled off to the idea of my body as a beef-like diagram of loins and quarters labeled and proportionate to my ethnic background. I’ll have to make this some day. “My short loin is Cornish but I’ve got a Northern European fore shank and my brisket is Mexican by way of 1700s westward mining migration from the Basque Country”]
Forget New York. The Valley of Mexico has been continuously inhabited for millennia and Mexico City itself was founded in the 1300s by the Aztec Empire. Resting at the heart of the whole country is the famed Zócalo, the ceremonial center since the city born the name Tenochtitlan containing Templo Mayor considered by Aztecs to be the center of the Universe.
Condesa. CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
Condesa. CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
Avenida Mazatlan. CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
Condesa. CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
Condesa. CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
Condesa. CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
Condesa. CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
The Pyramid of the Sun. Teotihuacan. Valley of Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
Parque Mexico. Roma Sur. CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
Condesa. CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
Now there’s a finite degree of ramble allocated to anyone making my earlier point that some places just have “It”, so I’ll drive the point home one last time:
Every street, every corner, every man, woman, and child, every dog, every taco, every cobble in every path, radiates Mexican energy here. There’s (or shall I say, ours) is a force of color and light, of flavor and vivacity, of intensity and toil, of rigor and heat.
Subtlety is not Mexico’s speciality. This is not the Finger Lakes, love them as I do.
The best places on Earth almost always involve convergence. Mexico City’s geography forces convergence. The Valley of Mexico is one of the most populated place on earth and “CDMX” is our world’s Spanish speaking city. This is a country who’s seal has a giant eagle landing on a cactus while eating a fucking snake. You cannot beat that energy, it does not hold back.
The best comparison I can drum up is what I’d imagine you’d end up with if New York and Los Angeles had a baby but raised it in Mexico: walkable and dense like NYC but warmer and green with a lower, sprawled skyline like LA. LA’s basin with nearly NYC density across much of it. It’s just, well, massive. This place is not a place, it’s a realm. Mexico City is like a giant Mexican SkyRim.
Granted, Mexico City is older than both of these cities’ ages combined. Normally such age would force an uneasy give-and-take with modernism on the other end, but not here. CDMX is both parts old and new, if not hyper-modern in some areas of town, but it somehow works. Contemporary art, unmatched food found nowhere else and counterculture to boot make it a hard place to describe when you’ve also got literal pyramids across the street. It feels like a land that’s aware of its past, proud of it, in touch with it, but not clung to it and unsure of what to do next like say, kitschy western re-hashed saloons in Breckenridge that masquerade as though the sheriff is still in town while kids listening to dubstep walk by wearing 4x fluorescent tall tees that look like Muumus on their way to earn Delta SkyMiles with daddy’s credit cards.
After six or so pages of spewing, here’s an honest shot at some surface level description. While of course varied given its unfathomable size, Mexico City on the whole appears more European than anything you’d find in the US (besides New York). Its Spanish influence is clear but not overbearing. The building stock in the famed neighborhoods of Condesa or Roma Sur is a pleasing, warm blend of pasteled Art Deco buildings and older colonial façades. Corner stores dominate, as do mom-and-pops. New Yorkers or Parisians will feel home at once. The cafe culture here is world-class, espressos are expected and the prices are agreeable. People dress better than almost any American city (though on second thought, this doesn’t mean much given our country considers mesh sportswear to be an acceptable outfit) but not to the point of ostentation. Of the many people I spoke with (I traveled alone), all exuded a calm self-confidence and looked me directly in the eyes. The weather, though cold and rainy at times, remained generally ideal for my Californian preferences and hovered around 70 despite it being early springtime.
The real pull here for me though is the strolling. Strolling, or sauntering as I’ve noted in previous posts, in destination-less walking that’s nonetheless intentional. The space and contentment that await anyone wishing to perform Zen kinhin expand in any and all directions. I spent days and days and days just walking. The best streets are the side streets, which tend to have uneven sidewalks and a cacophony of old American cars alongside newer imports. The walls of homes are ridden with the sunbaked cracks that Olive Garden locations try and fails to recreate.
Condesa. CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
Condesa. CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
Roma Sur. CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
Condesa. CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
Condesa. CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
Condesa. CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
Condesa. CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
Condesa. CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
My apartment stay. Condesa. CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
My apartment stay. CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
My apartment stay. CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
My apartment stay. CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
The sunlit spiral stairwell between the first and second floors of the apartment, with bougainvilleas filling the void between the next building over. CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
Near Parque Mexico on Avenida Amsterdam. CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
Same street, different angle. I love how even the most mundane medians and street corners erupt with greenery in the central neighborhoods of the city. CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
Walking around Roma. CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
Roma Sur. CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
Somewhere on a very long walk for miles south of Condesa into neighborhoods whose names I do not know. CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
While I’ll never concede the title of best city for street art to anywhere above New York, Mexico City is a likely contender for 2nd place. CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
All around Mexico City the local government has placed street signs in both Spanish and the native Nahautl language. CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
Condesa at night. CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
One of the many 1950’s era ice cream shops still running. CDMX, Mexico. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400. Fletcher Berryman 2021
This city is one of the places where going to the well-known zones is a must. There’s no need to be too cool for the neighborhoods of Condesa or Coyoacán. If they were enough for Frida Kahlo, they’re enough for you.
Condesa, for me, is the highlight. To my point above, it’s no secret. Nor is it some cheap alternative. It’s one of Mexico’s pricier neighborhoods, though affordable compared to a major American city neighborhood. It’s known as The Lungs of the city for its many trees. It’s no exaggeration, I can’t think of a major city that feels this enveloped in greenery year-round though I’ll nod to Medellin for a tie and to the East Village as well with its tree tunnels and countless community gardens. It’s past either of them in sheer abundance of plants, with many corners draped in vines interwoven with electrical wire and neon signs.
This physical entanglement stands as one of many symbols of the greater entwinement across the whole of the city: Nahuatl pictorial signs label street names in indigenous language alongside ads for Bimbo brand candies in Spanish with the sounds of Mexican mariachi blaring in the background. All of Mexico, a cultural behemoth that’s birthed far more than burritos and lucha libre, comes together on every block like the singularity of a black hole reeling it all in. There’s just so much “Mexican-ness” to be had. An energy that I can’t not run towards. The best food, the best people, the best art, the best landscapes, the best, just goddamn best.
I did push beyond the well-known and well-earned reputations of Roma and Condesa into areas without curated descriptions on Lonely Planet. Of particular note is the series of neighborhoods south of Condesa, especially Escandón and farther on into Napoles. Neither have any standout sites or reasons to visit, they’re just liveable, pleasing, and pedestrian. I love that they have nothing particular to love, not one place to see. They stand immune to the “three things to eat in blah blah blah” lists that I’ve ranted about at length in the past.
And that immunity is what keeps me searching for other places like this. It keeps me shooting photos and writing these articles…the idea that life is a pacifist version of Grand Theft Auto and there are countless other levels out there that I’ve yet to unlock, waiting for me to show up and jump into the stream.
Go to places like this.
Go to Mexico City.
