This is a travelogue-letter or a letter-travelogue. Both letters and travelogues are about bridging distances, short or long, physical or metaphorical. And so the two forms merge easily.
I WENT TO MEXICO FOR A WEEK IN MY FEBRUARY STUDY BREAK. (Meckhiko, to the Mexicans). To me Meckhiko is a vast, colourful, beautiful, tropical country.
From this short trip I developed a somewhat romantic view of the place. I remain largely ignorant of Mexican history and culture, though I have some sense of it and a very incomplete, but emerging, picture of countries South of the USA. I think what I got from my trip was a strong flavour of Mexico: many heady whiffs of it.
Though I got just a glimpse, I feel that I had an intimate and intense relationship with Mexico while I was there. (Mere romanticism? But then, I am a very romantic traveller.)
Tropical (s)kin
A sense of familiarity enveloped me soon after I got off the plane. At a tangible level, it was the tropical terrain and the climate that made me feel at home. These struck me forcefully because I had lived in Canada for six months, through a deepening winter.
But I think that the empathy ran deeper than that. When I went to Florida in 1990, after three months in Canada, for instance, there was that familiar topography again, but the ambience was wholly American. Mexico is closer to the chaos, the pulsating rhythm of India and the “developing world” than the “West”. Though of course, it is very, very different from India.
I felt the need to experience and enjoy both the similarity and the difference. At least some of my understanding of these dualities was subjective. It was akin to a private and pleasurous humming inside me that made me more responsive to all the new stimuli that surrounded me. This interest in comparison is one of my motivations for travelling, for wanting to see the world.
Enough of these “metaphysical musings!” This is supposed to be a “fun” piece, reflecting, at least, some of the energy, excitement and vitality I experienced when I’m on the road. Essentially, after my Mexican sojourn, my interest in South America, which was acute to begin with, has sharpened.
I chose Mexico because it seemed cheap (it wasn’t, but it was affordable) and because my friend Gillian, from my department, is there right now, getting some field experience with a Mexican NGO.
I flew to Mexico City (Mexicans refer to their mostly infamous capital simply as Mexico just as the Québecois refer to Quebec City simply as Quebec) on a cold (but what else?) Monday morning. At Mexico airport, one of the most fortunate coincidences in my life occurred – I ran into Gillian in the washroom. She was there to see a colleague off with Kelly, a Canadian spending time at the same NGO, and Margarita, her Mexican boss.
Margarita is an affectionate and lively person (confounded at first by my English, which she found too “fast”, according to Gillian) who took us to the central square (zocalo in Spanish) and then to a very late (Mexican style) lunch to a vegetarian eatery (a novelty of sorts in this country) where we had a delicious and wholesome meal, CHEAP!
The larger than life zocalo
The zocalo, literally meaning pedestal, is the largest in the Western hemisphere. (I finally managed to perfect the pronunciation of zocalo and be comprehensible, after several days. The word has a sort of lilt in it. It became a kind of magical, “open sesame” word which helped me get around on public transport in the Mexican towns I visited.)
The zocalo in Mexico city is a HUGE square flanked by the most imposing and important buildings in the capital, chiefly La Cathedral Metropolitana (enormous) built between 1563 and 1813 and El Palacio Nacional, once Cortes’ official residence. All the present structures are built unapologetically on the ruins of the Aztec empire. The remnants of the ruins are visible in one corner of the square. This used to be Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire.
The Aztec ruins (Templo Mayor) constitute a temple dedicated to the Aztec sun and rain gods. On my return to Mexico City a week later, I witnessed a sort of Indian bonding ritual at this site. A small crowd (there were chairs arranged in a semi-circle, so this was an organised event) had gathered to watch three Indians in traditional costume, worshipping, facing the ruins of the Templo Mayor. They carried incense pots and knelt and moved around the enclosed space to live music.
More people, similarly dressed, arrived in a bus a little later. Some of them looked Anglo-Saxon. I asked Ketza, a Mexican, Indian guy I’d met in my hotel, about this. He said the whites were probably expressing solidarity with the cause of the native Indians, to reaffirm their mangled heritage, by dressing like them and participating in the ritual.
Another time, in Jalapa (pronounced Halapa), I glimpsed a similar sort of ritual through a bus window. It was taking place at the foot of a statue of a stereotypical native Indian, feathered headdress and al. (I think he was on horseback.) There was the Indian costume again, worn by a woman, and incense, and garlands of flowers.
All this reminded me of the African artefacts and clothes I’d seen in Harlem, in New York – the Malcolm X caps, pirated tapes of “black music” tapes, incense sticks (good old agarbattis, glossily packaged!) small perfume bottles (they look exactly like attar bottles and probably are). All the paraphernalia for an ethnic revival coupled with the New Age back to roots and nature type of aspirations.
The zocalo was ALIVE, THROBBING, LIT-UP, ANIMATED that night, my last night in Mexico City. One whole side (and a broad side that is!) was occupied with protesters with banners and loudspeakers – men, women, children too, who seemed to be camping in front of the official buildings. They had rigged up temporary awnings for an all-night vigil. Nearby was a stage, probably part of this demonstration.
Ketza told me later that they were demanding housing from the government. There is an acute housing shortage here. (And overcrowding, pollution, a la Bombay, though of course nothing ever seems to touch the extremes that typify India.) Ketza, for example, lives in this downtown hotel because this is his only option. There was another couple in my hotel that had lived there for 17 years!
I witnessed other demos in Mexico City. One was framed dramatically against a large park in the city centre which had, on one side of it, this Romanesque, semi-circular, marble creation with pillars and “noble” statuary.
Another corner of the zocalo houses an informal bazaar where native Indians sell their crafts in makeshift stalls. I shopped for a bag, a shirt and a scarf here and bargained using my fingers and writing down figures! The Mexican shopkeepers bargained in a shy manner that I found quite charming. On the whole they seemed to me a very friendly, helpful, relaxed, happy-go-lucky people.
Riveting Riviera
I walked, late in the evening, into a couple of the official buildings around the zocalo. The most interesting is the El Palacio Nacional because it houses some of the vast murals of Diego Riviera. There are pre-colonial scenes of market places and magical cities and native Indians at work and play, and murals depicting the arrival of the colonists. They are greatly detailed and I saw them somehow as miniature paintings blown up a thousand fold, because there are the shared features of presenting multiple perspectives at once (flattened perspective as well) and the decorative element.
I saw other murals by him and other contemporary Mexican artists in the very arty opera house, which is all copper, chrome and glass, and seemed to my architecturally uninformed eye, a hodgepodge of design styles. The murals are completely riveting and it’s difficult to focus on smaller works of art (which the opera house also displays) after you’ve seen them. Apparently, Riviera and his fellow artists used them to “teach” Mexican history, particularly pre-colonial history, to a largely illiterate people. So they are obviously political in intent. Mexico seemed like a politicised and politically active country – a feature that I really liked.
The murals are obviously still used for that purpose. In one of the museums, I stumbled upon a group of children being taught Mexican history (in Spanish naturally) through what I thought was an interesting technique. The room was darkened and they illuminated selected parts of one of Rivera’s murals (the colours are so bright and bold that I had a sense of the whole painting even in the dark) and commented on them.
The little I saw of modern Mexican art seemed to suggest a diversity of styles, though there was a definitive inclination towards the figurative, particularly portraiture and a use of bold colours and lines.
Jalapa-Bombay
One interesting place I chanced upon in Mexico City was a subway station, which functioned as a sort of a science gallery, with satellite pictures of Mexico and some North American cities and pictures of outer space and the planets, on the walls of one of the tunnels. One portion of the subway roof was designed to be a planetarium and as I was walking under it, the lights dimmed and it was like being not under a night sky, but in a sci-fi film.
On my first night in Mexico, I took an overnight bus from Mexico City to Jalapa, arriving there at 4 am! A prompt taxi service (operating from the bus terminus) took me through quaintly winding, up and down streets, as dawn was breaking, to a cheap but well located hotel. (I was using a guidebook written by Berkeley students, which I found very good.)
It was exciting to arrive there like that and I had an instant “good feeling” about Jalapa, which was confirmed as I spent the day looking around.
I am writing this at least a week later and my mood is far from upbeat. Bombay witnessed, indeed participated in, a series of bomb explosions yesterday that killed 200 people. I couldn’t help thinking that someone I used to know there may well have died in this random violence.
The violence that typifies so much of Indian life today is now at our doorstep, it seems. It’s almost in our homes. Today, I went to a very good panel discussion on “Democracy and secularism in India” held at York University. I couldn’t have spent the day more profitably. It was important to talk to other Indians about the current crisis in India as well as to analyse it.
I feel I have to start moving beyond shock, sadness and outrage to do something. One of the questions the panel posed to the people at this event is: What can we (Indians, people of Indian descent in Canada) do?”
Jalapa. Jalapa was described by my guidebook as a quiet, university town, and so it is. It has the second-best archaeology museum in the country, which I visited. I was struck once again by the expressive power of “tribal” (native or indigenous are the words used in these parts) arts and crafts.
In Jalapa I ate pancakes with condensed milk at a roadside vendor, and a yummy sandwich – torta – that had a special type of melted mild cheese, peppers, avocado, onion, and cost only 2500 pesos. (The staple is tortilla, corn roti. Practically every other dish is made of corn. Another favourite is beans. Marinated hot peppers, which are not unlike Indian green chillies but sort of fatter and very flavourful, are served with every dish.)
The Mexicans seem to have a desperate sweet tooth. The towns are thick with HUGE pastry shops, plus there are many other types of sweets. One milk-based sweet I ate was remarkably like a pedha.
Vivacious Veracruz
The next morning I went to Veracruz, a “hot, sweaty and alive” port town as my guidebook put it. It was and is Mexico’s chief port of entry, which Cortes used to enter this part of the world. There is a big fort just off the coast. Veracruz is supposed to be influenced by Spanish, Caribbean and indigenous cultures. The people are called Jericho and have a reputation of being happy-go-lucky.
The place was ALIVE, throbbing, pulsating with energy when I got there. It was carnival time (mardi gras) and there were people hanging around all over, in sidewalk cafes and the many gardens that dot the town, waiting for some action, which was a procession that took place around sunset. It was unreal – the colour, the costumes, the kids and young women and sometimes men all dressed up, either dancing down the street to the sound of individual bands or posing on floats. There were a lot of kiddies dressed up as kings and queens and church dignitaries and what have you. There were clowns with painted faces.
I tried to find out if there was any profound symbolism behind the fiesta. It had its beginnings in paganism and the rites of spring and the general idea is to banish unhappiness and bury bad humour. (It is also celebrated in a big way in New Orleans at the same time and of course in other parts of South America.)
It’s a mindless “bash” – unlike our own steeped in myth festivals. And why not? As if you need to justify having fun!
Before seeing the parade, I walked around the port area and through the markets, succumbing to my nth hat (actually I only had 6 at that point) – a mock-captains cap. In the main garden, I sat down to listen to the local music – the marimba – very sensuous jazz.
Here I was approached by a Mexican video photographer who mistook me for Spanish and who wanted to take shots of the city (he was covering the carnival) with my face in the foreground! I was pronounced very bonita (pretty) and asked if I was considered pretty in India. I assured him that India was brimming with good-looking women, doing my bit to promote tourism, you might say.
To make a very non-politically correct statement, the Mexicans tend to be somewhat overweight and are not particularly good looking. I suppose my looks took on quite a shine against this backdrop! I got comments in the streets in Mexico (in Spanish of course) but there was none of the physical harassment so common in urban India.
I was taken for Mexican – a boon – because they hardly get any South Asians here. People were quite “charmed” once it was established that I was Indian. They know very little about the country and the exotic image seems to dominate. Some Indian god men (including the Hare Krishnaites) have made it to the country. Later a farmer I met in Cuernavaca, through Gill’s NGO asked me about snake charmers!
My plan was to go from Veracruz to Cuernavaca, which is where Gillian and Margarita were. Enroute, I wanted to stop at Puebla, famed for its beautiful tile-work architecture, its colonial look, its food (stuffed cactus leaves said my guidebook) and its ceramic art.
Through a bus window
The scenery from Jalapa to Puebla was wonderful and varied. We went from lush green stretches to drier vegetation – open scrub dotted with cacti, descending from hilly terrain to plateaus and plains.
There are just the most beautifully symmetrical, conical, volcanic mountains in parts of Mexico. I saw one framed beside the setting sun, out of my bus window. It was like a Japanese painting.
You also pass through some very pretty towns. The bigger cities are much more westernised than the smaller towns, and you see tacky versions of North American malls in them. I parked my bag in a locker at the bus terminus at Puebla and explored the zocalo area for a few hours. I also went into a sweet shop and ate a whole lot of sweets, the most unusual being a dipped in sugar syrup lemon peel, stuffed with shredded, sugary coconut.
Then I went on to Cuernavaca, where I got a hearty welcome from Gillian and Margarita, and made friends with Kelly. There was quite an activist community at the NGO where Gillian worked, consisting mostly of Americans.
The next day we joined a group of Canadian farmers to look at the problems Mexican farmers are facing, in the outskirts of the city. Their water supply is badly polluted. They are well organised and vocal, but aren’t getting any help from the government. (Familiar story?)
That evening we went to a great nightclub (picked out from the trusty old guidebook of course) called Sammana, which played very good Latin American music and some American pop/disco stuff as well. I wore a bindi and so did Gillian and Kelly (bindis are a hit here. I should have got more of them.) We were let in free because we were three women alone. It was a typical Mexican yuppie hangout with waiters in bow ties and a women offering to freshen make-up, for a small fee, in the washroom.
Next day, I pottered around Cuernavaca. The crafts market with its painted pottery, masks, exquisite silver jewellery, etc, was particularly pleasing. I bought a pair of earrings.
All the Mexican towns I visited had one really huge central garden, besides other smaller parks. This really makes for habitable cities. The gardens are full of courting couples and chess players. Couples court openly and continuously in public places in Mexico, helping keep the “Latinos are hot-blooded” myth alive.
A friendly river resort
In the evening, I took a bus to Las Estacas, Morelos, to a resort, which Margarita’s family owns. It is situated on the prettiest riverbank I’ve ever seen (the water is crystal clear) among sugarcane fields and palm trees. We were put up and fed for free! It was good to spend time with a Mexican family.
Sometime in the afternoon, a troupe of Mexican dancers arrived from the countryside, dressed in traditional costume. They danced their way through the resort.
We also witnessed a birthday ceremony. A paper mache “pineapple” – piñata – was filled with sweets and hung from a line. The kids took turns at breaking it open with blows from a stick. The shower of sweets feels very festive indeed.
I gave Margarita Indian recipes and later sent her Indian spices through Gillian’s sister who went to Mexico. She loves Indian food. In fact, she had a suggestion: that I should help her set up an Indian food restaurant in Mexico!
Next day, one of her aunt’s drove me, through very scenic terrain, to the sound of opera and French music, to Mexico City. The rest of the story has already been told except for one thing.
One morning, I visited Teotihuacan, a pre-Aztec ruin, just outside Mexico City. The ruins contain MASSIVE pyramids, one of them being the third largest in the world (the pyramid of the Sun.) The smaller, pyramid of the moon is dedicated to a female deity. It’s an awe-inspiring site/sight. According to Ketza, the Spanish (and other European powers) started colonising the Americas when native Indian civilisations were at the peak of their glory. Who knows how things would have turned out otherwise?
On my last evening, I went to La Opera, an elegant bar-restaurant with old-fashioned décor, which was a hop, skip and jump from my hotel. There were musicians serenading tables and a bunch of happy, relaxed people, good food and great ambience. When told I was Indian, the waiter smiled at me all through the evening and as I was leaving, seized my hand and said something about New Delhi, in Spanish of course.
I was in supreme good spirits as I went from La Opera briefly to the zocalo, which was quieter that night. I gazed for some time at the good-looking La Cathedral Metropolitana, which has quite a presence at the zocalo, and then returned to my room, humming a song.
I felt so much at home in Mexico that after I boarded the plane to return to Canada, I asked myself: Why the hell is everyone speaking English here? What’s going on? I had trouble “recognising” the white stuff on the ground (snow, of course) on my ride home from Toronto airport. So that was Mexico- ohhh la la!